The Israeli Merkava mark IV tank at the Museum of Resistance near the Lebanon-Israel border (top); a Russian-origin T-54 tank, also in the museum. Pictures by Dilip Banerjee

Beirut, Dec. 25: Posing in front of the barrel of an Israeli Merkava IV tank, its barrel twisted like a badly-knotted pyjama string, its turret half-buried in the rocky ground, Muhammad Hasan spent this Christmas Eve here at the Mleeta hilltop full of the wastage of many wars with Israel.

Hasan, the guide at the Hezbollah militia’s Matbaf al-Muqawama, the Museum of Resistance, does not believe that Christ was born on this day. In any case, he says, Christmas today is more about Santa Claus and less about Jesus.

But some 70km north of Beirut, Lebanon’s often-embattled but lively capital, the uphill-downhill streets are chock-a-block with traffic that can barely inch.

In its mostly Christian centre, the shops are flowing over with merchandise. In the compounds of its many highrises overlooking the Mediterranean, tall Christmas trees are decorated with red and blue and silver stars and holly.

Lebanon’s and Beirut’s cosmopolitanism makes it unique in the Arab world, though its fragility is being tested somewhat since the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq al Hariri in 2005. Even the government is decided by a Christian President, a Sunni Prime Minister and a Shia Vice-President.

So, when a group of Indians and Asians on a caravan to Gaza reached Saida, 45km south of Beirut, this morning, the religious heads of the town — Shia, Sunni, Druze, Christian and Jew — and Oussama Saad, of the Nasserite party, gathered in its Maarouf Saad Cultural Centre for the welcome.

“We have learnt that peace can be possible only with a combination of negotiation and resistance. The peace process that is now said to be on is a farce”, said Saad, as the audience cheered.

Saida is practically the capital of the south of Lebanon that is demarcated from Israel (Palestine, not Israel, the Lebanese insist) by the UN-monitored Blue Line where Indian soldiers are also posted as part of a peacekeeping force. The townspeople we meet insist that we visit Mleeta.

Mleeta, the Museum of Resistance, on a hill 1050m high opened only a year back. Warriors the world over commemorate their actions. The Hezbollah did the same soon after the 2006 war even as it prepares for more.

Hezbollah volunteers hauled burnt and damaged Israeli weapons to the top of the hill that once served as their command post. Then they built a concrete amphitheatre with a gangway that spirals downwards along its circumference to symbolise a storm. And they put the Israeli weapons in the centre of the structure — in the eye of the storm as it were — the storm being the Hezbollah.

“We are very vulnerable here,” five-time Lebanese Prime Minister Salim Al Hoss had said in his central Beirut apartment earlier. “But since 2006 (the last war between Israel and the Hezbollah), Israel knows that if it continues to commit atrocities the Resistance will not remain frozen”.

Al Hoss is now the president of the International Committee to Break the Seige of Gaza.

Israel’s sophisticated and modern weaponry and its war-waging skills evoke awe in many countries. India is importing Israeli weapons in such numbers that it is now second only to Russia as a supplier of military hardware.

Radar and avionics and sensors from Israel Aircraft Industries and Elbit Systems are at the core of many Indian-built missile systems. Israeli guns such as the Galil, the Uzi and the Tavor are now increasingly becoming standard equipment for Indian special forces.

But it is a revelation how unafraid and blase Lebanon, a country barely the size of Kerala (like Israel itself) is of its southern neighbour. On the way to Mleeta we drive past Ein Al Halva, the largest refugee camp in Lebanon, housing some 70,000 Palestinians.

Like most of South Beirut’s Haaret Horeyk locality, many of the houses in the villages in the climb up to Mleeta have been rebuilt. Haaret Horeyk has been practically re-developed and, last evening, a Lebanese dentist who works out of there said the suburb is practically unrecognisable from what it was five years back.

Israeli Defence Force aircraft and ships in the Mediterranean bombarded Haaret Horeyk at the outbreak of the war in July 2006 suspecting that the Hezbollah headquarters were there.

But, said the dentist, the Hezbollah had cleared out “and even many of its own cadre still do not know where its headquarters are today”.

“But it is everywhere almost”, the dentist smiles. Indeed, at a café during a stop on the way to Mleeta, the breeze flapped the jacket of a fashionable jeans-clad youth escorting us, revealing a holster belted in his waist.

Near the top of Mleeta, the road takes a hairpin bend, in front of a peak named the Jabal Safi. Between Mleeta, the Jabal Safi and Zahraani in the valley named Iqleem Al Tuffah, the Hezbollah claims it formed a triangle of military posts that the Israeli forces could not detect and took heavy casualties from before being forced to withdraw to what is now the UN-monitored Blue Line.

The terrain is not really as forbidding as in Kargil or in Arunachal Pradesh though the tops of the peaks in Lebanon’s Sanine mountains ahead of the Bekaa Valley are sprinkled with snow. There are few precipices or cliffs and the hillsides suggest easy climbs even at heights of about 2,000m.

But here, the Hezbollah have used bramble and brush and scree to camouflage their positions. They have dragged burnt out tanks and bombed-out armoured personnel carriers of the Israeli forces to make it a kind of celebratory graveyard.

A tunnel that cuts 200m through the Mleeta top survived successive bombing raids and its control room, kitchens, sleeping quarters and prayer rooms are still intact.

“These are gifts really and this inspires our people,” says Mohammad Hasan, the Hezbollah museum guide.

Among the gifts to savour this Christmas: shells of cluster bombs used by the Israeli Defence Force in 2006, shells of 1,000-pounders and 500-pounders; a 175mm upended cannon, two 105mm field guns split in three, a 120mm howitzer of Swedish-origin its barrel held together by concrete support, mortars with inscriptions in Hebrew and hundreds of helmets.

They complete a sculpture of a continuing war, with and without the firing.