But today, as U.S. armor advances through Iraqi Shiite territory toward Baghdad, nobody arrives from Beirut to visit this victory shrine to Islamist resistance. Almost nobody came yesterday, either, or the day before that. Indeed, Kfar Kila is beyond quiet–it seems dead, animated only by the yellow flags of the Party of God–Hizbullah–that flap above more oil portraits of fresh-faced “martyrs” lining the streets. Two bored Hizbullah security men carrying Motorola walkie-talkies watch over the barbed-wire border fence. At the Freedom Cafe, Ali Youssef, 35, makes the day’s first sale–two cups of coffee. “Everybody’s staying inside,” he says. “Those that have family in Beirut have left. They’re afraid. This is possibly the big change. After Iraq…?”
Worry about the war in Iraq has only compounded the region’s troubles. The outside world–and the Lebanese government–lost interest in this troubled corner of the Mideast after the final Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon. Public services and schools remain dismal, and many refugees from the war have not returned. But people also fear that Israel isn’t finished with South Lebanon, and that now Washington may get into the game. The current Israeli army chief of staff, Moshe Yaalon, complained before his appointment that Israel lost credibility by turning tail in the face of suicide attacks. Dubious leaks by Israeli officials seem calculated to divert some of the momentum of Washington’s drive against Saddam Hussein toward Hizbullah and its chief patron, Syria. Israeli security sources claim Saddam’s chemical and biological weapons have made their way from Iraq to Syria, hence to Hizbullah in South Lebanon. That would serve to prepare U.S. public opinion for more “preemptive” military action.
Lebanese officials and Hizbullah figures say they will avoid a new confrontation. Even in an uninhabited area a few miles to the northeast from here that it still contests, Hizbullah has launched no attacks on Israeli forces since January. But nobody imagines the trouble is over. “Israel is not going to live with Hizbullah on its border–something has got to give,” says a foreign official with long experience in the area. The immediate fear is that civilian casualties in Iraq could provoke freelance attacks on Israel by Sunni fundamentalists in Lebanon. Last week, Palestinians bearing photos of the Iraqi dictator marched through downtown Beirut. Saddam is said to have bankrolled some small and little-known groups of Sunni extremists in Lebanon. Contractors capable of lobbing rockets over the border still lurk in the shadows, a holdover from the days when the PLO held sway in South Lebanon. Any Israeli casualties from such an attack would compel the government to exact revenge. And Israel might not make fine distinctions among those responsible. The Lebanese government has deployed extra security agents to this hilly border region and to Palestinian camps in the south, but the radicals remain a dangerous wild card.
Although Hizbollah is pulling its punches on the border, officials of the Islamist group have been have been quick to draw parallels between their struggle with Israel and what they view as the unfolding U.S. occupation of Iraq. In 1982, when Israeli forces tried to install new leadership and to evict the Palestinians from Lebanon, the rapture of local Shiites at being freed from Palestinian domination soured in three months. Nobody knows how the presence of U.S. troops will wear with Iraq’s long-suffering Shiites. But last week the leader of Hizbullah, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, predicted trouble. “We tell them that they will not be met in this region with roses, flowers, rice and perfumes,” he told a crowd marking the 10-day mourning period known as Ashoura. “They will be met with rifles, blood, arms, martyrdom and martyrdom operations.” The crowd shouted, “God is Great.” In Israel, the fundamentalist group Hamas on Friday issued a similar warning. But neither organization has joined street protests in support of Saddam, hated since his aggression against fundamentalist Iran.
All of this weighs heavily on people who have only recently emerged from a long ordeal of occupation and resistance. “We always feel that the Israelis are threatening us,” said Ibrahim Chamoun, a shopkeeper in the hilltop town of Khiam, overlooking the border. “Especially these days, something could start any moment. Everyone here is afraid. They are staying home from work.” On the town square, almost every store was shuttered. Even the Ministry of Tourism guide at the former al Khiam prison, where Israel’s security services once interrogated detainees, was absent. A lone group of Gulf Arab tourists, women in chadors, wandered in the dank cells and gawked at the “room for investigation and torturing by electricity.” A rack of red Katyusha rockets stood on display at the museum entrance. Cheap, crude and obsolete compared with the “smart” ordinance now falling on Iraq, these short-range weapons could still spread destruction within a region again consumed by war.
