Hezbollah gets its way

Assad has showed in the past few weeks that he may be willing and able to keep up the pressure. One way of achieving this is to question the comprehensiveness of the Israeli withdrawal and to challenge the new border being drawn by United Nations cartographers. Shebaa Farms, for example, a fertile patch of land near the ill-defined border between the Golan and Lebanon, cropped up seemingly out of nowhere last week, all groomed to become an apple of discord in diplomatic talks. (The Lebanese claim the farms are theirs, although U.N. maps place them south of the border.)

A more likely scenario for post-withdrawal mayhem, according to analysts, has Syria hiring new proxies capable of making Israeli lives unpleasant across the fence. Some expect that Hezbollah will decide to rest on its laurels and concentrate on politics after an Israeli withdrawal. But Lebanon shelters plenty of other groups that could easily be persuaded to play Syria's game: hawkish Palestinian refugees stuck in miserable dead-end camps in southern Lebanon, a multitude of semiclandestine Islamic organizations, even freelance terrorists. "All you need is someone lobbing the periodic Katyusha [hand-held Soviet-made rockets] into Israel," noted one analyst. "It's a perfectly credible line of threat."

After intense lobbying by Egypt and Saudi Arabia, the Syrians accepted last week the idea of giving the U.N. Interim Forces in Lebanon a beefed-up role in policing southern Lebanon after an Israeli withdrawal. But few analysts predict UNIFIL -- a contingent of foreign "peacekeeping" troops that has been in Lebanon since the outbreak of the civil war -- will be capable of protecting Israel's border.

Israel has warned Syria that it will retaliate harshly against any attacks and put the blame squarely on Syria's doorstep. "I don't recommend that anyone, directly or indirectly, try to attack Israel, its residents or its army after we withdraw," Barak told Israeli Army Radio on Monday. "Anyone who tries to harm us will get what he deserves."

When the Israeli air force bombed two Lebanese electricity plants on May 4, after Hezbollah had killed an Israeli soldier, the Lebanese were infuriated. The strikes, which caused power cuts and costly physical damage, gave the Lebanese the feeling that, once again, they were being asked to pay the price for unfinished business between Syria and Israel.

The threat of similar retaliatory attacks on Lebanese infrastructure after the Israelis leave partially explains the noticeable lack of enthusiasm on the eve of the pullout. That threat also fuels the current resurgence of anti-Syrian sentiment here. Although few of Lebanon's problems would be solved if Syrian troops marched home tomorrow, the Lebanese blame their Arab Big Brother for keeping them in a state of war.

"When foreign powers want to wage war, they do it in our country," complained a student at Christian St. Joseph University in Beirut, who was active in the anti-Syrian demonstrations in April. "We've been at war for 25 years although Lebanon has no weapons industry. We pay for all the Arabs."

But the grumbling can only go so far. "Everything we do now can be exploited as a possible point for Israel," said Tueni, who penned a groundbreaking anti-Syrian editorial in March but urged the students to keep a low profile in April. "We must wait until after July," he said in an interview. If Christian students demonstrate in the streets, the Syrians can bring out thousands of loyal Muslims -- and that will "bring back the kind of sectarian conflict that served as a pretext for the Syrian presence in Lebanon in the first place," he said.

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