Hizballahstan

Ehud Ya'ari, Jerusalem Report Magazine, 7.6.00

(Bilal Kasmar/AP)

(June 19, 2000) From the ramparts of the castle of Beaufort all the way to the Mediterranean shore, the majority of the territory that was once known as Fatahland, and that later became the Israeli-controlled security zone, has now turned into Hizballahstan.

The bottom line: Israel has, pure and simply, handed over control along the length of its northern border to a party that has declared Holy War against it. If, before the withdrawal, the open-fire regulations for IDF soldiers guarding the border were to shoot any armed, unidentified element on sight, they now have to keep their safety catches firmly closed even as a Hizballah fighter waves his rifle across the fence, less than a hundred yards away from houses on the perimeter of Upper Galilee communities.

Without any exaggeration or resort to poetic license, the IDF is now deployed outside the lounge window of my Aunt Devorah’s house in Metullah; Hizballah sits just across the fence in Kafr Kila, recruiting into its ranks the young Shi’ites who used to help with the cherry-picking in Devorah’s orchards. She spotted a few of them on TV sporting new stubble and the yellow flags of the new lords in the area, saluting Hizballah secretary general Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah at the victory rally he held on May 26 in liberated South Lebanon. Some of the new recruits can, by the way, still be reached on their Israeli cell phones, but that won’t be the case for long. For the first time in a quarter century, since the end of 1975, the Good Fence is locked and all traffic across the famous border point has stopped.

This new reality won’t change even if the U.N. realizes all its plans for upgrading UNIFIL from six to eight battalions and deploying them along the electronic wire of the international border line. UNIFIL doesn’t have any real mandate to operate against Hizballah. Rather, its brief is to assist the Lebanese government in enforcing its authority. In any case, only a fool would believe that Italians, French, Danes or Australians, should they ever appear, would put their heart into continuing from the point at which the IDF left off. We have already witnessed how UNIFIL officers from the command headquarters in Naqura were invited to Bint Jbeil to listen to Sheikh Nasrallah make a mockery of the Security Council and explain that he has no interest in its resolutions. Naturally, it didn’t occur to them to get up and leave as the crowd of thousands bellowed out an oath of allegiance to Iran’s leader Ayatollah Khamenei. Sure, it would be nice if the Foreign Legionnaires were to come in place of the UNIFIL soldiers from Fiji or Ghana, or in addition to them, but it won’t make a huge difference. Lebanon is no Sierra Leone, but the Blue Helmets aren’t likely to clash with the turbans.

The hope in the corridors of the U.N. and in Jerusalem, that regular troops of the Lebanese Army will be sent south, also remains a distant one. According to the assessments, a deployment on a scale of two to three brigades could rein in Hizballah’s control over the territory and could only aid stability. But all that Syria had allowed Lebanese President Emile Lahoud to do by press time was to send down a few hundred gendarmes to protect the Christian villages that had been the target of raids and looting. The Lebanese gendarmes in their mottled uniforms, submachine guns at the ready, make for good photographs, but nobody in Lebanon takes them seriously. They represent nothing more than a means for the puppet government in Beirut to display nominal sovereignty without impinging on the de facto control seized by Hizballah in the first 48 hours after the Israeli evacuation.

Syria managed to create a vacuum in South Lebanon that, predictably, has been filled by Hizballah. True, Nasrallah conceded power in the Druse sector in the southeast to the militias of Walid Jumblatt and the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party. Hizballah also tolerates an Amal armed presence in the Shi’ite areas. But overall superiority belongs decidedly, unequivocally, to Hizballah.

For our part, the Lebanese State is only our theoretical neighbor. Our actual, immediate neighbors belong to a movement created by Iran, that is totally mobilized by and loyal to Iran’s political agenda.

Regretfully, it’s hard to imagine this as the beginning of a wonderful friendship. It’s enough to listen to the Hizballah spokesmen’s carefully calculated rhetoric to understand that th