Warriors of God (48 page)

When the wind was favorable, Hezbollah supporters would release dozens of balloons carrying anti-Israel messages or pictures of Nasrallah across the border into northern Israel. Hezbollah took to tapping the Israeli security fence along the border with sticks, triggering the alarm system, then timing how long it took Israeli soldiers to reach the scene to check if there had been a breach. “We are in a state of war with them, and psychological warfare is one of the arenas of war,” Sheikh Nabil Qawq explained.

Israeli soldiers were not averse to unilaterally goading their opponents on the other side of the fence, either. In January 2002, a Hezbollah militant manning an observation post was temporarily blinded when Israeli soldiers directed a tank's laser range finder at him. Hezbollah fighters lasered Israeli soldiers in kind.

In another incident, soldiers from the Golani Brigade took to dashing across the border and snatching Hezbollah and Amal flags on a dare, an act apparently blessed by the unit's commanding officer. In retaliation, Hezbollah booby-trapped the flags, and the cross-border forays stopped.

Sometimes, however, Hezbollah's psychological needling of the Israelis went dangerously close to snapping the fragile “balance of terror.” In March 2002, Hezbollah engineered an audacious—and risky—operation in which two Islamic Jihad volunteers were dispatched across the border to carry out a deadly ambush near the kibbutz of Metsuva. Wearing IDF uniforms and carrying army issue M-16 rifles, the two gunmen opened fire on passing vehicles. By the time Israeli troops rushed to the scene of the ambush and shot the two gunmen dead, five civilians, including a shepherd, two truck drivers, a woman, and her daughter, had been killed.

Although the Israelis were initially unsure whether the gunmen had
originated from Lebanon or the West Bank, soldiers tracking the militants found a ladder hidden in brush beside the border fence, which the IDF said was as of “special design.” The Israelis concluded that Hezbollah was responsible for the attack.

Hezbollah responded coyly. Nasrallah maintained his usual ambiguity, saying, “Whatever the Israelis are accusing us of, be it realistic or not, is a great honor for us.”

Still, Hezbollah's fingerprints were all over the operation. The area of the border on the Lebanese side where the militants had crossed into Israel was under Hezbollah control. The location of the ambush site lay within sight of a Hezbollah observation post on an escarpment from which fighters enjoyed unhindered views of the western Galilee coastline to Haifa, twenty-five miles to the south. The actual attack was even filmed from the Hezbollah post and broadcast live on Al-Manar television.

Although the attack crossed the red line in the evolving “balance of terror” between Hezbollah and Israel, the Israeli government again chose to stay its hand.

In March 2002, rising violence in Israel claimed the lives of 135 Israelis, the highest monthly toll during the Al-Aqsa intifada. During the same period, more than 230 Palestinians died at the hands of the Israeli army, many of them during a major two-week incursion into the West Bank in the first half of the month.

At the end of March, Beirut hosted the annual Arab League summit, during which Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia unveiled a proposal to achieve comprehensive peace in the Middle East. In essence, his plan, subsequently known as the Arab Peace Initiative, offered full normalization and security in exchange for an Israeli withdrawal from all Arab territory occupied since 1967, the creation of a Palestinian state, and the return of Palestinian refugees to their original homes. Although Syria endorsed the plan on March 29, along with the twenty-one other
members of the Arab League, it did so with reluctance. Syria had consistently refused to discuss normalizing ties with Israel before receiving a guarantee that Israel would fully withdraw from the Golan Heights. In Syrian eyes, the Saudi initiative weakened its negotiating position in future peace talks.

Hours after the vote in Beirut, a Hamas suicide bomber blew himself up in a hotel in Netanya on the eve of the Jewish Passover holiday, killing thirty Israelis. Sharon ignored the Arab Peace Initiative and sent his army back into the West Bank in a massive punitive offensive.

As Israel launched its “Defensive Shield” operation against the Palestinians, Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran sensed an opportunity to squeeze Israel from the north. Nasrallah reportedly ordered the Islamic Resistance to prepare for stepped-up operations in the Shebaa Farms and then met with Bashar al-Assad to secure a green light. Nasrallah is said to have told Assad that Hezbollah could not stand idly by while the Palestinians were being slaughtered in the West Bank and recommended a controlled escalation along the Blue Line. Such a meeting would have been unthinkable during the presidency of Hafez al-Assad, which only underlined how the relationship between Syria and Hezbollah under Bashar al-Assad was evolving from one of client and proxy to a more balanced partnership. For Syria, fuming over the Arab Peace Initiative, a controlled escalation along the Blue Line could be useful.

The Islamic Resistance launched its offensive on March 30, hitting Israeli outposts on the occupied mountainside with an estimated fifty AT-3 Sagger antitank missiles and one hundred mortar rounds. While a symbolic gesture of support by Hezbollah for the Palestinians had been widely expected, the events of the next few days caught most observers by surprise. Hezbollah was soon battering Israeli outposts in the Shebaa Farms on a daily basis, with ever-increasing ferocity. After two weeks of clashes, UNIFIL estimated that Hezbollah had fired 1,160 mortar rounds, 205 antitank missiles, and Katyusha rockets as well as several SAM-7 antiaircraft missiles, the first recorded use of SAMs since before 2000. The attacks peaked on April 10, when all outposts in the Shebaa Farms came under what UNIFIL said in an internal memo was probably the heaviest artillery barrage by the Islamic Resistance since 1992. According
to one report, an estimated $800,000 worth of ordnance was expended.
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At least four hundred mortar rounds were fired in the attack, some of them 120 mm “bunker-busters” fitted with delayed-action fuses designed to penetrate the thick reinforced concrete roofs of outposts before exploding, the first time Hezbollah had employed such munitions. The barrage provided cover for a “publicity raid,” in which a squad of Hezbollah fighters approached an IDF forward base on the edge of the Shebaa Farms to plant a yellow party flag on the ramparts.

Within two or three days, Hezbollah's bombardments settled into a routine. Most of the attacks occurred in the late afternoon when the setting sun shone directly into the west-facing Israeli outposts. The offensive was tailor-made for the media. Camera crews obediently lined up each afternoon beside an Indian UNIFIL observation post facing an IDF outpost less than a mile away, ready to capture the next attack on film.

While Hezbollah was preoccupied with the Shebaa Farms, a more worrying development emerged when unidentified militants began staging attacks across the Blue Line directly into Israel. They were scrappy and amateurish for the most part: a handful of rocket-propelled grenades fired at an IDF border post or a pair of old 107 mm rockets sailing across the border. Several Palestinians—“disorganized individuals,” a Lebanese army officer told me—were caught in possession of rockets.

Yet by the second week, it appeared that what had begun as a controlled escalation was slipping out of control, to Hezbollah's apparent discomfort. When militants attacked an IDF border post one afternoon, an eyewitness told me he saw several startled Hezbollah men leave their own observation post, jump into a car, and chase the fleeing attackers down a valley.

Even Yasser Arafat sent a message to President Emile Lahoud grumbling that the fighting along Israel's northern border was drawing international attention away from the beleaguered Palestinians in the West Bank.

Sensing that the situation was growing unpredictable, Nasrallah chose to ease tensions by announcing that widening the conflict with Israel “all the way from the [Mediterranean] sea to Mount Hermon”
would not take place at this time. That option, he said, was being held in reserve in the event that Israel expelled the Palestinians from the occupied territories.

After two weeks, the offensive had played its course, and all sides began to de-escalate.

Although the April offensive came close to upsetting the “balance of terror,” the outcome was more than satisfying for Hezbollah and Syria. Hezbollah had flexed its resistance muscles and burnished its reputation as the spearhead of the struggle against Israel, while Syria had demonstrated once again that it remained essential to stability along Israel's northern border. The violence along the Lebanon-Israel border successfully diverted some international attention from the West Bank to Damascus. Dick Cheney, the U.S. vice president, had held a “polite and courteous” phone conversation with Assad, and the fighting had forced Colin Powell, the U.S. secretary of state, to readjust his schedule for a planned trip to the Middle East to include Beirut and Damascus on his itinerary.
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Significantly, the outcome hardened the view within Hezbollah and in Damascus that Israel had gone soft, that it was no longer the feisty, belligerent nation of soldier-settlers that had crushed and humiliated the Arabs, smashing their armies and seizing their land. Now the average young Israeli looked for a lucrative career in finance or technology rather than serving in the military or living the ascetic life of a kibbutznik. Even Ariel Sharon, that old Jewish warrior, had chosen to overrule his own cabinet when midway through the crisis it had voted by a margin of one for forceful military action against Lebanon. Sharon, who himself had voted in favor of heavy retaliation, decided that a one-vote majority was insufficient to launch reprisals that risked developing into a war with Syria.

Hezbollah took encouragement and satisfaction from what it perceived was the crumbling morale of the Israeli people as the Al-Aqsa intifada raged on. Israel's frail economy, the slump in the number of tourists, and the growing polarization between Israelis calling for a withdrawal from the occupied territories and those demanding harsher action against the Palestinians merely strengthened Hezbollah's conviction
that the Jewish state could be defeated through resistance and jihad.

“Israel is exploding from inside,” Sheikh Nabil Qawq told me in February 2002. “Tel Aviv is turning into a city of ghosts. The Israelis have lost confidence in their leaders and their army.… The only and lasting way for the Arab people is the path of resistance.”

While the attacks in the Shebaa Farms captured the headlines and provoked speculation on the possibilities of a new front opening, Hezbollah also waged a more insidious and covert war across the Blue Line. Even before the May 2000 Israeli withdrawal, Hezbollah had begun making contacts with Israeli Arab communities in Galilee in order to build a network of intelligence-gathering cells. The program accelerated following the Israeli withdrawal when Hezbollah deployed into the border district and co-opted some of the cross-border drug smuggling networks. Hezbollah's intelligence penetration of Israel was well planned, multitiered, and conducted with a high degree of professionalism, ruefully acknowledged by Western and Israeli intelligence officials.

In exchange for cash and narcotics, such as Lebanese hashish, or cocaine and heroin refined in secret laboratories in the northern Bekaa Valley, the Israeli Arab agents provided Hezbollah with valuable intelligence on Israel's northern border, including details of IDF outposts, the number of troops deployed, ambush locations along the border fence, surveillance and reconnaissance measures, personal details about IDF officers, and maps and photographs of military installations. The tactical intelligence was fed into potential plans for cross-border penetrations, abductions, and localized attacks.

Hezbollah also gathered detailed operational intelligence on facilities, military and civilian, throughout Israel to be included in a target bank for potential rocket strikes or bomb attacks in a future war. These facilities included IDF bases, government institutions, and industrial centers as well as major road junctions, towns, and cities.

On a strategic level, Hezbollah sought intelligence about Israeli politics, economy, and society. Some of Hezbollah's agents were tasked with gathering seemingly mundane information, such as statistical annuals, telephone directories, reference books, and periodicals. Along with the activities of the party's Hebrew speakers in the Hebrew Observation Department at Al-Manar television who trawl Israeli newspapers, television, and radio each day, the information provided by the network of agents inside Israel helped Hezbollah build a more comprehensive and thorough picture of how Israel works in order to better analyze future moves by Israel as well as to predict potential Israeli reactions to attacks.

In tandem with the direct intelligence-gathering operations using the cross-border drug smuggling connections, trained Hezbollah intelligence officers traveled abroad seeking to recruit university-educated Israeli Arabs attending conferences and even the annual pilgrimage, or Hajj, when the Muslim faithful travel to Mecca in Saudi Arabia.

The favorite location for exchanging drugs, information, and cash was in the northern—Lebanese—two-thirds of Ghajar, which remained unfenced from the southern one-third of the village under Israeli control. Ghajar, described by one Israeli army officer as Israel's “soft underbelly,” was a persistent worry on account of its vulnerability to penetration from the Lebanese side and the doubtful loyalties of its residents.

Initially, access to Ghajar from Lebanon was blocked because of the presence of a UNIFIL position beside a gate in the old Israeli security fence that encircled the northern tip of the village. But in August 2001, UNIFIL relocated its observation post to a new site a hundred yards farther south. Suddenly, anyone could drive through the gate and follow the dilapidated former Israeli patrol road on the southern side of the fence straight into the northern end of Ghajar. To the alarm of the Israelis and the Alawite residents, the first visitors were from Hezbollah. A dozen or so fighters erected a white tent on the outskirts of the village and turned an old bomb shelter built from blocks of black basalt into a command post. The new Hezbollah position beside the village renewed speculation that the Israelis would divide Ghajar with a security fence, a move vigorously opposed by the residents. Apart from Hezbollah militants,
the only other visitors to the village were curious Lebanese reporters. Neither group was made particularly welcome by the villagers.