In Deep Shi'ite

A few days ago, four of us rented a car, filled its tank with dirt-cheap Arab oil, wrangled a travel permit from scowling bureaucrats, and racked up 400 km on the backroads of southern Lebanon- the heartland of Hezbollah, where Shi’ites roam and the Lonely Planet fears to tread.

From here, during the Civil War, Arafat’s guerillas launched the needling raids that finally, in 1982, brought the wrath of Ariel Sharon down upon Lebanon. Israel set the Shi’ite homelands afire in bloody, ill-considered retaliation for Palestinian terrorism. In doing so, they earned an eternal enemy in the Lebanese Shi’ites, yet another Middle Eastern tribe known for their long suffering and long memories.

In 2006, after years of ceaseless, self-perpetuating war, Hezbollah crossed the border and snagged two Israeli soldiers. Israel invaded, determined to bury Hezbollah with that oldest of tactics: punishing the peasants for the actions of Robin Hood. For 33 days, the whistle of falling bombs and the thunder of tank threads were heard once again in Lebanon, while Hezbollah showered northern Israel with homemade rockets.

After a month, Israel retreated red-faced, unable to uproot Hezbollah or turn the Shi’ites against it. The south had been flattened. Hezbollah declared a “divine victory”, and the UN rushed in 14,000 blue helmets to anchor a tenuous peace.



* * *



The view from Beaufort castle was breathtaking.

A hulking wreck of decaying battlements, crowned by a rusting watchtower, Beaufort straddles a strategic height that overlooks most of southern Lebanon, the Golan Heights, and a large swath of northern Israel- or as the huge sign at the entrance will inform you, “Occupied Northern Palestine”.

Originally built by Romans, the fort passed over the centuries through the hands of the Levant’s various conquerors: Crusaders, Ottomans, French. Palestinian guerillas used it as a base during the Civil War, but after Israeli troopers scoured the area in 1982, it became, as the entrance sign once again proclaims, the “Zionist Outpost of Beaufort”. From Beaufort, the Israelis kept an ironfisted watch over the south and defended their convoy lines.

We climbed up rusted ladders and sauntered across the overgrown paths criss-crossing the castle top. A few lonely remnants indicated that the battlements had once stood much higher, and that a roof had perhaps once sheltered the ground where we now stood in open sunlight. But I didn’t know- and never found out- if this had been caused by the slow decay of time or a rain of Israeli bombs.

Down below, the towns of the south took shape: square-blocked low-rises sprinkled across the ridges of the arid hills, clinging to the heights and then spilling haphazardly over into the valleys. Tiny vehicles raced along snaking roads. Pointing to the south and west, we squinted at the Golan and the Galilee.

From that height, I couldn’t tell where the Golan ended and the Galilee began, or within what areas Shi’ites or Jews raised their children. Where were the borders drawn up in our newspapers and textbooks? It was all one land that shared the same clouds, trees, and soil… claimed by three tribes, and divided with invisible lines by wasteful hatreds and the twisted workings of history.



Above us, an Israeli recon plane left long jet-streams in its wake as it made a pass to the south, then turned back towards home. From Beaufort’s silent watchtower, a ragged Hezbollah flag fluttered in the breeze.

* * *



In another nameless town, we sighted a group of blue vested soldiers sipping coffee in a little hole-in-the-wall. A large van parked outside flew the UN colors, with a placard announcing: “United Nations Observer Group in Lebanon”. We strolled in under the pretense of getting snacks, and badgered a friendly Argentinean officer into a conversation.

Frederico, a burly man with eyes as bright as his sky-blue vest, explained that the UN contingent in Lebanon is divided into two: the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), and the UN Observer Group, of which he was a part. UNIFIL is the military arm. Comprising 14,000 troops, it’s charged with overseeing the 2006 ceasefire and patrolling the border. The Observers are a smaller, unarmed contingent, which reports violations of the peace to UNIFIL and the Lebanese and Israeli governments.

It’s an open secret that UNIFIL’s a paper tiger. Peace in the south hinges not on UNIFIL’s ability to enforce it, but on Hezbollah’s desire to accept it. If civil war broke out and Hezbollah went on the warpath, UNIFIL wouldn’t be protecting the south; it would need protection from the south. In 1982, Reagan pulled American peacekeepers out after 241 marines were suicide-bombed in their barracks. Today, it would take far less for UNIFIL’s donor states to do the same.

I kept this to myself, and listened attentively as Frederico explained the mechanics of cluster-bombing: a missile containing dozens of smaller bombs breaks apart in mid-air, showering an area with deadly little explosions. When we asked him which southern towns had been bombed by Israel, he seemed surprised at our ignorance. “All of them!” Israel, he explained, had bombed every town south of the Litani that didn’t have a Christian majority.

As we drove out of the town we passed a mine-clearing vehicle in a distant field. Beside it, a small group of men were gathered in a circle, crouched over the ground. Days later, I would read that Israel had yet to turn over to Lebanon its maps of southern mine fields and cluster bomb targets.

One of the guys mentioned that he’d heard in passing that Israel painted its cluster bombs a playful pink so that unexploded ordnance could be more easily found. We debated whether this was so that they could be disposed off, or so that they could maim curious children.

* * *



A tall, chain-linked fence topped with lines of barbed wire marked Lebanon’s border with Israel.

It ran parallel to a 400m stretch of road. UNIFIL convoys trundled past regularly- trucks filled with Italian blue-helmets, and armored jeeps painted glaring white and marked boldly with UN insignia. A UN helicopter buzzed over us, keeping well to the Lebanese side of the border.

On the Israeli side, a kilometer in the distance, about fifty white-walled houses with sloping, red-tiled roofs neatly ringed a small hill topped by a radio tower. In the car, we whooped and hollered in glee. We were sure it was a settlement- and it was surreal to actually see one in the flesh.

We paused for pictures on a high ridge. It was like staring at two worlds.

On the Lebanese side of the barbed wire stretched a half-wrecked township of abandoned houses, shelled ruins, and half-reconstructed dwellings. The land was dry, arid; largely unfarmed. But on the Israeli side, the settlement clustered prettily on a hilltop framed with tall green trees- harmless, picturesque, unviolated. Pleasantville in a warzone. The land bloomed with green orchards and furrowed farmland. Some, dangerously close to the border, were guarded by camouflaged bunkers and unseen Israeli soldiers.



Standing there, it was not hard to imagine the ease with which either side could shell each other with million-dollar or homemade weaponry. How many Katyusha rockets had Hezbollah militants fired at those distant Israeli roofs over the years? How many potshots had bored Israeli soldiers taken at Shi’ite villagers across that wire fence? During the war, did Israel shell that wrecked town with artillery from miles away, or did it fly American-made F-15s dropping American-made bombs down on it? Why had Hezbollah not rained rockets down on that settlement- a stone’s throw from the border- in retaliation?

I’m going to find that same settlement from the other side, and see the barbwire border from Israeli eyes.

* * *



The Shi’ites have, over the years, done their share of damage to the Israeli army. Road mines planted in dirt roads pack enough punch to overturn state-of-the-art Merkava tanks. RPGs supplied by Iran turned Israeli APCs and tanks into flaming wrecks.

These mangled but intact hulks have been turned into monuments, perched proudly on stone platforms on prominent street corners in many a southern town. Carven plaques proclaim the heroism of Hezbollah’s martyrs and warn Israelis who will never read them of the folly of invading Shi’ite land. Most have Hezbollah posters stuck upright with steel posts into the tank turrets.

I thought of an old Latin phrase: “Nemo me impune lacessit”. No one harms me with impunity. Crush my farmlands with your tanks, and I’ll take seven or eight as souvenirs. Wreck my towns with your million-dollar bombs, and I’ll drop a patchwork rocket into your front yard. Put your dick in my mouth, and I will bite it off.

My favorite “tank” moment came at an army checkpoint. An old-model Merkava sat on a roadside embankment, mounted with a massive cutout of Ayatollah Khomeini.

As we snapped pictures of the tank, one soldier, a blue-eyed Maronite, gestured at the Ayatollah, with his stern, hawk-like face and flowing beard.

“Papa Noel!” he shouted at us, grinning. “Papa Noel!”

* * *



Maroun Al-Ras is a small hilltop town to which Hezbollah fighters retreated during the 2006 war. In response, Israel bombed it flat.

Rebuilding has begun in earnest. When we got there, a dozen concrete low-rises were taking shape, and the largest pieces of rubble had been carted away from bomb sites. Bright, busy posters memorializing fallen militants punctuated the streets. Murals with Islamic slogans covered the few walls left intact. Signboards announced that funding provided by the European Commission, the UNDP, various aid organizations, and Hezbollah itself was being used to resurrect the town.



But there might as well have been a sixteen-foot neon sign that read: “ISRAEL WAS HERE.” We climbed over large swaths of rubble stretched over whole blocks, cameras clicking. Concrete slabs riddled with twisted rebar- the remains of walls, and ceilings, and floors- lay in thick grey piles. One ground zero was reduced to nothing more than the concrete archway of what had been the main entrance. I thought of the marble arches of Roman ruins. Some townsfolk had planted a Hezbollah flag on top of the lonely structure.



The people of Maroun Al-Ras had come back to rebuild their homes and lives- but not all of them. The streets echoed with the honking of passing cars, the shouts of neighbors, the clank of machinery, the squawk of livestock. But still, there were far too few. I wondered where the others had gone. Absorbed into the slums of south Beirut? Other towns? Had they fled to Syria?

Those who returned had set up their shops and homes in the remaining functional buildings. If it hadn’t collapsed, it was inhabited by a business or a family- sometimes both. I saw an autoshop whose walls were riddled with large shrapnel holes. Families clustered in still-upright apartment complexes hung their clothing out to dry in the gaping spaces of what had once been a living room, or a bedroom.

Lying abandoned in fields or on roadsides were the rusting remains of blown-up cars and minibuses. Roads were pockmarked with cluster-bomb pits- holes six to eight inches in diameter that had been filled in with sand.



I recalled a joke by my buddy Justin from a few days before, standing amidst the crumbling Roman temples of Baalbek in eastern Lebanon.

“It’s all ruined,” he’d scoffed, tongue-in-cheek. “It’s like someone came in here and trashed the place.”

The remains of the town made me think of those Israeli tanks. Earlier, one of the guys had pointed that three or four Israeli boys had probably burned to death inside of each tank so we could take those pictures and act like goofy tourists.

The remains of war are often so sterile, so bloodless. You can’t truly understand the carnage of trench warfare by visiting the Somme, or the methodical madness of the Holocaust while strolling the walkways of Auschwitz. It’s been cleaned up. The blood’s been scrubbed off, and the screams have died away.

No amount of wreckage, no memorial, no words, could ever make real to me the visceral, slow-motion horror of war’s ground zero moments.

We stopped by an old man by a collection of blackened houses and asked him for directions out of Maroun Al-Ras. Not understanding our query, he responded with a toothless grin. “Ahlan!” He said. “Ahlan wa sahlan!”

Welcome. My house is your house.

* * *



As the sun faded into twilight, we passed a huge, white armored jeep. A black soldier in a blue helmet peered curiously at us from his machine-gun perch. On the other side of the road, a small group of black troopers in UN colors sat, guns propped up on chairs and walls, in the shelter of a concrete garage that had seen better days.

They were from Ghana. Products of British colonialism, they spoke perfect English. One man, short and animated, grabbed my hand and pumped it. “You’re a long way from home!” I told him. “Yes, yes.” he returned. Almost conspiratorially, he then leaned in and whispered: “I miss my home, you know. You know why?”

I blinked at him, thinking he was going to say something about a pregnant wife, or the threat of civil war, or having to risk dying for a cause that didn’t in the least concern him so he could collect his monthly paycheck.

He stared dolefully at me. “Because here, it is very cold!” And he rubbed his arms and shivered in an exaggerated pantomime, then burst into a booming laugh.

His commander, a far grimmer man with a bristly mustache, gave us permission to take a picture of the jeep. “But not with Israel!” he cautioned. We could not take a photograph with the Israeli countryside in the background. Espionage. Well, guess what, Israel. It’s a world of google maps and GPS-equipped cell phones. Take a hint.

All of us nabbed lovely shots of the UN battlewagon, posed stoically against the red sunset, with its Ghanaian gunner, far from home, staring off into the distance.

* * *



Hezbollah territory wasn’t in the least bit dangerous. I’d been expecting an interrogation or two, demands for my passport, pointed questions about my political opinions. I’d been expecting men in slovenly clothing and keffiyehs to be patrolling the towns with AKs. I’d expected reams of red tape at every army checkpoint from brusque officers intent in keeping curious tourists out of the south.

Nothing of the sort. We were waved through every checkpoint. I never saw a gun, and never heard an insult. Maybe the merry men of Hezbollah were always just hidden around the corner, out of sight- but all I saw were the peasants. The commoners. The people who take care of Hezbollah, because Hezbollah takes care of them.

The south isn’t quite what the Maronites and Israelis make it out to be. It isn’t a den of thieves and murderers. It’s just the asshole of Lebanon- the part that always gets fucked. The south has a weary population- and as a result, extreme politics. The Shi’ites would negotiate with words with they could, but they’ve been talking to deaf ears for decades. So now, they negotiate with guns… and somehow ended up on the wrong side of the post-9/11 fence between Good and Evil.