The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations (28 page)

The Iranians found sympathy for their project in the unlikeliest quarters. There was Saad Eddin Ibrahim, the Egyptian democratic rights activist, who came out in support of Hezbollah’s war. I had met Ibrahim a few years before while he was awaiting trial for trumped-up charges brought against him by the Mubarak government, a government he had once served as an adviser and speech-writer for Mubarak and Egypt’s First Lady. The enmity he felt toward his former jailer was undoubtedly part of the reason he now cheered on Hezbollah—the enemy of his enemy Mubarak was his friend. But Ibrahim always had a soft spot for the Islamists, and his work on Egyptian militants in the 1980s had established his academic reputation. “When I was in school in the U.S.,” he told me at a dinner in Cairo, “there was the civil rights movement and the women’s movement. When I came back to Egypt, there was the Islamist movement.”

Weeks after the July 2006 war’s end, Ibrahim would interview Nasrallah and praise him, chastising the Bush administration for isolating Hezbollah’s secretary-general. After all, according to Ibrahim, Nasrallah wasn’t an extremist like bin Laden; he was a moderate. Ibrahim’s assessment was based on polling showing that Nasrallah had won a large cross section of popular support; ergo, he could not possibly be on the extremist fringe. In a survey of seventeen hundred Egyptians, Nasrallah was first on a list of thirty regional figures ranked by perceived importance.
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What did it mean that bin Laden appeared on only 52 percent of those lists? According to Ibrahim, it meant Nasrallah’s 82 percent made Hezbollah “mainstream.” The democratic rights activist argued that an armed group
that had effectively staged a coup d’état on behalf of an adventurist foreign policy that had put all of Lebanon at risk was of a “civic disposition” and “not inimical to democracy.”

It was an odd conclusion. There was no arguing that Nasrallah was popular with the Arab masses. But the broad support for him would be evidence of his moderation only if moderation were a political value universally cherished in the Arabic-speaking Middle East. It is not. What Nasrallah’s approval ratings really showed was that a majority of Arabs gravitate toward the strong horse, no matter how violent or risky its tactics. It was shocking that a famous Arab liberal like Ibrahim refused to see this, and ended up carrying water for Hezbollah, an organization determined to destroy any vestiges of a liberal, democratic order in Lebanon. The White House’s project for regional transformation was going backward.

More urgently still, Israel did not perform as well as everyone, including the Sunni powers, had expected. The Olmert government had promised to change the regional equation and disarm Hezbollah, but its management of the war was uncertain, if not incompetent. After two weeks of an aerial onslaught, Hezbollah was holding on against the Israelis, and at the same time damaging the prestige of Arab regimes fretting on the sidelines. Arab rulers like Saudi king Abdullah and Mubarak were half men, said Bashar al-Assad, while Hezbollah had shown the Arab masses who was willing to take it to the Zionists, and capable of doing so. Sunni resolve was ebbing. So when the Israelis struck civilian housing near the town of Qana, site of another Israeli raid that killed civilians in a UN compound in 1996, the Sunni regimes could abide no longer and demanded the United States move to a cease-fire immediately.

In strict military terms, the war didn’t look like much of a victory for Hezbollah, which had lost at least five hundred fighters, or five dead Hezbollahis for every IDF soldier killed. But Nasrallah’s stated aims in the conflict were modest
—if I survive, we win—so
Israel was widely perceived to have lost the war, even if long afterward Nasrallah
would seldom come out of hiding for fear of an Israeli assassination attempt. Had the war continued, it’s possible Hezbollah would have been severely weakened, but the irony was that Washington had effectively helped rescue Hezbollah, fearing that a continuation of the war would have led to the toppling of the Lebanese government.

The Israelis did not want to distress their U.S. ally further than their poor management of the war already had, and so there is reason to believe the Olmert government sought the cease-fire at least as ardently as the Americans. But the Israelis were still frustrated with the way Washington saw Lebanon. The Israelis thought Bush had created an imaginary Arab country in his own mind. The administration, the Israelis contended, thought they were dealing with Jeffer-sonian liberals when the Lebanese were just a bunch of clansmen at each other’s throats. And the Israelis believed that their reading of Lebanon was later vindicated when leaders of the March 14 movement, including Walid Jumblatt and Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, feted Samir Kuntar after the Lebanese national was released from an Israeli prison where he’d served three decades for murdering a four-year-old girl while fighting with the Palestinian resistance. It was a repugnant moment, and to watch pro-democracy figures celebrating Kuntar’s return was nauseating. But the Israelis had it wrong about Lebanon. There was only one tribe doing the killing in that country, and most of the Lebanese—the ones the United States was backing-were willing to abide by the rule of law and put their trust in the international community. The Americans were undoubtedly naive and overly optimistic about Lebanon’s prospects. But it was the Israelis who didn’t understand what was happening in Lebanon.

That misunderstanding had its roots in Israel’s past experience.

The Israelis had always imagined that Lebanon would be the second country to make peace with the Jewish state, after Egypt. Among other things, they saw in Lebanon’s large Christian population a community that shared many of the same values and was also at odds with the region’s Sunni majority. But Israel’s perception of
Lebanon changed when it invaded in 1982 in order to drive out the PLO. Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin met with the country’s newly elected Christian president, Bashir Gemayel, to move toward diplomatic relations, but two weeks later Gemayel was assassinated by a Syrian agent. Remarkably, this left the Israelis without a backup plan, showing that they had an incomplete understanding of Lebanon, and of the region as a whole: even if they wanted peace with Lebanon and saw the Christians as their partners, that choice was not for minorities like Christians and Jews to make. Decisions of that magnitude can only be made by the Sunnis.

In fact, the Israelis knew this—their two peace treaties were with Sunni powers—and generally refrained from basing their regional strategy on what they had in common with Arab minorities: that they were all despised by the Sunni Arabs. Their past Lebanon policy of reaching out to the Christians was an aberration, and a miscalculation they were determined not to make again. Hence they considered the Americans sentimental for being taken in by the prospect of Lebanese democracy.

The Lebanese understood the region perfectly in all its complexity. They knew what effect pulling one lever here would have over there, and how the regional powers interacted. But for all that, they could not see the forest for the trees. They were too subtle, too convinced there was a backdoor way to solve their problems. Because they, understandably, did not want another civil war, they would not take on Hezbollah. Instead, they told themselves that eventually Hezbollah would simply give up its arms—if only they could find the right incentive, the correct political recipe to make it do so. The truth should have been clear after Israel’s 2000 withdrawal, when the resistance declared its arms were still needed to fight for a thin piece of land in an obscure corner of Lebanon near the Israeli border, the She-baa Farms.
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Hezbollah was never going to give up its weapons. Who has ever willingly given up their arms, except after having been defeated?

The result of all this was that Hezbollah marched on, effectively
setting its own foreign policy, regardless of what the rest of the country or its government desired. The only consolation left to the Lebanese was the belief that Hezbollah would never turn its weapons on other Lebanese. That delusion was shattered in May 2008, when Hezbollah mounted a coup targeting Sunnis in Beirut and Jumblatt’s Druze in the Shouf Mountains. Even before this, it should have been obvious that Hezbollah was more than willing to sacrifice fellow Lebanese to its own interests—after all, how much of a difference is there between shooting your neighbors yourself and starting a war and then hiding behind your neighbors when the enemy returns fire?

Of course, it wasn’t clear to the Western media and policy circles until after the Gaza conflict in 2009 that the resistance bloc used human shields as a matter of course. During the summer of 2006, the question was still open to debate, even though it should have been obvious that the reason Hezbollah had built a state within a state was to avoid responsibility for its actions and prevent enemies from engaging it as they would the military of a sovereign nation. All of Lebanon was a human shield.

It was easy to feel like a human shield that summer. The Israeli Air Force dropped circulars across the country warning civilians to vacate potential areas of interest. The papers were pressed together into large balls that would break apart in midair and scatter the flyers over a wide area. One such mass failed to open and fell hard to the earth in the middle of a soccer field near my apartment. Kids stripped the warning ball down sheet by sheet.

I went up to Fawaz’s house in the mountains. His balcony overlooked the valley down below by the water, where Hezbollah was entrenched in the southern suburbs of Beirut. The Israelis, it seemed, had found the building where Nasrallah was holed up, hidden somewhere in its recesses, and they were pounding away at the nine-story structure to get at him. During the civil wars, the men now under siege below in the southern suburbs had kidnapped Fawaz’s father.
“We owned a tile store in West Beirut,” Fawaz told me. “My family lived there for a long time, through most of the war even—I still vote in that district—it was a mixed neighborhood, and my father was used to working with anyone. He had hired this young Shia kid who told Hezbollah about the money my father had in his safe, and they took him hostage.” They released him a day later, but not before cleaning out half of the family’s money. “Right after that,” said Fawaz, “we moved up here to the mountains.”

The year before we had been sitting out on the same deck from where we now watched buildings being turned to dust. Last year the noise came from a bunch of teenage girls hosting a pool party for some neighborhood boys. Fawaz had said he was envious of them. “I wish that we had that experience, too,” he said. “But we grew up different. We didn’t know what it was like to throw parties, to meet girls in a regular way. And so my generation is kind of stunted emotionally; we grew up in a non-normal environment. Everyone is always so close together you have no room for yourself, your thoughts. You don’t have the time or room to figure out who you are and how to grow up.”

Fawaz’s three young nephews were visiting from Paris, and they made the best of a strange summer vacation, taking turns petting Fawaz’s big golden retriever, the children and the animal soothing each other after each explosion. We went back and forth between the TV set in the living room and the balcony; there was nothing else to do. “During the war,” Fawaz remembered, “there were entire days you couldn’t leave the house, and all we could do was sit around and play cards. I can’t even stand to look at a deck of cards now. Any card game reminds me of the war.”

 A
n entire generation of Israeli men fought in Lebanon. They frequently refer to the First Lebanon War as their Vietnam—except it was more traumatic. Continents separate America from
Southeast Asia, but Lebanon is on Israel’s northern border. And when I came to Israel in the middle of the July 2006 war, almost every man I met asked about Lebanon, because they, too, had lived there. Some had gotten as far north as Beirut, though most were confined to the southern part of the country, where they occupied the security zone and fought Hezbollah. Many liked the country. Some Israeli men wanted to talk about the women, others about the beach, and others yet the mountains. In Jerusalem, I met Asher Kaufman, who had served in Mount Lebanon with the Maronites, and went on to become an important scholar of Lebanese intellectual history and culture. Another Israeli told me how his time served in Lebanon had made him rich. After his tour in the army he traveled, like many Israeli kids just out of the service, and wound up in Tokyo. To support himself, he sold posters on a street corner until a local street tough told him he was poaching on his territory. When the Japanese man turned to answer a call on his cell phone, the Israeli stripped the primitively large device from his hands and beat him with it. The street tough’s boss admired his nerve and hired him. “I didn’t even think about the consequences when I hit the guy,” he said. “I had just left the army, and when you are a teenager, crazy things go through your mind—anything could happen to you in Lebanon.”

Levanon
is the most mournful word in the mouth of a Hebrew-speaking mother, and I confess that when I first heard the word uttered, it terrified me, too, the biblical name of a country I had come to love.

 I
met Fawaz’s hero in a café in West Jerusalem. Natan Sharansky was surprised to hear of the reception his book
The Case for Democracy
had with Lebanese readers. He didn’t know there were neoconservatives like Fawaz in Lebanon. In fact, Sharansky admitted, there weren’t that many neoconservatives in Israel either. If Israeli intellectuals and policy makers agreed with Sharansky that
democracy would make the Arabs better neighbors, few thought the Arabs were even capable of it. Now, after the war against Hezbollah, an Islamist group that was elected to take part in the government, I asked him if he still believed in Arab democracy. “The White House was unwise to rush to elections rather than build democratic institutions first,” he answered. I said I was not sure that was the only issue.