SHEIKH ABAD HILL, southern Lebanon, 7 February — In the "center for world terror", the Lebanese farmers are guiding their plows through the fields, gently flicking sticks over the necks of their horses. In Lebanon, where Iranian Revolutionary Guards are supposed to have been pouring in from Tehran, the country’s National Symphony Orchestra has been playing Brahams, Tchaikovsky and Saint-Saens. And down here on the border with Israel, where 8,000 new missiles have supposedly arrived for the Hezbollah, the women are drying tobacco leaves in the sun.
The "center for world terror" comes from the imagination of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who was flying to Washington last night for a warm welcome from President Bush. The non-existent Revolutionary Guards and the 8,000 missiles — over the weekend, the Israelis upped the figure to 10,000 then mysteriously brought it down again to 8,000 — are the invention of Shimon Peres, the Israeli foreign minister. In reality, there hasn’t been an Iranian Revolutionary Guard in Lebanon since 1984 — Peres is just 15 years late with his facts. As for the missiles, the Hezbollah would like to know where they are. So why is Lebanon being set up?
It’s not that the Israelis don’t believe their own myths. At Sheikh Abad Hill, the wire mesh of the United Nations Blue Line marking the Lebanese-Israeli border actually bisects an ancient tomb, variously regarded as the last resting place of an imam or a rabbi, depending on which side of the frontier you’re on. But just on the other side, the Israelis are building a massive bunker of black concrete and machinegun nests, a towering 70-foot emplacement of camouflage drapes and communications towers. Israeli technicians are fixing dishes to the masts and the face of the bunker, while soldiers supervise another blockhouse along the border fence. The UN boys call it "the Guns of Navarone" and you can see why.
But what is it being built for? The two unarmed Hezbollah men — one in camouflage fatigues and army boots with a battered two-way radio in his pocket, the other in an old jacket, hunched against the breeze — shrug their shoulders. They sit on the dirt 10 feet from the wire, watching the construction of this behemoth with bemusement. Almost as bemused as the Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, who has been expressing his outrage at American claims that Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda is planning to set up a base in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, that a Yemeni Al-Qaeda leader has secretly visited Sidon.
It’s a smear campaign, he says. "We regularly find in Israeli and American newspapers references linking Lebanon to terrorism," he told the Lebanese Parliament on Monday. "One time we read about terrorist camps in the Bekaa, other times they refer to negotiations with Al-Qaeda for moving the organization to Lebanon. These are malicious allegations and pure lies." Much good did these words do. Still the Israelis claim that Iran or Bin Laden or Syria are turning Lebanon into a "terror-center" or — this from Peres again — a "powder keg".
The reality is quite different. The border hasn’t been so quiet in 25 years. Save for a brief attack at Shebaa farms, a terrain of abandoned fields belonging to Lebanon but occupied by Israel since 1967 — the UN says its fate should be decided at a peace conference and puts it on Israel’s side of the Blue Line — the only action has been in the air. For ever since Israel restarted its reconnaissance flights over Lebanon — clear violations of the Blue Line agreement, according to the UN — the Hezbollah has taken to blasting 57-mm anti-aircraft rounds into the air over the Israeli border. Each time a contrail whispers up the pale blue skies toward Beirut, the Hezbollah bangs away with its old gun above Kiryat Shmona.
They have sent some splinters into the gardens of a kibbutz but it’s the sound that is meant to impress. The 57-mm rounds, fired from a relic of Stalingrad vintage, explode with a powerful detonation. If Israel’s pilots want to rattle the windows of Beirut with their sonic booms, the Hezbollah are saying, then Israel’s citizens can endure a few noisy explosions in the sky.
Gen. Gaby Ashkenazi was enjoying his Israeli Northern Command’s annual dinner when the first reports came in of "three loud explosions" over Kiryat Shmona. Some Israeli children were sent into shelters.
The Hezbollah were accused of breaching the Blue Line agreement with their air-bursts — it was indeed a violation, just like the Israeli overflights — but no one was hurt. It’s a dangerous game. If just one splinter hits an Israeli, shells will come whistling back across the border.
But it doesn’t constitute a "powder keg", let alone a "center of world terror". The latest press report to finger Lebanon even claimed that one of Osama’s henchmen had turned up in Tyre, a largely Shiite Muslim city that would brook no Bin Laden supporters in its midst. A security source in southern Lebanon believes that many of these fabrications are being generated by a private Israeli website. "There’s an ex-journalist who runs it and every time he’s told that Bin Laden’s in Beirut or Iranians are swarming through the Bekaa, he puts this stuff out," the source said. "Then the Americans pick it up and it turns up on the New York front pages."
Prime Minister Hariri has reason to be worried. Lebanon is $32 billion in debt and the Americans aren’t encouraging anyone to bail him out. The Hezbollah have gone back on the US "terrorism" list. The American ambassador to Beirut has been telling Hariri’s government to send its soldiers to the border and take over from the Hezbollah — which is what Israel wants. And now government officials are saying that President Bush tried to persuade King Abdallah of Jordan to help cancel next month’s Arab presidential summit in Beirut.
Why give legitimacy or credit to a state with Hezbollah "terrorists" in its borders? But if Lebanon would obligingly disarm the Hezbollah — another of Israel’s aims — then there would be no problem about that summit.
The real danger, of course, is that since Iran is being accused by the US of paying and arming Hezbollah and since Iran was included in President Bush’s messianic State of the Union address as part of the "axis of terror", Lebanon, via the Hezbollah, fears it will become part of the axis. What would come next? Israeli air raids against "terrorist training camps" in the Bekaa? Or US air raids on Lebanon? Below the Navarone bunker and the whitewashed tomb of Abad and the two Hezbollah men, the UN’s Ghanian peacekeepers sit on deckchairs in the sun, reading newspapers beside their white-painted SISU armored vehicle. It’s been another peaceful day on the border, disturbed only by the hum of a great generator in the Israeli blockhouse. No Bin Laden, no Al-Qaeda, no powder kegs, no missiles, no Iranian Revolutionary Guards. The center of world terror is quiet today. (The Independent)
