Beware of Small States: Lebanon, Battleground of the Middle East by Hirst David

Author:Hirst, David [Hirst, David]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780571258680
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2010-04-27T16:00:00+00:00

‘EXECUTING’ THE JEWS

Perhaps the most poignant victims of the anti-Western terror were not Westerners at all, even if, in the minds of their tormentors, they were closely associated with them. They were Lebanese Jews. A community of something like 10,000 in 1948, at the time of Israel’s creation, they had, like the rest of Arab Jewry, emigrated in large numbers since. The process had accelerated with the outbreak of the civil war, so that by the mid-eighties those, by now reduced to a few score, who chose to remain were taking as great a risk as any Westerner, as well as displaying a greater – because far more perilous – loyalty to their native Lebanon than its Muslims or Christians. Clearly, there were divisions of labour within the kidnapping fraternity, and to the Organization of the Oppressed of the Earth fell responsibility for dealing with the Jews. It acquired a stock of them over time, eleven in all. One of its ‘policies’ was that whenever Shiite civilians died at Israeli hands in the South, a Jewish hostage would die too. And so, one by one, they did, including Isaac Sassoon, the head of the Jewish Council whom the Oppressed of the Earth described as the ‘chief Mossad agent’ in Lebanon.48 Another was Elie Hallak, known as the ‘doctor of the poor’ for the way he ministered to the homeless squatters, mainly Shiites, who had settled in and around Beirut’s old, now desolate and war-ravaged Jewish quarter of Wadi Abu Jamil. His kidnappers even used him to treat Michel Seurat. As Hallak told the dying Frenchman and his three compatriots, he knew that he himself was doomed, because, unlike them, he was never blindfolded in his captors’ presence. Sure enough, shortly after Seurat’s death, his possessions were brought to the surviving hostages’ cell. And two months after that they heard on the radio what they had already surmised: that the Oppressed of the Earth had ‘executed’ him too.49

Few of those best placed to know could take Hizbullah’s claims to non-involvement seriously, certainly not Giandomenico Picco, the UN emissary who took on the dangerous task of negotiating the hostages’ release. Hizbullah was the ‘political force behind the whole crisis’: there was ‘no doubt in [his] mind’ about that.50 The kidnappers mouthed essentially the same ideology as Hizbullah.51 They came from Hizbullah’s social and cultural milieu, and operated in its geopolitical space, mainly the Dahiya and the Beqa’a Valley; if it had really disapproved of them, it had every means of stopping them. But it did not; on the contrary, it provided them with cover and protection.52 Even if the party condemned hostage-taking in principle, it was not prepared to do so in practice.53 Even if the mujahideen were misguided in method, it said, they were ‘honest ‘in purpose.54 There were ‘extenuating’ circumstances; and when those – above all the overwhelming Western/Israeli onslaught against the Shiite community – were taken into account, hostage-taking could be seen as a form of ‘self-defence’, which Hizbullah fully ‘understood’.

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