Nir Rosen - Aftermath

There were two groups of Salafis in Lebanon, he told me: peaceful ones and jihadists. But he feared that after the appearance of extreme Salafi jihadists the peaceful ones might side with the jihadists. Seyid admitted to me that Sunnis were being trained in Jordan but explained that it was only to work as security guards. Because of Sunni solidarity and the fear that all Shiites have weapons, there were new armed Sunni groups, he said. “Sunnis feel insecure, but it’s not a good idea,” he told me. “It’s not a good situation, but what can you do? The security forces can’t protect all those institutions, as the bombings show, so they have to have their own guards.”

Facing the Sunni-dominated March 14 coalition was the March 8 coalition, led by Hizballah and aligned with Syria and Iran. Named for the date of the demonstration at which Hizballah thanked the Syrians for supporting the resistance to Israel, the coalition grew to include Michel Aoun, the Christian former Lebanese army general who had spearheaded the fight against Syrian domination. Though Aoun’s anti-Syrian credentials were clear, even calling Hizballah pro-Syrian was misleading. The Syrians had fought Hizballah in the past and supported its rivals. It was only in the mid-1990s that they began to support Hizballah, while not allowing it to participate in Lebanese politics, and it was only after the Syrians left that Hizballah entered Lebanese electoral politics. Privately, Hizballah officials disparaged the Syrian system and expressed resentment of the Syrian presence in Lebanon. But their priority was the resistance, and they were grateful to the Syrians for supporting it. Other members of March 8 included lesser Sunni figures such as the late former Lebanese Muslim Brotherhood leader Fathi Yakan, who was sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

In July 2006 Hizballah soldiers captured two Israeli soldiers in a daring raid typical of the tit-for-tat exchanges that were limited to the border region. Hizballah was surprised when the Israelis responded with a massive onslaught, pounding Lebanon and destroying much of its infrastructure, killing about one thousand civilians while laying waste to southern Lebanon and the Shiite suburbs of Beirut. Standing up to the Israeli military might, less than 1,500 Hizballah soldiers lost about 150 of their men. It was the first time an Arab army had achieved a kill ratio on par with the Israelis. The war ended with the Israelis failing to achieve their stated goal of destroying Hizballah or pushing it north of the Litani River. For Hizballah and its supporters, thwarting Israeli goals was a victory—a divine victory, they said. Hizballah shot to popularity with the people, if not the regimes, around the Arab world.

Although Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice described the war and its devastation as the “birth pangs of the new Middle East,” it deepened the chasm between the March 14 and March 8 camps, as well as that between Sunnis and Shiites. Hizballah and its allies accused their opponents of collaborating with the Israelis and Americans. March 14 politicians blamed Hizballah for the destruction that had not only ruined the summer tourist season but the economy and infrastructure. If Hizballah accused them of serving Israel and America, they accused Hizballah of serving an Iranian agenda.

Concerned that the Lebanese government, dominated by the March 14 coalition, was attempting to achieve diplomatically and politically what Israel had failed to do militarily (emasculate Hizballah and remove its weapons), the Shiite members of the government resigned. In November the March 8 coalition asserted that the government was no longer legitimate, since without the Shiites it was in violation of the sectarian division of power. Hizballah sought a national unity government in which it would have a greater share of power. But it was not asking for a larger share of the political pie for the Shiite community beyond the 21 percent of parliamentary and cabinet seats the Shiites were allocated by the Constitution. Instead it wanted a greater share for its non-Shiite allies in the opposition, which collectively represented at least half the Lebanese population. Hizballah wanted a veto-wielding one-third of the cabinet seats so that it and its allies could maintain their influence over “strategic” issues, protecting the resistance, maintaining Lebanon’s “Arabism” and centrality in the Arab-Israeli conflict, and preventing Lebanon from falling under American and Israeli hegemony.

In December 2006 Hizballah and its allies in the March 8 coalition initiated demonstrations, and a “sit-in” turned into a tent city in downtown Beirut, an area that symbolized Hariri’s costly reconstruction of Beirut and also the seat of the Lebanese government. For Sunnis, this infringement on their territory was perceived as a Shiite “occupation” that had broken the Sunni sense of ownership over this Sunni oasis. In January the opposition called for strikes and civil disobedience. In clashes between Sunnis and Shiites in Beirut, seven were killed and at least 150 were injured. All sides were surprised by the explosion of violent hatred and pulled their forces back. Saudi Arabia and Iran quickly came to the negotiating table. Neither side wanted things to get out of control. Their power was based on the potential for war, not war itself, on playing brinksmanship without being drawn in. During the clashes the army refused to interfere and attack civilians. At the time the army was condemned by March 14 politicians for being insufficiently repressive.

All this was taking place in a region anxious over the civil war in Iraq, in which Sunnis felt threatened by Shiite militias that had profited from the American occupation. King Abdullah of Jordan had warned of a “Shiite crescent” stretching from Lebanon to the Gulf. President Mubarak of Egypt had accused Shiite Arabs of being fifth columnists for Iran. In an unprecedented move, America’s Sunni Arab clients in the region, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan, had gone so far as to issue formal statements condemning Hizballah, which suggested they were siding with Israel. While the Sunni regimes used the Shiite threat to galvanize their population, nobody wanted an actual conflict between Arab states and Iran. The tense quiet in Lebanon over the next few months was punctuated by bombs and assassinations. But everybody was waiting for what was to come. Saudi Arabia decided that Lebanon was its project, the place in the region where it would confront Iran. But Lebanon was also an Iranian project, and both countries invested large amounts of money and political capital in support of their allies. Unlike Iraq, where their proxies also competed for power, Lebanon was less costly and the consequences less severe. Much as it had in Iraq, Gaza, and Somalia, the United States appeared determined to provoke a civil war in Lebanon. In the conflict over the cabinet seats and over selecting a new president, the Americans were pressuring their proxies not to compromise with Hizballah and its allies, increasing the tension and seemingly denying Shiites the right to participate in the government.

Lebanon’s twelve Palestinian camps form an archipelago that exists inside and outside the state. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees live suffocated and marginalized in them. Inside the camps the Palestinian identity is maintained, and the main employers are the Palestinian resistance factions. When the Syrian military was in Lebanon it backed former Lebanese President Emile Lahoud—a Maronite Christian, as was custom, who served from 1998 to 2007. Throughout his presidency Lahoud invoked the threat of tawtin , warning that Muslims would grant citizenship to the Palestinians, in order to frighten Christians into backing him and the Syrian presence. Most Palestinians are Sunni Muslims. The Christian minority among them had been granted citizenship long before, since their numbers would bolster the ranks of Lebanon’s Christian minority. Tawtin was an existential threat, Lahoud warned. It would boost the number of Muslims, and only the Syrians could prevent it.