Shabaa Farms at Center of Tension for Lebanon, Syria and Israel

Ali Abdullah’s home was blasted into a mess of twisted metal and shattered stone when Israeli forces crossed the border and refused to leave two decades ago. Today, the Israelis are gone, and he wants to rebuild a life on this rocky patch of land where he was born.

“This is my country, my land,” Abdullah, 73, said wistfully as he prepared thick, black coffee on an outdoor wood stove this week. “This is where I was born, and the place where you were born is like heaven.”

But this is hardly the sanctuary Abdullah had hoped for.

Instead, he and the few hundred other people who have returned to this mountainside village find themselves at ground zero of a festering conflict.

A mile away, across a heavily guarded fence that separates Lebanon from Israeli-controlled territory, is a grassy parcel called Shabaa Farms. Lebanon claims the turf as its own, and Hezbollah militants have vowed to continue military strikes against Israel to force it to withdraw. The fight over this obscure grazing site provoked an Israeli attack on Syrian forces in Lebanon last week and has raised fears of escalating tensions regionwide.

“This is where the whole thing can start,” said Timur Goksel, senior advisor to the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon and a 22-year veteran of the region. “As long as Lebanese are of the view this is a disputed area and every official says we have the right to get it back, you will have problems.”

The south of Lebanon is a region of rolling hills speckled with steel-gray boulders. Narrow roads wind past olive groves to homes built of hand-hewn stones from local quarries. Terraced farms climb up the hillsides.

Ibrahim Diab came home a year ago, hoping this village would enjoy peace and quiet for the first time since Palestinians used the region as a base to stage cross-border attacks more than 30 years ago. The 65-year-old retired schoolteacher wants to rebuild his house, destroyed twice by Israeli forces.

“I want to build it so I can live here, to come back to my land,” Diab said as he climbed down a rickety wooden ladder this week. “If it is destroyed again, and I am still alive, I will rebuild it again. If not, then my children will.”

A Sticking Point in Israel’s Withdrawal

Twenty-three years ago, Israeli forces crossed into southern Lebanon, eventually occupying a buffer zone that the Jewish state said was necessary to ensure its security. Despite international condemnation, Israeli forces held firm for years, controlling 114 villages stretching eight miles into Lebanon. Recognizing Israel’s superior military powers, Hezbollah, with support from Syria and Iran, developed a hit-and-run guerrilla strategy that wore down the Jewish state’s resolve. Last May, Israel suddenly withdrew.

The United Nations certified that Israel had pulled back to the internationally accepted border, but for Lebanon and its power broker, Syria, there was a sticking point: Shabaa Farms.

International maps, including the Lebanese army’s, show that the land was part of Syria’s Golan Heights, now annexed by Israel. But Lebanon and Syria insist that the territory rightfully belongs to Lebanon: Its nationals lived there. Its farmers grazed their animals there. And, the two Arab countries say, Syria even agreed to give the land to Lebanon in the 1950s, though it was never formally deeded.

“The Syrian government provided documents that Shabaa Farms is Lebanese,” said Hussein Naboulsi, spokesman for the guerrillas. “I think there is an Israeli pressure [on the United Nations] indeed. How else can you explain the situation when you provide the U.N. with all the documents and it still says what it said?”

Many analysts in Beirut say the 10-square-mile pastureland, which many people in Lebanon had never even heard of before this crisis, became a focus of conflict because Syria and Hezbollah were groping for justification to continue striking at Israel. As long as Hezbollah continues to unnerve Israel, Syria believes that it has leverage in its bid to one day recover the Golan Heights, they said. The guerrillas and officials in Damascus, the Syrian capital, hotly deny these charges.

“When Israel withdrew [from Lebanon], [late Syrian President Hafez] Assad had nothing to do short of opening a front in the Golan Heights,” said one political analyst with close ties to the Lebanese government. The analyst was afraid to be identified, saying that angering Syria could lead to repercussions. “There isn’t a single document that shows Shabaa Farms is Lebanese territory. This was the only trump card they were able to give Syria after the withdrawal.”

There is also a widespread, if muted, sentiment that Shabaa Farms is too small a concern to risk a broad military conflict.

“If we assume this is Lebanese, 100%, is it worth the price we are paying?” said Farid Khazen, a political science professor at American University in Beirut, the Lebanese capital.

It is not a question asked openly here in the south. Lebanese officials have refused to deploy government troops along the border, so Hezbollah calls the shots in the zone once occupied by Israeli forces. “Hezbollah pretty much has the run of the place,” said the U.N.’s Goksel.

On the road leading into Kfar Chouba, the yellow flag of Hezbollah hangs on a metal post. The guerrillas have staged some of their most controversial recent attacks from just south of the village, turning up the heat so high that government officials finally approved construction of a U.N. observation tower here.

Some of the villagers say they are relieved to see the U.N. increase its presence.

“We’ve asked for the U.N. post for a long time,” said Ismail Diab, 50, nephew of Ibrahim. He left just before the Israeli occupation and returned last year with his seven children. “We hope this will protect the village. We don’t care about politics. The issue of Shabaa Farms, we are leaving it to the government.”

Many of the approximately 100 families who have returned live in cinder-block shells as they try to rebuild their damaged homes. They await aid promised by the government to encourage homeowners to return to the area.

‘We Are So Tired, So Tired’

As the work crawls forward, the sound of shovels clinking against stone cuts through the cool mountain air, blending with the street sounds of children playing and the percussion of automatic gunfire coming from the direction of Israeli observation posts on the hills overlooking the homes.

Since Abdullah and his wife, Nadie, returned one year ago, they have realized that their dream of a calm life will have to be deferred. But they say that they do continue to support Hezbollah.

In the meantime, they live in a cold, damp, sparsely furnished room alongside the rubble that was their home years ago. This week their son, a doctor, visited from his home in a town near Beirut, about two hours away by car. Together they smoked cigarettes, sipped coffee and planned the reconstruction.

“We are still living in a tragic situation,” Ali Abdullah said. “I was hoping the situation would improve. We are so tired, so tired. God will help us.”