Warriors of God (11 page)

Israeli casualties began to increase in tandem with the rising rate of attacks. IDF bulldozers destroyed stone or cinder block walls along the coastal road and uprooted orange and lemon trees and banana groves to deprive the resistance men of cover to launch attacks. The Israelis attempted without success to revive anti-Palestinian feeling among the Shias by spreading rumors that Musa Sadr had been discovered as a prisoner of the PLO in the Rashidiyah Palestinian refugee camp south of Tyre. Israeli-allied militiamen or plainclothes Israeli security personnel were sent into villages to smash down front doors, search homes, and arrest “suspects,” who could face interrogation in the IDF intelligence headquarters in Tyre or incarceration in the Ansar prison camp.

To evade capture, the Amal men dug small chambers and tunnels beneath their homes with disguised entrances. Other hiding places included fake water tanks that were only half filled with water, the other half providing space for a man to hide. They made use of the natural caves that riddled the limestone valleys around the villages, employing children to cover the entrances with bushes and twigs. Resistance became a community effort. When the Israelis approached a village, the warning would be relayed from the loudspeaker attached to the minaret of the mosque or
husseiniyah
, alerting the residents. Women and children would gather in the street or clamber on the roofs of buildings to hurl stones and pans of boiling oil at the Israeli soldiers while the men in the village hurried to their hideouts.

On one occasion, the IDF learned that Mohammed Saad was in Kfar Sir and surrounded the village with troops. Saad ran into a house and without saying a word to the startled family climbed into a pair of pajamas he saw lying on a bed. When Israeli soldiers banged at the front door, Saad himself opened it. The soldiers said they were looking for Mohammed Saad. Saad turned to the family inside and said, “Mother, they're looking for someone called Mohammed Saad.”

“Never heard of him,” the mother replied, and the soldiers left.

The Amal resistance lived by secrecy and caution. Messages were sent between separate cells in simple yet inventive ways. One method was to write a message or press statement on cigarette papers, which the courier would crumple and leave in the ashtray of his car until he reached his destination. Sometimes two resistance men would identify themselves to each other by matching the two halves of a torn Lebanese one-lira note.

They developed ingenious methods of smuggling weapons and ammunition into the occupied area. One morning, Sheikh Najib Sweidan, the Shia mufti of Tyre, found a written death threat on his doorstep. The worried cleric met with Saad and showed him the letter. Saad told Sweidan that he must be careful and should no longer travel to Beirut alone in case he was ambushed along the way. A few days later, Sweidan contacted Saad and told him that he needed to go to Beirut the next day. Saad told the mufti that he would send a chauffeur to his home. The chauffeur turned out to be Saad himself, and he drove Sweidan to the capital and back again. They repeated the trips several times, although unknown to the mufti, Saad was packing the car with weapons and ammunition in Beirut before returning to Tyre. Saad calculated that the Israelis would never inspect too thoroughly the vehicle of such a prominent religious figure. However, one day Saad learned that the Israelis had grown suspicious of Sweidan and guessed that his vehicle might be carrying arms to the resistance in Tyre. On the next trip, Sweidan traveled alone to Beirut while Saad stayed at home. On the return journey, the infuriated mufti had his car searched at every IDF checkpoint. The Israelis, finding no weapons, allowed the fuming Sweidan to proceed. Later, when the mufti complained to Saad about his treatment at the
hands of the Israelis, Saad broke into laughter and confessed that he had been using the mufti's car all along to smuggle weapons. What's more, he told the stunned cleric, it was Saad who had written the death threat that encouraged Sweidan to seek the protection of the wily resistance commander in the first place.

By the first half of 1983, Hezbollah's influence was seeping from the scattered villages in the plain of the northern Bekaa into the cramped slums of Beirut's southern suburbs, where the new party intended to consolidate a presence before projecting its influence more deeply into the south. The impoverished district was a melting pot of Shia families and clans from south Lebanon and the Bekaa, and Hezbollah faced little difficulty in attracting a loyal support base.

Slowly, Hezbollah's presence began to grow in the southern villages. Residents of Amal-dominated villages noticed the arrival of severe-looking young men with neatly trimmed pointed beards wearing long-sleeved shirts who constantly fingered prayer beads and spent most of their time in local mosques deep in prayer. The local Amal leadership paid the new Hezbollah arrivals little heed initially, thinking that all they were interested in was prayer and that they could not possibly pose a challenge to the well-entrenched movement.

With resistance activity heating up, the Israelis struck back. On the evening of February 16, 1984, Sheikh Ragheb Harb was gunned down by three Lebanese collaborators as he walked to his home in Jibsheet, fulfilling the cleric's prediction that he would die at the hands of the Israelis. His murder sparked a wave of demonstrations and strikes in south Lebanon and southern Beirut.

It also hastened the emergence of a new tactic of warfare into the south Lebanon theater. On April 12, 1984, Ali Safieddine drove his explosives-laden car between two Israeli armored personnel carriers near Deir Qanoun and blew himself up, killing six soldiers. Safieddine was Hezbollah's first official suicide bomber (Ahmad Qassir had not yet been
identified as the perpetrator of the 1982 IDF headquarters blast), and his immolation was the organization's revenge for Harb's assassination.

Other bombers followed, and not only from Shia groups such as Amal and Hezbollah. Strikingly, the majority of suicide attacks against the Israelis and their Lebanese militia allies in the mid-1980s were carried out not by religious Shia militants drawing upon the sect's tradition of martyrdom, but by volunteers from secular political parties, notably the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP), which accounted for more suicide bombings in the 1980s than any other group. Indeed, during the peak of the suicide bombing phenomenon in 1985, of the nineteen attacks recorded, only one was by Hezbollah.
⁷

Although the phenomenon of suicide bombing captured international headlines and underlined the determination of the Lebanese to rid their country of the Israelis, as a military tactic the results were mixed. Other than the carefully planned Hezbollah spectaculars against the IDF headquarters in 1982 and 1983, which accounted for a total of 136 fatalities, 104 of them Israelis, most attacks killed only a handful of soldiers or militiamen. Fifteen of the thirty-three attacks, including Amal's two operations, failed to kill anybody other than the bomber. As the number of suicide bombings increased, the tactic became a source of competition between the different factions, especially among the secular parties. For the SSNP and the Baathists in particular, suicide bombings were acts of prestige and patriotism, powerful declarations of commitment to the cause of liberating Lebanon. The results of the attacks in terms of enemy casualties were less important than the acts themselves and the propaganda value they accrued.

Hezbollah could justify sending suicide bombers against Israeli targets on religious grounds, as well as for “nationalist” reasons of liberating occupied territory, but it used the tactic sparingly, and generally each operation was planned with more care than those of its secular counterparts. Martyrdom for the sake of martyrdom was deemed wasteful and possibly
haram
, or forbidden by Islamic convention. Hezbollah, Nasrallah explained in 1996, does not carry out “indiscriminate martyrdom operations.” Although he admitted coming under pressure every day from young men eager to carry out suicide missions that he could
easily have authorized, he said, “If the operation is not productive and effective, and [doesn't] cause the enemy to bleed, we cannot legally, religiously, morally, or humanely justify giving an explosive device to our brothers and telling them, ‘Go and become martyrs, no matter how'!”
⁸

Suicide bombings began to tail off in the latter half of the 1980s as the influence of the secular groups began to wane and Hezbollah came to dominate the resistance.

By late 1984, Israel was in deep trouble in Lebanon. The U.S. marines had pulled out of Lebanon that February after west Beirut fell to the militias and the Lebanese army disintegrated for the second time in eight years. That same month, Saad Haddad, Israel's top ally in south Lebanon, died after a battle with cancer. Haddad could be petulant and bullheaded, but he had remained a dependable ally of Israel for eight years, and his loss was keenly felt by the IDF. Appointed in his place was Antoine Lahd, a retired brigadier general in the Lebanese army, who was not from the south and lacked the loyal base of support that the major from Marjayoun had built. Then Amine Gemayel, the Lebanese president, formally abrogated the ill-fated May 17 peace agreement with Israel under Syrian pressure.

The Israeli government also had to contend with a heated domestic debate over what was proving a highly controversial war. Menachem Begin was an early political casualty. His spirit crushed by the mounting casualty toll and domestic criticism of the war, Begin became a near-total recluse in his Jerusalem home before resigning from the premiership in September 1983.

Even IDF officers and soldiers were torn between those who supported their presence in Lebanon and those who just wanted to go home. This was Israel's first full war of choice in its four decades of existence, and many soldiers were deeply unhappy at having to risk their lives patrolling the roads of south Lebanon for what they considered an immoral and unsuccessful policy. Nearly 150 soldiers had been punished for refusing to
serve in Lebanon. And each soldier killed by a roadside bomb or shot dead in an ambush by elusive Lebanese militants further sapped morale. Nervous Israeli soldiers conducted reconnaissance-by-fire, blasting away with machine guns mounted on armored personnel carriers into the banana groves and orange orchards flanking the roads they patrolled.

“You see the change first of all in the eyes of the soldiers,” commented Zeev Schiff, the military correspondent for Israel's
Haaretz
newspaper, in comparing the deterioration of the IDF in Lebanon over an eighteen-month period from summer 1983 to early 1985. “It's a look that reminded me of the look in the eyes of the American soldiers I saw in the final stages of Vietnam. It is the look of soldiers and officers who know that their chances of winning in Lebanon are less than zero. In Lebanon you can see an army that has experienced firsthand how military might is rendered impotent.”
⁹

On January 14, 1985, Israeli announced a three-stage plan for a unilateral pullout from Lebanon. The plan was to withdraw to the old “Haddad enclave” along the border that had existed between 1978 and 1982. The strip would be patrolled by the Israeli-allied militia under the command of Antoine Lahd. Lahd's Army of Free Lebanon was renamed the South Lebanon Army (SLA) and reorganized along conventional military lines with brigades and battalions. The Israelis hoped to recruit some five thousand soldiers to the SLA, but they were unable to coerce or dragoon sufficient numbers, and the total strength of the militia never exceeded half that figure.

During the first phase of the withdrawal between January 15 and February 16, the IDF adopted a “velvet glove” approach, concentrating on dismantling its military infrastructure and trucking it southward. The Israelis seemed to hope that the declaration that it was leaving and the visible activity of the withdrawal from Sidon would persuade Amal, if not Hezbollah, to discontinue its attacks. But Amal echoed the official Lebanese stand, which was to demand a total Israeli troop withdrawal from Lebanese territory and the dismantling of the SLA. If the SLA was to remain in control of a security belt along the border, then Israel would still be considered an occupying force. The IDF had faced around fifty attacks a month in 1984, but in the first two months of 1985 the rate
nearly doubled. Among the fatalities were two senior officers, a colonel, and a major, killed in separate attacks.

In response, the IDF implemented a new policy at the end of the first phase of withdrawal, exchanging the velvet glove for the iron fist. Movement in the occupied area was severely restricted with the imposition of a dusk-to-dawn curfew. Motorists were required to carry at least one passenger—a measure to curb suicide bombers, on the assumption that it was harder to find two people willing to blow themselves up at the same time. Motorcycles were banned, and parking was forbidden along main roads. The crossing points into the Israeli-occupied area were sealed, preventing the exchange of goods from Beirut and agricultural produce from the south. Prices of basic commodities steadily climbed in the occupation zone.

The crackdown was marked by a series of punitive raids against villages. The pattern was repeated throughout the zone: A mechanized battalion would surround and cordon off the targeted village, blocking all approach roads. Troops accompanied by sniffer dogs and plainclothes Shin Bet (Israeli Security Agency) officers would round up all males between the ages of fourteen and seventy and hold them for interrogations, while houses were searched for militants and weapons. The homes of suspected resistance fighters were bulldozed, and there were repeated incidents of deliberate vandalism. Troops took dogs into mosques and
husseiniyahs
knowing that it was a grave insult to Muslims. Copies of the Koran were torn up and the pages scattered on the ground for the dogs to walk over. Sacks of lentils, rice, and wheat were split open and mixed together, making the contents inedible.