KNOW THY ENEMY

JERUSALEM-ON JULY 28, as part of a wartime special of the comedy show ``Wonderful Country" on Israeli television, an actor decked out as Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, appeared in the show's mock TV news studio for an interview. The Nasrallah character made his swaggering and triumphant entrance just moments after the comedian mimicking Lieutenant General Dan Halutz, chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, expressed his certainty that the air force had finished off Nasrallah for good.

When the interviewer asked Nasrallah where he had been when the planes attacked his bunker, he answered, ``I have an irritable bladder"-quoting an especially irritating local radio commercial in which the listener is asked how it is that he missed key moments in the family's or the nation's life. Later, asked to explain how it is Israeli audiences find him so charismatic, Nasrallah boasted, ``I was born for TV. I'm a ratings magnet."

Indeed, the real Nasrallah, at age 46, has been a regular fixture on Israel's TV screens for years-but in my house, at least, he has always struck fear into the viewer. His power derives no less from his calm, his smile, his cuddly appearance, than from the lethal message he imparts. Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shi'ite ``Party of God," is dedicated to the elimination of Israel, and to the establishment of a fundamentalist Islamic state in Lebanon. The organization's political successes there, the spectacular acts of terror it is alleged to have carried out internationally-from the 1983 truck bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut to the bombing of the Israeli embassy and Jewish community headquarters in Buenos Aires a decade later-and the impressive resistance with which it has confronted Israel this summer, have turned its secretary general into a figure of almost mythic proportions.

Nasrallah has made himself someone Israelis take seriously. He comes off as the antithesis of a madman; he doesn't rave, he looks directly at the camera, and when he speaks about the ``Zionist entity," it's clear that he's studied his subject well. In another context that might be flattering, but when it's the enemy who evinces an intimate knowledge of your society, it can be frightening.

``Nasrallah regularly sees clips from Israeli newspapers and tapes of Israeli TV," says Ehud Ya'ari, a commentator on Arab affairs for Israel's commercial Channel 2. Ya'ari has reported that Nasrallah is a regular reader of Ha'aretz military analyst Ze'ev Schiff, and Nasrallah himself has owned up to having read former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's book about Israel ``A Place Among the Nations." ``Once he even took me on in public," adds Ya'ari, ``and charged that something I had broadcast was wrong."

According to Mordechai Kedar, a research associate at Bar-Ilan University's Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, Hezbollah's ``excellent intelligence" extends beyond merely monitoring the local media. ``You can also tell that they listen in on IDF phones," he says, referring to the Israel Defense Forces. ``They know more about us than we think they know."

Nasrallah taps more than phone lines-he taps into, and exploits, Israeli culture as well. Two years ago, when Hezbollah and Israel concluded a deal by which the latter released more than 400 prisoners, most of them Palestinian, in exchange for one kidnapped civilian and the bodies of three soldiers killed in battle, Nasrallah acknowledged the great lengths to which Israel will go to bring even its dead soldiers home. He sees this as a sign of the society's weakness, part of what he meant when in 2000 he referred to Israel as ``weaker than a spider web."

When Nasrallah speaks, at Hezbollah rallies or on the party's satellite TV station, Al-Manar, it is clear he knows that Israelis are listening, and he is skilled at pushing their buttons. I know you, he seems to be saying, and I can make you behave as I wish. Over time, as psychiatrist Ilan Kutz described to me, ``he assumed the position of a person who has the power to inflict pain or to withhold it." As a consequence, Nasrallah's appearances have had a Pavlovian effect on Israelis: ``Like any laboratory animal, when we hear the bell," says Kutz, ``we expect the blow to follow."

. . .

Nasrallah became the leader of Hezbollah in 1992, after Israel assassinated his former teacher, Abbas Al-Musawi. Under his leadership, Hezbollah presents itself as unified and disciplined, as opposed to the Palestinian militias, who answer to many different chieftains, some of whom are clearly in business for themselves. Over the years, when Nasrallah has agreed to cease-fires he has had the power to maintain them, and when he announces his organization's intention to kidnap Israelis, he generally makes good on the threat.

Just a week before the July 12 Hezbollah cross-border raid into Israel that set off this latest war, Aluf Benn, a generally astute analyst for Ha'aretz, bemoaned the fact that not all of Israel's enemies were like Nasrallah. Although he ``hates Israel and Zionism no less than do the Hamas leaders," Benn wrote, Nasrallah ``has authority and responsibility," and therefore is perceived as ``rational and reasonably predictable."

Kutz, a specialist in trauma and stress, believes that Nasrallah derives extra authority among Israelis by virtue of being a cleric as well as military leader. Like other leaders of radical Islamic groups, he gives orders to people who actually want to die for their cause, a religious one. (Nasrallah's oldest son, Muhammad Hadi, was killed by Israel in a 1997 battle; the father later said that he had ``died facing the conquerors as he wished, with a gun in his hands.") ``He certainly represents the purity of religious ideology, which always means business," Kutz says.

Nasrallah's reputation for reliable reporting has suffered some erosion during the latest war, however. Al-Manar, normally a highly professional operation, has made claims that could not stand up to scrutiny, such as a report at the end of July that Hezbollah had sunk an Israeli warship off the Lebanese coast, with 50 sailors aboard. It wasn't true. (Earlier in the month, a Hezbollah radar-guided C-802 missile did badly damage an Israeli missile boat, and killed four of its crew, but that success has not been repeated.) The organization has also underplayed the extent of its own losses, which, although it may be typical behavior for an authoritarian regime in wartime, does put a crack in Nasrallah's image of infallibility.

To Israelis, Yasser Arafat went from being a fearsome adversary to a kindly if wimpish partner for peace, and then, with the outbreak of the intifada in late 2000, to a murderous and prevaricating enemy who lacked the inner strength to make tough political compromises. But he never commanded the respect that Nasrallah does. Nasrallah's ``visit" to ``Wonderful Country" poked more fun at the Israelis-certainly at Chief of Staff Halutz-than it did at the Hezbollah chief.

But there have also been less sophisticated responses to Nasrallah on websites and in other media recently. One site invites surfers to send in their own home videos about the Hezbollah leader. Another features a rock band's insulting song calling him ``the scum of humanity" and warning, ``We'll screw you, Inshallah, and send you back to Allah, with all the Hezbollah." A new ringtone that's selling rapidly calls for Nasrallah's death, and the army spokesman's office has placed stories in most local media outlets about the young woman in army intelligence who draws caricatures of a cowardly Nasrallah who hides behind civilians, which are then dropped over South Lebanon.

While these attacks on Nasrallah are understandable as rockets continue to wreak damage on Israel's north, and may in fact serve a certain therapeutic purpose in themselves, in the end it may be the more sophisticated humor that's the most useful. Ilan Kutz says he's all for ``high-end satire," like the sketch on ``Wonderful Country," ``especially if you put Nasrallah together with [Defense Minister Amir] Peretz and other of our own leaders. Suddenly we can laugh at ourselves, and at him, and he becomes less dangerous."

``It's okay to be frightened and apprehensive, and useful to tell the truth," says Kutz. ``You're acknowledging, Here's a formidable guy, but we don't have to take his words seriously, because he's a manipulator. He's dangerous, but he's not a danger to our existence."

Perhaps not, but as these lines are being written, the question all Israelis are contemplating is whether Hezbollah will target Tel Aviv, as Nasrallah threatened Thursday. Missiles on Israel's commercial and cultural center could be devastating, and in this case Nasrallah's enemy will be grateful if his threat turns out to be bluster.

David B. Green is deputy editor of The Jerusalem Report