Southern Lebanon is not the place to come for clarity, of any kind. From the heavily fortified border that divides Lebanon from Israel the air is gauzy with the dust - part sand, part smog, part heat haze - that permanently cloaks the summer sky. Only in winter would it be possible to stand beneath this tattered Hizbollah flag, watched closely by two ten year olds who have warned me against taking their photograph, and gaze south, almost as far as the distant West Bank.

To the west it is possible to make out the crest of the Golan Heights, flat beneath the weirdly snow-capped Mount of Transfiguration, Jebel ash-Sheikh. The Golani soil is rocky and inhospitable, a swamp of mud during the short and icy winter and a dust bowl for the remaining 10 months of the year.
In an ideal world, it would be possible to walk south from this point. Instead I face a thirty metre long, ten metre high cement bunker, topped with satellite dishes, video cameras, and flanked by razor wire that runs as far as the eye can see on either side. I can not walk down the hills to Galilee, to Tel Dan, where water springs, impossibly cold, and trickles east to Banias, collecting the run off from the Golan Heights to form the Jordan River, which, in turn, flows to the Sea of Galilee, between Jordan’s upraised flank and the West Bank, and finally to the Dead Sea.

Distances here are so small that were busses running, it would only take around 4 hours to cover the river’s entire length. The kibbutz below me is only two kilometres away. Syria, about another five. The modest sizes of the Levant nations are compounded further by the poor quality of the land – more than 70% of both Syria and Jordan is considered either unsuitable for cultivation or of extremely poor quality. What is of value is invariably closer to the ocean and lies to the west – so that on population maps it looks as if both countries are trying to back away from the desert, pressing their torsos up against the beauty of Lebanon and Israel.

Israel is unfeasibly green. It is a jewel sparkling with the light of a thousand sprinklers, shining off the avocados and cotton of kibbutzes Dan and Dafna, off the fish farms and the orange trees. And off the planned settlements that now extend east from Qiryat Shemonah into what was once Syria but is now Israeli Golan, the two separated by the devastated ghost town of Quneitra and a thin UN strip.

In contrast to Israel, Lebanon looks simply dead. Back over the villages of Kfar Kila and Sarada little grows high enough to block the sight of cement block villages and yellow Hizbollah flags. An occasional herd of goats grazes across ground that is otherwise stony, arid, and torpid in the heat. Perhaps this, in itself, explains something of the tension that has gripped this line since its artificial inception in 1948. The Shi’ite children standing behind me must gaze down at the corn and tomato fields with as much wonder as if what lay before them was some kind of hologram.

In Lebanon, as in all of this region, the most important aspect and the one least frequently addressed is the matter of having and not having. Food, water, houses, buses, services. Religious fervour maybe a convenient target to blame for the endless fighting, but safer, wealthier people rarely devote the time or energy to violence as the Palestinians or their southern neighbours.

~

No visit to Kfar Kila is complete without first visiting the Hizbollah Gift Shop, a corrugated iron shed selling everything from key rings and cassettes of spiritual leader Nasserallah’s speeches, to children’s hair brushes and dolls. Not to mention martyrs’ scarves, should one be inspired into performing an impromptu suicide attack on the nearby border, and delightful snow globes containing Jerusalem’s Al-Aksa Mosque. Were I concerned about authenticity, a sign on the wall assures me all gifts are genuine gifts from the Hizbollah.

Outside, I wave at one of the UN soldiers —who allows me to photograph his Armoured Personal Carrier without comment—and head east and north to the manifestation of all this border has come to mean.

On a hilltop looking down across a dry and barren river valley stands Khiam, one time French guard post, but more recently an Israeli detention centre, and since 2000 a museum run by the latest of the successive ruling forces of this area: the Hizbollah.

The car park is full of something one doesn’t usually associate with Hizbollah or Southern Lebanon—tour buses. Tourists from the Gulf, Syria, and Jordan make their way here to witness crimes that seem to have been well advertised in the Arabic press but escaped without notice elsewhere. On arrival, we are invited to watch a video (with English commentary) which variously describes Israelis as being “mischievous”, “impetuous”, and the slightly more puzzling “impudent”. I keep waiting for “lackeys” or my favourite “capitalist running dogs”, but even Hizbollah’s taste for cliché has to end somewhere.

The prison itself is compact, clean, and seems to have been recently painted. Although it is universally acknowledged that prisoners brought here could be detained without trial for years, the cells opened up to convince me of Israeli war crimes reveal precious little, and it is only the commentary of our ex-prisoner guide that suggests that the Israelis were anything other than perfect hosts.

Abdullah claims the suffocating heat meant prisoners begged constantly for water, which was delivered in buckets, laced heavily with toilet cleaner. His voice suggests permanent damage resulted. Smaller cells, probably built for one person, housed 5 – enough that only 2 could lay down at any one time. Exercise was unknown, food scarce, and Red Cross visits denied for 3 years.
The accusations are damning, but while Hizbollah are at pains to point out the illegality and immorality of holding captives in such conditions, less reference is given to European prisoners, such as Terry Waite and Brian McKeenan, held by various Shi’ite groups in Beirut during the same period.

~

Beauforts Castle was once a magnificent structure built by the Crusaders, commanding sweeping views of the entire area. Built atop a sheer cliff face, its crumbling ramparts are impressive to this day, not least for the fact that it has proven useful to every army who ever passed by, and survived innumerable wars. At least until much of the castle was torn down by the Israelis upon their departure from the Security Zone in 2000.

The views from the broken ramparts, both ancient and modern, are breathtaking. Not just of valleys, hilltops, and villages, but across desolate fields for which Israel still refuses to provide mine maps, an act of simple belligerence that means local children still risk the danger of being blown up every time they play football on the outskirts of their village.

Beauforts is one of the first peaks Israel secured during the 1982 invasion. From here they gazed north towards Beirut. If they had reached only this point, perhaps the Middle East would not be the place it is today.

~

Lebanon had collapsed into civil war in 1975, its precariously balanced Christian/Muslim power structure toppled by the influx of Palestinian refugees. In the place of the nation of Lebanon, factions divided the South into fiefdoms, variously Sunni, Shi’ite or Druze, Christian, pro-Damascus or PLO or both.

Life in Galilee had been tense in a way that is difficult to describe to anyone who has never lived under the ongoing threat of attack. Under the cover of darkness, combatants, at least partially driven by the promise of reward in the next world for themselves and in this world for their families, slid through the border and towards the kibbutzim. The weapon of choice was a small mortar shell called a Katyusha, that could be fired from the back of a pick-up truck. The single shots were invariably answered by heavy fire from kibbutz sentry posts and machine gun fire from the incoming helicopters stationed nearby.

“You can’t imagine the tension,” Asher told me, after his garage was levelled by a direct hit in 1980, “Of laying in bed in the darkness after the sirens went off. Just waiting. My daughter’s room is maybe three or four metres from where the shell hit. I couldn’t sleep for months after that. It’s a kind of hysteria. You just want to run outside and strangle the next Arab you see—it doesn’t matter who it is. Anyone, anything.”

Although they did succeed in creating a climate of intense fear, the attacks were by and large ineffective and so poorly executed that more Israelis died in the first day of the Lebanese invasion than in the previous 11 months of attacks.
What Israel responded to wasn’t as much the attacks, as the opportunity. In retrospect, the idea of a 2-day campaign to install a pro-Israeli government and annihilate the PLO forever seems absurd. Even inside Israel, the prospect of complete success was considered unlikely, but the potential rewards hugely attractive to a people tired of living in fear.

Prime Minister Menachem Begin and his Defence Minister Ariel Sharon decided to do what no Israeli government had done before – to invade the territory of a nation that was not about to attack them. It proved to be the beginning of Israel’s Vietnam, the single most poorly conceived military action ever taken by the nation, and the end of its love affair with the Western media. The campaign was envisaged to take as little as 48 hours. It took twenty two years.

Israel had fought wars before. Four of them, to be exact. In doing so it had become the darling of Western journalists with its swashbuckling heroes and daring-do, its sheer Boy’s Own courage. But never before had Israel attempted to quell a neighbour quite so thoroughly.

The tactics reflected a ruthlessness and savagery that would come to shock and horrify the few journalists who ever witnessed them.

Arriving in a Lebanese settlement, troops would take a teenage boy, tie him by his feet to the back of a jeep, and drive through town as a warning to others. Prisoners taken into places like Khiam were tied, naked in the middle of winter, to stakes, doused with cold water, and left to freeze. Deaths, officially explained as heart failures and accidents, were more often the result of electrodes attached to their fingers and testicles. Others were suffocated.

Almost as soon as Israeli troops crossed the border on June 6, 1982, resistance fell apart. The population fled north to the already infamous “camps” (which were more often simply poor settlements, though some do have walls and guard posts) in Beirut.

Israel blew through the dusty seaside towns of Tyre and Sidon, meeting little resistance. By the time the army paused at the Christian stronghold of Damour even the Reagan administration wondered where they were going, and to what end.

~

Coming north from Sidon, the advertising hoardings appear, offering Tissot watches and Bacardi Rum to Muslim children who will be lucky to hold a job in their short lives. The coast is dishevelled and polluted, though Damour is now fashionable, its long beach spotted with resorts and bars that draw weekend crowds down from the city only 20 kilometres to the north. Behind the town, banana and corn fields give way to apple trees and tobacco as the land rises up into the hills.

~

Special Envoy Philip C. Habib, Washington’s brilliant Middle East expert, met Sharon in meetings that invariably collapsed into yelling matches. At one stage late in the conflict, the relationship was so bad that Israeli tanks are rumoured to have surrounded the US Embassy.

The armed reached Beirut and stopped. Troops caught up on sleep or went swimming near the airport. The 7 week siege had begun.

~

The Bekaa Valley is a God-forsaken place. A long, flat strip of dust captured between two mountain ranges so high that both still hold traces of snow while the temperature in Chtaura hits 40 degrees. The hills are deforested, the roadsides littered with plastic and paper.

It is here that Hizbollah are at their strongest. Strong enough to be a political force with 13 MPs in the national parliament and enough supporters to mean that from here to the border it is their flag that usually adorns the power poles and billboards that dot the countryside. Their symbol – the word Allah forming an upraised hand, holding a machine gun against a yellow background – is everywhere.

It is only where the land rises that anything seems to grow without extreme duress. And from my hotel balcony in Baalbek, I can look out from across the gorgeous ruins—through fir trees to snow-capped peaks that are violet against an apricot sunset—and wonder that anywhere can look this beautiful in the evening and so desolate at midday.

At the Hizbollah information centre a polystyrene billboard, written incongruously in English, announces, “Passing Resistance”. Inside, a metal spiral channels red water into a small metal dish. It is, apparently, a river of blood. The walls are adorned with photos of “martyrs”, or dead fighters lost against the “occupiers” (nearly all of whom were killed in territory granted Israel in the 1948 UN mandate). Groups of would-be suicide bombers crowd into photographs with the bearded, turbaned Nasser Allah.

Hizbollah is funded largely by Iran. Both are Shi’ite, the smaller of Islam’s two major groups. (Sunni traditionally hold power in all other Arabic countries except Iraq). Its aim is the destruction of Israel, an aim abandoned by most other groups as early as 1964. Whether Hizbollah can really be considered a Palestinian group is a moot point – they have little interest in how they are regarded, and refused to answer this question when asked. They represent an element within Lebanese society which may never have gained momentum without the invasion, an element seduced by mindless racism, and fascinated by the idea of violence for its own sake.

While most Palestinian groups would be delighted to sign a peace settlement that saw Israel pull out of the Occupied Territories, and move a peacekeeping force into East Jerusalem, for Hizbollah this would be catastrophic. If they stand for anything other than fighting, it is certainly nowhere represented in their information centres.

~

Diplomacy moved rapidly in 1982. Habib came and went. Phone calls took place with increasing haste between Moscow, Damascus, Jerusalem and Washington. Habib pushed for Israel to simply halt and allow PLO leaders safe access out of Beirut to a point outside Lebanon. The PLO stalled. The tanks opened fire, pounding Ras Beirut relentlessly. Hospitals, apartment blocks, hotels and schools simply crumpled into rubble. Israel accused the PLO of hiding cadres in residential areas, a claim which is almost certainly true but does not necessarily justify levelling the residential areas. Israel halted the bombing amidst a wave of condemnation, but by then it barely mattered. Beirut had been put out of its considerable misery.

Amazingly, worse was still to come. In an act more akin to the genocide of Hitler or Stalin, Sharon allowed Christian militiamen through his lines in an orchestrated move that gave them access to the Palestinian areas of Sabra and Shatila, close into to Beirut’s Cola transport hub. Around 800 civilians were murdered in 40 hours beginning September 13, 1982. Many were killed with axes, so that the sound of gunfire would not alert others to their fate. The hatred that is the modern day Hizbollah was born.

The road from Israel ends overlooking Pigeon Rocks, the Cathedral Cove-like towers of sandstone that dominate Beirut’s western coastline. It’s a popular place for swimmers and joggers, and there are bars that will sell you a beer for US$5 and plenty of places to park the BMW you might have driven around from Hamra or the campus at the American University of Beirut.

The Palestinians hang out here. It’s the closest strip of coastline to Sabra, and dozens, it seems, of these men have spent time in the west and are keen to talk to any of the few Westerners that pass by.

Ali says he’s from Acco, though he’s never been there. But his parents came from there, in what is now West Israel and has been for 50 years. He was born in Sabra, where his parents fled after Partition.

He met a Danish woman and moved to Copenhagen, but then she left him, and he got sent back.

“Now I drive a taxi,” he shrugs, “A friend’s. Sometimes.”

Perhaps he can go to a free Palestine, I say, hoping to make him feel better, to Ramallah or Hebron.

“Ramallah?” he asks despondently, “Why would I go and live somewhere I’ve never been?”

So instead he stays in a city where he says he is treated like a criminal, by people who see him not as a man but as something which skews the country’s demographic map away from its Christian leaders. Although Ali’s case is extreme (90% of Palestinians say they would not return to live within the state of Israel even if they could) it is cases like his that make the situation appear as hopeless as it does.

~

So perhaps even more surprising then that Sabra can appear so full of hope. On a Thursday morning it throbs and pulses beneath buildings that still bear the scars of a twenty year old war. It is 36ºC in the shade and smelling thickly of petrol, rotting vegetation, and old meat. Stalls selling fake anything sprawl across the street while cars park on the pavement. The gutters are awash with something black.

“Mister, mister, hello, Mister, thank you, welcome, hello!” someone shouts from near my waist, the call any visitor hears a dozen times a day here, and I bend down to talk to Hamed, who is around twelve and running his uncle’s clothing stall. He is selling low quality fake jeans for $5, modelled from Moschinos that go for around $120 twenty blocks away in upmarket Solidere.

“Where are you from, Hamed?” I ask him, while my wife sorts through a pile of T-shirts that announce things like “Let’s not extinct animal.”
He shrugs, “Sabra.”

Not Beirut, not Lebanon, not Palestine or Israel, but the name of his sweltering suburb, a symbol of war and hope and despair, but a place at least, with a name of its own.

~

The troops pulled out of Beirut late in 1982, moving south to occupy a “buffer zone” from which they were unable to leave for a generation. The establishment of a Lebanese proxy force, the SLA, did little to alter the perception that Israel was mired in a swamp.

I remember my friend Gabi coming home after his tour of Lebanon in 1984. He seemed depressed, defensive.

“How bad can it be?” I teased him, “When you live in a place like this?”

“You don’t know what kind of place it is!” he snarled back.

At the time his words meant little – we all knew they’d been bitter fighting – but back home some months later I read an in-depth account of the massacres at Sabra and Shatila and got a hint of what he had meant.

“When someone steps on our foot, we cut off his head” Israeli Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan had said, but few of us realised they had begun killing his family as well.

Israel had become its own enemy, an animal gnawed by demons of doubt and self-loathing it could never admit to itself, let alone reveal to an increasingly vituperative West.

~

One afternoon I head up to Byblos for a swim, walking down past the castle, part Persia, part-Crusader, that dominates the waterfront. It’s been beautifully restored, in parts, and sits above a tiny fishing harbour and a couple of excellent cafes.

It reminds me, though, that war has always come this way, north from Europe and Istanbul, east from Damascus, west from Rome, and most recently, south from Jerusalem. Lebanon is what it has been for 4,000 years – a way station, a trading post, a thoroughfare for armies on their way to other places.

The castles have been conquered and re-built again so many times it’s hard to tell whether they were originally Persian, Mamaluke or Umayyad. Even Ras Beirut has been restored, its thirty-year-old wounds now barely evident.

Except in the memory of people like Ali, lonely and unemployed on his cliff-top vantage point, and even then, not in the minds of children like Hamed, hawking jeans in Sabra, too young yet for the labels of Palestine or Shi’ite or Jew or Druze or Lebanon.

Perhaps now, finally, his generation can live without them.

© David Brown, 2007

About the Author David Brown is a New Zealand born travel writer and language consultant based in Helsinki, Finland. For the past 5 years, he has been publishing travel writing in half a dozen magazines and newspapers, such as Metro (NZ's most highly regarded magazine), AA Directions and Destinations (NZ/Pacific). www.wordofmouth.fi

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