one day in beirut i headed to the hills of south lebanon to visit an infamous new hezbollah museum. hezbollah’s paramilitary branch is considered a terrorist organization by much of the world, and they consider destruction of the state of israel to be their primary objective. let me obviously and emphatically disclaim that i do not support this objective and that i think any group that employs terrorism is terrible, even when/if if they do have valid reason to be upset with their situation. this said, i thought it would be fascinating to visit their brand new, 60 million us$ museum, which was funded by iran.
the “tour” starts with a 13 minute movie about the “resistance” in south lebanon, overlayed with emotionally-stirring war movie type music. israel occupied south lebanon from the mid 80’s through 2000, with another another war in 2006. the climax of the film comes when hassan nasrallah, the bearded fundamentalist cleric who leads hezbollah, has his fist in the air and looses control of both the volume and resonance of his voice when describing how the group can hit ben-gurion airport in tel aviv with their missiles at any moment’s notice. such passion.
i was then given a tour by another bearded cleric, dressed in camouflage, who spoke perfect american english. he showed me the museum’s centerpiece, “the abyss,” meant to symbolically represent the future of israel as they see it going down. bizarre and surreal. a huge hole in the ground is filled with captured israeli tanks and helicopters that were shot down in the 2006 war. israel also used cluster bombs during that and other wars, which were on prominent display. these bombs are illegal according to international law, as they are designed to inflict maximal civilian casualties. in no way defensible, but at least israel’s prime objective isn’t to wipe south lebanon from the face of the earth.
the facility also included trenches and bunkers used by paramilitary fighters in their resistance, including the founding leader of hezbollah before he was assassinated by israel. they have published a schematic of the power structure and leadership of all the branches of the israeli military, previously classified information which they claim to have discovered covertly, and which israel was apparently very angry about when they found out. they also have maps of israel with the quantity and types of military aircraft at each israeli air force base, for example, and schematics of their rockets hitting these targets. throughout the place were stationed, symbolically and anything but subtly, many rocket shaped gold-plated receptacles for monetary donations to the cause. i’ll bet that this will be one of the first places taken out in the next of the long string of israel-hezbollah wars.
the museum was far up in the mountains, and the clerics/tour guides didn’t have any cell phones to call for a taxi, so i started what turned out to be a four hour hike down the mountain to the nearest highway. it would seem that the whole of south lebanon is covered in posters of recent martyrs for the hezbollah cause. a guy gave me a ride on his moped for a while, and eventually an extremely elderly and seemingly senile but unbelievably hospitable couple gave me a ride in the their rusted out, sputtering mercedes benz. we crawled along at two kilometers per hour as the man mumbled along to his classical arabic oud music while the woman kindly and slowly spoke words to me which i was unfortunately completely unable to comprehend.
i spent that evening in the south lebanese city of sidon/saida, where i found an abandoned and locked up crusader castle out in the ocean, connected to land only by a causeway. i snuck into the premises, and chanced upon a group of three teenage boys who showed me all around inside the castle. on the roof, looking out over saida, one of them broke out in arabic song (with some akon mixed in there too), and the four of us vigorously danced away all our problems. it was really nice, just like the whole trip 🙂 hopefully one day in the future the typical citizens of israel and lebanon will legally be able to visit each other’s beautiful countries. until then, i feel especially honored that i’m able to experience both!
