## 17

## “THE AMERICANS HAVE SENT
US A POLITICAL BOMB”

November 16, 2001

> The most significant challenge that Hezbollah’s continuing armed presence faced after the Israeli withdrawal was posed unexpectedly, following the multiple attacks orchestrated by al-Qaeda on US soil on September 11, 2001. Hezbollah immediately halted its activities along the border, acknowledging publicly that the potential costs of any violent operations had been dramatically raised.

> The move was obviously well considered: in a rhetorical turn that clearly had implications for the party, US President George W. Bush addressed America and the world on September 20, and declared, “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.”

> Perhaps in an attempt to lighten the party’s difficult predicament, Nasrallah suggests in this interview with the Kuwaiti daily newspaper Al-Rai Al-Aam that, after September 11, the US offered the party a deal via intermediaries: total disarmament, an end to support of violent groups within Israel, and assistance in tracking down Sunni terrorists in exchange for a deal including US recognition, economic aid, and wider electoral and governmental power. As with news reports of a similar post-withdrawal package in 2000, US officials vehemently denied that any such deal had been offered. However, the prior contacts with Hezbollah by UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, the British ambassador to Lebanon, and a host of EU officials—where the prospects of disarmament were reportedly discussed—seemed to lay the foundations for such an offer.

> A clearer indication that such a package might in fact have been proposed was provided in mid-November 2001, only weeks after Hezbollah’s first (albeit mostly symbolic) post-September 11 operations in Shebaa Farms on October 3 and October 22, and following the first tenuous attempts by the US to bring to bear the legal instruments of the new “War on Terror” against the party. Led by prominent Republican, the Honorable Darrell Issa, a large Congressional delegation visited Beirut and declared upon leaving: “We are taking back assurances that Hezbollah does in fact have a limited scope … You must differentiate between any organization working here from other organizations that might have a global reach.”1 Although President Bush had by this time already called Hezbollah a terrorist group of “global reach,” and had formally added the group to a list of organizations whose assets would be targeted, the Congressional statement, as well as reports that the delegation had sought a direct meeting with Hezbollah leaders through the influential Lebanese Deputy Prime Minister Issam Fares, signaled at the very least that the carrot-and-stick approach could be resolved in favor of a rapprochement if Hezbollah followed the script.

> As with all prior US–Israeli deals couched in such maximalist terms, Hezbollah and Nasrallah were able to capitalize on the fact that, while the party abhorred al-Qaeda and condemned the September 11 operations, it found little reason to trust the US’s motives or approach, claiming that all the US wanted was to take advantage of the current situation to destroy Lebanon’s ability to resist Israel’s overwhelming and, Nasrallah stressed, historically destructive power.

AL-RAI AL-AAM: What do you think of the political bomb that the intermediaries carried with them from the United States?

HN: After September 11, the United States thought that we would be scared to death, so they sent us intermediaries with the hope that after September 11 we would be willing to give up what we had previously refused to [give up]. These intermediaries made two US proposals: after praising us profusely for not being involved in what took place in New York and Washington, D.C., on September 11, they proposed the establishment of very special relations with us, whereby they would let bygones be bygones—especially the bombing of the Marine headquarters in Beirut, and other such incidents.

I interrupted the intermediaries to stress the fact that we had nothing as a party to do with these incidents—a fact we had reiterated several times before, and everybody knew what the situation was like in Lebanon at that time. But since the Americans had dispatched intermediaries to discuss these matters with Hezbollah, they naturally did not put our Party’s name on either the first or the second terrorist list.

The intermediaries asked us for three things in return for letting bygones be bygones, and turning over a new leaf. They wanted Hezbollah to adopt a new policy that distinguished between Islam and terrorism; between what is religious and legitimate, on the one hand, and what is criminal and terrorist on the other. They wanted us to do this because they recognized that Hezbollah enjoyed a lot of credibility in the Arab world and among Muslim populations. They wanted our party to sever all its connections to the Palestinian cause and to the Arab–Israeli conflict; they told us, “Now that you have liberated your land, you should stop supporting the Palestinian intifada; sever your relations with the Hamas and Islamic Jihad movements, and disengage from your relationship with Syria.” They assumed that because we are an Islamic movement, we maintain relations with other Islamic movements and have information about all of them. They therefore wanted to establish security cooperation with us, so that we could provide them with information about those whom they believed had carried out the September 11 attacks.

AL-RAI AL-AAM: What was Hezbollah’s response?

HN: We do not accept the premise that anyone could teach us the difference between what is religious and legitimate and what is criminal and terrorist. As for their demand that we sever our connection to the Arab–Israeli conflict, I told the intermediaries that that this would mean the total elimination of Hezbollah’s head and heart, a complete disregard for the martyrs’ blood, and a betrayal of their families’ tears, of our people and of their sacrifice. It would also mean giving up our religious and legal duty to come to the assistance of Palestine. Our response was equally clear in relation to Syria: our relationship with it is a strategic and solid one, and does not depend on transient local developments, because if Syria is weakened, Lebanon will become an easy target.

As for security cooperation, the Americans have tried, through their intermediaries, to place us in a state of confrontation with what they called “Sunni fundamentalism.” They tried to provoke us along these lines, on the grounds that, in the future, Sunni fundamentalism will pose the gravest threat to Shiism. They reminded us of the large-scale massacre the Taliban committed against the Shia in Mazari Sharif a few years ago, and the murder of the Iranian diplomats.2 One should bear in mind that many Sunnis were also killed in that massacre, and that the Taliban’s objective was to incite the Islamic Republic of Iran to retaliate, and thus provoke a worldwide Shia–Sunni confrontation. But Iran behaved reasonably, overcame its grief, and did not fall into the trap. Any talk about Sunni fundamentalism and its dangers, therefore, holds no water with us; our position in this regard was clear from the very first day the Americans attacked Afghanistan.

Of course, we rejected all these proposals because we believed them to be nothing but a political bomb meant to destroy Hezbollah, since they cannot of course destroy us by dropping a nuclear bomb on us. When we rejected these proposals, the United States placed Hezbollah once again on its third list of “terrorist” organizations. If anything, this makes it clear that the United States is not willing to tackle the regional situation except from the perspective of Israel’s interests.

AL-RAI AL-AAM: Are you satisfied with Lebanon’s official and public rejection of the American terrorist list, which requires Hezbollah’s financial assets to be frozen?

HN: The Lebanese position is a very good and important one; so is Syria’s steadfast position, which positively influences the official position of Lebanon. We should also be aware that the requirement that Hezbollah’s assets be frozen is first and foremost aimed at eliciting an admission that the party is a terrorist organization. This was done not only as part of the campaign against so-called “terrorism,” but also as an attempt to foment internal sedition in Lebanon of the kind that Lebanon has already had to overcome at both the official and public levels.

Furthermore, and in order that everybody is clear on this, we have no assets in the party’s name, and everything we receive by way of contribution we spend immediately, because our needs exceed our income.

In my opinion, the issue is far more than simply one of freezing our assets; it is a bid to eliminate Hezbollah, starting with the freezing of its assets, then its activities, followed by the arrest of its mujahidin, the confiscation of its weapons, its elimination from political life, and finally, placing an embargo on its movements. Seen through American eyes, all these efforts are meant to advance Israel’s interests in the region. The call to freeze Hezbollah’s assets is therefore nothing but an attempt to sow the sedition that the Lebanese people have already rejected. We should also thank God that the noteworthy official and public Lebanese positions have thwarted these attempts, and did not respond positively to them at all.

Similarly, the position of the Maronite patriarch, Mar Nasrallah Boutros Sfeir,3 and of the Christian community in general, forms a substantial part of this patriotic and popular rejection of America’s demands. It is worth mentioning that our main preoccupation at the time was the liberation of our land and the expulsion of the aggressors. In this context, I remember well how, when we liberated the greater part of the south and the western Bekaa Valley, the Council of Maronite Patriarchs issued a statement praising the performance of the resistance and the wisdom of its leaders.

(…) I was astonished at National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice’s statements, in which she expressed her surprise that Lebanon would officially defend Hezbollah, “which has killed innocent people.” The irony is that her statement coincided with a massacre committed by American troops that same day in a suburb of Jalalabad, killing 300 innocent Afghanis.4 We have never, ever targeted innocent civilians; and the United States itself has admitted through the April Understanding5 that we have the right to carry out military operations against the Israelis as long as they occupy Lebanese territory.

We need to stress that our options and positions have not changed after September 11, and will not change in the future from what they were prior to September 11. We are no strangers to the American carrot-and-stick policy of wooing and threatening; we were able to stand fast in the past, and therefore are not worried about the future. After the liberation of the south, we refused one such American offer to woo us, and today we face another round of threats, which will not intimidate us either.

After the liberation of the south and the western Bekaa, we received a message from the Americans, through intermediaries, suggesting an exchange they may have thought we would find tempting. They had three requests in return for four proposals. First, they wanted us to stop resistance operations in the occupied Shebaa Farms area; second, they wanted a commitment from us—even an oral one—that we would cease all aggressive cross-border activities against Israel; and third, they wanted us to stop supporting the Palestinian intifada and put an end to our relationship with Syria as far as the Golan Heights were concerned.6

In return, they proposed the following: first, giving the party, exclusively, enormous sums of money to spend on the territories from which the Israeli enemy had withdrawn, and equivalent sums to spend on deprived areas of the country, for which we had appealed for assistance in order to alleviate the suffering of their people; second, establishing new and excellent relations with the party, and lifting all constraints imposed on it; third, introducing Hezbollah with the utmost ease into Lebanon’s political life, and applying pressure on Lebanese officials to include the party in the government, as soon as Washington lifted its veto on our participation; and fourth, releasing all of our detainees and prisoners from Israeli jails.

We of course rejected their proposals, because our acquiescence to America’s demands would simply have meant abandoning our faith, our people, and our history.

AL-RAI AL-AAM: What about the secret issue of detainees and prisoners in Israeli jails—in particular after Israel announced that the three soldiers that the party had captured were not alive?7

HN: We decided from the outset not to talk about the state of the three Israeli soldiers; let the enemy say whatever it wants—that they are dead, alive, half-dead, or half-alive. What they say will not change matters one bit.

From the outset, we told the mediators who came to attempt a prisoner exchange that there are two methods through which such an exchange could be accomplished. Either we give the Israelis information regarding the state of the Israeli soldiers in return for a human price—i.e. the release of our prisoners followed by negotiations over an exchange based on conditions we have specified earlier; or [conduct] negotiations over a comprehensive deal—i.e. a complete exchange of prisoners without the prior release of information.

At first, Israel chose the second method, but after several rounds of negotiations through their mediators, they wanted to revert to the first method—trading information for the bodies of our fighters. We did not agree to this, because the price we were seeking in return for information was the release of our live prisoners. It is worth mentioning that, in the negotiations that preceded the 1998 prisoner exchange,8 Israel wanted information in return for the bodies of our fighters, including that of my son Hadi. At the time I rejected the proposal, and said that it was an honor for us to have these bodies buried in Palestine.9 Similarly, we are now asking for living prisoners in return for information; they only agreed to give us bodies.

Ben-Eliezer10 lies to the families of the three Israeli soldiers we hold when he says that he made an offer to Hezbollah in return for information, when in reality Israel never offered to exchange live prisoners for information. Israel is now once again engaged in back-and-forth negotiations through the intermediaries, and we express our readiness to negotiate through either of the methods we have outlined, and according to our earlier specifications.

AL-RAI AL-AAM: Finally, what does the future hold, particularly in light of the present difficulties?

HN: We are not at all worried. We are holding fast to the options that our legitimate, religious, national, humane, and moral commitments impose on us, and do not think that the US will carry out military operations in this region. At any rate, they do not have valid pretexts for doing so, and we stand firm in our position, our path, and our convictions.