The Hand That Feeds the Fire

The trouble is, anger against the Israelis is almost certain to grow even faster than against Hizbullah. Many Lebanese owe a great deal to Hizbullah's clinics, schools and other basic social services in the areas it dominates--underwritten, of course, by hundreds of millions of dollars from Iran. When Israel finally decided to withdraw completely from southern Lebanon in 2000, after relentless pressure from Hizbullah's guerrilla attacks, the organization achieved heroic status not only in Lebanon, but throughout the Muslim world. Nasrallah, especially, emerged as a charismatic leader, his speeches carried regionwide by Hizbullah's own Al Manar satellite television station.

Part of Nasrallah's mystique is as a man of his word. He vowed to oust Israel from Lebanese land, and he succeeded. But Nasrallah also vowed to free hundreds of captured Lebanese in Israeli jails. In 2004 he ransomed an Israeli businessman for 400 prisoners, but others remained in jail. By late last year Nasrallah was on the prowl again, looking for new captives to use as bargaining chips in another swap. In November the Israelis announced that they'd thwarted an attempt by Hizbullah to take Israeli soldiers as hostages. It should have been no surprise when members of the Hamas military wing in Gaza adopted a similar strategy last month to try to win the release of some of the 10,000 Palestinians in Israeli prisons.

The Palestinians: There's no more potent issue in the Muslim world than the fate of the Holy Land, and Iran has been looking for a piece of that righteous action since the early days of the Khomeini revolution. As if to underscore the point, the unit of Iran's Revolutionary Guards charged with carrying out operations abroad, including terrorism, is called Al Quds--which is the Arabic name of Jerusalem. Tehran has pledged at least $50 million to help underwrite the embattled Hamas government elected in January. But it's the clandestine ties that are of most concern to Israel, its neighbors and the United States.

The alliance between Hizbullah and Hamas dates back to 1992, when Israel rounded up hundreds of Hamas activists and dumped them in no man's land, on the Lebanese side of the border. The Beirut government refused to let the militants travel any farther, and they found themselves stranded on barren hillsides that were, in fact, under Hizbullah's control. The two groups have serious religious differences: Hamas follows a militant Sunni strain of Islam, and Hizbullah is Shiite. All the same, Hizbullah offered tents and food to the stranded Palestinians, and the friendship grew from there.

Jordan's security services, fearful that their territory might become a base--or a target--for terrorist attacks, have tracked the Iranian connection very closely. Jordanian intelligence sources, declining to be named because of the sensitivity of security issues, recall that by 1997 their government was arresting and interrogating Hamas members who had received, in the words of one veteran security officer, "religious, military, counterinterrogation and even intel-ligence training in Iran." Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal was living in Jordan at the time, and that's where the Israelis tried to assassinate him. When he recovered, he made several trips to Tehran before the Jordanians told him not to come back, in 1999.

Iran's support for the Palestinian militants only continued to grow. After the second intifada against Israel began in 2000, the Israelis intercepted boatloads of arms sent from Iran or through Hizbullah to Palestinian guerrilla groups. The last ship, intercepted in 2003, was a fishing trawler carrying not only munitions and manuals from Lebanon to Gaza, but a Hizbullah bomb-maker as well.