A Privilege to Die

Inside Hezbollah's Legions and Their Endless War Against Israel

Thanassis Cambanis

• Éditeur: Free Press
• Année: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781439150061
• Sujet: Politics & International Relations
• Sous-sujet: International Relations

While Hamas and Al Qaeda are certainly dangerous to Israel and the West, Hezbollah and its millions of foot soldiers are the premier force in the Middle East. Veteran Middle East correspondent Thanassis Cambanis offers the first detailed look at the surprising cross section of people willing to die for Hezbollah and its uncompromising agenda to remake the map of the region and destroy Israel.Part standing army, part political party, and part theological movement, Hezbollah is made up not just of unemployed young men but also middle-class engineers, merchants, even nurses. Hezbollah's widespread popularity rests on its ability to offer its followers economic reform, affordable health care, dependable electricity, efficient courts, and safe streets, as well as victory over Israel. Also unique to the party is its powerful doctrine of self-improvement, which challenges its members to fight ignorance, make money, and engage in safe sex. Millions of demoralized Middle Easterners have gravitated toward these principles, swelling the ranks of what is at heart a radical, militant group. They span economic class, include both fanatics and casual believers, and are sworn to the apocalyptic beliefs of the "Party of God." With its promise of perpetual war, Hezbollah has ushered in a militant renaissance and inspired fighters in Gaza, the West Bank, Egypt, Iraq, and beyond. Whatever their differences, their hatred of Israel and the United States binds them together. To understand Hezbollah is to understand the fighters and engineers, the women who raise the martyrs, the scouts who plant trees, and the nine-year-old girls who take the veil over the objections of their less militant fathers. Cambanis follows a few Hezbollah families through the ups and downs of the 2006 war with Israel and the continuing preparations for another conflict, letting us listen in to Hezbollah members' intimate discussions at the kitchen table and on the battlefield. Cambanis's reporting puts a human face on the Party of God, so we might understand the ideological and religious roots of today's conflict. His riveting narrative provides an urgent and important exploration of militancy in the Middle East. Praise for A PRIVILEGE TO DIE

PART I THE BATTLE

Crying brings sadness to a country, blood brings strength. God willing, our operation for Shebaa will continue. We will keep fighting to liberate our land. The day will come for the Israelis, you must have faith. Their day will come.

SAMIRA SHARAFEDEEN, after burying her three cousins who were Hezbollah fighters, in Taibe, Lebanon, August 21, 2006

As far as I’m concerned, the war ends when there’s nothing left of Israel. After we all die, that’s when Hezbollah is gone. When you kill the Shia, that is when Hezbollah is gone.

ALI SIRHAN, a volunteer fighter for the Islamic Resistance, standing a few hundred feet from Israel in the Lebanese border village of Kfar Kila, August 21, 2006

1 THE PARTY OF GOD

Hezbollah has captivated the Arab world with a radical new belief, decisively changing an entire region’s dynamics and paving the path to a long series of wars. Put simply, Hezbollah has convinced legions of common men and women that Israel can be defeated and destroyed—and not just in the distant future, but soon. With more success than any other Islamist group, Hezbollah has harnessed modern politics and warfare to mobilize millions of dedicated supporters and soft sympathizers under its banner of resistance against Israel. Theirs is not a quixotic quest for dignity, a symbolic but doomed fight for the sake of empowerment; Hezbollah’s militancy has had concrete consequences for Israel and has unleashed a new Islamist wave. Hezbollah has achieved military success in nearly three decades of guerilla war against Israel, first expelling the Israel Defense Forces from the “security zone” it occupied in South Lebanon for nearly two decades, and then frustrating Israel’s objectives in the war it fought against Hezbollah in 2006. Now Hezbollah, the Party of God, has the Islamic world’s ear, and is spreading a gospel of perpetual war. Hezbollah is persuading a growing swath of Arab society to follow its example: militarize fully and confront the enemy at every opportunity. An even greater number has added its moral approval. In 2006, Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers and provoked a war that left Lebanon physically in shambles. But Hezbollah emerged elated. It had held out against Israel longer than any Arab army ever had. Its militia had thwarted Israel’s land advance, and the Jewish state failed to reach any of its declared war aims—the release of its captured soldiers, stopping Hezbollah from firing rockets, and dismantling Hezbollah’s militia along the border. Hezbollah moved from the backbenches to the center of power within the Lebanese government. And Hezbollah’s rise thwarted the United States’ carefully laid plans for a friendly, secular, liberal Lebanon securely at peace with Israel. Today Hezbollah preaches humility to its followers while acting anything but humble to expand its power and influence across the Islamic world.

Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary-general and charismatic supreme leader of Hezbollah, commands more popularity in the Middle East than any other leader.¹ Unusual among the region’s militants, he has frequently shown restraint and political savvy, but Nasrallah has encountered his greatest political success through confrontation. Speaking in November 2009 on the annual holiday that commemorates the “martyrs” of the Islamic Resistance, Nasrallah sounded like he was spoiling for another war with Israel:

I say we are ready. Here I vow again before the souls of the martyrs, which are alive and present, saying: O Barak, Ashkenazi, Netanyahu and Obama!² Let the whole world listen. Send as many squads as you want: five, seven or the whole Israeli army. We will destroy them in our hills, valleys and mountains.

Well into another millennium, Nasrallah and Hezbollah have woven a new reality for their followers, built on ideology, identity, faith, and practice. Hezbollah has delivered tangible social gains for its followers, like the $400 million reconstruction of southern Beirut to be completed in 2010, replacing refugee slums with gleaming glass residential towers that resemble luxury hotels. It has won tactical military victories against Israel, unlike the other Middle Eastern regimes that ineffectually rail against the Jewish state. As a growing movement with transnational appeal, Hezbollah has broken the crusty traditions of Arab politics to craft a big-tent party platform that speaks to people’s mundane aspirations: economic reform, affordable health care, round-the-clock electricity, efficient courts, and community policing. Most important of all, however, Hezbollah has shifted the norms of Middle Eastern politics with its fast-spreading ideology of perpetual war.

The Party of God’s new world is most vividly on display in the living rooms of its rank-and-file partisans, where Hezbollah’s bourgeoisie explain their devotion to a movement that organizes their daily lives and ideology, and which every decade or so leads them into a catastrophic war. The first time I visited the village of Aita Shaab, at the close of the war in 2006, virtually every structure bore the marks of Israeli mortars. It was from this heavily militarized border village that Hezbollah had launched its raid into Israel in July of that year, initiating the most recent war. It was here that Hezbollah guerillas had laid a second ambush, destroying the first Israeli tank that crossed the border into Lebanon. House-to-house fighting had reduced much of the village to rubble.

At the edge of the village closest to the frontier, I met a pair of local Hezbollah officials, surveying the wreckage of the war from a hilltop that looked like a rock quarry but which had recently been a crowded neighborhood. One of them, a man named Faris Jamil, told me how the local villagers had instantly mustered when war broke out and compared them to the National Guard. The doomsday destruction, he said, wouldn’t deter committed Hezbollah supporters; they felt they had won, and the loss of their homes would amount to no more than a temporary inconvenience. I found it hard to imagine that Aita Shaab would ever function like a normal town again; I thought of other war zones where even decades after the last clashes fallen buildings still marred the landscape and makeshift roads wound like goat paths around the detritus of uncleared bombing grounds.

In January 2009 I returned to Aita Shaab to find out how the villagers—still in the process of rebuilding—felt about future conflict. War was raging not far away in Gaza, between Hamas and Israel, and many Hezbollah activists were urging the Lebanese Party of God to attack in support of their Islamist allies in Gaza. To my surprise, the drive was an hour shorter than it had been before the war, because of a network of gently graded and freshly paved roads paid for by the government of Iran. The village was unrecognizable, bustling with construction crews, packed stores, and new villas. The ruined bluff where I first had met Faris Jamil was once again a crammed neighborhood, with two houses on lots meant for one.

Now 52, Faris was still living in the unfinished basement of his almost fully rebuilt family home. He was well off, and before the war had lived in a pleasant two story house on a hill. He had rebuilt it one notch better, as a mansion, three stories tall, with marble columns and hand-carved floral accents above the windows. This too he saw as a form of resistance. Israel wanted Hezbollah to leave the border villages, so it was the duty of patriots of the Islamic Resistance to stay—if possible, in style. Aita Shaab’s full-time population had expanded since 2006; Faris Jamil implied that Hezbollah had subsidized the boom with payments to families willing to relocate from Beirut. “We want peace. We don’t want to suffer another war,” he said. “But we must have our plans in place. Last time there was a war, only a few hundred people stayed here. Next time, we want thousands to stay. We will send the children to Beirut, since they can do nothing. All the men must stay, along with some women to cook and support them.”

Faris had lived in Manhattan for years and for a time had worked for a Jewish man who dealt wholesale in fabric. He remembered his boss fondly. He was unusual in that during his long complaints against Israel he didn’t slip into ranting about Jews. He wasn’t itching for war, but he was planning for it. As a businessman he had trained himself to anticipate the future, and in his opinion two things were guaranteed: Hezbollah would run his world, and Hezbollah and Israel would keep fighting wars. Neither eventuality upset him. “Our life is hard, and that is mainly because Israel refuses to let us live like a normal country,” Faris said. “There are some people who want peace at any cost in their life, but we feel that in life you have to have respect. Without respect, it’s not a life.”

His main preoccupations were his house and the businesses he had established for his sons, including a restaurant and an internet café. His quotidian struggles were material, and yet to Faris they did not contradict his complete submission to the higher aim of the Islamic Resistance. He was not a violent man, nor was he an impulsive hothead. But he willingly and calmly served a movement whose commitment to armed struggle guaranteed that his world and livelihood would be blasted apart every few years. Like Ayman, the young man I had met smoking the water pipe in Beirut, Faris Jamil had voluntarily relocated from a prosperous merchant’s life in America to the borderlands of South Lebanon, choosing near-certain war over prosperity. New York, in his view, was a dangerous place to raise kids, riddled with gangs, drugs, and other temptations. Better to relocate his young family to the cradle of Islamic Resistance, a place where their spirits could thrive, and any violence they encountered would be part of a meaningful, epochal battle. He was not rare in choosing the battleground of south Lebanon over a career in the United States; I met a half-dozen families that followed the same trajectory. They always explained their decision to return as a result of contemplating what would become of their children in America’s public schools. In Aita Shaab, Faris pursued daily dreams quite similar to those that animated him when he worked at 37th Street and Broadway in Manhattan. Yet he was happy to let his commercial livelihood go up in smoke, literally, when Hezbollah deemed it time for another war with Israel. “Life is for more than to make money,” Faris said. “We will continue, and if we make peace, it will be through power.”

Hezbollah has inculcated millions—including many beyond Lebanon’s borders—into its ideology of Islamic Resistance, which is coupled to an unusually effective operational program. That recipe has put Hezbollah in the pilot’s seat in the Middle East, steering the region into a thicket of wars to come. And it has made Hezbollah dangerous not only in the short term, as a military threat to Israel and to the pragmatic, compromise-seeking Arabs in its neighborhood, but over the long term as the progenitor of an infectious ideology of violent confrontation against Israel and the United States, vilified in the region as the ultimate backer of the Jewish State.

During six years of reporting in the Middle East I encountered no popular movement that rivaled Hezbollah as a militia or an ideological force. In Lebanon I met men and women prepared to die, or sacrifice their children, for Hezbollah’s program, but they defied the mold of dreary desperation that characterized other would-be martyrs. Educated middle-class types populated Hezbollah’s legions, professionals with alternatives and aspirations, who lived multidimensional lives not much different from those of my friends in America. They were engineers, teachers, merchants, landlords, drivers, construction workers; they had jobs and children. They weren’t broken, miserable people, turning to Hezbollah out of hopelessness; they were willing actors who had come to embrace Hezbollah’s view of the world, a heady mix of religion, self-improvement, and self-defense that translated into a sustained surge of toxic and powerful militancy. I met mothers who grieved their dead children but encouraged their surviving brood to join Hezbollah’s militia; they projected the confidence of patriots, rather than the fanaticism of a death-cult. They radiated a victor’s confidence I rarely encountered among Palestinian militants. These Hezbollah mothers sounded proud and sad, but never unhinged or cornered. Hezbollah’s followers were as notable for their discipline and restraint as for their willingness to die.

Hezbollah coalesced in the crucible of Israeli occupation. Israel occupied about one-tenth of Lebanon’s territory from 1982 to 2000, a strip of south Lebanon that Israel euphemistically termed “the security zone.” The first generation of Hezbollah fighters came of age during two decades of guerilla war against Israel. When Israel quit the occupied area under fire from Hezbollah in May 2000, it left behind thousands of collaborators, including men who had beaten and tortured Hezbollah fighters on behalf of the Israelis. Hezbollah’s rivals expected a raft of vigilante executions, but Nasrallah ordered his followers to keep their hands off all collaborators, leaving their judgment to Lebanese courts. This decision shocked everyone. I met Hezbollah fighters who recalled years later how they had wanted to take revenge, but instead had cordoned off the collaborator villages and protected their erstwhile tormentors from harm—an act less of mercy than of political calculation, which eased the fears of some opponents and ultimately gained Hezbollah more power than it ever before had possessed.

Nasrallah’s personal charisma has played a major role in Hezbollah’s rise. He has run the party since 1992, steadily consolidating the fidelity of its inner ranks while expanding Hezbollah’s reach among soft supporters. A pudgy man with a handsome mouth, a mellifluous voice, and the black turban that signals direct descent from the Prophet Mohammed, Nasrallah has matured along with the Islamist Party that he took over almost two decades ago when he was only thirty-one years old. His speeches alternate between humor and invective; between steady exposition of Arab politics and appeals to gut anger; between systematic analyses of Israeli policy, and racist hatred of Jews.

Under Nasrallah’s leadership, Hezbollah steadily has expanded its number of followers and its share of political power, in large part because the Party of God is just as happy to use the tools of coercion as of persuasion. Within its primary target constituency of Lebanese Shia, Hezbollah ruthlessly quashes any serious threat to its monopoly on force and power. Hezbollah has thwarted any attempt to organize alternative Shia parties, either religious or secular. It has crushed individuals who publicly question Hezbollah’s militant approach. The party tolerates free speech and political dissent only from weak actors, to forge the impression of openness. Hezbollah accepts only one other Shia political party, the Amal Movement, which has long been subsumed into Hezbollah’s ambit as a junior partner. Those who dare challenge Hezbollah’s policies or bona fides face the withering power of the party to ostracize and economically marginalize them. Those suspected of plotting against Hezbollah might disappear or end up imprisoned and charged with treason or espionage on behalf of the Israelis. Hezbollah’s constituency and its skeptical neighbors know that the hand extended in invitation easily turns into a fist. But Hezbollah has convinced many audiences to overlook its brutal side as an unavoidable consequence of war, highlighting instead the party’s humanitarian wing and ideas-based agenda. So long as Hezbollah is perceived to be defending the Arab world against Israel, it can put its Arab critics on the defensive.

Hezbollah’s ideology might seem incoherent were it not so successful; but the Party of God has been able to market its ideas effectively because success sells. Perpetual war has perpetuated the movement; Islamic Resistance has brought power to its adherents; and Hezbollah’s web of embedded institutions, including courts, schools, militias, and hospitals, has dramatically raised its community’s standard of living. Faris Jamil truly believes in the war against Israel, but Hezbollah buttresses that abiding belief with the formidable material resources it spends to rebuild its communities after each war. So long as it continues to deliver, Hezbollah’s number of followers continues to grow.

Roughly put, Hezbollah teaches a sort of Islamist prosperity agenda, a doctrine of militant empowerment. People must live with dignity, and that means taking the offensive on every level: against Israel, the regional military bugbear; against poverty; against immorality; and against ignorance. Power is the antidote to powerlessness, Hezbollah counsels. It’s a compelling gospel of self-improvement, and it easily translates into specific prescriptions for demoralized Middle Easterners, especially members of the long-downtrodden Shia sect of Islam. Hezbollah lectures about everything from safe sex and hygiene to family responsibilities and financial planning. Individual power, in the party’s ideology, stems from the ummah, or community. The more powerful the ummah, the stronger its members. Hundreds of thousands have joined Hezbollah’s community, freely volunteering their time or donating their money to the Party of God, adopting its militia and bureaucracy as an extension of their own families. Millions more extend their sympathy and political support to the Islamic Resistance.

The holy struggle against Israel weaves together these manifold ideological strands. Anger toward Israel unifies Hezbollah’s followers in the face of internal contradictions that might otherwise unravel the movement. An almost primal and simple dictum informs and at times dwarfs all else for Hezbollah’s community: Resistance. It is difficult to contain a militant movement that includes not only fully indoctrinated Shia Islamists but soft sympathizers lured by identity politics and held in place by Hezbollah’s impressive network of social services. When it proves too daunting to hold this coalition together with Islamist teachings, Hezbollah can always invoke its trump card—the War Against Israel. Many people across the region dislike Hezbollah but loathe Israel’s policies even more. And for many of Hezbollah’s followers, Israel’s very existence amounts to a casus belli.

Nasrallah regularly reminds his millions of listeners across the Arab world that Hezbollah and its allies—the “Axis of Resistance”—have wrung more concessions from Israel by force than the pro-Western “Axis of Accommodation” has won through decades of negotiation. As Nasrallah said in his November 2009 Martyrs Day speech:

Eighteen years of [Palestinian] negotiations resulted in failure, frustration, forfeiture, humiliation and the persistence of occupation. On the other hand, eighteen years of resistance in Lebanon [from 1982 to 2000] led to the liberation of Beirut, the Southern Suburbs, Mount Lebanon, Beqaa and the South from the Zionist occupation and the restoration of our dignity and esteem without anyone in the world begrudging us that…. God willing with our resistance, unity, cooperation and firmness and the moral blessings of the blood of martyrs, we will turn any threat into an opportunity.

Hezbollah’s followers have embraced the notion that it’s better to fight and die with dignity than live comfortably without it. They scorn the pacific Arab governments that support coexistence with Israel.

In taking the leadership of the region’s militant renaissance, Hezbollah has capitalized on diffuse anger about Israel’s policies toward Gaza and in the West Bank, including the growth of settlements. The failure of the Palestinian Authority to reach a settlement with Israel nearly twenty years after signing the Oslo Accords has weakened advocates of compromise while strengthening Hezbollah’s “resistance camp.” But Hezbollah also draws on a deep well of hatred of Jews, knowingly and cleverly intertwining it with the bubbling vein of anger at Israeli policy. Still sensitive to international opinion, Hezbollah leaders speak pointedly about Israeli, rather than “Jewish,” policies in their speeches. Ever since an infamous speech in May 1998, Nasrallah has avoided anti-Semitic invective. On that occasion, he mourned the “historic catastrophe and tragic event” of the founding of “the state of the Zionist Jews, the descendants of apes and pigs.” Since then, Nasrallah’s rhetoric has been more measured; he has carefully observed that Hezbollah’s complaint is against “Zionist policy,” and not Jews in general or the Jewish religion. Whether sincerely or not, the party has excised hatred of Jews from its official doctrine. In November 2009, Nasrallah unveiled Hezbollah’s new official manifesto, its first update since the “Open Letter” released in 1985. “Our problem with them is not that they are Jews,” Nasrallah said, reading from a document that had been debated for months by the party’s leaders. “Our problem with them is that they are occupiers who have usurped our land and sacred places.” The Hezbollah leader went out of his way to call the Jewish State by its name, Israel, in addition to making the usual references to “the Zionist entity.”

Throughout the Arab world, many peopl...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Title Page
• Map
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Prologue
• Part I: The Battle
• Part II: War Without End
• Photographs
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright