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Hezbollah Fighters Emerge From the Rubble
A War of Perceptions
Members of the Red Cross evacuate an injured fighter in the southern Lebanese town of Khiam on the first day of the cease-fire.
(By Ghaith Abdul-ahad -- Getty Images)
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A few of the fighters were exuberant, filled with bravado from a battle they clearly believed they had won.
"We don't want it to end," Kalash said. He pointed toward the Israeli border. "We want to keep going, all the way inside."
More common among the fighters was the subdued demeanor of Abu Khafif, the heavyset, bearded commander, who drove through the town square in a black Mercedes, the rim of a flat tire on the car creaking across the street. Its windshield was cracked like a spider web, and a rifle sat in the front seat.
In black pants, a black Izod shirt and white Fila tennis shoes, he was friendly, smiling as he asked another fighter to change the tire. A black plastic bag with five AK-47 assault rifles sat next to the spare tire, and he casually stocked the trunk with canned luncheon meat and a 10-liter bottle of water. He was confident, grinning at questions. But he was professional, leery of saying anything too revealing.
"Are you going to bother me with talk?" he asked. "I'm not a spokesman, I'm a fighter."
There was a word repeated time and again Monday in Khiam, by both fighters and the residents who chose to stay through the war. It was karama , or dignity. In the speeches of Arab leaders, ridden with clichés that often provided the rhetorical buttress of authoritarian regimes, it had come to lose much of its meaning. But in Khiam, it was uttered so often, so fervently, that it felt different.
"This is our land," said Bilal Ali Saleh, a 42-year-old beekeeper. "Can we leave our land? Would you leave your land?"
He looked out at the street, where two men carried bundles of bottled water. He glided his hand across his black beard, peppered with gray, grown because, he said, no barber had opened since the war started. And he spoke softly, almost matter-of-factly.
"I remember that the Arab armies in 1967 were defeated in a few days. The Israelis advanced across hundreds of kilometers of land. From what you see here in the south, from what you hear on the radio, they advanced seven kilometers in 33 days, and they couldn't go any further," Saleh said. "Is that not a victory? Do you consider it a legend or not?
"My view, my sense of this, is that no one who comes from their land and is attached to it can ever be defeated," he added. "It is the land of their fathers, it is the land of their grandfathers."
Saleh had stayed the entire time in Khiam. He hadn't tended to his bees, which he kept a few miles outside town. "You think I could go there?" he asked. His store selling household goods was destroyed. He had sent his wife, two sons and three daughters to Beirut. And he weathered the Israeli shelling in Khiam, munitions falling so often that he said it felt like bubbles bursting in boiling water.
"It wasn't less than 20,000 shells that fell here, that's my impression," he said.
