Onetime Fanatical Menace Now Savior to Many Lebanese

These are happy days for the militant Islamic guerrilla movement Hezbollah, which has spearheaded the fight against Israeli forces from places like this picturesque village in southern Lebanon, with its cedar-shaded streets and olive groves stretching invitingly along the hillsides.

Two fortified military positions, one belonging to the Israel Defense Forces and one to its militia proxy, the South Lebanon Army, loom over the bucolic setting. But the residents below, many of whose homes bear scars from the fighting, say the enemy’s proximity no longer seems quite so forbidding.

“It is the Israelis who are afraid now,” Amal Saieh exults. The town’s petite English teacher is planning to do the traditional folk dance known as the dabke on that historic day, coming soon, when the Israelis finally withdraw from southern Lebanon after 22 years.

Ask Saieh whom she credits for the withdrawal, and the answer comes quickly: “Hezbollah. Here the people love Hezbollah because they are the ones doing the fighting, and they help us in so many ways.”

It has been a strange transformation for an Iranian-backed group with about 2,000 fighters and perhaps 10 times that number of party members.

In the eyes of many Lebanese, Hezbollah has gone from being a foreign, fanatical menace that blackened the country’s image with its bombings, assassinations and kidnappings to a mainstream, indigenous, political-humanitarian organization, one whose steadfastness has restored wounded Lebanese and Arab national pride.

Not only has Hezbollah gained what it regards as a military victory in its war of attrition against Israel, but Hezbollah claims to be riding high in the polls and set to expand its presence in the Lebanese parliament in a few months.

Even its media are doing well. Hezbollah’s television station, Al Manar (The Lighthouse), is rapidly becoming one of the most watched in Lebanon and is preparing for worldwide telecasts via satellite from new $15-million marbled headquarters tucked into the slums of south Beirut. The group also has two radio stations.

Sheik Naim Kassem, co-founder of Hezbollah and its deputy secretary-general, doesn’t rule out the idea that the group, whose name means Party of God, might one day be the most powerful in the country. “Isn’t that what any party would want?” he asked during an interview.

Hezbollah came to Lebanon as one of the first foreign manifestations of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. Iran’s spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, saw the movement that brought down the shah as the crest of a worldwide wave that eventually would sweep the enemies of Islam--in his view, Israel and the United States--from the Middle East.

Where better to spread his doctrine of political Islam than in Lebanon, whose Shiite Muslim community had ties to the Shiites of Iran and whose land had recently been invaded by the Israelis, who were seeking to end attacks by Palestinian guerrilla groups?

In its early days, Hezbollah was known and feared for its revolutionary fervor. It enforced modest dress for women and a ban on alcohol in the areas it controlled. In pursuit of its goals, it could be ruthless--using kidnappings, suicide bombings and assassinations to drive foreigners out of Lebanon.

Some observers believe that this is still the true face of Hezbollah, but after a Syrian-imposed peace ended Lebanon’s civil war in 1990, Hezbollah abandoned such tactics and began concentrating on harassing the Israelis, who had retained a self-declared, 9-mile-deep “security zone” on Lebanese territory.

Armed, funded and trained by Tehran--and abetted by Syria, which had its own interest in keeping the Israelis mired in Lebanon--Hezbollah developed and perfected its combat skills, mounting a classic guerrilla campaign that managed to turn southern Lebanon into Israel’s Vietnam.

The turbaned Kassem said winning the war against Israel stands as Hezbollah’s proudest accomplishment.

“We have been fighting since 1982 to seize the momentum, and we have put all our energy and effort to liberate the land,” he said, seated in a safe house in south Beirut, protected by a bevy of thickset guards. (Hezbollah’s mania for security is much in evidence; reporters are taken to see top officials in black-curtained limousines so that they cannot disclose the precise location.)

But Hezbollah is facing some strategic and tactical challenges now that Israel is starting to leave, a process that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak has promised will be complete by July 7. In a nutshell, political analysts in Lebanon are not sure that the group can maintain its popularity. What becomes of a resistance if there is no occupier left to fight?

Hezbollah’s leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, is trying to keep the world guessing about what Hezbollah will do when the Israelis go. Will it lay down its arms, or will it continue the struggle, in keeping with its rhetoric that Israel is an illegitimate presence in the region with which there can never be peace?

Whichever course it chooses, Hezbollah could face difficulties. If it continues to shoot Katyusha rockets into northern Israel from across the Lebanese border, it invites sustained retaliation that would detract from its victory and weaken its popularity inside Lebanon. But if it stops fighting, the organization loses its distinctive status and raison d’etre, and runs the risk of becoming just another political party.

In contrast to the view in Israel, where military commanders are warning of cross-border attacks, most observers here are betting that Hezbollah will stop fighting Israel when the Israelis leave Lebanon. And, here at least, analysts believe that Hezbollah’s ambiguity is a form of political posturing.

Nicholas Blanford of Beirut’s Daily Star newspaper said he considers a cessation of fighting by Hezbollah “one of the few certainties of the post-withdrawal phase.”

Nizar Hamzeh, a political scientist at the American University of Beirut, agreed that fighting with Israel will stop but said that a “mini-civil war” could erupt between Hezbollah and the remnants of the Israeli-supported South Lebanon Army. Hezbollah demands that any SLA fighters remaining in the country surrender their arms and agree to stand trial for having collaborated with Israel.

In the weeks leading up to the pullback, neither side has shown any sign of softening. SLA artillery killed two Lebanese women near Kfar Roummane last week, and Hezbollah answered the next day with a shower of Katyusha rockets on northern Israel that killed an Israeli serviceman and wounded a number of civilians.

Asked if Hezbollah would be more pacific after the pullback, Kassem only smiled and said the withdrawal must be total and permanent.

“In general, Israel will not go unpunished if it violates either the air or waters of Lebanon,” he said.

Its defiant, in-your-face attitude toward Israel is one reason so many non-Shiite Lebanese have been drawn to Hezbollah in recent years.

Hamzeh says the addition of a new recruit dubbed “the cameraman” to Hezbollah combat units in the south has helped its allure. In footage shown on Hezbollah’s TV station, the cameraman has captured scenes of Hezbollah fighters marching, heads held high, into battle and of Israeli soldiers being blown up in their bunkers.

“Seeing them firing their rockets at the Israeli might, this is something big for the average viewer,” Hamzeh said. Al Manar’s chairman, Nayef Krayem, said he considers his station a key factor in Hezbollah’s victory because its front-line pictures often found their way onto Israeli news broadcasts and sapped the Israeli will to stay in Lebanon.

Hezbollah “has not mellowed yet. They are as aggressive and violent and you name it as ever before,” said Tewfik Mishlawi, editor of the Beirut-based Middle East Reporter newsletter. But he said he thinks that might change soon. “In the future, after the peace is reached, everybody is hoping that the party will turn its attention toward the domestic field. They have got a lot to do there.”

Already, Hezbollah is one of the larger factions in the highly fragmented 128-member parliament, controlling nine seats, and Kassem said he is positive that bloc will increase in August, when elections are planned.

With contributions from Iranian hard-line foundations, Hezbollah also has built an extensive patronage network. Its social programs include schools, clinics, food distribution programs and services to wounded veterans.

Hamzeh said he thinks that for Hezbollah to meet its long-term goal of becoming Lebanon’s chief political power, it must move beyond its Shiite base, about a third of Lebanon’s 3.5 million people. But to do that, Hezbollah would have to soften its religious-based ideology, something he doubts it can do successfully. All in all, he is leery of predictions that Hezbollah will increase its parliament numbers significantly.

But the mood among Hezbollah stalwarts remains irrepressible.

In south Beirut, where the Hezbollah symbol of an upraised AK-47 and portraits of Khomeini are part of the street architecture, Hezbollah parliament member Hussein Haj Hassan said the party will thrive whether or not the military fight continues.

“It is Hezbollah that has fueled the resistance, not the opposite,” he asserted. “Our popularity comes from our philosophy, and our way of implementing whatever we say.”