NYT : Arab World Finds Icon in Leader of Hezbollah

Arab World Finds Icon in Leader of Hezbollah

By NEIL MacFARQUHAR | August 7, 2006

DAMASCUS, Syria, Aug. 6 — The success or failure of any cease-fire in Lebanon will largely hinge on the opinion of one figure: Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary general of Hezbollah, who has seen his own aura and that of his party enhanced immeasurably by battling the Israeli Army for nearly four weeks.

With Israeli troops operating in southern Lebanon, Sheik Nasrallah can continue fighting on the grounds that he seeks to expel an occupier, much as he did in the years preceding Israel’s withdrawal in 2000.

Or he can accept a cease-fire — perhaps to try to rearm — and earn the gratitude of Lebanon and much of the world.

Analysts expect some kind of middle outcome, with the large-scale rocket attacks stopping but Hezbollah guerrillas still attacking soldiers so that Israel still feels pain.

In any case, the Arab world has a new icon.

Gone are the empty threats made by President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s official radio station during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war to push the Jews into the sea even as Israel seized Jerusalem, the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula.

Gone is Saddam Hussein’s idle vow to “burn half of Israel,” only to launch limited volleys of sputtering Scuds. Gone too are the unfulfilled promises of Yasir Arafat to lead the Palestinians back into Jerusalem.

Now there is Sheik Nasrallah, a 46-year-old Lebanese militia chieftain hiding in a bunker, combining the scripted logic of a clergyman with the steely resolve of a general to completely rewrite the rules of the Arab-Israeli land feud.

“There is the most powerful man in the Middle East,” sighed the deputy prime minister of an Arab state, watching one of Sheik Nasrallah’s four televised speeches since the war began, during an off-the-record meeting. “He’s the only Arab leader who actually does what he says he’s going to do.”

Days after the current war started, he ended a speech by quietly noting that Hezbollah had just attacked an Israeli warship off Lebanon, a feat considered inconceivable for his group. Those who rushed outside saw a glow visible from the damaged vessel offshore, setting off celebrations around Beirut.

The departure represented by Sheik Nasrallah — his black turban marking him as a sayyid, a cleric who can trace his lineage back to the Prophet Muhammad — has been particularly evident in those speeches. He makes no promises to destroy Israel with its superior military might, but to make it bleed and offer concessions.

“When he says to the people: I am your voice, I am your will, I am your conscience, I am your resistance, he combines both a sense of humility and of being anointed for the task,” said Waddah Sharara, a Lebanese sociology professor and a descendant of Shiite clerics. “He’s like the circus magician who pulls the rabbit out of his hat and always knows exactly who is his audience.”

Some call it his “Disney touch.”

In many ways, this war is the moment that Sheik Nasrallah has been preparing for ever since he was first elected to run Hezbollah at age 32 in 1992, after an Israeli rocket incinerated his predecessor.

In his broadcasts he appears tranquil, assured, sincere and well informed, in command of both the facts and the situation, utterly dedicated to his cause and to his men. He is aloof yet tries to lend his secretive, heavily armed organization an air of transparency by sharing battlefield details.

On Thursday, he offered to stop firing missiles if Israel halted its attacks, saying Hezbollah preferred ground combat. Hezbollah’s position on any cease-fire, echoed by the Lebanese government, is that none is possible as long as Israeli soldiers remain inside the country.

“He has all the power; the government has no cards in its hand,” said Jad al-Akhaoui, the media adviser to a Lebanese cabinet minister. “He keeps saying that he supports the prime minister, but there has been no translation in the field, nothing has stopped. The decision is still Hezbollah’s decision.”

It is not even clear how such decisions are formulated. Even though Hezbollah has two cabinet ministers, proposals are passed through Nabih Berri, the head of the Amal Party and Hezbollah’s onetime rival as the voice of the Shiite Muslim working class.

Lebanese officials said that once Mr. Berri passed on the proposals, nobody was quite sure what happened. Hezbollah officials are either unreachable or mum.

But Sheik Nasrallah is definitely in touch. He gloats over the evident confusion reflected in the Israeli news media about their military offensive. He is known to have read the autobiographies of Israel’s prime ministers. He always calls Israel “the Zionist entity,” maintaining that all Jewish immigrants should return to their countries of origin and that there should be one Palestine with equality for Muslims, Jews and Christians.

In the past, when Israel advanced into Lebanon against Palestinian fighters, the Palestinians would defend fixed positions, then retreat toward Beirut as each line fell.

Analysts say Sheik Nasrallah’s genius was to train hundreds of grass-roots fighters — school teachers and butchers and truck drivers — then to use religion to inspire them to fight until death, with a guaranteed spot in heaven.

Sheik Nasrallah outlined some tactics in Thursday’s speech.

“It is not our policy to hang on to territory; we do not want all our mujahedeen and youths to be killed defending a post, hill or village,” he said, sitting in a studio with the flags of Lebanon and Hezbollah behind him. The idea is to lure elite Israeli soldiers into a trap by having them walk into villages before his guerrillas open fire.

In a world where fathers are known by the name of their eldest son, Sheik Nasrallah is known as Abu Hadi or father of Hadi, after his eldest son, who died in September 1997, age 18, in a firefight with the Israelis. The name instantly reminds everyone of his personal credibility and commitment to the fight.

On that September day, Sheik Nasrallah was scheduled to deliver a speech in Haret Hreik, the unkempt southern Beirut suburb dense with apartment houses that Israel has just turned largely to rubble. But he said nothing of his loss until the crowd started chanting for him to speak about the “martyrs.” He eulogized Hadi as part of a great victory.

In interviews, he said that he would not give his enemies the satisfaction of seeing him weep publicly but that he mourned privately.

He has a daughter and two surviving sons. The eldest, Jawad, around 26, is believed to be fighting in southern Lebanon.

Sheik Nasrallah takes obvious pride in standing up to Israel on the battlefield. All his wartime speeches have been laced with references to restoring lost Arab virility, a big sell in a region long suffering from a sense of impotence. He called the three southern villages where the fiercest clashes erupted “the triangle of heroism, manhood, courage and gallantry.”

He can be by turns avuncular and menacing.

Walid Jumblat, the chieftain of the Druse sect and one of Sheik Nasrallah’s more outspoken critics, said he found the combination unsettling. “Sometimes the eyes of people betray them,” Mr. Jumblat said in an interview in his mountain castle. “When he’s calm, he’s laughing. He’s very nice. But when he’s a little bit squeezed, he looks at you in the eyes fiercely with fiery eyes.”

In the hierarchical rankings of Shiite Muslim clergy, Sheik Nasrallah is a rather ordinary hojatolislam, one step below an ayatollah, and far below being a mujtahid, or “source of emulation” to be followed as a guide.

Yet the Shiite faithful in Lebanon revere him, both as a religious figure and as a leader who gained for them a modicum of respect in the country’s sectarian political system long dominated by Christians and Sunni Muslim barons. Families who evacuated their homes in Beirut’s southern suburbs seemed invariably to leave behind an open Koran with Sheik Nasrallah’s picture propped up nearby, in the hope that the holy verses would protect their homes and their leader.

He is believed to live modestly and rarely socializes outside Hezbollah’s ruling circles. He avoids the telephone for safety reasons, but has met thousands of constituents and dispatches personal messengers to congratulate them for weddings and births.

Aside from Hezbollah’s secretive military operations, the state within a state that he helped build with Iranian and expatriate financing includes hospitals, schools and other social services.

Sheik Nasrallah is a powerful orator with a robust command of classical Arabic, yet he makes himself widely understood by using some Lebanese dialect in every speech. He has coined numerous popular phrases, like calling Israel “more feeble than a spider’s web.”

He comes across as far less dour than most Shiite clerics partly due to his roly-poly figure and slight lisp. But he also — very unusually — cracks jokes.

Prof. Nizar Hamzeh, who teaches international relations at the American University of Kuwait and has written a book on Hezbollah, recalled a Nasrallah speech from last year, given while Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was in the region. A helicopter happened to clatter overhead at some point while he was criticizing United States meddling, and the sheik quipped, “You might be able to catch a glimpse of her now; I hope she sees us as well.” The crowd roared.

He has never pushed hard-line Islamic rules like veils for women in the neighborhoods that Hezbollah controls, which analysts attribute to his exposure to many of Lebanon’s 17 sects.

Born in 1960 in Beirut, Sheik Nasrallah grew up in the Karanteena district of eastern Beirut, a mixed neighborhood of impoverished Christian Armenians, Druse, Palestinians and Shiites.

His father had a small vegetable stand, but the 1975 eruption of the civil war forced the family to flee to their native southern village.

The oldest of nine children and long entranced by the mosque, he decamped for the most famous Shiite hawza, or seminary, in Najaf, Iraq. He fled in 1978 one step ahead of Saddam Hussein’s secret police, returning to Lebanon to join Amal, then a new Shiite militia. He became the Bekaa Valley commander in his early 20’s.

But he considered the Islamic Revolution in Iran led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979 to be the real model for Shiites to end their traditional second-class status and moved to Hezbollah as it coalesced in the early 1980’s. He studied in a seminary in Qum, Iran, briefly in 1989.

How much a religious figure can appeal to Lebanon’s generally cosmopolitan population has never been clear, and it is particularly murky now that he has provoked a war. Some Lebanese say he has sold his soul to Damascus and Tehran.

“I used to think of Nasrallah as the smartest politician in Lebanon, but this last operation changed my mind,” said Roula Haddad, a 33-year-old administrative secretary, shopping at the upscale ABC mall in the predominantly Christian Ashrafiyeh neighborhood. “It was a huge mistake and he is solely responsible for all the destruction. He proved that he does not care about Lebanese interests; he revealed his true Iranian skin.”

Political analysts said that Lebanon should have seen it coming, but that Sheik Nasrallah proved a rather skillful hypnotist. “Lebanese politics, especially since Nasrallah carved out his role, has become his very own circus,” said Professor Sharara, the Lebanese sociologist. “He built this circus on a foundation of pageantry, lies, fear, crazy hopes and unreal dreams.

“He sold Lebanese on the certainty that he would not abandon them, he would not undertake anything that would cause them harm or destruction, and at the same time he instilled fear, fear of himself,” Professor Sharara said. “He has known this was going to happen for the past 15 years. How can you believe someone who says, ‘Don’t worry, I won’t do anything,’ even while he was building this hellish machine? He knew people would be credulous, would be seduced.”