Hezbollah Proves a Wily Enemy for Israel

Here in the rolling countryside of southern Lebanon, one thing is certain--you won’t see a Hezbollah guerrilla fighter coming.

In Israel’s self-declared “security zone,” Hezbollah fighters appear from nowhere, ambush Israeli soldiers, and then vanish without a trace, blending into the local population.

According to U.N. official Timur Goksel, the only clue to their presence is an increase in the number of Yamaha motorcycles on the roads. The bike is believed to be one of the guerrillas’ preferred modes of transportation, said Goksel. Otherwise, “there is no enemy to crush.”

In Beirut, Hezbollah member Ibrahim Musawi put it this way: “You cannot kill me if you do not find me.”

That, in a nutshell, has been Israel’s problem in its 13-day-old military campaign to defeat Hezbollah rocket attacks using air raids, artillery and naval bombardment. The Hezbollah fighters are usually long gone before the Israeli bombers and shells arrive.

Whether riding motorcycles or leading mules piled high with smuggled Katyusha rockets over highland paths, the 4,000 to 5,000 Muslim guerrillas of Hezbollah, the Party of God, have shown themselves over the past year to be dangerous and determined enemies of Israel.

They have also been resilient, raining down Katyusha rockets on northern Israel while enduring the firepower of one of the world’s foremost armies employing high-tech artillery, advanced fighter jets and helicopters.

In fact, more Katyusha rockets have struck Israel in the past 13 days--nearly 500--than in all the previous years since Israel started keeping count in 1968.

Even if U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher’s current round of shuttle diplomacy results in a cease-fire in southern Lebanon, most analysts in Lebanon believe that Hezbollah is already the winner: It has stood up to Israel and suffered comparatively few casualties.

But declaring victory does not come easily to a religiously austere group such as Hezbollah.

“We are not going to wave our hands in triumph,” said Musawi, a bearded Edgar Allan Poe aficionado who meets with journalists over coffee at the Hezbollah press center in the teeming slums of southern Beirut. Celebration will come later, he said: “When southern Lebanon is liberated, this is the real victory.”

Despite the tons of munitions expended by Israel in “Operation Grapes of Wrath,” only a handful of Hezbollah fighters have been among the more than 150 Lebanese victims since the Israeli offensive began. Israel says it has killed 30 Hezbollah fighters; Hezbollah says the number is six.

“Even if it is 30, Hezbollah’s infrastructure is still intact,” said Adnan Iskander, a political scientist at the American University of Beirut.

Politically, the organization says, it has only gained in stature and popularity. Even Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri recently hailed its role in resisting the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon. At a news conference last week, he compared Hezbollah to the French Resistance in World War II.

Once famous only for kidnappings and car bombings, Hezbollah in recent years has reinvented itself, gradually gaining respectability and moving into the mainstream of politics in Lebanon. It sits in parliament, runs schools and hospitals, works to improve garbage collection and, with its “Jihad Construction Co.,” helps rebuild homes damaged in Lebanon’s civil war.

Hezbollah’s guiding philosophy remains anti-U.S. and anti-Israel. But what is garnering it the most support these days is its appeal to patriotism. By fighting to push Israel out of a 9-mile-wide area in southern Lebanon, Hezbollah has turned itself into the country’s white knight.

“We are not afraid at all of Israel’s threats and of America’s intimidating rhetoric,” Hezbollah’s leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, told the London magazine Al Wasat last month. “We are conducting a war for defending our nation.”

Hezbollah believes that its fighters have the advantage of engaging their enemy on their own terrain, armed with a faith in the Koran that inspires its fighters and glorifies the sacrifice of their lives for their cause.

To hear Musawi tell it, Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres now faces a dilemma: Either he must concede that the bombing campaign has not significantly curtailed Hezbollah’s rocket attacks, or order a ground offensive into Lebanon to root out Hezbollah.

Nothing would be more welcomed by Hezbollah. Drawing parallels with Vietnam and Afghanistan, the group says its guerrilla tactics would ultimately defeat and humiliate its stronger foe.

Hezbollah was founded by Iran in Lebanon’s Shiite Muslim community in 1982 as a militia to fight invading Israeli troops. Its members received money and military training from Tehran, and the organization was integral to Iran’s aim of exporting Islamic revolution to other countries of the Middle East.

The group played a central role in the taking of Western hostages in the mid-1980s and was suspected in the suicide truck-bombing that killed 241 U.S. servicemen in Beirut in 1983.

Hezbollah acknowledges that it continues to receive strong financial backing from Iran, estimated by some Western diplomats to be about $80 million a year.

“Why should we conceal Iran’s help to us when the United States openly grants billions of dollars to Israel, which has been using the money to attack every party in the region?” Nasrallah said in the magazine interview.

Hezbollah disputes U.S. and Israeli assertions that it started the recent round of fighting by launching Katyusha rockets at civilian targets in northern Israel. The group says it fired the rockets only in response to recent Israeli attacks in Lebanon and that its current barrage of Katyushas will end as soon as Israel ceases its military operation.

Goksel, of the United Nations, believes that the Israeli offensive may have been prompted at least in part by Hezbollah’s recent taunting and the guerrillas’ successes in fighting the Israeli army inside southern Lebanon.

“Hezbollah never missed the chance to rub it in,” Goksel said.

Hezbollah has always said its long-term goal is to destroy Israel. But many commentators believe that if Israel leaves Lebanon, Hezbollah will be satisfied.

Nasrallah has been vague on the topic.

In any case, Hezbollah now appears to be relishing being at center stage.

“It gives me great satisfaction to see the Israelis and the Americans at a loss as to how to deal with a group of true believers,” Hezbollah’s second-in-command, Naim Qassem, said recently. “We’ve become their only obsession.”