Warriors of God (39 page)

In the days that followed, the Israeli government sanctioned the creation of a three-man committee empowered to order immediate raids into Lebanon without having to seek prior cabinet approval. David Levy, the hawkish foreign minister, delivered a series of bloodcurdling threats redolent of the Old Testament in which he warned that if Hezbollah rocketed northern Israel, Lebanon would pay “soul for soul, blood for blood, child for child.” On the ground, the IDF belatedly began erecting steel mesh antimissile fences around its outposts to protect the vulnerable observation bunkers.

Hezbollah's propaganda machine took full advantage of the escalation, with Al-Manar broadcasting a clip showing portraits of each of the seven dead soldiers, one after the other. The clip ended with a blank box containing a question mark and a message in Hebrew asking who would be the next victim.

Hezbollah had scored more impressive single achievements, such as the Ansariyah ambush and General Gerstein's assassination, and it was the sustained and deadly IED campaign that sapped Israel's resolve to stay in Lebanon; but the three-week escalation in January and February 2000 was perhaps the pinnacle of Hezbollah's resistance campaign against the Israeli occupation. It blended thoughtful intelligence work to discover the weak spots in the Israeli outposts; skillful battlefield exploitation of the TOW missiles; and tactical foresight by playing within the rules of the April Understanding.

In three short weeks, Hezbollah had turned the tables on Mofaz's confident declaration that the Israeli army had gained the upper hand in south Lebanon. The spate of military casualties and the television footage of wounded soldiers deepened Israeli public opposition to the occupation in Lebanon. In March, a Gallup poll for
Maariv
newspaper found that 61 percent of respondents wanted an immediate withdrawal from Lebanon, even without an agreement with Lebanon and Syria.

“This is one war we have lost,” opined Yoel Marcus in
Haaretz
. “If we are fated to leave anyway—let's do it now.”

On March 5, the Israeli government announced that it would pull the troops out of Lebanon by July 2000, hopefully within the framework of an agreement. If no agreement was forthcoming, “the government will convene at an appropriate time to discuss the method of implementation of the above-mentioned decision,” promised the Israeli cabinet communiqué.

There was no going back now; the countdown to withdrawal had begun.

The Israeli army drew up two plans of withdrawal. The first, dubbed “New Horizon,” envisioned a pullback to the international border in conformity with Resolution 425. The second, “Morning Twilight,” was an option in the event of a unilateral withdrawal. The one significant difference was that Morning Twilight envisaged a redeployment to the Purple Line, Israel's military border where the fence had been pushed deeper into Lebanon in certain places over the years to seize the high ground. This plan would leave under Israeli control eight outposts either straddling the border or fully inside Lebanese territory on the annexed pockets of land. The Israeli army assessed that if a withdrawal was conducted without an agreement with Syria, Hezbollah would continue to launch attacks against Israel. Therefore, if fighting was unavoidable, Israel might as well retain the tactical advantages offered by the Purple Line deployment.

Yet the Lebanese would consider the adoption of the Morning Twilight plan to be a redeployment, not a full withdrawal, thus making the Israeli army's prediction of continued fighting a self-fulfilling prophecy. Hezbollah consistently declared that it would continue to attack Israeli forces as long as “one inch” of Lebanese land remained under occupation.

The Israeli-Syrian talks had gone into limbo following the failure of the Shepherdstown meeting in January. But by late March, the Clinton administration had extracted some bottom-line concessions from Barak over the extent of the withdrawal from the Golan Heights, and the U.S. president prepared to sell the package to Assad. The two met at a summit
in Geneva on March 26. The sight of the visibly frail Assad wearing a wool overcoat and flat cap making the effort to meet Clinton in the icy cold Swiss city suggested that the peace deal was all but done.

But it was not to be. According to Dennis Ross, the American Middle East peace coordinator who attended the summit meeting, Assad simply showed no interest as Clinton carefully read out Barak's concessions.
²
Ross concluded that Assad's priorities had shifted to ensuring a smooth transition to the presidency for his son, Bashar, rather than achieving peace with Israel. Assad had been angered by Barak's foot-dragging in Shepherdstown, which may have dampened his enthusiasm for a deal.

But the Syrians have a contrary explanation for the summit's failure. According to Abdel-Halim Khaddam, then Syria's vice president, Assad had wanted to conclude a peace deal with Israel before his death because he believed it would smooth the succession of Bashar to the presidency. Despite his ill health, Assad undertook the trip to Geneva because he had been told by Sharaa that Barak was willing to withdraw to the June 4, 1967, line, thus satisfying the Syrian president's long-standing demand. He had also been reassured by Clinton, who telephoned Assad prior to the Geneva summit to say that he was bringing some new and serious proposals from the Israeli prime minister.

“I think if he had known the position did not include the withdrawal of all the territory prior to 1967, he would not have even accepted to go to Geneva,” Khaddam told me. “Of course, he was disappointed. He thought he was tricked by the Americans.”

Clinton and Barak initially blamed Assad for the failure at Geneva. Since then, however, even Israeli negotiators acknowledge that the primary responsibility rested with Barak, who dithered at the crucial moment in Shepherdstown when the Syrians were clearly eager for a deal.
³
Even Clinton subsequently wrote in his memoirs that he believed Assad was serious about peace and that Barak had gotten “cold feet.”
⁴

The collapse of the Israel-Syria track in March 2000 set in motion a series of events that have helped shape the current political landscape in Lebanon, Syria, and Israel. If a peace deal had been concluded in the spring of 2000, Israel, Lebanon, and Syria probably would have enjoyed calm and stability along their respective borders for the past decade.
Lebanon would have followed Syria's lead and signed a deal with Israel, Hezbollah would have been disarmed under Syrian fiat, and quiet would have prevailed along Israel's northern border. There would have been no Shebaa Farms campaign, no military buildup by Hezbollah in south Lebanon from 2000 on, and no war in 2006, nor would the Lebanese and Israelis continue to be living under the unremitting threat of a fresh conflict that promises to be even more destructive than the last.

After Geneva, Barak abandoned hopes of achieving a withdrawal from Lebanon within the framework of an agreement with Syria and began preparing for a unilateral pullout. Initially, on the advice of his military staff, Barak leaned toward implementing Morning Twilight's partial withdrawal option, but he changed his mind when warned by the UN that the Security Council would recognize only a full pullout to the international border.

The Lebanese and Syrian authorities, meanwhile, appeared to be in denial about the impending troop withdrawal, a denial that slowly evolved into panic. Lebanese officials believed—or hoped—that the promise of an Israeli pullout was just a bluff and that Barak would not have the courage to take a plunge into the unknown. Nabih Berri told Terje Roed Larsen, the UN Middle East peace coordinator, that he would “eat his hat and dance with you in the street” if the withdrawal actually went ahead.

After the Israeli government formally declared that the IDF would leave Lebanon by July, Farouq al-Sharaa said Israel would be committing “suicide” to withdraw without making a deal with Syria first. “They will bear the consequences and should never use this possibility as a means of pressure against us,” he said.
⁵

The evident unease that Barak's pledged withdrawal evoked in Damascus and Beirut was a paradox that did not go unnoticed in the Arab world. “It was as though he [Sharaa] were urging Israel not to withdraw but to remain in south Lebanon, thus contradicting Arab and indeed
Syrian policy, which demands day and night that Israel should withdraw unilaterally,” wrote columnist Abdel Bari-Atwan in
Al-Quds al-Arabi
. “If such a withdrawal were indeed tantamount to ‘suicide' for Israel, then let it go ahead and commit suicide and do us all a favor.”
⁶

The Syrians stood to lose an important means of leverage against Israel if the unilateral withdrawal went ahead as planned. If there were no longer any Israeli soldiers for Hezbollah to kill in south Lebanon, how could Syria exert pressure on Israel to yield to Damascus's peace demands? With an end to the occupation of south Lebanon, any future attacks across the border into Israel would be deemed acts of aggression against a sovereign state, not legitimate resistance against illegal occupiers. Hezbollah faced the same dilemma. How could it continue to justify bearing arms if there was no occupation to resist?

There was, however, one possibility: a small, remote, almost uninhabited mountainside of weathered limestone, dense thickets of evergreen oak, and a few long-abandoned stone hovels, known collectively as the Shebaa Farms.

Ever since the Israelis had seized the lower slopes of the Shebaa Farms mountain in the June 1967 war and secured the upper reaches over the following three years, the occupation of the area had lingered only in the memory of a handful of aging residents living in the adjacent villages of Shebaa and Kfar Shuba. Although the place name was familiar to most Lebanese and cited as one of the enduring examples of Israeli aggression against Lebanese sovereignty, few knew where it was located, let alone what it contained.

In early May, the Lebanese government told Terje Roed Larsen that the Shebaa Farms was sovereign Lebanese territory and demanded that Israel withdraw from the mountainside along with the rest of the south. Larsen was told that the territory had been transferred to Lebanon in an oral agreement with Syria in 1964, but the border had not been formally re-delineated and demarcated on the ground.

As far as the UN was concerned, however, the Shebaa Farms area was inside Syria. Maps submitted by Syria and Israel to the UN in 1974 during the process of establishing a UN-patrolled buffer zone on the Golan Heights clearly marked the Shebaa Farms as Syrian territory. On that
basis, the Shebaa Farms was not included within the UNIFIL zone in 1978, and twenty-two years later, Israel was not required to pull out of the area to satisfy UN Resolution 425. If the area was Lebanese, the UN noted, why had the Lebanese government in 1978 not protested the exclusion of the Shebaa Farms when 425 was adopted and UNIFIL's mandate determined?

It was true, however, that the exiled farmers who once tilled the stony soil of the Shebaa Farms were Lebanese, not Syrian, citizens. Even though they had been evicted three decades earlier from their mountain farms, they still possessed their property deeds as proof of ownership.

The haziness of who bore rightful sovereignty over the area provided sufficient excuse for the Lebanese—prodded, as ever, by the Syrians—to argue to the UN that if Israel failed to withdraw from the Shebaa Farms, then Beirut would consider Israel still an occupying power, leaving open the option for continued resistance operations.

“My Lebanese and Syrian counterparts did not want a full withdrawal,” Larsen recalls. “That was why the Shebaa Farms [issue] was raised. I went to see the Shebaa Farms and saw it was a worthless piece of land. I very quickly realized that this was what they would construct in order to say that this was not an end to the occupation and use it as a justification for having Hezbollah as a resistance.”

The UN studied more than eighty maps from sources in Damascus, Moscow, Paris, and London, among other locations, to determine the sovereignty of the Shebaa Farms. All of them portrayed the Farms as lying inside Syria. But the ham-fisted attempts by the Lebanese and Syrians to persuade the UN that the territory belonged to Lebanon at times verged on farce.

Just as Lebanon's case for the Farms was looking increasingly flimsy, Larsen was summoned to a meeting at the presidential palace with Emile Lahoud and Jamil Sayyed, the powerful head of the General Security department. Lahoud triumphantly presented the UN envoy with a
Lebanese map dating from 1966 that clearly marked the Shebaa Farms as being inside Lebanon. Larsen took the map back to New York, where it was examined by UN cartographic experts.

“Yes, indeed, the map was from 1966,” Larsen says, “but the ink was not dry on the line drawn on the map. It was two weeks old.”

Larsen returned to Beirut and confronted Lahoud and Sayyed, telling them that the map was of “questionable authenticity” and that if he ever heard about this map again, he would go public with the forgery. “Of course they were completely mad at me, but I never heard again a word about that map,” Larsen says.

Nabih Berri had his own brush with cartographic ignominy in early May, when, before assembled television cameras, he proudly unveiled an “American” military map that he said marked the Farms inside Lebanon. Berri said he had received the map within the past week and that it refuted a recent claim by Ehud Barak that Lebanon possessed no documents showing the Farms as Lebanese territory. “I'm presenting this map today to Arab and international public opinion through the Lebanese media in response to Barak's claims,” he said, jabbing a finger in the general direction of Shebaa on the map.

The map brandished by Berri was prepared by the Defense Mapping Agency Topographic Center, a former division of the U.S. Department of Defense. It was, in fact, the standard map used at the time by UNIFIL in south Lebanon. Indeed, I had a copy of that very same map on the wall of my study. There was a problem, though. The map clearly portrayed the Shebaa Farms inside Syria, not Lebanon. Presumably, someone had a quiet word with Berri after his press conference, for no more was heard about the “American map.”