Warriors of God (43 page)

“People were flocking to the villages and the Israelis were pulling out under heavy covering fire,” said Nazih Mansour, the Hezbollah MP. “If civilians were killed needlessly, then we would have lost the flavor of victory. I'm not going to risk my people just to shoot a bullet at the Israelis.”

At 6:42
A.M.
, as dawn broke on May 24, 2000, an Israeli officer snapped the padlock on the metal swing gate in the border fence, a simple gesture that symbolized the end of the occupation after twenty-two long years.

The thump of exploding munitions echoed through the eastern sector that morning as an ammunition dump set alight hours earlier by the
departing Israelis continued to burn, cooking off an assortment of missiles, flares, and artillery and mortar shells. The ammunition had been stockpiled beside the main road between several houses just south of Qlaya. The explosions had blown out all the glass from the sides of houses facing the dump. For Ghada Khoury, a twenty-four-year-old mother of two infants, it had been a terrifying night.

“They never even told us to leave. They left us sleeping in our beds,” she said, her voice shaking with hysteria and her face caked in dried blood. “There were bombs exploding all the time. My little daughter is in shock. She can't speak. She's only a year old and she's not accepting her milk.”

She led us through her small home to inspect the damage, her feet crunching on the shattered glass. “We spent the night in the bathroom because it has no windows,” Khoury said. “My baby was screaming and I was crying and my husband didn't know what to do.”

The ground outside her home was littered with shiny aluminum missile fragments and steel shrapnel. The burning munitions sent clouds of smoke billowing into the blue sky. A blazing flare shot skyward, cartwheeling through the air before tumbling into the main road. Across the road from Khoury's home, local residents prayed in the church as others swept up broken glass.

In Marjayoun, a mile to the north, at the headquarters of the now-defunct SLA, a bearded gunman booted open the door of a room and fired a few rounds from his AK-47 rifle into the dark interior. He stepped inside and emerged moments later laden with military clothing. To the victors, the spoils. And there was plenty to choose from in the abandoned headquarters. Dozens of gunmen, mainly Amal militants, ransacked the barracks, bursting into offices and grabbing what they could. Others attempted to start up a fleet of T-55 tanks, armored personnel carriers, trucks, military jeeps, and a few World War II–vintage half-track vehicles parked in a mechanics depot. Black smoke billowed out a window where someone had started a small fire. A hand grenade exploded in another burning room. Hundreds of civilians mingled with the militants. A headscarfed teenage girl, one of a class of students from Nabatiyah, less than five miles to the west, gazed eastward across the flat
Marj Valley to the hilltop town of Khiam and beyond to the mountainous skyline where the Shebaa Farms hills melded into the soaring heights of Mount Hermon. The distant mountains were a washed-out pale gray in the early morning sunlight. “What a wonderful country,” she exclaimed. “I had no idea that it was so beautiful here.”

Aloof from the mayhem around him, a young Hezbollah fighter dressed in black uniform stood by with his rifle, eyeing the looting and pointless gunplay with an expression of disdain. He said that he and his comrades were under orders not to harass Christian residents of the border district. “Our people said, ‘Don't show your guns. Don't let them say you came in with your guns,' ” he said quietly. “We have instructions not to enter Christian villages.”

Hezbollah's leadership had deliberately issued the order to prove wrong those who had predicted that bloody chaos and revenge killings would follow in the wake of the Israeli withdrawal. The leaders knew that the eyes of the world were upon them in their moment of triumph and were careful to ensure that their cadres maintained discipline.

In Qlaya, the mood among the few remaining Maronite residents grew more resentful as the day progressed with no letup to the triumphalism of the mainly Shia crowds. Most of the population of Qlaya, the cradle of the SLA, had fled across the border, accounting for nearly two-thirds of the six thousand militiamen and their families who left for Israel. Another fifteen hundred militiamen turned themselves in to the Lebanese authorities.

Bassam, who a week earlier had proudly displayed his $650 worth of weapons, ammunition, and equipment on his living room floor and proclaimed his intention to stay and fight, was gone, along with his family. The front door of his home was not even locked, such had been his haste in departing.

Inevitably, rumors soon circulated that houses belonging to fleeing SLA militiamen were being looted and roadside shrines to the Virgin Mary desecrated. But Sheikh Nabil Qawq promised that the Christians and other residents of the zone would be treated well.

“From tomorrow morning you will not see any weapons being carried here. We will provide protection for everyone, including the Christians,”
the white-turbaned cleric told me when we bumped into each other at the entrance to Khiam prison. Qawq had just toured the prison's cramped, fetid cells and interrogation rooms, which reeked of stale sweat, urine, and unwashed bodies. Among the visitors wandering the narrow corridors of the detention blocks were former detainees, some released the previous day, others freed long ago, who could not resist returning to a place where they had experienced such hardship and misery.

“This place proves for sure that Israel is the number one terrorist state in the world,” Qawq said.

As Hezbollah's southern commander, Qawq had played a key role in the resistance campaign against Israel. It was evident that he was elated with the outcome, but even in that moment of victory, the tall cleric cast his brown eyes toward the sepia-tinted Shebaa Farms hills to the east of Khiam.

“Our feeling is one of great happiness and victory. It's a big holiday,” he said. “We look forward to many more victories, hopefully the Shebaa Farms, and, having seen Khiam prison, hopefully the rest of our detainees will come home soon.”

The late afternoon light bathed southern Lebanon in a pale gold as I drove up the steep lane from Arnoun to Beaufort Castle, fulfilling a personal ambition to visit the Crusader fortress the day the Israelis left. I steered through the open swing gate that had marked the edge of the occupation zone, where an Israeli soldier once had leveled his rifle at my companions and me in the pouring rain, past the rubble of the homes bulldozed by Israeli troops eighteen months earlier when the lane had been a “roadside bomb alley,” past the spot the crowds had reached in their game of dare with Israeli machine gunners in the wake of Arnoun's brief liberation. The Israelis had dynamited their concrete bunkers, machine gun posts, and accommodation blocks beside the castle the previous night. Some Lebanese assumed the distant explosions meant that the castle itself was being destroyed. But Beaufort's eight-hundred-year-old walls remained standing, although the open area between its western wall and a bulldozed earth rampart was filled with smashed cinder blocks, broken chunks of reinforced concrete, cracked green-painted cement
slabs, and collapsed T-walls, the air caustic with cement dust and chemical residues from the explosions. An acrid pile of rubble was all that remained of Israel's presence at the castle.

A few dozen curious sightseers climbed the ramparts, following walkways guarded by metal railings that wound over the castle's overgrown ruins. Someone had already hoisted a yellow Hezbollah flag atop one of the turrets where 24 hours earlier the blue and white Star of David had fluttered. From the parapets, the whole of southern Lebanon was laid out below like an aerial photograph. Far to the west, across the rolling, hazy hills, the silver Mediterranean shimmered as the sun sank ever lower in the sky. The castle's eastern ramparts were perched on the edge of the six-hundred-foot precipice of the Litani gorge, the river itself fleetingly visible far below as it gushed and frothed beneath the shadows of the dense undergrowth that lined its banks. On ridges farther east lay the red-roofed houses of Marjayoun, and beyond that Khiam. In the far distance the Shebaa Farms hills and Mount Hermon gradually turned crimson in the face of the setting sun. Metulla, with its neat rows of houses, and the flat plain of northern Galilee could be seen to the southeast; no wonder the Israelis once called Beaufort “the Scourge of Galilee” when Palestinians had manned its lofty parapets. With its latest defenders gone, the tired ruins of Beaufort were back in the hands of the Lebanese state for the first time since the 1960s.

That night, far to the south of Beaufort Castle, in a refugee camp on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, angry and bitter SLA militiamen and their families dwelled on their new status as exiles in a foreign land.

One unwelcome visitor to the SLA refugee camp near Tiberias that first bleak night was Antoine Lahd, who arrived in Israel from his home in Paris only after the withdrawal was over. The Lebanese refugees angrily accused Lahd and Israel of betrayal. What had happened to all the promises from Barak that the SLA would be protected? What did their future hold now that they had been forced to abandon their homes and flee their country? Lahd yelled back at his former comrades-in-arms and then stormed out of the camp. As he climbed into his car, the ex-militia leader was heard to mutter, “
C'est fini.
”

Two days after the last Israeli soldier departed Lebanon, Hezbollah held a huge victory rally in Bint Jbeil. Some hundred thousand people descended on the border town to hear Nasrallah speak on his first visit to the former occupation zone. It was a moment for the Hezbollah leader to savor, the culmination of eighteen long years in which the Islamic Resistance was born, nurtured, shaped, and developed until it had achieved a feat of arms unprecedented in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Neither the armies of Jordan, Egypt, nor Syria had been able to drive Israeli forces from occupied Arab land. But a relatively small yet resolute band of Shia warriors from Lebanon had achieved just that. Nasrallah stood on a podium inscribed with the figure 1,276, the number of Hezbollah “martyrs” since 1982, and gazed out at the sea of supporters before him. Significantly, a Lebanese national flag hung behind the Hezbollah leader; Nasrallah wanted to convey the message that this was a day of victory for all Lebanese, not just one party.

But he also served warning that the struggle against Israel was not over just because Israeli troops had left Lebanon. The confrontation would continue. The resistance, he said, was determined to win the freedom of the remaining Lebanese detainees in Israel and secure the return of the Shebaa Farms.

The most significant part of Nasrallah's address was directed toward the Palestinians. Hezbollah's victory over the Israelis in Lebanon, he said, represented a model of resistance that could be adopted and adapted by other subjugated people:

It was a powerful and compelling message, and it was sown on fertile ground. For unrest was building in the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip even as the Clinton administration was preparing a fresh push at striking a deal between Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat. For decades, the Arabs had viewed the small but potent state of Israel with a mixture of hostility, awe, and trepidation. But Nasrallah was telling them that there was no need to fear Israel, because for all its military might and international influence, it could be defeated, as proven by Hezbollah's successful resistance in Lebanon. Israel's “threats and menaces,” he said, “do not scare us anymore.”

Nasrallah's defiance clearly hit a nerve among the Palestinian leadership, which found itself caught between its commitment to the peace process and the growing impatience of the Palestinian street. At the end of June, Yasser Abed Rabbo, an adviser to Arafat, told Ephraim Sneh, the Israeli deputy defense minister: “With you Israelis, one should only speak in ‘Lebanese.' It's the only language you understand.”
³

In the days that followed the liberation of the south, crowds continued to roam the former occupation zone, gathering at several places along the border such as at the former Fatima Gate crossing and on top of Sheikh Abbad Hill to hurl stones and abuse across the fence at increasingly irate Israeli soldiers. UNIFIL began armored patrols of the border district, but the Lebanese government refused to permit a full deployment of army troops and UN peacekeepers into the border area until the process of verifying Israel's withdrawal was completed.

In early 2000, when it became clear that Israel was planning to leave Lebanon, the UN had begun to focus attention on Lebanon's long-neglected border with Israel. Clearly, the exact path traced by the boundary would have to be identified on the ground in order to confirm that Israel had fulfilled Resolution 425 and pulled out of all Lebanese territory. But Lebanon's southern border, first delineated in 1920, demarcated three years later, and reaffirmed as the Armistice Demarcation Line in 1949 at the end of the first Arab-Israeli war, had not been surveyed
properly for decades. Israel had altered the shape of the border with its Purple Line incursions; the original whitewashed stone cairns had long ago disappeared, and what existing boundary markers remained often fell in the middle of the chain of minefields planted by Israel stretching almost the entire length of the frontier.