Thursday, February 23, 2012

That one time I went to the Hezbollah Museum

One of the places I most desperately wanted to go to when I arrived in Lebanon was the Museum of the Resistance in Mleeta in the South. The museum was created in 2010 by Hezbollah to commemorate the ten-year anniversary of the retreat of Israel from South Lebanon. A museum on a given political organization created and maintained by said organization is the kind of surrealist self-serving enterprise I just had to see for myself. In mid-January, one of my classes got to visit the museum, an occasion that was exciting for the reasons mentioned above, and also because I thought class trips were only for middle-schoolers.

The museum is situated on top of a hill which used to be the location of a Hezbollah encampment during the fighting against the Israeli Occupation Forces. At approximately 1.5 km in altitude, my attitude of denial when it comes to wearing proper winter clothing proved particularly painful on this January morning. The hill was covered in thick fog that we were told used to be prime weather to attack Israelis without being spotted.

View from Mleeta