Warriors of God (47 page)

A pattern soon emerged for this new conflict. Hezbollah struck at Israeli forces in the Shebaa Farms on a periodic basis in a finely tuned “balance of terror” designed to keep the Israelis on edge but without triggering a full-scale war. “When we took the decision to continue the resistance, we took into account all possibilities,” Sheikh Nabil Qawq told me in an interview days after the second IED attack. “If Israel stages a large-scale attack, it will not be to their benefit. Our aim is not to have a wide-scale war. Our aim is to liberate our land and free our detainees.”

Yet the Shebaa Farms campaign stripped Hezbollah of the internationally recognized legitimacy it had earned battling Israeli occupation forces in south Lebanon, validated by the 1996 April Understanding. Then, Israel had been an illegal occupier of Lebanese sovereign territory; and while its occupation of the Shebaa Farms was also judged illegal, according to UN Security Council resolutions, because it was regarded as Syrian land, Israel had officially withdrawn from Lebanese
soil, thus making Hezbollah's attacks across the Blue Line impermissible.

Hezbollah also faced a domestic challenge to its arms. The Israeli withdrawal inevitably ended the national consensus on Hezbollah's right to resist Israel. With the Israelis gone, Hezbollah's critics argued, only the Lebanese state should bear arms in defense of the nation and decide matters of war and peace, not a movement drawn from just one sect that owed its ideological allegiance to the leader of another country. Furthermore, the rate of one attack every month or so was insufficient to compel Israel to cede the territory. Instead, the sporadic campaign needlessly antagonized a powerful enemy and was nothing but a cynical ploy to defer Hezbollah's disarmament. But Hezbollah made no apology for the limited pace of attacks, noting that the strategic concept for the Shebaa Farms campaign was very different from the effort to liberate the occupied south.

“We estimated that the Shebaa Farms did not require more from the resistance than reminder operations separate in time because we are not a regular army that attacks, takes positions, and defends positions. If we had fired on a regular basis, it would have been a useless exchange of fire,” Sheikh Naim Qassem told me.

The abduction of the three Israeli soldiers and Elhanan Tannenbaum heralded not only Hezbollah's campaign to liberate the Shebaa Farms but also its new military strategy for the postwithdrawal phase. Israel's withdrawal from south Lebanon necessitated a change in Hezbollah's strategic and tactical behavior to take into consideration the new circumstances on the ground and the evolving geopolitical climate in the Middle East.

During the previous two decades, Hezbollah's objective had been to drive Israel out of Lebanon through force of arms. To achieve that goal, it had waged a classic guerrilla-style war of attrition to liberate occupied territory, using deadly hit-and-run tactics to outwit and kill Israeli
troops combined with a persuasive propaganda program to grind down the will of the Israeli domestic front to support the occupation.

Israel, as the occupier, adopted a static defensive strategy to retain its hold on captured territory—building fortified hilltop compounds to dominate the ground, employing a local proxy militia, establishing an array of human, aerial, and ground surveillance and early warning systems. Although the Israelis occasionally used offensive measures, such as the air and artillery blitzes of July 1993 and April 1996, commando raids, and helicopter gunship assassinations north of the zone, these were generally tactical reactions to developments on the ground. Hezbollah, as the resistance force, was the principal initiator, choosing where and when to strike, leaving the Israelis primarily in a reactive role.

After May 2000, the strategic situation changed. Hezbollah was no longer confronting an occupier of sovereign Lebanese territory (the Shebaa Farms anomaly gave Hezbollah public justification to retain the Islamic Resistance, but its postwithdrawal military concept was not predicated solely on ousting the Israelis from the mountainside). Instead, Hezbollah's new strategic profile was principally one of defense. The next major confrontation between Hezbollah and Israel would likely involve a ground incursion by Israeli troops into south Lebanon with Hezbollah this time in the role of defender, a reversal of the situation that had prevailed during the previous two decades.

When confronted with the same situation before 1982, Yasser Arafat's PLO had built a third-rate conventional army to defend against the IDF. But Hezbollah's planners opted for a more unorthodox approach, one that combined elements of low-signature guerrilla-style warfare with the technology and sophisticated armaments of a conventional army. Resistance from now on was intended to defend the homeland rather than expel an occupier. This new concept, Nasrallah explained in 2008, “needs close examination.” “I do not think this is paralleled in the world or in history,” he said. “Resistance liberates land, but resistance to prevent an aggression against a country is something new.”

Hezbollah's concept of defensive resistance—the blending of guerrilla and conventional tactics and weaponry—was regarded as the most practical means of confronting Israel militarily after 2000, but it also
served as an additional justification to skeptical Lebanese who questioned the need for Hezbollah to keep its weapons. It was not enough to expel Israel from Lebanese soil, Hezbollah argued. Now the “resistance” had to ensure the Israelis would not come back.

The Lebanese army, with its bloated officer corps and arsenal of obsolete and diverse U.S. and Soviet-era armaments, was incapable of defending the homeland against the most powerful army in the Middle East, Hezbollah's leaders averred. On the other hand, the resistance had demonstrated its strengths by driving Israel out of south Lebanon and proven its deterrence capabilities through the evident reluctance of Israel to mount a powerful retaliation to Hezbollah's attacks in the Shebaa Farms. As Nasrallah explained to me in 2003,

Significantly, Hezbollah's new case for preserving its arms effectively ended any assumption that the resolution of tangible outstanding disputes between Lebanon and Israel, such as the release of the last Lebanese detainees and the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Shebaa Farms, would result in a quid pro quo disarming of the Islamic Resistance.

Indeed, Ali Ammar, a Hezbollah MP, made it abundantly clear in June 2006 that “the resistance will go on; the extent of the resistance is not the Shebaa Farms … nor the return of the prisoners [from Israel], but its extent is when it becomes impossible for Israel to violate Lebanon's sovereignty even with a paper kite.”

Still, Hezbollah was careful not to publicly disparage the Lebanese army, an institution that is broadly respected in Lebanon and seen as the principal guarantor of internal stability. Hezbollah's leadership carefully articulated the notion that the army could play a collaborative role with the Islamic Resistance to form what Nasrallah called in 2004 “a fence around the homeland.”
¹

In reality, however, such declarations were for public consumption only. The Lebanese army was irrelevant to Hezbollah's battle plans, and the Shia organization, in coordination with the Iranians and with the blessing of the Syrians, continued to pursue its military agenda.

The argument that the Islamic Resistance was necessary for Lebanon's national defense was contrived, and it merely confirmed in the eyes of many that Hezbollah was determined to pursue its struggle against Israel irrespective of Lebanon's national interests. Hezbollah's leadership understood that its somewhat strained argument for keeping its weapons would not convince everyone, but it also knew that its armed status was guaranteed while Lebanon stayed in Syria's shadow and the Middle East peace process remained deadlocked.

Hezbollah's war of attrition against Israel along the Blue Line soon began to evolve along the same lines that had shaped the larger conflict in south Lebanon over the previous decade and a half, in which each group struggled to outwit the other. Hezbollah's first two attacks in the Shebaa Farms in November 2000 were roadside bomb ambushes, with fighters infiltrating the Israeli side of the Blue Line to plant the IEDs. But as the Israelis tightened security, Hezbollah began launching assaults from the Lebanese side, firing wire-guided TOW antitank missiles
at Israeli armored vehicles in sporadic attacks in the first six months of 2001. The Israelis ringed outposts in the Shebaa Farms with antimissile fencing and strengthened bunkers with reinforced concrete. They built new supply roads hidden from the Lebanese side of the Blue Line, thus denying Hezbollah targets with their line-of-sight missiles. From June 2001, Hezbollah's attacks reverted to mortar, rocket, and antitank missile barrages against the seven outposts in the Shebaa Farms.
²
In one attack in October 2001, Hezbollah fired thirty-three AT-3 Sagger antitank missiles at one Israeli compound, a large number for a single operation.

The Shebaa Farms was treated as a free-fire zone by Hezbollah and the Israelis, and was the most visible source of friction between the two enemies. Yet despite the efforts of foreign diplomats to devise creative solutions to resolve the conflict, paradoxically the mountainside became a useful pressure valve, allowing both sides to let off steam and thus mitigating the possibility of a broader conflict erupting along the border. The area was remote and unpopulated and the risk of civilian casualties, especially on the Israeli side, was minimal.

The renewal of hostilities once more placed Hezbollah at odds with Rafik Hariri, who returned to the premiership in November 2000 after an absence of two years. Hariri had hoped that the Israeli withdrawal would end the violence in south Lebanon that constantly threatened to undermine his efforts to attract foreign investment and rebuild the economy. But unhappily for him, his return to the premiership coincided with the advent of Hezbollah's new military campaign.

Hariri's worries were not helped by the arrival in February 2001 of a new Israeli government headed by none other than Ariel Sharon, the architect of the 1982 invasion. Many Lebanese feared that the pugnacious old general would not hesitate to respond harshly to Hezbollah's attacks in the Shebaa Farms. But Hezbollah's leadership remained confident that the “balance of terror” between the Islamic Resistance and Israel would continue to hold regardless of who held the premiership in Israel. “The coming of Sharon does not change the reality that northern Israel is still within range of our rockets. Sharon will return to his
natural size when confronting Hezbollah and will swallow his threats,” Qawq told me.

But Lieutenant General Shaul Mofaz, the IDF chief of staff, and other top officers were pushing Sharon's government to establish new rules along Israel's northern border. Mofaz and others argued that each unanswered attack in the Shebaa Farms was eroding Israel's deterrence, and that Syria, as the instigator of the violence along the Lebanese-Israeli border, should no longer be spared reprisals. The test came on April 14, when Hezbollah fighters hit a Merkava tank with an antitank missile, killing the radio operator. The next day, Israeli jets bombed a Syrian radar position at Dahr al-Baydar, the lofty pass in the mountains separating Beirut from the Bekaa Valley. Three Syrian soldiers were killed and the radar facility was destroyed in what was the first Israeli attack against a Syrian post since the Grapes of Wrath operation in 1996.

At the end of June, Hezbollah fired a volley of antitank missiles at an Israeli patrol on the edge of the Shebaa Farms. Again Israel hit back against the Syrians, bombing an antiaircraft site in the Bekaa Valley. This time, however, Hezbollah counterretaliated almost immediately with a heavy mortar bombardment of Israeli outposts in the Shebaa Farms. Hezbollah's leadership recognized that it could not afford to let Israel set a new precedent of destroying Syrian positions every time the Islamic Resistance launched an operation in the Farms. The mortar shelling focused on the “Radar” outpost on a sharp mountain peak opposite Shebaa village. It was the first time that the compound, which actually lay just north of the Shebaa Farms area, was struck, and it was deliberately selected because of its equivalence to the bombed Syrian position in the Bekaa Valley.
RADAR FOR RADAR
ran a headline in Lebanon's
Al-Mustaqbal
newspaper a day after the attacks. The Israelis refrained from further retaliation. The “balance of terror” had held.

While the attacks and retaliation centered on the Shebaa Farms were the most obvious examples of friction between Hezbollah and Israel, a more subtle conflict was waged almost every day along the Blue Line. Hezbollah erected billboards and dummy Katyusha rocket launchers visible to Israelis on the other side of the border as part of its psychological
warfare effort. The most conspicuous example was a billboard placed directly opposite the Israeli compound on the summit of Sheikh Abbad Hill displaying photographs of dead and injured Israeli soldiers, including what was left of the head of Sergeant Itamar Ilya, the Shayetet 13 naval commando who was blown to pieces in the Ansariyah ambush. Written in Arabic and Hebrew beneath the gruesome pictures was the caption “Sharon: your soldiers are still in Lebanon.”