More than any other event in the years of conflict, the Israeli invasion brought the Islamic movement to Lebanon. Islamist parties had faced isolation and condemnation for their actions against their own governments and societies in Egypt and Syria. However, the Lebanon conflict provided external enemies for the Islamist movement to fight. Any party that inflicted pain and humiliation on the United States and Israel would gain mass support in Lebanon and the broader Arab world. These were perfect conditions for the emergence of a new Shiite Islamist movement that would develop into the scourge of Israel and the United States—a militia that called itself the Party of God, or Hizbullah. Hizbullah emerged from the training camps set up by the Iranian revolutionary guards in the largely Shiite town of Baalbek in the central Bekaa Valley in the early 1980s. Hundreds of young Lebanese Shiites flocked to Baalbek for religious and political education and advanced military training. They came to share the ideology of the Islamic Revolution and grew to hate Iran’s enemies as their own. Ironically, Hizbullah owes its creation as much to Israel as to Iran. The Shiites of South Lebanon had not felt particularly hostile toward Israel in June 1982. PLO operations against Israel since 1969 had brought untold suffering to the inhabitants of the south, and by 1982 the Shiites of South Lebanon were glad to see the backs of the PLO fighters and initially received the invading Israeli forces as liberators. “As a reaction to the hostility towards Palestinians that had engulfed some inhabitants of South Lebanon,” Hizbullah deputy secretary general Naim Qassem recalled, “the [Israeli] invaders were welcomed with trilling cries of joy and the spraying of rice.”²⁸ Shiite opposition to Israel intensified, however, in response to the siege of Beirut, the enormity of the casualty toll, and the arrogance of Israeli occupation troops in South Lebanon. Iranian propaganda exacerbated this emerging hostility, nurturing rage against Israel and the United States, and their common project in Lebanon, the May 17 Agreement. From its very inception, Hizbullah was an organization distinguished by the courage of its convictions. Its members were united in their unswerving faith in the message of Islam and their willingness to make any sacrifice to achieve God’s will on earth. Their role model was Imam Husayn, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, whose death in the southern Iraqi town of Karbala fighting the ruling Umayyad dynasty in A.D. 680 still stands for Shiite Muslims as the ultimate example of martyrdom against tyranny. The example of Imam Husayn gave rise to a culture of martyrdom within Hizbullah that it turned into a lethal weapon against its enemies. Hizbullah’s prolific use of suicide bombers have led many analysts to try to link Islamic Jihad, the shadowy organization that claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing of the American and French barracks, to the embryonic Hizbullah movement that took shape between 1982 and 1985—though Hizbullah itself has always denied any involvement in those attacks. The struggle against Israel and the United States were but the means to a greater end. Ultimately, Hizbullah’s goal was to create an Islamic state in Lebanon. However, the party has always maintained its unwillingness to impose such a government against the will of the diverse population of Lebanon. “We do not want Islam to rule in Lebanon by force, as the political Maronism is ruling at present,” Hizbullah leaders asserted in the February 1985 Open Letter declaring the establishment of the party. “But we stress that we are convinced of Islam as a faith, system, thought, and rule and we urge all to recognize it and to resort to its law.”²⁹ Like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Syria, Hizbullah hoped to replace man’s law with God’s law. The leaders of Hizbullah were convinced that the vast majority of the people of Lebanon—even the country’s large Christian communities—would willingly opt for the greater justice of God’s law once the Islamic system of government had proven its superiority to secular nationalism. The Hizbullah leadership believed that nothing could better demonstrate the superiority of Islamic government than a victory over Israel and the United States. Young Shiite men were willing to sacrifice their lives, like their role model the Imam Husayn, to achieve this goal. The first Shiite suicide bombing in Lebanon was organized by the Islamic Resistance, a progenitor of Hizbullah, in November 1982. A young man named Ahmad Qasir conducted the first “martyrdom operation” when he drove a car laden with explosives into the Israeli army headquarters in the southern Lebanese city of Tyre, killing seventy-five Israelis and wounding many others. Journalist Robert Fisk went to Tyre to investigate the bombing. He was shocked by the number of Israeli casualties pulled from the wreckage of the eight-story building, but it was the method of the bombing that he found hardest to accept. “A suicide bomber? The idea seemed inconceivable.?³⁰ A number of attacks following the bombing of the Israeli headquarters confirmed suicide bombing as a dangerous new weapon in the arsenal of the enemies of America and Israel: the U.S. Embassy bombing in April 1983, the attacks on the American and French barracks in October 1983, and a second attack on Israeli headquarters in Tyre in November 1983, killing sixty more Israelis. Israeli intelligence was quick to identify the threat posed by the Islamic Resistance and struck back with targeted assassinations against Shiite clerics. Far from subduing the Shiite resistance, the assassinations only served to escalate the violence. “By 1984,” one analyst noted, “the pace of [Shiite] attacks was so intense that an Israeli soldier was dying every third day” in Lebanon.³¹ In the course of that year, the Shiite militias also diversified their tactics and began to kidnap Westerners in a bid to drive the foreigners out of Lebanon. By the time Hizbullah emerged on the scene in 1985, their enemies were already on the retreat. The first defeat the Shiite insurgency dealt Israel was the destruction of the May 17 Agreement. The besieged government of Amin Gemayel had been unable to implement any part of the agreement and, within a year of its signing, the Lebanese Council of Ministers abrogated the treaty with Israel. The Islamic Resistance’s next victory was to drive the U.S. and European armies out of Lebanon. As American casualties in Lebanon mounted, President Reagan came under growing pressure to withdraw his troops. Italian and American troops evacuated Lebanon in February 1984, and the last French soldiers pulled out at the end of March. The Israelis also found their position in Lebanon increasingly untenable, and in January 1985 Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s cabinet agreed to withdraw from the urban centers in South Lebanon to what they termed the South Lebanon Security Zone, a strip of land along the Israel-Lebanon border that ranged from 5–25 kilometers (3–15 miles) in depth. The Security Zone was to prove the most enduring legacy of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The idea behind the South Lebanon Security Zone was to create a buffer to protect northern Israel from attack. Instead, it created a shooting gallery for Hizbullah and other Lebanese militias to carry on the fight against the Israeli occupier. For the next fifteen years, Hizbullah gained support from Lebanese of all religions, if not for an Islamic state, then at least as the national resistance movement against a much-hated occupation. For Israel, the 1982 invasion ultimately replaced one enemy—the PLO—with a yet more determined adversary. Unlike the Palestinian fighters in Lebanon, Hizbullah and the Shiites of South Lebanon were fighting for their own land. In Cold War terms, the Lebanon conflict had proved a major defeat for the United States in its rivalry with the Soviet Union. However, the Soviets were in no position to celebrate. Their 1979 invasion of Afghanistan had provoked a sustained insurgency, attracting a growing number of devout Muslims to join the ranks of the Afghan mujahidin fighting to expel the ?atheist Communists.? If Lebanon was the Shiite school for jihad, Afghanistan became the training ground for a new generation of Sunni Muslim militants.