From: The Daily Times
Friday, July 14, 2006
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk
By Fatima Bhutto
If there is to be another war between Lebanon and Israel, the rules of
engagement will be reminiscent of what is happening in Iraq today
On Wednesday, Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers in retaliation
for the arrest of one of its men earlier this week.
Air strikes have already started over Southern Lebanon and another
Israeli invasion has been threatened. If there is to be another war,
because that's what it will be, between Lebanon and Israel the rules of
engagement will be reminiscent of what is happening in Iraq today. The
Lebanese army will not be able to fight Israel. The Syrians have left
and can't be there like they were in 1982. This time, should it come to
that, it will be a people's resistance that faces the onslaught of an
Israeli incursion. It's impossible to understand the immensity of this
possibility without understanding the unique position Hezbollah
occupies in the realm of Lebanese life. Not Lebanese politics, but the
everyday life of its citizens.
Early last Saturday morning, in a taxi driven by an ex-Iraqi Baathist,
my family and I, along with a college friend of mine from Greece, drove
from the sleepy northern city of Tripoli to the liberated South of
Lebanon. We spent the afternoon in Sidon and Tyre, both formerly the
sites of mass Israeli bombing until the Israel Defence Forces (IDF)
withdrew from the South in 2000, and now restored to the beautiful
seaside towns they have been for hundreds of years. But perhaps not for
much longer.
In Tyre we stopped for lunch at the beach — there were no resorts, no
fancy imported hotels standing guard over God's sand and sun, just the
open space. We walked onto the stand and sat down. This wasn't Beirut
where an afternoon in the open costs an arm and a leg, this was the
Hezbollah-controlled South and it was free. There were women with
hijabs playing with their children in the water and women in rather
adventurous swimsuits tanning by the water. There were the yellow and
green flags of the "Party of God" hung from streetlights and also the
flags of Italy and France who were set to fight for the World Cup the
following day. There were posters of the Shaheeds of the town, martyred
resisting the Israeli occupation of their lands, and also billboards
advertising Triumph lingerie and Acuvue contacts ("My eyes need Moist!"
they read). This was not what I had imagined when I was told I would be
in Hezbollah territory. Not at all.
We later drove further South, passing by Qana, the site of Israel's
Grapes of Wrath operation in 1996. Over 150 people were killed in the
operation; after warnings of an aerial assault many people left their
homes and took shelter in a UN camp which was bombarded by Israeli
planes. A memorial maintained by the townspeople and their political
representatives marked the site of the massacre. The memorial housed
photographs of those killed, heart-wrenching and yet also an exhibition
space where local artists had captured the grief of their town. There
was a collage of words and images that asked in red "where are u
arabs?" and another six-foot long painting that was inescapably
Picasso's Guernica done in blue. A statue for the Fijian UN
peacekeepers who had died under the attack was erected in granite near
the memorial. The site where a church had been burned to the ground,
leaving the 54 inside it dead, was preserved. The equanimity of the
remembrance was striking.
The situation that day was tense; an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, had
been captured days before in the Occupied Territories and Israel had
commenced a series of air strikes and bombings on Gaza that has killed
more than 75 civilians to date. Israel is calling this operation
"Summer Rain" — one wonders who comes up with all these sentimental,
poetic operation names for the IDF, and where he was when Operation
Enduring Freedom was thought up.
We drove on, reaching the border between Lebanon and Israel. It was the
first time I had seen Israel, albeit through the barbed wire that was
supposed to represent a border. It was also as close as I'd probably
get – my Pakistani passport does not allow me to enter Israel. There
was a Hezbollah gift store facing the border. There were huge flags
waving out towards the settlements and blaring music strung together
with the soundbites from the Party's speeches. It was certainly ballsy.
We were looking around at the key chains, T-shirts and tapes in the
store when we heard Mustafa, our former Baathist cab driver, calling us
from the balcony above the store. I climbed the stairs with my friend,
Sophia, while my family sat downstairs having a cup of coffee. There
were several men standing on the balcony, we were told they were
mukhabarat, Lebanese intelligence. They were there because a Hezbollah
man had been captured in Israel that day — an event that would spark
the capture of two more Israeli soldiers and the talk of another
possible Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The mukhabarat men pointed out a
group of soldiers, gathered behind a row of cement columns. They were
nothing like what I expected them to be. They were boys. They were as
young as Sophia and I, maybe younger. It's the young that die on both
sides. I hadn't processed Israel into this equation before; I hadn't
imagined them as victims in this way, too. When Sophia asked Mustafa if
she could turn on her camcorder, he nervously yelped that it would not
be wise to. One of the mukhabarat men leaned forward and said, "Yalla,
just do it quickly." Mustafa nodded and told us to duck down if we
heard "pop-pop!" We weren't encouraged by Mustafa's miming of us being
shot in the head and so the camcorder was put away and we got back into
the car and continued our journey.
Our last stop that day was to be the Al-Khiam prison, used by the South
Lebanese Army (SLA) and later Israel during the Lebanese civil war. It
is now run as a museum by Hezbollah. The prison was built in 1933 by
France as barracks for their men and was turned into a Lebanese-Israeli
detention centre in 1985. The prison which held 5,000 people, including
400 women, was liberated in 2000. The prison guards and major domos
left in their Mercedes accompanied by tanks without releasing any of
the prisoners. It was the townspeople that stormed Al Khiam and broke
free the men and women who had been jailed during the civil war for
their resistance. When you enter the gates of Al Khiam you notice how
well it has been preserved. And the Hezbollah are not without a sense
of humour either; near the prison's gates there is a room that bears
two signs — the first reads "Previously: dormitories of the traitors
and collaborators and their bosses" and the second reads "Now: Men's
Bathroom". There are signs in English and Arabic explaining each and
every room and nothing has been altered — the single bulbs that lit
both the corridors and the dank cells are still hanging from the
ceilings, no other form of electricity guides you around the place. The
cells don't feel empty at Al Khiam. There are toothbrushes in the
bathrooms and pillows and sheets still left on the beds. The solitary
confinement cells — which were not much larger than the 8ft by 3ft
cells that used to house up to four men at a time before the Red Cross
inspected the site in the mid-90s — were so small I couldn't stretch
out my arms. As we walked through the camp, led by a former prisoner,
Ahmed al-Amin, I noticed my feet still had sand on them from the beach
at Tyre.
Hezbollah, for all its use of violence and religion, is no Taliban. As
we left Al Khiam we found ourselves hopelessly lost. Mustafa had no
clue how to get us back to Tripoli. We stopped an elderly man on the
roads to ask for directions and he offered to show us how to get back
to Sidon if we followed him. As part of our newly formed friendship
with him, Mustafa asked him if he had been at Al Khiam. He replied that
he had. "How long were you jailed for?" we asked. "Jailed?" he
responded indignantly. "I was with the Jews. I was a guard there." He
didn't whisper, he didn't lower his eyes. He had been a collaborator
and he told us so right there in the middle of the road. He had nothing
to fear, not from the Hezbollah. They were ruthless, yes, but only to
those that had killed. They understood that people did what they had to
survive and left them to their homes and their communities after the
war. This kind of reconciliatory attitude is not exactly prevalent in
the Middle East, nor in all honesty has it ever been.
I am not one who preaches the politics of religion; I find the very
notion antithetical to everything I believe in. However, what makes it
possible to tolerate an organisation like Hezbollah is in fact its
tolerance. While it would be more inclusive if it operated outside the
parameters of religion, the Hezbollah's tolerance seems to be sincere.
During the negotiations to release prisoners from Israeli jails in 2000
they not only fought to release those belonging to their party, but
also to free prisoners belonging to the Communist party, among others.
Rather, in a country whose politics are founded on religion — Sunni,
Maronite Christian, Druze and Shiites, each lobbying for their own
—Hezbollah is anxious to speak of Lebanon. Of Lebanon's foreign policy,
of its place in the Middle East, of its people and the rights
guaranteed to them. Hezbollah has always insisted that it is not merely
built to defend Islam but rather to defend its country, its soil.
Hezbollah's strength may not lie in its politics or rhetoric, but in
its complexities. It has waged wars and killed, but those who
collaborated against the group were often forgiven. A strictly Islamist
outfit, it has also allowed women the freedom to dress and act as they
please. As we drove out of Tyre and the surrounding towns, down winding
roads covered from both sides by the shade of pine trees, there stood a
huge billboard that read "The Liberated Territories: Please enter
Peacefully and Safely" and underneath it was stamped the Hezbollah
flag.
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