The Longer Israel Occupies Southern Lebanon, The Richer Its Lebanese Puppet Becomes

By Stephen J. Sosebee

Recent developments in south Lebanon offer conflicting signals concerning Israel’s desire to remove itself from what has become a political and military nightmare. Since 73 Israeli soldiers on their way to the 15-kilometer-wide Israel-occupied zone in Lebanon were killed in a 1997 helicopter crash, there has been an increasingly vocal movement across Israel’s political spectrum to get the Israel Defense Forces out of Lebanon.

A grassroots protest movement, the “Four Mothers,” was born after the helicopter crash, followed by other groups demanding a withdrawal from Lebanon. Israeli demonstrators began holding vigils outside Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s office, chanting “Lebanon is Vietnam” and “We have no children for wars.”

The killing of seven Israeli soldiers in late February and early March, including a brigadier general (the highest ranking Israeli killed in Lebanon since 1982), has furthered the call in Israel to get out.

The first move toward a much-debated “gradual unilateral withdrawal” by the IDF is expected to take place soon from the village of Jezzine on the eastern tip of the occupied zone. The village has little strategic value, and over a dozen South Lebanese Army (SLA) soldiers in recent months have deserted to the north from their posts in that area. Those remaining have been under increasingly deadly pressure from Hezbollah and Amal resistance fighters in the surrounding hills.

Despite all this, 61 percent of Israelis polled recently were opposed to a unilateral withdrawal. Labor candidate Ehud Barak, however, has promised Israeli voters that if he is elected in May, he will have the IDF out of Lebanon within a year. How he will achieve that goal without a peace deal with Syria is not clear.

In a surprising move in early February, the Lebanese village of Arnoun was occupied and, with barbed wire and land mines, incorporated by the IDF and SLA into Israel’s so-called “security zone.” Two weeks later, in one of the most dramatic, and effective, displays of patriotism since the civil war ended in Lebanon at the beginning of this decade, more than a thousand students from Beirut stormed Arnoun and liberated it from Israeli occupation by tearing down the barbed wire. During the storming of the village, the Israeli forces shot and wounded 14-year-old Mohammed Nasser.

The seemingly contradictory Israeli debate over withdrawal, coupled with the effort to include yet another south Lebanese village in Israel’s zone of occupation, occurred at a time when an embarrassing report was circulating in Paris detailing the Mafia-like behavior of the SLA commander, Gen. Antoine Lahad, in the occupied zone. The report dramatically undermines Israel’s half-hearted claim that its occupation is a benevolent one that permits thousands of Lebanese to cross over to Israel daily for labor-intensive employment.

Following Arnoun’s occupation, for example, the Israeli army said that the village was taken “to protect its residents” from attacks by Lebanese guerrillas. No mention was made, of course, of the widespread acts of extortion by the SLA, a proxy army which Israel trains, arms and finances.

In addition to embarrassing Israel, the Lahad report is also certain to further depress whatever morale is left among the battered 2,500 SLA troops, who, along with 1,500 IDF soldiers, suffer almost daily Hezbollah and Amal ambushes in the occupied zone. According to the IDF, Hezbollah mortar attacks doubled to 1,100 last year.

Those soldiers fighting and dying, especially in the SLA, must now question what they are fighting for. Is it to protect Christian Lebanese villagers in the south from an Iranian-backed Islamic Shi’i domination, or is it to further enrich Lahad and his family? And most SLA soldiers must wonder how long the withdrawal debate in Israel will go on before it actually becomes a reality. Who will protect them once the IDF leaves?

The Lahad report details seven main sources of income in south Lebanon for the SLA commander’s family. It charges that Lahad and his sons have enriched themselves during the past 14 years of occupation through bribes in construction dealings, and smuggling and selling stolen cars through the Lebanese-Israeli border post of Nakoura. It further charges that they imposed passage fees for Lebanese residents entering and leaving the security zone, as well as fees on Lebanese workers who pass between the “security zone” and Israel. The rap sheet on Lahad’s sources of income also includes taxes on fuel imports coming from Israel, the smuggling of tobacco into Syria and bribes from allowing the expansion of Lebanon’s extensive cellular network into the southern part of the country. Through these means, the report charges, Lahad and his sons have established a Mafia empire in the south that has netted them millions of dollars.

Embarrassed by the substance of the report, which indicates that there is more to the war in south Lebanon than just “security,” Israeli Knesset Member Gideon Ezra angrily remarked that the IDF was “not in south Lebanon so that Lahad’s business interests can prosper.”

Maybe not. From Lahad’s perspective, however, every new IDF casualty in Lebanon brings his eventual abandonment by the Israelis that much closer, despite what Netanyahu and his defense ministers say about “standing by their friends.”

Like the former Christian warlord from the north, General Michel Aoun, Lahad knows that the window of opportunity to prosper through war before he flees to France is closing. Aoun now lives in Paris with millions in the bank from his days as a Lebanese strongman.

As Lahad gets rich, his soldiers lose faith and their lives, and Israeli leaders seek an “honorable” way out of a war that has killed 69 of its soldiers in the past two years and over 250 since 1985. As for the hundreds of thousands of Lebanese and Palestinian refugees living in or on the edge of the war zone, up to now they have been largely forgotten.

On Feb. 6, IDF and SLA shelling wounded 10 Lebanese civilians. A month earlier, during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, an Israeli air raid killed a mother and her six small children in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. This prompted Lebanese Prime Minister Salim Hoss to accuse Israel of violating the “Grapes of Wrath” agreement, which was signed following Israel’s pre-election bombardment of Lebanon. That included the April 18 shelling deaths of more than 100 Arab women and children refugees in the United Nations compound in Qana. The agreement calls for both sides to avoid harming civilians and is monitored by France and the U.S. “What happened today was a sample of Israel’s traditional brutality,” said Hoss, following the February 1999 shelling.

Full of admiration for the students who liberated Arnoun, Lebanese MP Butros Harb summed up popular feeling in his country: “In the face of the world’s inability to put pressure on Israel to force it to pull out of Arnoun, young Lebanese have resisted not only Israel but the whole world by removing the barbed wire that was erected to isolate Arnoun from the rest of the country.”

The Lebanese government, meanwhile, connected water to the liberated village for the first time in years. The Israelis had prevented water trucks from entering Arnoun last November to bring about an exodus from the village.

Barring an unconditional unilateral Israeli withdrawal, the possibility of the war in south Lebanon ending any time soon is remote at best. Israeli leaders still hope to extract something politically from Lebanon and its brokers, the Syrians, before packing up and leaving. General Lahad has too much at stake financially to think about giving up any time soon. And the Syrians won’t consider reducing support for Hezbollah and Amal unless they get back all of the Golan Heights in return.

Meanwhile, what is clear through the fog of conflicting signals over the military Mafia-state is the fact that innocent Lebanese men, women and children are continuing to live a miserable and dangerous life under occupation for the sake of an Israeli illusion that it can have “security” without trading land for peace.

Stephen J. Sosebee is a free-lance journalist specializing in the Middle East. He can be reached via e-mail at SteveS8992@aol.com.