The Bush administration ­ zealously supported by, if not driven by, Israel ­ is intensifying its propaganda campaign against Hizbullah, elevating it with relentless vigor as an ally of Osama bin Laden, implying that it should be targeted with the same ferocity. The Americans have long sought to get even with Hizbullah for driving them out of Lebanon in the 1980s with suicide bombings and kidnappings, but much of the post-Sept. 11 ire seems to stem from the organization’s quarrel with Israel, its support for the Palestinian intifada and the threat it poses of opening the so-called second front on Israel’s northern border.
There is no doubt that Hizbullah has had a violent history since it was formed in 1982 as the cutting edge of Iran’s Islamic revolution in Lebanon and that it is rabidly anti-Israeli and anti-American. But since the end of the civil war, it has evolved into a social and political movement, setting aside its plans to transform Lebanon into an Islamic republic and banishing ideological firebrands like former secretary-general Sheikh Sobhi Toufeili. It now has mainstream political legitimacy, with nine members in Lebanon’s Parliament and a social service that leaves the state’s cumbersome bureaucracy in the shade. Its worldview reflects the moderate elements in Tehran, although it maintains a highly disciplined military wing that since driving the Israelis out of south Lebanon in May 2000, ending 22 years of occupation, has been the paramount power in that region.
In recent weeks, Israeli military commanders have claimed that Hizbullah is stockpiling weapons and planning a “major attack” armed with some 10,000 Katyushas of various calibers they say were supplied by Iran through Syria, an allegation that no one in Lebanon has been able to verify. The same goes for US and Israeli allegations that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) have sent a contingent of hundreds to Lebanon again. The IRGC deployed forces in the Syrian-controlled Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon, a Hizbullah stronghold, during Israel’s 1982 invasion, but the last units were withdrawn several years ago and no new formations have yet been sighted.
Hizbullah has been reinforcing and hardening its positions along the border, but, undoubtedly at the insistence of Damascus, has launched no attacks on Israeli forces since April apart from firing on Israeli aircraft which constantly violate Lebanese airspace. Still, the relative calm along the border did not stop Israel’s deputy foreign minister, Michael Melchior, from warning in June: “If they continue the escalation and attacks on Israel, we risk coming to the point that there has to be an intervention in Lebanon.”
On July 2, Israel’s security services claimed they had foiled several attempts by Hizbullah to kidnap Israelis by trying to lure them to meetings with “Arab businessmen” in Europe, a ploy that netted the Lebanese group Israeli businessman Elhanan Tenenbaum (Hizbullah calls him a reserve air force colonel who worked with Israeli intelligence) in October 2000. The Israelis cited one Qeiss Obeid, an Arab Israeli from Taibeh in northern Galilee and now based in London, as a Hizbullah agent involved in these alleged operations. The objective, the Israelis maintained, was apparently to swap the kidnap victims for Arabs held in Israel. Apart from Tenenbaum, Hizbullah claims to hold three Israeli soldiers snatched on the border in October.
Several Arab Israelis have been arrested for alleged links to Hizbullah and on June 3 seized Nissim Nisr, 35, whose family hails from Bazourieh, a village near Tyre. What made this arrest particularly interesting is that Nisr is Jewish, a faith he inherited from his mother who was married to a Lebanese Shiite. He emigrated to Israel 10 years ago to live with his sister in Tel Aviv. Shin Bet, Israel’s security service, said Hizbullah had tasked him with mapping and photographing electricity and gas facilities in Tel Aviv, Haifa and central Israel and to identify Israeli security officials. The Israelis say he was arrested as he prepared to leave Israel to make contact with his Hizbullah handler.
Hizbullah denied any knowledge of Nisr, but there seems little doubt that Hizbullah has gone to great lengths to infiltrate Israel and to establish cells among Arab Israelis in recent years, particularly since the intifada broke out in late September 2000.
US media reports in May, citing unidentified US officials, claimed that Al-Qaeda emissaries secretly met Hizbullah and Hamas representatives in Lebanon in March. Oddly enough, Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer had said much the same thing on Feb. 5, claiming Al-Qaeda activists fleeing Afghanistan were entering Lebanon and joining Hizbullah.
The Americans have alleged that Hizbullah, backed by Iran and Syria, is now cooperating with Al-Qaeda on tactics, training, money-laundering, weapons smuggling and forging documents in what they hint is part of an emerging pattern of decentralized alliances between extremist Sunni and Shiite groups regardless of religious rivalries. Strange bedfellows indeed; so strange in fact that some senior US intelligence officials, not to mention European and Arab security services, seriously discount such an alliance is likely. Hizbullah’s leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, has admitted links with Sunni Palestinian groups but denied any relationship with Al-Qaeda, “not previously and not now ­ and not for religious or ideological reasons but for political reasons.”
Amid the deepening uncertainty and instability that is gripping the region what is more worrying than the new drive to demonize Hizbullah ­ which is not known to have attacked a non-Israeli target for more than a decade, essentially since the end of the 1975-90 Lebanese civil war ­ is the mounting criticism of Iran and Syria by the Bush administration. Both remain on the State Department’s blacklist of rogue states that sponsor international terrorism. Neither has been implicated in any attacks for years ­ Syria since 1986 and Iran since reformist President Mohammad Khatami was elected in 1997, although the Americans and Israelis consider support for the intifada to be terrorism.
The rise of right-wing hawks in the US and Israel has dangerously widened the fissure between the West and Islam and sharpened the denunciations of these two states, partners in a strategic alliance.
This in turn has raised fears that Ariel Sharon, with US blessing, will strike against Hizbullah and/or its patrons, probably in Lebanon, which has borne the brunt of Israeli ire over the years, and possibly against targets inside Syria itself, which has not been attacked on its own soil since the 1973 war.
Senator Bob Graham, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, declared in Washington on July 9 after he led a congressional delegation to Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and Israel to gather information for the Sept. 11 investigation being conducted with the House Intelligence Committee: “Hizbullah of course is the A-team of terrorism.”
He said that training camps in Lebanon and Syria were a threat to US national security. “Hizbullah has killed hundreds of Americans over its history,” he said. “It’s the most vicious and effective terrorist organization in the world and if we’re serious about the war on terrorism it’s going to carry us to Hizbullah and those training camps.” Asked if the US should launch air strikes to destroy the camps, a strategy that would cause untold damage to the Americans’ already difficult relations with the Arab world, Graham said that if Damascus refused to shut down the bases, “then I think the international community, led by the United States, has a priority to do so.”
Graham went so far as to suggest that eliminating these facilities, “where the next generation of terrorists is being prepared,” was a greater priority than getting rid of Saddam Hussein. “There are some things that we need to do that are more urgent,” he said.
The mounting propaganda campaign targeting Hizbullah, particularly its alleged links to Al-Qaeda, are viewed with the deepest skepticism by non-US intelligence and diplomatic sources in the region, who see the new stridency as Israeli-inspired. “We don’t have any concrete element justifying the accusations,” one said. Most believe that the demonization process has two objectives ­ discrediting Hizbullah to dissuade it from supporting Palestinian radicals such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and justifying future military operations against it at some point in the future.
The Europeans, who are increasingly concerned about George W. Bush’s plans to expand his war against terrorism, have been hesitant to accept US and Israeli allegations against Hizbullah at face value. But they have over the last few months swung behind the US in branding Palestinian groups, particularly those close to Yasser Arafat, as terrorist organizations, including the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades that are linked to Arafat’s Fatah movement.
There are reports that Britain and Germany are pressing to add Hizbullah to the European Union’s blacklist, while France, Sweden, Greece, Spain and Belgium oppose the idea. Britain, Bush’s strongest ally in the war against terrorism, put Hizbullah’s External Security Organization ­ a name which no-one in Lebanon had ever heard before and which the London government apparently made up ­ on its first-ever list of proscribed organizations in February 2001.
Lebanon, along with Syria and other Arab states, does not consider Hizbullah a terrorist organization, but a legitimate armed force fighting Israeli occupation of Arab land. In November 2001, the Beirut government flatly rejected US demands it freeze Hizbullah assets, jeopardizing relations with Washington and risking retaliatory US financial sanctions, the last thing Lebanon needs as it struggles to rebuild from the civil war and labors under a $25 billion debt.
Graham has claimed that Hizbullah and Egypt’s Jihad organization, which does have close links with Al-Qaeda, may be more able to undertake attacks on the US than bin Laden. As far as is known, neither has ever been involved in action on US soil. But there have been increasing allegations that Hizbullah has support groups in the US. Drug Enforcement Administration chief Asa Hutchinson announced on May 10 that federal investigators had uncovered evidence that a vast narcotics trafficking ring in the US had funneled millions of dollars in proceeds to Hizbullah and other extremist groups in the Middle East. The US anti-Hizbullah campaign, aimed at establishing that Hizbullah has a global reach and was thus a suitable candidate for US military attack, went into high gear at about that time.
On June 22, Lebanese-born Mohammed Hammoud was sentenced to life imprisonment in Charlotte, North Carolina, for sending Hizbullah the profits from an interstate cigarette smuggling ring that made $7.5 million in the late 1990s. He was the first person convicted under a 1996 US law that prohibits aid for organizations considered to be terrorist by the State Department. He was also charged with racketeering, fraud and money-laundering along with his brother Chawki and six others, who remain on trial. One alleged member of the group, Said Mohammed Harb, has also been charged with planning to provide Hizbullah with cash and supplies, including night vision goggles, global positioning units and mine detectors. He faces 60 years behind bars.
Since Sept. 11, Hizbullah has also been linked to business ventures and criminal operations in Romania, Moldova and Spain that funnelled funds to the organization, although the evidence provided by the authorities in these countries was extremely slim. Hizbullah has also been linked to “conflict diamond” sales in West and Central Africa, where there is a sizeable community of Lebanese Shiites. Tehran has traditionally bankrolled Hizbullah, but its funding is understood to have been reduced in recent years and despite Hizbullah denials of involvement in shady businesses abroad, it may well have turned its hand to other means of financing.
Latin America is another region where Hizbullah is long believed to have been entrenched, particularly the lawless region where the borders of Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina converge. Dozens of Lebanese and other Arabs have been reported arrested there since Sept. 11.
Since that date, there have also been a growing number of reports of Hizbullah, not to mention Al-Qaeda and Hamas, activists operating in Chile, where a Lebanese financial group in the northern town of Iquique is believed to be linked to the organization and to businessman Assad Ahmad Mohammed Bakarat, wanted in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks. Others have been reported in Ecuador, near Colombia’s border with Venezuela, in Panama’s Colon Free Trade Zone and on Venezuela’s Margarita Island. Much of this activity by the authorities in these countries seems to have been inspired by the Americans and it is likely to intensify in the months ahead.

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