Warriors of God (44 page)

At a two-day seminar in April in New York attended by diplomats and cartographic experts from the UN and the U.S. State Department, it quickly became evident that attempting to re-delineate Lebanon's southern border was impractical. Instead, Miklos Pinther, the UN's chief cartographer, suggested devising a line, matching the border as much as possible, that could be used to gauge the extent of Israel's compliance with Resolution 425. To forestall endless bickering between the Lebanese and Israeli governments, the line of withdrawal—which later became known as the Blue Line—was a temporary measure without prejudice to any future alterations to the international border agreed upon by Lebanon and Israel.

The path of the Blue Line left the Shebaa Farms under Israeli control, but it bisected the village of Ghajar, which had been occupied by Israel since the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war when the adjacent Golan Heights was seized. The village's Alawite residents had accepted Israeli citizenship in 1981, when the Syrian territories occupied fourteen years earlier were formally annexed by Israel. Since then, what had been an impoverished and isolated farming community had grown relatively prosperous. Residents found steady work in Israel, while others earned a lucrative income from smuggling drugs from Lebanon, helping transform Ghajar into a village of whitewashed and pastel-tinted houses and streets lined with lush purple bougainvillea. But the Blue Line threatened to disrupt that peaceful existence.

While the Israelis objected to the partition of Ghajar, the Lebanese also had reservations over the path of the Blue Line. One complaint was a curious anomaly beside the kibbutz of Misgav Am, which abuts Lebanese
territory. During the years of Israeli occupation, the kibbutz had expanded across the original border onto Lebanese soil. The UN cartographers finessed the problem by bending the Blue Line around the kibbutz, thus sparing the Israelis from evacuating their homes. They justified the decision on a misleading description of the Lebanon-Israel border from a fifty-year-old UN report, even though it clearly deviated the Blue Line from the original boundary.

Another Lebanese complaint was over a three-mile stretch of the border southeast of Metulla, where the UN placed the Blue Line a hundred meters north of the true frontier. The UN team appeared to have misread the original 1923 Anglo-French boundary agreement, a point Miklos Pinther subsequently conceded to me when I raised it in an interview in July 2000. The delineation of the Blue Line at this point was “murky,” he said, due to conflicting sets of data, and he and his team “just juggled things around.” The result, however, was that Israel was not required to pull back another hundred meters along this stretch of the frontier, which allowed it to keep one military outpost intact and saved Israeli farmers from losing some apple orchards.

More significantly, minor deviations in the path of the Blue Line additionally spared the Israelis from having to pull back their forward outposts on the mountain peaks of the Shebaa Farms. The most common delineation of the border in this area places the boundary along the watershed, running from mountaintop to mountaintop. But if the Blue Line had followed this exact path, it would have shaved off the edges of three IDF outposts, requiring the Israelis to dismantle the positions. Instead, the Blue Line follows the border but loops around each IDF compound.

“The UN saw that the border cut right in front of our positions, so they gave us a few tens of meters in front of each one,” Giora Eiland, in 2000 the head of the IDF's Operations Branch, confirmed to me nine years later.

The UN also had to contend with more arcane challenges. One of them concerned the sovereignty of the tomb on the summit of Sheikh Abbad Hill near Houla village. The local Lebanese insisted that the tomb belonged to the eponymous Sheikh Abbad, a hermit who lived in the
area some five hundred years ago and achieved local renown for the quality of the reed mats he and his followers made and sold by the Sea of Galilee. The Israelis, however, claimed that the tomb belonged to Rabbi Ashi, the fifth-century editor of the Babylonian Talmud, an interpretation of Jewish oral law. When the Israelis constructed their compound on Sheikh Abbad Hill after 1978, a new tomb containing the remains of the Lebanese cleric, or the rabbi, was erected on a platform in the center of the compound along with an archway and an inscription in Hebrew.

The Lebanese government insisted that Sheikh Abbad's final resting place remain inside Lebanon; rabbinical authorities in Israel were equally insistent that the Barak government retain Rabbi Ashi's tomb inside the Jewish state. The dilemma facing the UN was that the tomb lay within the five- or six-yard GPS margin of error of boundary pillar 33 on the original 1923 border, which the Blue Line was supposed to follow.

The solution was provided by Brigadier General Jim Sreenan, UNIFIL's deputy commander, who headed the UN team tasked with verifying Israel's withdrawal on the ground. Sreenan, a burly no-nonsense Irishman, suggested a Solomonic compromise in which the Blue Line would pass down the middle of the tomb, allowing access from both sides. The eastern half would fall inside Israel and could be acclaimed as Rabbi Ashi's resting place, while the western half would lie inside Lebanon and could be recognized as that of Sheikh Abbad.

The UNIFIL and Lebanese border inspection teams in early June jointly began the process of formally verifying Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon in compliance with UN Resolution 425. But it quickly became evident that an exercise that should have been completed within a few days, was going to take much longer owing to the dawdling of the Lebanese team and repeated petty border violations by the Israelis.

The process grew increasingly rancorous as the weeks trickled by.
One morning, a hidden Israeli sniper fired shots at the border inspectors and the small band of reporters following them when we tried to cross through an old gate some hundred yards north of the Blue Line. Several bullets ricocheted off the road just a few feet from Sreenan and General Amin Hoteit, the head of the Lebanese border team. A furious Hoteit ordered an immediate halt to the operation for the day.

At Manara, the Blue Line actually ran alongside the road running around the western edge of the Israeli settlement. The Lebanese even complained that the streetlights were an Israeli “violation” because they now fell on the Lebanese side of the line. In a bizarre scene emblematic of the process, Israeli soldiers standing on the road in Israel chatted amiably with Ghanaian UNIFIL peacekeepers standing on the curb in Lebanon, the two groups separated by nothing more than fresh splotches of blue paint marking the path of the Blue Line. Astonished Israeli motorists slowed down and gaped at the UN soldiers and the small crowd of Lebanese reporters filming them on the side of the road. Other Israeli residents of Manara wandered up to see what was going on. Like shy teenagers at a school dance, they stared at the Lebanese, who stared back at them in mutual awed silence.

In early July, Terje Roed Larsen, the UN peace coordinator, negotiated a written agreement with President Lahoud in which Lebanon would accept and honor the Blue Line, “with reservations.” The Israelis provided a similar document, and on July 24, two months to the day after the last Israeli tank crossed the border, UNIFIL finally was able to confirm that Israel had departed Lebanon in conformity with Resolution 425.

In early August 2000, UNIFIL began moving to new positions along the Blue Line, followed days later by the first Lebanese troops to deploy in the border district in a quarter century. The soldiers were met with tears and handfuls of thrown rice in Qlaya and Marjayoun. Lebanese politicians and UN officials spoke of a new dawn for southern Lebanon, a “welcome exercise of sovereignty,” and the restoration of state control in compliance with Resolution 425. However, the deployment was a chimera. Only a thousand personnel moved into the former occupation zone, a joint task force of five hundred military police and five hundred
paramilitary Internal Security officers. Ghazi Zeaiter, the Lebanese defense minister, said that the force would not deploy along the Blue Line as “border guards” for Israel.

During that long, hot summer, a cautious calm settled over southern Lebanon as all parties adjusted to the new realities on the ground. Within days of the withdrawal, Hezbollah began to quietly deploy militarily along the Blue Line. Fighters took over several former Israeli outposts close to the border. The former SLA training camp at Majidiyah at the foot of the Shebaa Farms hills became Hezbollah's logistical headquarters for the eastern sector. Small observation positions were established along the Blue Line, initially consisting of a little more than a tent or hut, some camouflage netting, and seats. One observation post was located beside the Israeli security fence near an outpost on the edge of the Shebaa Farms. Unknown to the hospitable Hezbollah men who offered us small glasses of tea freshly brewed over an open fire, they had crossed the unmarked Blue Line and were about two hundred yards into the Israeli-controlled Farms. The militants were unarmed, wearing civilian clothes and carrying only walkie-talkies and binoculars.
The daily clashes may have ended
, ran the unspoken message,
but Hezbollah is still here
.

Although Hezbollah refrained from direct military action against Israel, it quietly encouraged the phenomenon of stone throwing at some key locations along the border, chiefly the Fatima Gate crossing in Kfar Kila and on the summit of Sheikh Abbad Hill. On weekends, large crowds congregated to lob stones and other missiles across the border fence at Israeli soldiers hidden in fortified observation posts fitted with bulletproof glass. While stones may have been preferable to bullets, the Israelis leveled constant complaints to the UN that UNIFIL was not doing enough to prevent disturbances along the border. By late August, Israel had lodged 348 complaints with the UN over Lebanese civilians hurling stones, metal rods, bottles of boiling oil, fireworks, and firebombs across the border fence at Israeli soldier and civilians. Sheikh Naim Qassem described the stone throwing as a “form of freedom”; UNIFIL refused to become involved in what it said was a policing duty.

Despite the tensions generated by the stone-throwing, Fatima Gate
and Sheikh Abbad Hill often exuded a carnival-like atmosphere, especially on weekends when hundreds of sightseers flocked to the border. Visitors could take a break from lobbing stones over the fence and buy Hezbollah kitsch at a stall beside the crossing, such as flags, bumper stickers, T-shirts, key chains, watches with portraits of Nasrallah on the face, tapes of martial songs, propaganda videos, and books. Other stalls sold grilled corn on the cob or Arabic coffee.

On Sheikh Abbad Hill, Lebanese civilians could stand as close as three feet from stern-faced Israeli soldiers, separated only by the tomb of the sheikh (or rabbi). One day a group of grinning Lebanese men stood on the tomb, arms locked, and danced the
dabke
, Lebanon's national dance, before two very unhappy-looking Israeli soldiers. After that incident, the Israelis placed a stiff wire fence lengthwise along the tomb. Undaunted by the new obstacle, a Lebanese youth one morning taunted Israeli soldiers by dangling a yellow Hezbollah flag on the end of a stick over the top of the fence. The youth's friends laughed as the flag bobbed just inches above the head of a visibly irritated soldier. Losing his patience, the soldier made a grab for the flag, but the Lebanese youth was too quick and flicked it out of reach. The soldier scowled and stroked the trigger of his rifle as the Lebanese mocked him with raucous laughter.

Yet the Israeli army had more troubling concerns about the future stability of the Lebanon-Israel border than the odd stone flying over the fence. Since the withdrawal in May, there had been a near-ceaseless barrage of warnings from Israeli military officials that Hezbollah was preparing for a renewed military struggle. Specifically, the Israelis expected Hezbollah to carry out kidnappings of soldiers or civilians, in Israel or abroad, and also to exploit the Shebaa Farms as a new theater of military operations.

Hezbollah took every opportunity to flex its military muscles rhetorically
and remind Israel that there was unfinished business between the two of them, namely, the occupation of the Shebaa Farms and the continued detention of Lebanese prisoners in Israel. In July, Israel extended the administrative detention of Sheikh Abdel-Karim Obeid and Mustafa Dirani, prolonging their indefinite incarceration as bargaining chips for the return of missing Israeli servicemen. Dirani, the onetime leader of the Believers' Resistance, had just begun his seventh year behind bars in Israel, and Obeid had been a detainee for eleven years. Hezbollah vowed to secure the release of Obeid, Dirani, and the remaining Lebanese prisoners. “We will never rest until we see them free; we will work with all means to secure the release of Sheikh Obeid, Dirani, and all the hostages,” a statement from the party said.

The pledge was not mere rhetoric. Nasrallah had warned Kofi Annan when the two met in Beirut in June that he would allow only a few months for diplomacy to secure the release of the detainees. If diplomacy failed, Nasrallah told the UN chief, he would seek more drastic methods to bring the detainees home. And by late summer, despite the semblance of calm along the border, Israel's gloomy predictions had proved entirely accurate: Hezbollah was preparing the next stage in its military campaign against Israel.

Ideologically, Hezbollah's conflict with Israel had always been much bigger than simply ending the occupation of south Lebanon. There was a moral and religious obligation to confront the Zionist state all the way to the liberation of Jerusalem. Yet that ideological objective was necessarily tempered by the realities of the political environment within which Hezbollah operated. In the months before the collapse of the Israel-Syria peace talks at Geneva in March 2000, when expectations of a breakthrough were high, Hezbollah was forced to digest the possibility that the armed struggle against Israel might soon come to an end. But the failure of Geneva, and the subsequent abandoning of the Syria track by Israel and the United States, forestalled any further need for internal mulling of the party's future options if a regional peace deal had been concluded.