Lebanon Remains a Powder Keg for the New Israeli Government

As Arab leaders scramble to draft a response to the election of a right-wing prime minister in Israel, Lebanese Sheik Nabil Kaouk calmly explains that he already knows how to respond: Kill Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon.

Kaouk, the leader of the Shiite Muslim organization Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, is not waiting for Benjamin Netanyahu to take the mantle from Prime Minister Shimon Peres, or for an Arab summit to convene in Cairo on Friday. Hezbollah guerrillas killed four Israeli soldiers the day after Israel elected Netanyahu and five more last week in an embarrassing blow to the Israeli army.

An Israeli patrol was on its way back to base Monday after having lain in wait all night to ambush Hezbollah. The guerrillas attacked it with machine guns at close range, killing or wounding all 13 soldiers.

“It doesn’t matter to us who runs Israel. What we want is the full withdrawal of Israel from Lebanon and a stop to attacks on our people,” Kaouk said in a rare interview. “The region will never enjoy peace and stability as long as Israel’s aggressive policies are in place.”

If Netanyahu is sworn into office as expected this week, he will inherit Israel’s quagmire in southern Lebanon--a costly, 11-year occupation that could produce one of his first crises as prime minister.

As the last two fatal attacks show, Hezbollah guerrillas have recovered quickly from the 16-day “Operation Grapes of Wrath” that Peres launched against them in April and are on the offensive deep inside Israel’s so-called security zone in southern Lebanon.

If the Israeli army responds more aggressively by penetrating further north into Lebanon and closer to villages, that will mean risking civilian casualties and international condemnation for violating its “understandings” with Syria and Lebanon that halted the fighting in April.

At the same time, prospects are dimming for a negotiated solution in Lebanon, where neighboring Syria holds the key. Peres had indicated that he would give the Golan Heights back to Syria for a peace agreement that surely would have included Lebanon. Syria is the de facto ruler in Lebanon and has used Hezbollah as a stick to batter Israel.

Netanyahu, on the other hand, promised during the campaign that he would not relinquish the Golan, a lush, high ground overlooking the Galilee that Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East War. Several of the eight parties expected to make up Netanyahu’s coalition government are demanding that a ban on returning the Golan be written into the coalition pact.

Israel’s chief of the army intelligence corps, Brig. Gen. Yaacov Amidror, warned the parliament’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee last week that, if Syria concludes that it is not getting the Golan, Israel should expect a more “aggressive policy” from it in return. Presumably, that would include Hezbollah.

“In a few days, a new leadership will enter the government and the Defense Ministry and begin to address the crisis developing in southern Lebanon,” wrote military affairs correspondent Zeev Schiff in the daily newspaper Haaretz.

Predicting that the army will get a green light for more aggressive operations, he added that “the cycle of violence in southern Lebanon and north of the security zone will grow . . . unless Netanyahu surprises us with a completely new direction--a willingness to unilaterally withdraw from the security zone.”

In Lebanon, Sheik Kaouk denies that Hezbollah takes its cues from Syria or from its Iranian suppliers. “We are Lebanese in our leadership and our base,” he said.

Dressed in the fine robes and headdress of a Muslim cleric, Kaouk received two reporters in a lavender-carpeted office with heavy drapes and a photograph of Iran’s late Ayatollah Khomeini on the wall. The sheik, who appeared to be in his early 40s, twisted worry beads as he spoke of Israel’s “criminal” leaders and “failed” military operations.

Kaouk dismissed the idea of a negotiated solution in Lebanon, saying that Israel never honors the agreements it signs. He pointed to its refusal to withdraw from the West Bank city of Hebron as required by the peace agreements between it and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

“The occupation will not be solved with a signature,” the sheik said.

Israel invaded Lebanon during the country’s civil war of 1982 to evict Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization, which was then a guerrilla movement fighting Israel. Arafat’s fighters fled within months, but Israel stayed, provoking Iranian-backed Shiite Muslims to form a militia called Hezbollah.

Three years later, Israel agreed to pull out of Lebanon but held on to the 328-square-mile border security zone that it said was needed to protect northern Israel from attack. The Israeli army remains there along with a proxy Christian militia called the South Lebanon Army.

Today, Hezbollah, or “Party of God,” is a broad political, social and military organization with seats in the Lebanese parliament, welfare services and a clandestine army to fight Israel. Timor Goksel, who has been with the United Nations in southern Lebanon for 17 years, estimates that Hezbollah has a corps of 400 highly trained, full-time combatants in its Islamic Resistance branch and can mobilize an additional 5,000 to 6,000 part-time militia among its supporters.

Hezbollah stepped up attacks on Israeli soldiers in the security zone in 1995 and early this year, often launching them from civilian areas just north of the occupied zone and fleeing into villages afterward. Israel would return fire at Hezbollah fighters, sometimes hitting civilians, which prompted the guerrillas to fire small Katyusha rockets at civilians in northern Israeli towns.

With the Israeli military itching to respond and prospective voters under fire before an election, Peres began Operation Grapes of Wrath. During the April offensive, Israel used air strikes and ground artillery against the guerrillas in southern Lebanon and Beirut.

The operation, which also targeted Lebanese infrastructure and forced hundreds of thousands of civilians to flee southern Lebanon, was ostensibly designed to create pressure on the Lebanese government and Syria to rein in Hezbollah.

The operation went awry for Israel when its artillery shells fell on a U.N. camp at Qana, killing more than 100 civilians who had taken refuge there. According to U.N. officials and Israeli press reports, the incident occurred after Hezbollah guerrillas near the camp fired Katyushas and mortars at an Israeli ground unit that had penetrated beyond the occupied zone.

Israel has said that its artillery gunners miscalculated when they fired back and accidentally hit the camp. The U.N. has accused Israel of intentionally firing back at targets it knew to be too close to the camp.

The operation ended with the U.S.-brokered understandings between Israel, Syria and Lebanon that ban attacks on civilians but allow each side to retaliate if its civilians are hit. This is the loophole through which both sides see the agreement unraveling.

On Friday, three children were killed in an explosion near the village of Houla in the Israeli-occupied zone, and each side blamed the other for detonating the roadside bomb.

Since the understandings were agreed to, U.N. officials say, Hezbollah has been changing tactics, abandoning long-range fire out of civilian areas and moving inside the Israeli-occupied zone to plant roadside bombs and lay ambushes. While Hezbollah denied responsibility for Friday’s bombing, its fighters admitted planting another bomb in the same area the day before.

Kaouk said the last two fatal attacks on Israeli soldiers were part of Hezbollah’s revenge for the killings at Qana, and he insisted that Hezbollah will continue to “protect our civilians” in Lebanon.

“Israel only understands the language of retaliation. They only understand an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” he said. “We believe Israel will not feel pain until their people have wept like our people have wept.”

After Monday’s ambush, Israeli officials said they had been too hesitant to go after Hezbollah since Grapes of Wrath and thus allowed the guerrillas to gain ground.

“We have to attack [Hezbollah] north of the security zone and take the initiative,” the frustrated chief of Israel’s Northern Command, Maj. Gen. Amiram Levine, said. “We have to seek them out in every place and not let them live their lives.”