With the supporters of Hezbollah demonstrating in the streets of downtown Beirut, I am reminded of my own encounter with Hezbollah. It happened during a visit to Lebanon in 1999, at a place called Baalbek, site of the some of the grandest Roman temples of all antiquity. Far from what you might expect, the scene was idyllic. On a moonlit summer's eve, my wife and I joined the cream of Beirut society for a performance by a visiting troupe of Spanish dancers. On a broad stage set beneath the temple ruins, dancers surged to the rhythm of Flamenco guitar. The air was crisp, the sky timeless, the crowd impeccably dressed. During breaks in the performance, people mingled over cups of Arabic coffee scented with cardamom, conversing in Arabic, French, and English. As the sun disappeared behind the mountains to the west, the confluence of people, culture, fashion, and history was nothing short of sublime.
Above the dancers, however, armed soldiers patrolled the temple walls. This is because Baalbek is also home base for Hezbollah, or Party of God, the militant Shiite Muslim party long notorious for hostage-taking, embassy-bombing, and radical anti-western politics. In recent years they have toned down their act, and now hold 13 seats in the Lebanese Parliament. But they still maintain a formidable militia, which explains the lines of Syrian tanks we drove past on our way in.
So what the heck was I doing there? Visiting my in-laws.
My wife was born in Lebanon (to expatriate parents), and had been evacuated along with her mother and sister when the war broke out in 1975. Her father had remained in the Middle East, had eventually separated and remarried, and had returned to Lebanon in 1998. My wife was only 7 when she left, and though she'd visted a few times, this was her first trip back to Lebanon in many years. For her, it was something of a homecoming, and a trip to the Baalbek Festival brought back memories of the glory days before the war, when Beirut truly deserved the moniker Paris of the Middle East. As for me, I was just along for the ride.
So there we sat at the Baalbek Festival, guarded by Lebanese government troops in the stronghold of Hezbollah, and surrounded all around by Syrian forces—a perfect microcosm of the balance of Middle-Eastern power. The Syrians, for their part, have supported Hezbollah as a weapon against Israel, and as a strategic ally in domestic Lebanese politics.
Or so it was explained to me, though never in so many words. After two decades of civil war, the Lebanese would rather talk about something else, and straight answers are hard to come by. At the time, I just hoped the current stalemate would last through the intermission.
(It was a delicate balance. In the week before our visit, the Israelis had bombed Lebanese power stations in retaliation for Hezbollah's attacks, causing great hardship among those Lebanese too poor to afford their own backup generators, and putting pressure on Syria to keep Hezbollah in check.)
The stalemate did hold that night, and for several years after, until last month when former prime minister Rafik Hariri was blown up along with 8 members of his entourage. Most people blame the Syrians, who everybody now agrees should leave the country they have occupied since 1976.
Everybody, that is, except for the hundreds of thousands of Hezbollah supporters who rallied in downtown Beirut yesterday. Hezbollah's goal is to build a theocracy in Lebanon modeled on Iran, and its continuing influence serves as a reminder that the country is still split along religious and ethnic lines. The Lebanese weren't getting along very well before the Syrians rolled in almost 30 years ago, and it's unclear what will happen when they finally leave.
So did I ever actually meet any members of Hezbollah on my visit to Baalbek? Not to my knowledge, though I wouldn't know unless they wanted me to. In Lebanon, as P.J. O'Rourke once wrote, it's hard to know what's happening, even to yourself.
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