On the highway that connects Saida, a major city in the south, to Tyr, further down along the Mediterranean coast, posters of countless martyrs and huge banners accentuating the need for resistance signal that leaving Beirut is like entering another country. “You are the most honorable people,” one banner tells the people of the south. The posters welcoming Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on the occasion of his visit to Lebanon last month, have not yet been removed.

The Iranian president’s visit came as Hezbollah launched an aggressive campaign against the United Nations’ Special Tribunal for Lebanon, set up to prosecute people responsible for the death of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. Ahmadinejad termed it an Israeli tool to destroy the resistance. With this rhetoric, Hezbollah managed to mobilize its Shia base around their collective identity as a sect threatened by everyone else in Lebanon.

While most of Lebanon seemed to be on hold during Ahmadinejad’s visit, the streets leading to the south filled with supporters holding Hezbollah and Iranian flags. Lebanon seemed like two entities: those who preferred to stay indoors, nervously watching the events unfold on TV, and those who gladly went out to greet Hezbollah’s guardian.

That division, however, was not as clear-cut here as it was portrayed in the Western media. Those who were cheerfully greeting Ahmadinejad were Hezbollah supporters, but they did not represent the whole Shia community. Many in the south were as anxious as other Lebanese in Beirut and the north. My aunt, for example, had her suitcase ready in case she had to flee the south in a hurry, and my grandmother, a huge Hezbollah supporter, had mixed feelings of excitement and fear. Ahmadinejad’s visit was a high moment in her monotonous daily life, but the timing of the visit carried major concerns for her, as it did for other Lebanese.

After the liberation of the south from Israeli occupation in 2000, Lebanese Shia regained both their land and a sense of political power. But due in part to Hezbollah’s aggressive rhetoric and practices toward other communities in Lebanon, this power backfired on the Shia. The 2006 war, the 18-month sit-in against the government that followed, and the strikes and protests of May 7, 2008 led to a huge rift between the Shia and Lebanon’s large and influential Sunni community.

Now the special tribunal, which most observers agree will soon accuse as-yet-unnamed Hezbollah members for the killing of Lebanon’s former prime minister, is widening that rift.

Nobody knows when the tribunal’s indictments will be announced, or who they will target, but some media reports cite sources that say that several Hezbollah members will be accused. In Lebanon, this was enough to put Hezbollah and its supporters on high alert.

In The Hague, meanwhile, tribunal staff try to keep out of the political bickering and threatening rhetoric of Hezbollah and its media by stressing confidentiality, reliance on evidence, and the need for justice to achieve long-term peace and security. But in Lebanon, Hezbollah argues for security over justice, and ignorance of the tribunal’s proceedings and structure allows divisive politicized rhetoric to consume any kind of logical thinking.

The deepening isolation of the Shia community within Lebanon makes the likelihood of a violent response to the tribunal’s findings all the more threatening. Samer, a 40-year-old man who owns a small restaurant in Tyr, said that he recognizes Hezbollah’s protecting role. (Samer and other local Shia quoted in this article preferred not to provide last names, for fear of reprisal for expressing opinions on Hezbollah.) “But we all know that Israel will strike again, and when they do, it is not going to be the same as in 2006,” he said. “The problem is that this time, we cannot escape to other areas in Lebanon. The Sunnis will not receive us like they did in 2006, and no one knows if the rest of Lebanon will be safe.”

Samer worries that the Shia will be treated like the Palestinians were treated after the 1982 Israeli invasion that led to the end of the Palestinian Liberation Organization in Lebanon. “Everybody will eat us alive,” Samer said. “It has already started. We cannot find jobs outside the Shia-owned institutions. We cannot buy property outside Shia areas.”

Amira, a 35-year-old woman from Nabatieh, a village in the south, agreed. Her husband used to work at a company owned by a Sunni businessman in Beirut. After May 2008, he was fired and had to settle for a low-paying job in the south. “I have never felt so insecure,” Amira told me. “Israel is waiting around the corner, the international tribunal will indict Hezbollah, and we will be more fragile and more isolated than ever. Our children are leaving the country to look for life elsewhere. There is nothing left here.”

Amira lived all her life in the south of Lebanon. She witnessed the 1982 Israeli invasion as an 8-year-old child, and during the 2006 war she lost friends and family members who died only because they lived in the south. Israeli military planes still fly over her village every day, reminding her that the war is not really over.

Hezbollah is not perfect, she said. “But at least it is the only force that is resisting the Israelis. Without Hezbollah, the Israelis would have taken over Lebanon a long time ago.” Amira said she has no choice but to stay and expect the worst. She has little hope of emigrating or leaving to safer areas of Lebanon. “I cannot live in peace,” she said. “Anything can happen any day, and I feel stuck here. I am suffocating.”

Amira is like many Shia in Lebanon, who still support and vote for Hezbollah but on the other hand feel that they cannot take the tension anymore. “It is true that the Shia are today more critical of Hezbollah’s practices and politics, but we really don’t have anyone else,” she said. “There is no guarantee that other political leaders will take care of us. It is a sectarian system, and each leader cares about his own sect. That’s why we cannot but stick to Hezbollah.”

According to Mona Fayyad, a writer and professor of social psychology at the Lebanese University, the Shia are afraid but helpless. “It is too late for them now to leave Hezbollah,” she said. “There is no one else ready to receive them, and Sunni street sectarian rhetoric is not helping.”

The Shia are afraid of losing power because everyone will turn against them, but they know that any street violence by Hezbollah will make the situation worse for them as Lebanese. “The Sunni-Shia conflict has already started in the street, and there is no way to stop it if no real effort is made to resolve the political problem,” Fayyad said. “On the other hand, the Israeli government is becoming more and more uncompromising, and this gives the Shia no choice but to stick to Hezbollah, leading to more isolation of the community. And this is exactly what Hezbollah wants.”

But the isolation is intensifying, and the stereotypes are becoming more rooted. A few weeks ago, a local TV channel aired a report alleging that an Islamic educational organization headed by Agriculture Minister Hussein al-Hajj Hassan—who is one of Hezbollah’s ministers—is buying land tracts in the northern Beirut suburb of Jdeideh. This started a dangerous Christian-Shia quarrel over who controls which part of Lebanon, which in turn revealed deep-rooted sectarian resentments.

Christian politicians say transactions like the one in Jdeideh are taking place all over Lebanon. In some neighborhoods of Beirut, such as Hadath, Christians have agreed not to sell property to Shia buyers in order to “preserve their community.” But the agreement also applies to Shia members who don’t support Hezbollah.

Meanwhile, some Lebanese complain that certain neighborhoods in Beirut, considered Hezbollah strongholds, are controlled by party-led militias. “After May 7, 2008, the edges of Beirut’s neighborhoods became more apparent,” said Kamal, a liberal independent Shia who lives in Beirut. “You don’t see arms in Beirut’s Shia neighborhoods, but you know they’re there, so if you get bullied by a guy in the street over a parking space, it is advisable to avoid the confrontation. As for resorting to the rule of law, forget it. Security forces do not interfere with these people.”

Both the Lebanese army and the Internal Security Forces prefer to sit back and watch each time street clashes erupt in a Sunni-Shia neighborhood. Instead, and in an attempt to reassure other citizens, they deploy in Christian areas such as Achrafieh, in eastern Beirut, or other upper-class neighborhoods where people never clash. This is understood to be a way of protecting the institutional integrity of the army, which suffered severe division during the civil war.

The army, like any other state institution, cannot impose its authority on Hezbollah, which is the main representative of the Shia community. This means that the Shia, living outside the authority of the state, can overstep the rule of law. It also means that the Shia are becoming more and more isolated in a self-made sectarian ghetto.

Iran took very good care of the Shia in Lebanon when no one else did. Now it is the time for repayment. When Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to Lebanon, many Shia were afraid of an Israeli reaction, but only the cheerful welcoming crowd was heard and reported in the media.

“Eventually, we will have to pay the price, because Hezbollah will not remain that powerful forever,” said Maha, a 40-year-old woman from Dahiyeh, Beirut’s southern suburb. “We sometimes overlook the problematic connection of Hezbollah to Iran. The money that poured from Iran after the 2006 war was never for free.”

Hanin Ghaddar is a Lebanese journalist based in Beirut.

I was at the playground with my two daughters this week, near our home outside Tel Aviv, when I heard another mother make a comment that would not have been out of place in a war zone.

“I think we left behind some captives in the field!” she said casually in Hebrew. A moment later she held up the “captive”: A doll with yellow pigtails that had been briefly forgotten in the plastic tunnel that leads to the slide.

But while captives, or shvuyim, are an everyday point of reference for Israelis, that’s not the word they typically use to describe Gilad Shalit, probably Israel’s best-known soldier in captivity. Shalit, who was seized on June 25, 2006, by Hamas-allied militants who infiltrated southern Israel by crawling under a tunnel from the Gaza Strip, has been making headlines in Israel again recently, because Hamas and Israel have announced the resumption of negotiations for his release.

The international media often refer to Shalit as having been taken captive. But the Israeli media, along with the many Israelis campaigning for his release, tend to describe him as hahayal hehatuf, the kidnapped or abducted soldier. The word for abductee was further cemented into the cultural consciousness by a TV show called Hatufim, about two reservists’ reintegration into Israeli society after spending 17 years in captivity, which won best drama in Israel’s equivalent of the 2010 Golden Globes.

The term hahayal hehatuf is nearly inescapable in Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refers to the “hatifa” of Shalit, and the Shalit family objects to the use of any other word to describe him. Gilad Shalit’s father has spoken out against the Goldstone Report’s finding that he meets the requirements for prisoner-of-war status, insisting, “Gilad is not a prisoner of war. Gilad is an abducted person and a hostage.” A ben aruba.

Shaul Shay, author of the 2007 article Islamic Terror Abductions in the Middle East, notes that Israeli soldiers taken captive by the army of a sovereign state—like the hundreds of POWs held, and then released, by Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon in Israel’s first three decades—were referred to as shvuyim; the confusion began during the first Lebanon war, between 1982 and 1985, when non-state terror groups like Hezbollah started entering the picture.

Some see the widespread use of the word for abductee, as opposed to captive, as a subtle way of framing Israel as the good guy, or of generating more sympathy for soldiers like Shalit. “Someone who’s abducted is viewed as passive,” writes Eyal Zandberg, a lecturer in the School of Communication at the Netanya Academic College. The terminology, he adds, reflects the view that “the opposing side is the initiator, the one that causes harm, the abductor, while ‘we’ are always defending ourselves.” This view is perhaps bolstered substantively by the fact that, unlike capturing prisoners of war, taking hostages is a violation of international law.

The extensive public support for Shalit’s release, possibly reinforced by the sympathetic connotations implicit in the term hahayal hehatuf, might have been expected to pressure the Israeli government to reach a deal. But prominent peace activist Uri Avnery argues that the government’s own use of the word hatuf has helped create an excuse for its failure to secure Shalit’s release. “Prisoners of war are not left in captivity,” he writes. But abduction, he argues, is “altogether different,” because people are expected to ask whether it’s worth paying the ransom—thus setting the stage for lengthy, and possibly futile, negotiations.

Shoshana Kordova is an editor and translator at the English edition of Haaretz. She grew up in New Jersey and has lived in Israel since 2001.

Earlier: ‘The Peace Process’
No Confidence
‘After the Holidays’

Once regarded as a U.S. aircraft carrier in the Eastern Mediterranean, Israel is now perceived, correctly or not, as a strategic liability. Before the flotilla incident last month—an event that, yet again, earned Israel the opprobrium of the international community—there was the Gaza war in the winter of 2008 to 2009, an inconclusive battle that ended with Hamas still in control and with the Israelis ultimately having to face the Goldstone Report. In July 2006 there was the Second Lebanon War, popularly understood as a Hezbollah victory—or as its Secretary General, Hassan Nasrallah, describes it, a divine victory. But perhaps Israel’s largest strategic blunder was its 2000 withdrawal from Lebanon. Even while Defense Minister Ehud Barak continues to defend the decision he made as prime minister, the facts are clear: Israel abandoned its ally in the South Lebanese Army, made its citizens vulnerable to Hezbollah rockets, and effectively rewarded terrorism as a negotiating tool. Now Hezbollah has 40,000 missiles and rockets.

It is peculiar that most U.S. policymakers and bureaucrats do not believe that the United States has an interest in pushing back against an Iranian asset in the Eastern Mediterranean and going after a terrorist group that operates inside U.S. borders. But the fact is that if Israel has become a strategic liability, U.S. policymakers—from the Clinton Administration through the Bush and Obama Administrations—have helped make it one, forcing Jerusalem to accommodate terrorists and the states that support them, thereby putting our own interests and citizens under fire. Now, instead of asking how we can ensure that our ally wins its next war with the Shia militia, the question in Washington’s halls of power, its think tanks, and dining rooms is: How do we deter Israel from going to war against Hezbollah?

It seems they can’t. Perhaps the Syrians will cross another red line by sending advanced weapons across the border with Lebanon, maybe war will be in response to an Israeli attack on Hezbollah’s sponsor in Tehran, or maybe the casus belli will be another mishap in the wake of another freedom flotilla or a Hezbollah assassination of an Israel official. One likely excuse for Hezbollah’s next war against Israel is the discovery of sizable natural gas deposits off of Israel’s coast. Alongside the Tamar and Dalit fields, the recently discovered Leviathan field will make Israel a net exporter of energy. Since the fields are adjacent to Lebanon’s territorial waters, the Lebanese are already clamoring that the Israelis have stolen their resources.

“If Lebanon needed to pile up hundreds, thousands of rockets to protect our sovereignty, dignity, and hydraulic resources, then the need to protect our hydrocarbon assets motivates us to enhance the Resistance’s capacities,” says Sayyed Hashem Safieddine, head of Hezbollah’s executive council and a cousin to Secretary General Nasrallah. The idea that the United States should get Israel to relinquish its claims on the Shebaa Farms, an insignificant piece of land in the Golan Heights that the Shia militia uses as a cause to justify maintaining tens of thousands of rockets and other offensive weapons, is now off the table for the good. The natural gas fields are Shebaa on steroids, and no one can afford to fool themselves that Hezbollah will ever willingly disarm.

Walid Jumblatt, the leader of Lebanon’s Druze clan, understands both the logic of Hezbollah’s eternal resistance and the reluctance of Washington and Europe to confront it, which is why the former hero of Lebanon’s pro-democracy movement has jumped sides. Jumblatt is certain that there will be a renewal of hostilities. He assumes that as Israel pushes into Lebanon and drives the resistance northward, his fiefdom in the Shouf Mountains will be flooded with Hezbollah fighters. And so the man whose Druze community fought the Party of God to a standstill in May 2008 while the rest of the world looked on and did nothing now says: “The arms of the Resistance are crucial for defending Lebanon’s offshore petroleum resources.”

Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri is also convinced that war with Israel is inevitable. His patrons in Saudi Arabia convinced him to make his peace with Damascus, because Riyadh calculates that an Israeli attack on Iran and Hezbollah will reshuffle the deck at which time Hariri can put his house in order. The Israelis say that they will hold the Lebanese government responsible for Hezbollah’s actions and make the whole country pay, but they might as well blame Harry Potter’s magic wand, for the source of the problem is in Damascus and Tehran. Still, it is foolish for Hariri to side openly with the resistance, as he has, even as he imagines his governing partners in Hezbollah do not recognize that he is going from one Western capital to another asking the Europeans and Americans to tell the Israelis to target Hezbollah and leave the rest of Lebanon alone.

Hariri has staked the future of his country on the clarifying violence of war, a conflict waged on his behalf by an enemy state against a domestic enemy that has taken over Lebanon. But what if there is no war? After all, Hezbollah doesn’t want war right now; it can’t afford another conflict like 2006. To be sure, Nasrallah’s management of what he calls the divine victory counts as one of the most brilliant campaigns in the history of information warfare. A man bunkered for the rest of his life has convinced the world that he won while his wardens lost.

But of course, Lebanon’s Shia are like all other men—they bleed and die and know when they have been decimated. For instance, during Israel’s war with Gaza in the winter of 2008 to 2009, when a small quiver of rockets was fired against Israel from southern Lebanon, Shia left their homes in droves fearing Israeli retaliation. The Lebanese government was incapable of processing all the passport requests from southerners who wanted to leave the country and remove the targets from their heads for good. In spite of the quasi-hysterical pitch of Hezbollah’s rhetoric over the last few months, they will be careful about starting a war that may turn the Shia community of the south into permanent refugees.

As for Hezbollah’s sponsor in Tehran, the question is how the Islamic Republic conceives of its nuclear program. If a bomb is the regime’s grand prize and the historical patrimony of the Persian nation, then Tehran has no choice but to unleash Hezbollah in retaliation should the Israelis, or the United States, strike. However, if the Iranians conceive of the bomb as just one asset among others in the regime’s arsenal, then it may pause before spending Hezbollah, another expensive investment, at a moment when Israel’s response is likely to be particularly fierce.

Regardless of how Israel’s enemies game it out, sooner rather than later, Jerusalem is going to have to make war on Hezbollah, because the United States is withdrawing from the region, Israel is getting weaker, and its enemies are getting stronger. The only way to ratify or challenge a new balance of forces in the region is through war. Someone will miscalculate or decide that war serves their interests or both.

In the next round, says Nasrallah, Israeli ships will be targeted. In the next round, says Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, the war will be widened and Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and his “family will lose power.” As the rhetoric becomes more expansive, strategic aims will shift. For instance, if Israeli ground forces cannot destroy the long-range missiles that Hezbollah has hidden under schools and hospitals in order to deter pre-emptive Israeli air strikes for fear of civilian casualties and Hezbollah fires on Israeli cities, then the rules will change.

Maybe Saad Hariri is right—that the cancer of Hezbollah can be excised and Lebanon will survive the operation. Or perhaps Lebanon at this point is no longer a country but merely a human shield, captive to Hezbollah and its own inability to imagine the limits of its mortality. In this regard, the Lebanese responses to the Gaza incident last month have been especially poignant. The organizer of the women’s “Freedom Flotilla,” scheduled to leave from the northern Lebanese port of Tripoli this week, is the wife of one of the Lebanese generals allegedly responsible for the murder of Saad’s father, Rafik Hariri, believed to have been killed on the orders of Bashar al-Assad. In other words, the inhabitants of an entity whose public officials murder each other for the benefit of foreign powers have censured a state that protects its citizens by controlling its borders.

Natural gas deposits have also been found in Lebanese territorial waters, which while not as large as Israel’s would go a long way to building up the finances of one of the world’s most indebted states. And yet for all the talent that the Lebanese have for doing business even under the worst of circumstances, those fields will never be developed. The equipment alone is too costly, the investment too dear to hazard on a state run by a terror organization working at the behest of two foreign powers.

In the end, this is why Israel will have to go to war once again. The issue is not merely in rolling back Iranian influence and disabling a terrorist organization whose tentacles reach U.S. shores. Rather, it is a conflict pitting two worldviews against each other, a conflict that has nothing to do with any putative war between the West and Islam, but with two differing forms of social and political organization. On one hand, there is a state with its attendant institutions that embody several thousand years’ worth of the principles and ideals that led to political modernity. On the other hand, there is the primordial chaos of tribal competition throughout a region where violence and obscurantism rule, where “national interest” is a euphemism for the bloody work that security services employ against their countrymen to keep tyrants in power. The United States has an interest in that war coming out right.

Two days before, on the afternoon of July 12, Nasrallah had only seen fit to hold a brief press conference where he explained that Israel’s sole hope for getting back the two soldiers who had been captured in a cross-border operation that morning was by indirectly negotiating, as it had on several prior occasions, for the release of Lebanese prisoners held in Israeli jails.

In a direct nod to the growing domestic political discontent in Lebanon over the matter—as well as the widely held Western perception of Hezbollah as hostage-taking Islamic radicals bent on wanton destruction—Nasrallah also added the caveat that if there was to be further violence, it should be conducted according to the terms of the U.S.-negotiated “April Understanding” of 1996—the product of an earlier devastating war between Israel and Hezbollah that sought to prevent both sides from targeting civilians and from firing from “civilian, populated areas.”

By the evening of July 14, however, more was clearly needed to rally Hezbollah’s fighters, the Lebanese in general, and the wider Arab and Islamic communities that were, together, Nasrallah’s main target audiences.

The course of the war, the condition of Lebanon, and indeed the future of Hezbollah as a coherent movement whose constituents would have to live on in any postwar Lebanon all seemed to be in grave doubt.

Already, Israel had begun a massive bombing campaign targeting some of the country’s civilian infrastructure, suspected Hezbollah targets (including the homes and offices of various officials), and border positions where Hezbollah was firing volleys of Katyusha rockets toward Israeli military and civilian targets alike.

After delivering separate messages to his troops (with ample references to Shiite heroes), his Lebanese compatriots (in the language of Arab nationalism), and then to the Israelis (“You wanted an open war; we are going to open war and we are ready for it”), Nasrallah’s disembodied voice—he was speaking live, but off camera—turned to the subject of “Arab rulers.”

“I just want to say it briefly: We are adventurous,” he said in reference to an anonymous Saudi official who had earlier criticized Hezbollah’s capturing operation as an “adventure.”

“We, in Hezbollah, are adventurous,” he continued. “That is very true, we have been so since 1982. In 1982, you and the world described us as insane, but we proved that we were even-minded people. As for the insane, this is another issue. I do not want to engage in an argument with anyone.” He then addressed the Arab rulers directly: “You should count on your reason. We will count on our adventure.”

At that point, the camera jerked from a static picture of Nasrallah’s face, out from Beirut and toward a darkened Mediterranean Sea. At least one missile flare was clearly discernible, speeding off toward a Sa’ar class Israeli corvette.

“The surprises I promised you will begin from now,” Nasrallah intoned.

“Now, at sea, the Israeli warship off the coast of Beirut, which attacked our infrastructure, people’s homes and civilians—look at it burning. This is only the beginning. There will be a long way until the end. Peace be upon you.”

It was, simply, a masterstroke of war, politics, and theater. Hezbollah’s power together with the impotence of Arab regimes—harkening back to the false promises of Egypt’s President Jamal Abdul Nasser and the divided Arab ranks of 1948—had been illuminated live on satellite TV for all to see.

Thirty-one days later, when a U.N.-brokered ceasefire went into effect, the “divine victory” that Nasrallah would soon declare did in fact appear to be both remarkable and compelling to many in the Middle East and beyond—even to the Israelis who shortly were compelled themselves to reshuffle their leadership and admit defeat, more or less, via the Winograd Commission.

Of course, the sense of triumph was probably never as bright (for Hezbollah’s supporters, especially) as it had been the night of July 14—before most of the estimated 1,200 Lebanese and 44 Israeli civilians were dead and before Nasrallah was forced to retreat to the confines of a bunker.

But no matter how one views the outcome of the war, the crucial fact was that 13 years after the initial promise of the Oslo Accords had faded, an unfortunate principle—an “artful balance” as one Lebanese author termed it—that Hezbollah had long relied on was forced decisively back to the center of Nasrallah’s discourse and the discourse of the region as a whole: Reason and adventure, non-violence and violence are inextricably linked when it comes to achieving justice and ending humiliation.

In fact, as Nasrallah argues further, the operation between these two sides might just be the only way left to grudgingly force a negotiated resolution of the conflict.

Surely, neither the secretary-general nor Hezbollah want to see a negotiated resolution when it comes to the Arab-Israeli conflict. On this point, there is no dissimulation, as many critics of Islamists often charge.

The Party of God, Hezbollah, “craves” total justice, total victory. One democratic state of Palestine.

“In the next war we will triumph,” Nasrallah now promises, “and change the features of the region” decisively toward these ends.

But as he has also consistently stressed in his speeches and interviews over the years—although usually with greater clarity and emphasis than at the height of battle—the path of violent resistance cannot remain outside of, and in direct contradiction to, reason or compromise.

If it were to do so, it would only be a matter of time before a popular movement collapsed—as al-Qaeda did in Iraq—under the weight of total violence, total rejection, and an all-consuming hatred.

Indeed, this is the lesson Nasrallah took away from the fall of Saddam Hussein and the subsequent rise and fall of the Sunni “Takfiri” movements, which largely targeted Shiite “unbelievers.”

“We should all learn a lesson,” he told an audience of party supporters and cadres shortly after Baghdad was captured, “and so should the regimes in power in the Arab and Islamic countries.” The lesson to be learned from the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq “is that the army and security services can protect any oppressive regime, but the army and security services of any oppressive regime will not be able to protect it if confronted by a stronger military force. What can really protect a regime,” he stressed, “are its own people and its own citizens, if they are well treated by it; if it oppresses them, none of its rallying speeches will do it any good.”

For Nasrallah, then, any popular resistance movement must act in both the short-term, material interests of the people (which is a straightforward instrumental rationality) as well as in their longer-term, spiritual interests, their divine, absolutist interests—two calculations, it should be noted, that can sometimes radically collide, especially when Nasrallah’s messianic clock begins counting down.

You rely on your version of reason, your instrumental rationality, your realpolitik, and we will rely on the dialectic between even-mindedness and (sometimes unbearable, even oppressive) adventure.

Accordingly, although the point is often overlooked or summarily dismissed by most Western analysts (as well as by some in the Arab and Islamic spheres), Nasrallah has regularly gone to great lengths in challenging Arab states to yoke his own particular logic of resistance (even-mindedness/adventure) in the service of the negotiated settlement the West and others seem to count on—even as he works tirelessly to increase his party’s military power and carefully calibrates its next military and non-military moves.

The hard question that emerges from this is how to deal forthrightly with the new reality—and this complex, dialectical approach—that Nasrallah and, to a much lesser degree, the Resistance Axis as a whole (Syria, Iran, and Hamas together with Hezbollah) have forcefully re-imposed on the peace process in the spirit, they argue, of the October 1973 War, the Intifada(s), and Hezbollah’s own success in ejecting Israel from Lebanon in May 2000.

Can the demands of the Resistance Axis really be refused, in part or full, at the negotiating table much longer?

If yes, then can it really be reasonably attacked and removed—led, as it is, on its front line by Hezbollah, backed in its strategic depth by chemical-tipped Syrian SCUDS, and supported by the evident/hidden capabilities and determination of Iran?

If it cannot, then how might the “false promise of resistance,” as the Lebanese pundit Michael Young derisively calls it, be turned into a byword for compromise instead of just mutually assured disaster? Can one actually use the Resistance Axis’s partial, but still vital, reliance on reason and compromise to radically undermine that which is indeed violent and oppressive about it?

“A peace agreement will be a victory for the rationale of resistance”

One particularly fruitful avenue to begin answering these questions, especially regarding Hezbollah, was provided 10 years ago when it seemed as though Syria and Israel would actually sign a peace agreement.

In the weeks before the final negotiating session in Geneva, even as his fighters were stepping up their attacks on the Israelis and their proxies with operations in South Lebanon, Nasrallah placidly told Egypt’s official daily, Al-Ahram, that, “as for Israel, we will join with other elements opposed to normalization. We are aware of the international efforts to obtain a settlement in the region. We are convinced that the signing of a peace agreement will be a victory for the resistance and the rationale of resistance.”

The impending “victory” was, certainly, not what Nasrallah had hoped for. But with 30,000 Syrian troops and intelligence agents in Lebanon, and a series of stern public warnings by Damascus that any Syrian-Israeli peace would obligate Lebanon and Hezbollah, Nasrallah had little choice but to comply. Syria held a preponderance of power, and Nasrallah had built up a movement and a constituency that operated on the interchange between faith and logic—long-term aspiration and immediate interest—not mere suicide (even if such tactics were occasionally, and carefully, brought to bear in the battle against various enemies).

Asked what he would do when the Star of David flag was raised, in peace, over an Israeli embassy in Beirut, Nasrallah said he would not fight with violence but that his movement and supporters would not trade with the Israelis, would not interact with them, and would not welcome them in their areas as tourists or investors.

But only a few weeks after Nasrallah’s interview, the so-called “Syrian Track” collapsed.

As one of Israel’s top officials on Lebanon and Syria, General Uri Sagi, subsequently explained—and essentially reiterated in an April 2010 interview with Israel’s Maariv newspaper—President Bill Clinton “lied” to a dying Syrian President Hafez Assad about having a full Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights in his pocket (including up to the northeastern shoreline of Lake Tiberius), and Israeli Premier Ehud Barak got “cold feet” about giving back the last hundred meters or so of territory partially ringing Israel’s vital freshwater source.

Events had turned out just as Nasrallah had predicted weeks before, despite his stated acquiescence to what had seemed at the time like a probable deal between Israel and Syria:

When the Arabs went to Madrid [in 1991], it was said that the matter would be over in three months, that everything was settled beforehand and the only thing left was to prepare public opinion to accept what was about to be signed. We are now in the year 2000. So you see, things aren’t always as simple as they are made out to be. It is true that the Americans want a settlement. We don’t underestimate the extent of America’s influence on events. But America is not God. It can’t just will things for them to happen. American policy has failed many times and in different parts of the world. That is why we don’t believe that matters are going the way the Americans want them to. The Israelis are not prepared to accept a settlement in which they have to make concessions. They want a settlement on their terms, and not all Arabs—especially Syria—are prepared to accept that.

Two months later, in late May 2000, the Israelis abruptly withdrew from South Lebanon, without conditions or an agreement and under fire from Hezbollah.

According to top U.S. negotiator (and now National Security Council official) Dennis Ross, the effect of the withdrawal in general was that, “Suddenly there was a new model for dealing with Israel: the Hezbollah model. Don’t make concessions. Don’t negotiate. Use violence. And the Israelis will grow weary.”

The comment is particularly strange, though, coming from Ross since he had helped broker all three of the “Understandings” with Hezbollah through the 1990s, especially the 1996 April Understanding, which did entail concessions by both sides, did involve negotiations, and which ended up mitigating violence during Israel’s occupation of South Lebanon.

Moreover, Ross had been vigorously involved in the lengthy negotiations with the Syrians, who exerted effective control over Hezbollah, to a point where a deal was only a few hundred meters away.

Ross had Nasrallah publicly positioned, in Arabic and in front of his supporters and supposed masters in Tehran, to turn a cold shoulder to an Israeli ambassador in Beirut.

No matter, the lesson was lost on Ross, just as it was on many of the other officials involved in the effort. Hezbollah was not merely interested in relentlessly spoiling a perfectly neutral and just peace process through the wanton use of violence. The party was, instead, carefully and continually modifying the underlying balance of power in a stacked process (rightly or wrongly, depending on one’s view) to strengthen negotiating cards that it did not believe in, but that it recognized it had to deal with to in order to stay inside the bounds of reason and, ultimately, survivability.

It was a joint Israeli and U.S. failure, then, to meet the minimum Syrian demands in Geneva that had truly reinvigorated the “Hezbollah model” of negotiations through the occasional projection of violence, leading some observers in the United States and in Israel wondering years later if those few meters of shoreline had really been worth it. Just last month, in fact, Nasrallah hit on these sentiments, saying, “Now when the Israelis review what happened in 2000, they will weep in regret. They will say: Had we reached an agreement with Syria before 2000 and returned the Golan to it, we would have gotten rid of Lebanon, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Jihad, and everything called resistance, in addition to Iran also. Regrettably, we were stubborn and we failed to reach such a settlement.”

As long as the unfavorable balance of power between Israel and Syria and Israel and Lebanon persisted in the intervening years after the failure at Geneva, Nasrallah was able to deliver a compelling message linking his preferred message of resistance to the message of settlement: Whichever side you are on, use Israel’s declining Qualitative Military Edge (QME) over some of its adversaries and the example of Hezbollah’s asymmetrical power to the advantage of your desired end.

In the meantime, we will go on with the work of resistance.

The Unbinding

By the time the Second Lebanon War was finished, however, that military edge had eroded remarkably in the direction of Hezbollah (though Israel still holds a clear preponderance of power on this score).

The Israeli Defense Forces had performed miserably during 34 days of open war, even according to its own accounts. Hezbollah had stood its ground, inflicted casualties, and reached progressively deeper into the Israeli heartland in a sustained manner as few had ever been able to before.

And even though Nasrallah would later admit that he had miscalculated the ferocity of the Israeli response, he was deftly able to keep his movement in the realm of reason for a decisive majority of Lebanese, Arabs, and Muslims since the Israeli response to what was properly a border incident had been so seemingly wanton and unreasonable.

Bolstered by this, and with Syria having been kicked out of the country the year before—but maintaining its all-important position as the only friendly land route for supplies—Nasrallah’s motivation for linking Hezbollah’s resistance project to the settlement process began to fade.

Still, in a little-recognized section of his “Divine Victory” speech in September 2006, Nasrallah felt compelled to underline the point that he was “speaking to you about the settlement you want,” in reference to the “moderate Arab states,” including “the Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas.”

“How can you obtain an honorable settlement,” he said, “while you announce day and night that you will not fight? You do not want to fight for Lebanon, Gaza, the West Bank, or even Jerusalem. How then can you obtain a reasonable settlement, while you announce every day that you will not use the oil weapon? In fact, even if anyone comes to speak to you about the oil weapon, you deride him, saying: This is backwardness. You do not want to fight, boycott, use the oil weapon, or even allow the people to come out in the street, or the resistance in Palestine to be equipped.”

Nasrallah then hit on the key point he had made six years earlier when peace seemed at hand (sounding remarkably like Western hawks today who argue for a more threatening approach to Iran): “How can these states secure a just and honorable settlement between quotes? Does the Israeli recognize them in the first place? I tell you: The Israelis today view the Resistance and the resistance men in Lebanon with great respect. As for all those lowly ones, they are not worth anything. Even the Arab initiative calls for a stand. It calls for men and power. If you can’t use power, you can at least threaten with it. The talk that we are weak will not do.”

“Realistic political behavior,” Nasrallah added soon after, dictates that you must “first convince the Israelis of the need to have a just and comprehensive peace before asking the resistance movement to lay down its arms.”

Practically, as Hezbollah would explain some months later in its revised manifesto, this means that, “the resistance option constitutes a fundamental need and an objective factor in stiffening the Arab stand and weakening the enemy, separate from the nature of the strategies of the political wagers that have been made. On the basis of the above, the resistance has no objection to spreading the benefits of adopting it as an option whereby the benefits reach the various Arab positions.”

Departing from the prepared text, Nasrallah then looked directly at the camera and said, “Even those who have opted for a settlement have a need for this resistance. Indeed, we want them [the Arab states] to benefit from the resistance.”

Rocket teleology

Four months after releasing the party’s updated platform, Nasrallah gained an unlikely backer for his logic linking the military power of Hezbollah to a settlement: U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

In a late April 2010 speech to AIPAC, Clinton warned:

We must recognize that the ever-evolving technology of war is making it harder to guarantee Israel’s security. For six decades, Israelis have guarded their borders vigilantly. But advances in rocket technology mean that Israeli families are now at risk far from those borders. Despite efforts at containment, rockets with better guidance systems, longer range, and more destructive power are spreading across the region. These challenges cannot be ignored or wished away. Only by choosing a new path can Israel make the progress it deserves to ensure that their children are able to see a future of peace, and only by having a partner willing to participate with them will the Palestinians be able to see the same future.

Perhaps not surprisingly, shortly after her remarks were delivered, news reports citing unnamed U.S. officials surfaced charging that Hezbollah had acquired the infamous SCUD missile via Syria. Whether true or not, the SCUD magnified the underlying point implied by Clinton and wholly endorsed by Nasrallah: Hezbollah is growing militarily stronger by the day, and Israel is inexorably losing its qualitative military advantage over its enemies.

The next war, if it comes, will therefore be very different from the last, all the more so since Hezbollah has learned from the last conflict; it has had its own internal Winograd Commission, devising new technological and human “surprises” in the process and ensuring that old mistakes are not made anew.

Plainly put by the party: Hezbollah will not relocate to Tunis like Yasser Arafat and his PLO did following the Israeli strangulation of Beirut in 1982. They will fight to win a total victory they believe is now coming “in the next few years,” as Nasrallah recently promised.

Seen in this vein, then, the SCUD report, originally circulated by unnamed U.S. officials, was perhaps as much a warning to Syria and Hezbollah as it was to Israel.

It is time, Clinton and Nasrallah are both saying—though from diametrically opposed ends—for Israel to change the “hardware” and “software” of its negotiating positions.

For if Israel does not—if the change is not decisive enough vis-à-vis the underlying grievances to put the Resistance Axis, especially Hezbollah, definitively outside the vital realm of reason (and therefore on a path to isolation and implosion should it continue to violently resist)—the war that the Party of God has said it “does not want” but that it nevertheless “craves” will draw ever closer until, by miscalculation or one small decision by one party, great or small, war is upon us.

In his speech late last month to mark the 10-year anniversary of the liberation of South Lebanon, Nasrallah went so far as to quote Clinton’s AIPAC speech at length, exhorting, “This is Mrs. Clinton, and this is the U.S. State Department, and this is the evaluation of the U.S. stand. This is not the evaluation of President Ahmadinejad or anyone in Palestine or in Lebanon.”

“Now,” he continued, “the Americans are telling the Jews, openly and frankly: If you do not help us; if you do help Obama to reach a settlement, then there will be no purely Jewish state. This state is threatened. Everything in it will be threatened. Now you might find someone to reach a settlement with you but you will not find anyone in the future. This means that you are heading toward the abyss, to ruination.”

Of course, the winner of this contest is anything but certain—despite those who still believe in the unchallenged military hegemony of Israel and the United States and those, on the opposite side, like Nasrallah, who believe the State of Israel is facing immediate ruination.

Two things, however, are certain: First, that in the absence of a credible settlement process, Nasrallah’s dialectic, which should be radically unstable, is only growing in strength—gaining the party allies who no longer see any other option and who no longer view Hezbollah as the only “insane” party in the Middle East.

And second: that the losers in this whole awful gamble will surely be counted on both sides—great and small, far and near.

Nicholas Noe is the editor of Voice of Hezbollah: The Statements of Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah and the 2008 Century Foundation white paper, “Re-Imaging the Lebanon Track: Towards a New US Policy.”

“Everything can burst here tomorrow morning, and you just never know,” said Katriel Schory, executive director of the Israel Film Fund, a government-backed nonprofit that provided financing to both Folman and Maoz. “You cannot say the Second Lebanon War triggered these projects—it was a sheer coincidence.” And, he insisted, there was no master plan, just a desire to let a generation of filmmakers who had all served in the first, controversial Lebanon war—what Maoz calls the “Lebanon generation”—explore the lasting effects of combat on Israel’s young.

“What isn’t a coincidence is that we are all obsessed with this war,” said Amy Kronish, the former curator of Jewish and Israeli film at the Jerusalem Cinematheque. “But the film fund’s policy is to fund every feature film, if possible, that’s worth funding—they won’t say to a director, we had a film about this already, we won’t fund you.”

Theoretically, all three films could have come out at the same time. Cedar, a former paratrooper, and won financing in early 2006 from the Rabinovich Foundation for the Arts, another government-sponsored film fund, and wrapped in June of that year, weeks before the start of the 34-day second invasion. The film, which Cedar began writing while sitting in a military jail after refusing to do reserve duty, captures the final days of the occupation of an ancient fortress in southern Lebanon, just before IDF troops pulled out in 2000. Folman, a writer for the Israeli version of In Treatment, began his script for Bashir around the time of the pullout, after he requested early release from his reserve duty as a writer for IDF safety-instruction movies on the grounds that he needed therapy for PTSD stemming from his experience at the front in 1982. In the spring of 2006, he presented Schory with a 10-minute pilot for an animated film exploring his struggle to remember what exactly he did during the massacre at Sabra and Shatila, and released his film last year, just ahead of the Gaza invasion, triggering a heated national debate about the nature of responsibility and memory.

Maoz, a production designer and cinematographer who made his living for years shooting music videos and commercials, wrote his screenplay in a four-week burst in 2006. “I said to myself, you are over 40 and you need to do something with yourself—you are not a young director, and it’s now or never,” Maoz said in an interview last week. He began shooting in 2007, but completion of the film was delayed after the death of one of his producers. Chronologically, his movie belongs at the beginning: it describes the experience of four soldiers manning a tank on June 6, 1982, the first day of the first Lebanon invasion. Set entirely inside the claustrophobic metal walls of the machine, it captures the narrow experience of soldiers whose only view on the carnage is through the sight of a scope—cracked by a missile, for good measure—and who wind up having to bear the brunt of making life-or-death decisions while their feckless commanders sit considering abstractions in safe war rooms, far away.

Now, Maoz—who once told Variety that he watched the news coverage of the second Lebanon War with the uneasy sense that they were filming his script—bears the burden of being in the shadow of his compatriots. Both Beaufort and Waltz with Bashir were huge successes both domestically and abroad, garnering laurels at international film festivals along with consecutive nominations for the best foreign-language Oscars, Israel’s first since the early 1980s. (Folman, who lost the Academy Award race to a Japanese film, won Israel’s first Golden Globe.) “If they’d come out in the same year, maybe one would have succeeded at the expense of the others,” Cedar said.

Lebanon, which is set for theatrical release in America early next year, won the top prize last month at the Venice film festival, but was edged out for best picture at Israel’s Ophir awards, which means Maoz won’t have a shot at a foreign-language Oscar statuette. “In the beginning I thought it was bad luck to be number three,” said Maoz. “But I know that millions of people will see it, and I don’t have reasons to complain.”

Related:

Time of Favor [Tablet]

Fortress of Solitude [Tablet]

Soldier’s Story [Tablet]

Lebanese Critics Blast Israeli Director’s ‘Lebanon’ [AFP]

So, while the City to City sidebar went ahead quietly, with a screening of Danny Lerner’s film Kirot—the story of a Russian sex worker in Tel Aviv, played by, of all people, Olga Kurylenko, better known as the most recent Bond Girl—critics were apparently stampeding to make it into an afternoon screening of Lebanon, which has now rocketed to the top of the acquisitions wish-list for anyone hoping to repeat, or perhaps even improve on, Bashir’s Oscar showing. Poetic justice, irony, or both? While we wait to hear what Naomi Klein thinks, feel free to watch the Lebanon trailer (in Hebrew—though, as Matt Goldberg notes on the film blog Collider, it’s perfectly clear what’s going on even if you’ve disappointed your ancestors terribly by forgetting everything you ever learned in Hebrew school):

‘Lebanon’ and ‘Single Man’ are Suddenly Hot in Toronto [Risky Business Blog]
War and Drugs in the Cross Hairs [NYT]

U.N.: Hezbollah Violated Lebanon War Ceasefire [JTA]
U.N. Official: Arms Cache That Exploded in Lebanon Was Hezbollah’s [ynet]
Hezbollah: No More Border Demos [JPost]

Few Israelis seemed willing even to talk about the eighteen-year occupation, in which the ancient Beaufort fortress,

Beaufort Castle, 1982

eight miles north of the Israeli border, was strategically vital. Yet the book took off. “It first became popular among Israeli soldiers,” Leshem says. “Whenever I gave lectures, the people in the audience were predominantly soldiers who were just out of the army and young guys before their induction because the book was relevant to them.”

“Relevant” is understating the case. If Heaven Exists speaks directly to soldiers’ experience, using the blunt and gritty language of the front lines. Not only has the book garnered positive reviews from critics and respected Israeli writers like David Grossman and Meir Shalev, but it has also sold more than 130,000 copies, making it a hit of titanic proportions in Israel. During its eighteen-month stint on the best seller lists of the newspapers Haaretz and Yediot Ahronot, it held the number-one slot for nine months. You couldn’t sit on a train crowded with IDF soldiers traveling home and not find one or two of them reading it. Slowly, mothers of soldiers began reading the book to understand their sons’ army experiences. (I was one of those mothers.) In 2006, it won the Sapir Prize for Literature, the Israeli equivalent of the Booker Prize. “The reason that caused Leshem’s book to have such an impact is not the literary value of the novel,” says Maya Feldman, a book critic for Yediot Ahronot’s web site. “Its realistic content presents a chain of events that is expressed through soldiers’ words, people who were there, and not through the words of an author. Meaning, almost unprocessed. This authenticity, in my eyes, is strongly appealing.”

In March, a movie adaptation co-written by Leshem, titled Beaufort, opened in Israel to outstanding reviews. It broke box-office records in its first month of release (despite criticism from families of slain soldiers and war veterans that three of the leading actors had never served in the army), and became the nation’s submission to the Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film. Its director, Joseph Cedar, won the Best Director award at the Berlin International Film Festival. The novel will be published in the United States this month, also under the title Beaufort, and the film will open in New York City in January.

“The book provided soldiers with an outlet, a way to legitimize what they were feeling,” says Leshem over coffee at a café near his apartment in Givatayim, a Tel Aviv suburb. Slender and pale, with pensive dark eyes and a self-effacing demeanor, Leshem is thirty-one and works as Deputy Director of Programming at Israel’s Channel Two, lining up what he calls “escapist” shows like A Star Is Born. He says he did his own military service as a “pencil-pusher” in the Israeli Defense Ministry, working on behind-the-scenes preparations for the 1998 Wye peace negotiations. When he was released, he got a job reporting for Yediot Ahronot. He was sent to cover the Palestinians’ Second Intifada in the Gaza Strip in the fall of 2000, where he met the IDF soldier Rotem Yair, a commander in the Givati Brigade. “Rotem told me right out that he hated me,” says Leshem. “He said that when he was hiding in the bushes of Lebanon, I was, in his words, ‘drinking lemonade in a Tel Aviv café.’ He said I wouldn’t have even turned on the radio to see if he was okay and ‘you wouldn’t have even known if I was killed.’ Rotem hated me for not knowing.”

Leshem’s “guilt of not knowing” propelled him to persuade Rotem, who had always refused to speak to journalists, to recount his experiences. In If Heaven Exists Leshem has fictionalized him, turning him into Liraz Liberti, a dark-skinned Sephardic high school dropout, now the dispassionate but determined young commander of a team of thirteen Israel Defense Forces soldiers. The novel is written as his diary, detailing a condensed version of the actual events of the last winter of the occupation. “It’s really a book about withdrawal, not combat,” Leshem says.

At the start of the 1982 Lebanese War, a small Golani reconnaissance unit stormed and captured Beaufort Castle.

Israeli army troops at Beaufort Castle on June 7, 1982, the day after Israel Defense Forces invaded southern Lebanon

The Southern Lebanon security zone, controlled by the Israeli Army allied with the predominantly Christian South Lebanese Army, was established to prevent further rocket attacks on Israel by Hezbollah fighters who had moved into Lebanon. Soldiers at Beaufort knew the castle could become another Masada; they were sitting ducks for Hezbollah raids and mortar attacks. Alone in a medieval fortress on a lonely, vulnerable peak, cut off from their superiors at Army headquarters, they created their own culture, language, and rules. A wounded soldier is a flower; a dead soldier is a poppy. Eaten is afraid, and it is the worst thing for the unit, because it is contagious. The novel’s title comes from a saying that was written by a soldier over the doorway leading into Beaufort’s bunkers: “If heaven exists, this is what it looks like. If there’s a hell, this is what it feels like.”

Since Hezbollah soldiers often tried to storm the castle and there were constant rocket attacks, the soldiers always had to be ready for battle in less than thirty seconds—which meant sleeping in their uniforms and their boots. They couldn’t take showers or change their underwear; they took anti-diarrhea pills to avoid being caught by mortar attack while their pants were down. And every soldier knew how it felt to hold a dead man in his arms. The book captures both the intense devotion that develops among them and the propaganda that Hezbollah uses to try to break them. In one wrenching moment, the soldiers watch a Hezbollah broadcast on television that shows real footage from Israeli military cemeteries and pictures of Israeli soldiers weeping at a soldier’s funeral. “They love life, those Jews,” an announcer says in Hebrew with a Shiite accent. “We, on the other hand, love death.”

“I wanted to write an anti-war story,” Leshem says, “but it became a way for families of soldiers killed in the Second Lebanese War to cope with their grief.” The novel describes a game, What He Can’t Do Anymore, that Israeli soldiers played, a game of stories about their fallen comrades. In the first pages, the game is played about a soldier named Yonatan. “Yonatan can’t take his little brother to a movie any more. . . . He won’t be at his grandfather’s funeral, he won’t know if his sister gets married, he won’t take a piss with us from the highest peak in South America.”

Six soldiers named Yonatan were killed in the Second Lebanese War. At the war’s start, when Yonatan Hadasi, the first soldier named Yonatan, was killed, Israeli Army radio reported that the text of the What He Can’t Do Anymore passage of the book was read at Hadasi’s funeral. “Several parents of other fallen soldiers called me during the war,” Leshem says. “They told me that their son was in the middle of reading If Heaven Exists or had just finished reading it when he was killed and invited me to come to their house to meet their family.” Leshem went to pay shiva calls to these families. It was almost as if, because these soldiers were reading If Heaven Exists, they knew Leshem. And somehow, the families felt that Leshem knew their fallen sons and could bring some consolation. “Some of the families did a ‘take-off’ of my text,” Leshem says. “They rewrote a personalized version for the fallen soldier that was read during the eulogies.”

Dozens of American novels have been written by and about soldiers who served in Vietnam, but until If Heaven Exists no Israeli novel had ever been published about what happened to Israeli soldiers in Lebanon. “The Israeli Army pulled out on May 24, 2000, a Wednesday,” Leshem says. “By Friday, the word Lebanon was erased. Nobody talked about it.” His book, according to Maya Feldman, was the “first to break the silence surrounding that period.”

The book also serves as a painful reminder of how Israel has come full circle. “I thought that the withdrawal from Southern Lebanon was the right thing to do,” Leshem says. “It was an amazing chapter in Israeli history that what began as a movement of civilians, primarily mothers of soldiers, pushed the government to decide to pull out.” Yet the novel’s chillingly accurate prophecies, voiced by Liberti, about what would happen after Israel’s withdrawal seem to provide a way of understanding the growing consensus in Israel that the country is doomed to endless wars, even though it withdrew from Southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip—and will most likely withdraw from the Palestinian Territories. “You don’t think Kiryat Shmona will be bombarded again?” Liberti asks on the last page of the book. “They’ll take a soldier hostage . . . bombard some northern settlement with mortar shells. . . . And when it comes, anyone who thinks a flock of IAF fighter jets is capable of taking care of the job from the air is going to learn there’s no replacing foot soldiers. We’ll march in there.”

In July 2006, ten months after If Heaven Exists was published, Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers along the Israeli-Lebanese border. Then the Second Lebanese War broke out. Hezbollah shelled Kiryat Shmona and the entire north of Israel (including the village where my family and I live). Israel’s Air Force bombed Hezbollah targets, and soon foot soldiers returned to South Lebanon to engage in house-to-house fighting. Israelis have a reputation for being resilient—hard, even—and rightly so. Sometimes it feels as if the country chokes its sorrow in a numbing silence. But as Liberti says in the book, “I’m sane, don’t worry. I’m not shell-shocked. In our country I’m certainly not the only twenty-one-year-old who’s held a body of a friend missing a head. You could almost say it’s normal around here.”