Tower of the Sun: Stories From the Middle East and North Africa (27 page)

A peace treaty is a long way off, of course, and will certainly require the destruction or transformation of Hezbollah before it can happen. But the first step will be getting over this syndrome and dissolving the red line. And there may be a relatively simple way to accomplish it.

“What if,” I said to Gemayel, “people from Washington came here and said, ‘Hey, you need to talk to your neighbors.’ Would things change?”

“Yes, it can change,” he said.

And why shouldn’t it? The syndrome is simple. It’s based on fear, silence and punishment. If the United States pressures Lebanon to negotiate with Israel, the Lebanese will at least be able to discuss the fact that they’re being pressured by the United States to negotiate with Israel. And those who think it’s a fine idea will be given international cover. Just as the red line was imposed from the outside, it can be erased from the outside.

Indeed, powerful Lebanese people are walking right up to the red line right now without pressure from the outside.

“Remember,” Gemayel said, “when Hezbollah had indirect talks with Israel through the Germans? I went on TV. It was the first time someone talked about this. I said, ‘How come Hezbollah is allowed to talk to the Israelis indirectly through the Germans to get their prisoners back, while the Lebanese state is not allowed to do indirect talks?’”

Hezbollah didn’t respond to that challenge. What could they possibly say?

The Gemayels and their party were allied with Israel during Lebanon’s civil war. Samy Gemayel’s uncle Bashir swore to vanquish Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian state within a state in southern Lebanon, to throw out the Syrian army and to sign a peace treaty with Jerusalem. Naturally, the Israelis backed him to the hilt in 1982, when they invaded and he was elected president.

According to Thomas Friedman’s account in his book
From Beirut to Jerusalem,
one of the last things Bashir Gemayel ever said was, “To all those who don’t like the idea of me as president, I say, they will get used to it.” A few moments later, he was blown to pieces by terrorists from the Syrian Social Nationalist Party.

Bashir’s brother Amine replaced him as president. Lebanon’s civil war raged on; it was only halfway through at that point. And the Kataeb’s alliance with Israel began to wane. Jerusalem’s peace partner was dead and replaced with his more cautious brother. Hezbollah was on the rise in the south—from which Arafat’s PLO had been evicted—and in the northern Bekaa Valley. The Assad regime’s military forces weren’t planning to leave Lebanon anytime soon. The Israeli dream of a friendly and terrorist-free Lebanon was premature and would have to be deferred for a generation at least.

I asked Samy Gemayel about his party’s former alliance with Israel, and I did it carefully. “You can answer me twice,” I said, “on the record and off the record. I can turn off my voice recorder because I want to know what you really think, but I also want to know what you would say publicly.”

“Let me be very clear,” he said, “and this is my answer publicly and nonpublicly. We believe we had no choice back then but to have an alliance with Israel. I’ve said it on TV. And if we find ourselves in the same position today, we would do it again. I also said that on TV. We couldn’t do anything else. The Syrians were against us. The Palestinians were against us. The Lebanese Muslims were against us. The entire Arab world was against us. What were we supposed to do? Say, Please kill us? We would take support from anywhere, and the only country that supported us at that time was Israel. We really don’t have anything to hide on this matter. And we believe that there should come a day when we negotiate with Israel on all pending and disputed issues in order to have permanent peace on our southern borders. We should end this. We should have stability.”

He went on. I thought he might be careful and cautious, that he’d rather discuss something else, but no, he walked right up to the red line and told me I could print all of it.

“There is no excuse,” he continued, “why Egypt is allowed to have a peace treaty with Israel while we cannot negotiate for an armistice. Why can Jordan have a peace treaty while we also cannot negotiate for an armistice? Even Syria, without a peace treaty, has had peaceful relations with Israel since 1974. Why can’t we? More, why can Hezbollah, a paramilitary group, negotiate with Israel twice through German mediators in 2004 and 2009 to release its prisoners, and the official Lebanese state is not allowed to?”

How many Lebanese people agree with Gemayel? Who knows? They aren’t really allowed to discuss it. There certainly aren’t any polls on this question, and they wouldn’t be reliable if there were.

When I asked how many people he sensed agreed with him, he put it this way: “We have to take into consideration that a lot of people were killed here by Israel. We have to be very careful when we talk about it because people died. But it’s the same for Syria. Syria also killed a significant number of Lebanese from 1976 onward—more than what Israel killed, it may be argued. So if you want to have this attitude toward Israel, why not have the same toward Syria? Syria has done more harm to Lebanon than Israel.”

There are two reasons it’s considered acceptable to be a Lebanese ally of Syria but not of Israel. First of all, Syria is a “brother” Arab country. And second, Syria conquered Lebanon, transformed its political system and still has agents and proxies inside.

“We just want peace in this country,” Gemayel said. “We want to build this country that has been destroyed for the last 40 years. And we can’t build this country as long as it is at war. We don’t want to be at war anymore. It’s as simple as that. The future should be a future of peace.”

*  *  *

The Future Movement party, founded by the late Rafik Hariri—who was assassinated in 2005 by the Syrians and Hezbollah, kicking off the Cedar Revolution—is the primary political vehicle for Lebanon’s Sunni population. It gets roughly 90 percent of the Sunni vote in elections. (The local Muslim Brotherhood is an irrelevant fringe party.) Hariri essentially agreed with Gemayel, and so does his son and successor, former Prime Minister Saad Hariri. The Future Movement, as its name implies, looks to the future and not the past. Its ideology is one of liberalism and capitalism, which cannot flourish in war zones. Neither Hariri campaigned for peace with Israel, but neither waged war on Israel either. Instead, both struggled against Israel’s regional enemies. And they paid the price, the elder Hariri with his life and the younger with self-imposed exile in France.

I had dinner with Saad Hariri shortly before he became prime minister in 2009, and though I can’t quote him directly because our conversation was off the record, I can say that this man, who is the leader of Lebanon’s Sunnis, isn’t an obstacle to peace.

What about Lebanon’s Shias? They make up roughly a third of the population, and roughly two-thirds of them are at least nominal supporters of Hezbollah. But another third or so are staunchly opposed to the party.

Lokman Slim is the Shia community’s most prominent anti-Hezbollah activist. He lives right under the Party of God’s nose in the
dahiyeh,
Hezbollah’s stronghold in Beirut’s southern suburbs. He has dedicated his life to building a liberal alternative to the self-proclaimed Party of God. His opinions are his own. Politically, he’s a minority figure. But he’s not at war with his community. He is at war with its dominant political party, which is not the same thing at all.

“The Shia want to be a respected partner in the globalization of the world,” he told me. “I can’t accept that the shitty island of Cyprus is part of the European Union and we, just a few miles away, are ostracized. We want to enjoy prosperity and suffer recessions, to be a part of the world with all its problems and all its benefits. We want to be part of the world like Israel and Syria.”

How many people in the Shia community agree with what he is saying?

“Much more than you think,” he said.

Lebanon is one of the few Middle Eastern countries not ruled by a monarch that never went through a socialist phase. Even Israel went through a socialist phase, though fortunately not on the Arab or Soviet model. Capitalism and trade come naturally to the people of Lebanon. They don’t have much choice. It’s a small country without any resources. Even after decades of military occupation and war, Lebanon is more prosperous than the other resource-poor Arab countries. Wouldn’t its economy heat up if Beirut had a peace treaty and free trade with Israel?

“Obviously,” Slim said. “We should take advantage of the fact that people want peace. Don’t only listen to [Hezbollah leader] Hassan Nasrallah. Talk to people in the street. The people in the south will tell you they want peace, while Nasrallah always says he wants war. Of course the old woman in her shop selling cigarettes and sandwiches to UNIFIL soldiers wants to expand her small business.”

He wasn’t referring to any old woman in particular, but there are plenty of merchants in the south who have done business with the Israelis, and not all of them are in their 70s. When Israeli soldiers invaded southern Lebanon in 1982 to demolish Yasser Arafat’s PLO statelet, the indigenous Shia population hailed them as liberators. Hezbollah doesn’t talk about this, and the party is extremely unhappy when anyone else brings it up, but everyone in Lebanon knows it’s true.

At the time, it did not even occur to Lebanon’s Shias that Israel was their enemy. Their foe was an ancient one, which had been kicking them around since just after Islam was created: the Sunnis. Palestinians are overwhelmingly Sunni, and in the 1970s their construction of a belligerent mini-state in the Shia heartland of south Lebanon was a most unwelcome development.

“The Shia of the southern hinterland,” wrote Johns Hopkins professor Fouad Ajami, who hails from that part of Lebanon, “had endured Palestinian power, the rise in their midst of a Palestinian state within a state. The Palestinian gunmen and pamphleteers had had the run of that part of the country. Arab nationalists in distant lands had hailed that Palestinian sanctuary; Arab oil wealth had paid for it. The Shia relief in 1982, when Israel swept into Lebanon and shattered that dominion, was to the Arab nationalists proof that the Shia stepchildren were treasonous. Then a Shia militant movement, Hezbollah, rose to challenge Israel. Its homicide bombers, its policies of ‘virtue and terror,’ acquitted the Lebanese Shia in Arab eyes.”

But it took years for Hezbollah to convince the average Lebanese Shia civilian that they were the good guys. If the Israelis had not stayed too long in southern Lebanon—the occupation lasted almost two decades—Hezbollah would have had a much harder time getting started.

“The Shia peasants denounced Hezbollah to the Israelis,” Slim said. “They would go to the Israeli soldiers and report strange things that were happening. Hezbollah spent a long time changing the mentality of these people.”

If Hezbollah is weakened or collapses entirely, this mentality should eventually revert to the norm, because Jews have never been the principal enemy of the Shias. That dubious honor has always gone to the Sunnis. And as Ajami points out, the Shia “resistance” against the “Zionist entity” was from the start as much about acquiring status and respect, and thus acceptance, from the Sunnis as it was about Israel.

“Go to the south,” Slim said, “and ask people if they want a new war, another divine victory.”

I have, and they say no. Lebanon’s Shias are simply not interested in war anymore. The Second Lebanon War in 2006 was the high-water mark in support for Hezbollah aggression. Nasrallah himself was forced to admit it. He all but apologized to his community in the smoldering aftermath, saying, “If I knew the process of capturing [Israeli soldiers], even with a 1 percent probability, would lead to a war like this, and then if you asked me would you go and capture them, my answer would be, of course, no—for humanitarian, moral, social and security reasons.”

Obviously, he wouldn’t have said that if his constituents had enjoyed his destructive adventure. But that doesn’t mean they want a peace treaty and normalization. They don’t.

“They want a cold peace,” Slim said. “Right now they are ideologically conditioned. Don’t forget all the anti-Jewish propaganda. Because we’re not just talking about Israel. Anti-Semitism has been rooted in our culture from the 19th century up through Hezbollah. So people in the south just want a cold peace. They will not mind taking advantage of a warmer peace, but don’t involve them in its creation.”

Hanin Ghaddar, the managing editor of the online magazine
NOW Lebanon,
is another liberal Shia from the south who dissents from the mainstream opinion in her community, and she’s free to say things Hezbollah and its supporters will not.

“People had different opinions,” she told me, “but the general impression was that the 1982 Israeli invasion was great. The Israelis overstayed their welcome, but they were
really
welcome at the beginning. Everybody was very happy. I remember it. A lot of my relatives were happy, including my father. We had no problems with the Israelis.”

But they expected the Israelis to leave. The strangers from the south were welcome as liberators, but not as occupiers. If they had left, Hezbollah would have had a much harder time establishing itself. She concurs with Lokman Slim. Hezbollah, she said, “used the occupation to rally the people around them.”

The Israelis should have left sooner, but the error is perhaps understandable. They were welcomed at first, so they thought they’d be welcome to stay. And they wanted to stay to prevent another hostile group like the PLO from establishing itself on the border. Obviously, it didn’t work out.

But anti-Zionism was not an indigenous belief in this part of Lebanon. The Israelis didn’t foresee that Iran’s revolutionary new government would export its ideology to its distant coreligionists, partly because Iran’s ambitions in the Levant had not yet taken shape and also because the Shia history of dispossession and neglect was not—and still is not—widely understood in Israel. The Iranians understood it, however, because it is their story as well. The rise of Hezbollah was welcome among the Shias for the same reason the Israeli invasion was welcome: both promised relief from Sunni oppression, ancient and modern, real and imagined.