A day out at the Hezbollah theme park

Over recent decades, Hezbollah has become deeply embedded in southern Lebanon. It runs everything from hospitals and schools to infrastructure projects, and even has its own theme park. Naturally, when an email landed in our inbox from listener Alex who’s actually been to that theme park, we wanted to know every detail. So Matt gave him a call. Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app https://radio.abc.net.au/help/apps. Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFMNp1U_Nq

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  G'day, Matt Bevan here. So a few weeks ago, we did an episode about southern Lebanon and why that particular region is such an important fighting ground for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. We chatted about why exactly it's so difficult to eradicate the militant group Hezbollah from the region. In short, it's because in addition to having a sizable militia, over the last few decades, the group has become very ingrained in the social fabric of the workings of southern Lebanon. And there was one throwaway line in the script about how they even have their own theme park. Soon after the episode aired, we were thrilled to find an email in our inbox from a listener named Alex, who wrote in to say that he had actually visited the theme park on a trip to Lebanon.

• 1:34Speaker 03

  Now, obviously, we wanted to hear every single detail, so we gave Alex a call and he agreed to come on the show. Hi, Alex.

• 1:41Speaker 04

  G'day, Matt.

• 1:52Speaker 03

  What were you doing in Lebanon? Were you there on just a tourist visit or?

• 1:56Speaker 04

  I was just there on a holiday. I had broken up with a long-term girlfriend of eight years. And I thought, why don't I go somewhere where I don't know anyone? I'll do a bit of soul searching. And Lebanon came up. It was kind of one of the few places where I literally knew absolutely no one. I had planned absolutely nothing with the trip either. I had done zero research. I was winging the whole thing.

• 2:17Speaker 03

  So you landed in Beirut, not knowing much about Lebanon. How did you find out about the Hezbollah theme park?

• 2:22Speaker 04

  The day I landed, I was like, I kind of just want to get my feel of the lay of the land. So I looked online and found like a free walking tour, just to kind of give me a bit of a crash course in the city's history. And I met this guy who was British, a little bit nebbish. And he worked for, I want to say the UK Home Office or something like that. Me and him had a bit of banter on the walk. And after, as we said, why don't we go get a pint? And then after, I think about pint number seven that afternoon, he kind of felt out the fact that I was Jewish and so was he. So he goes, oh, do you want to go do something really, really different? I go, yeah, what? And he goes, let's go to the Hezbollah museum or Hezbollah theme park called Malita in southern Lebanon.

• 3:06Speaker 04

  And I just said, yeah, sure, why not? And I didn't, I didn't do any research. I didn't Google it. I just said, yes. And he said, cool, meet me tomorrow at 9am. And we got a taxi out there. The thing people don't realise about Lebanon is it's a tiny country. So, you know, to go from one end to the other, it's only a couple of hours. Remember, it was just over an hour to get out there. You know, it's, it's not in a town. It's, it's out in the middle of nowhere. So as soon as we arrived, we go, how are we going to get back? And we said, oh, we'll figure it out later. You know, how hard can it be? I'm sure plenty of other people are there.

• 3:38Speaker 03

  There'll be a bus. There'll be a courtesy bus.

• 3:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, that was not the case. As we're, you know, kind of rolling in, there's these massive yellow Hezbollah flags. We start to walk from the, the car park up to the main entrance and there is no one around. No taxis, no other visitors. It is an absolute ghost town.

• 3:59Speaker 03

  Okay. First of all, what year was this?

• 4:01Speaker 04

  This was early October 2019. It was not a particularly hot time in terms of geopolitics. It was on the calmer side.

• 4:09Speaker 03

  Yes, before the explosion at the port.

• 4:12Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 4:12Speaker 03

  And it's before the civil unrest.

• 4:14Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 4:14Speaker 03

  But a very odd situation. Two Jewish guys rocking up at the Hezbollah museum with absolutely nobody else around. Describe the theme park for me. I'm imagining sort of the open gates of like Disneyland with like the turnstiles and stuff? Or are we talking about sort of a smaller sort of a setup?

• 4:35Speaker 04

  Call it a theme park is probably generous. It's more of a historical site that you might see with a few children's attractions thrown in, something maybe equivalent to Port Arthur in Tasmania, where it's a bit more history-based and you can walk around. It's probably not as big as the Port Arthur side. But as you walk in, you go down a very, very long stone pathway with a bunch of cedar trees on the left and right. And then there's the ticket desk on the left-hand side. You pay your entry fee, which was, I think about $6 Australian, you know, a couple of hundred Lebanese pounds. And then they make you, when you arrive, you have to go watch a video. They said, no, no, no, because we tried to walk off. They said, no, no, this way first.

• 5:14Speaker 03

  You're going to have the induction.

• 5:15Speaker 04

  Yes, you go and sit in the theatre and they play you about a 10-minute-long propaganda video.

• 5:20Speaker 03

  I've got part of the video here. I'll have a look.

• 5:23Speaker 03

  Oh my goodness, it's very dramatic music. We've got explosions.

• 5:29Speaker 03

  Oh, Hassan Nasrallah is making a speech about how Israel needs to be eradicated.

• 5:36Speaker 03

  So you come out of the propaganda video. Do they have some sort of like a map that you have a look at? You know, that they often have at these sites, theme parks and that kind of thing?

• 5:44Speaker 04

  Yes, there's a map of the site, which looks like a typical tourist attraction or theme park map.

• 5:48Speaker 03

  Oh, great. Here we go. Yep, yep.

• 5:50Speaker 04

  That lists, you know, gift shop, parking, playground, restaurant. And then you've got other interesting things like shooting range or the abyss.

• 6:00Speaker 03

  The abyss is very exciting. I'm very, very keen to find out about the abyss. But yeah, this looks exactly like any other theme park map. The names of the things are extremely interesting and get more interesting as you go down the line. Martyrs' Hill, Liberation Square. Two of them are just cave and tunnel. It's a very big car park for there to only be you there.

• 6:25Speaker 04

  It is. Maybe it was the day of the week we went. Maybe it wasn't school holidays.

• 6:28Speaker 03

  Of course. Yeah, yeah. You managed to skip the school holiday rush.

• 6:30Speaker 04

  And if you also look in the right-hand corner and zoom in on that map, there's your typical government sponsors.

• 6:38Speaker 03

  Oh, yes. The Ministry of Culture. Yep, yep.

• 6:40Speaker 04

  And Lebanese Ministry of Tourism.

• 6:42Speaker 03

  Radio. So this is an official thing. Okay. So where do you head first?

• 6:46Speaker 04

  The first thing you see when you come out is the abyss.

• 6:48Speaker 03

  To describe it, it looks like a, when you walk into a zoo and like this area is where the giraffes are. And you walk all the way around the outside of it on a walkway, except instead of being a sort of a grassy area with giraffes in it, it is a concrete area with exploded parts of it and rusted out tanks, exploded helicopter parts, artillery cannons, positioned in a very dramatic way to show them sort of like as though they've just been destroyed.

• 7:18Speaker 04

  And then there is a bunch of barbed wire layering over it to look like a spider web. So it's meant to be kind of a modern art take on the idea that fighting Hezbollah was like getting ensnared in a spider's web in the mountains of southern Lebanon, because it's very treacherous terrain. It's people who have lived there their whole lives. There's a myriad of caves and tunnels for people to hide.

• 7:44Speaker 03

  Yeah. So this is terrifying and very intimidating, but it's actually, it's quite artistic.

• 7:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's not something you would usually associate with a turnus group like Hezbollah to, you know, be so big on metaphors. But I've got a photo here of the placard that was next to it. It says, the abyss. It says, this structural scenic artwork symbolises the defeat of the Zionist entity. It is composed with Israeli armoured vehicles, cars and weapons, which have been captured by the resistance between 1982 and the War of July 2006.

• 8:15Speaker 03

  All right, let's go to the cave and the tunnel. What do the cave and the tunnel look like?

• 8:20Speaker 04

  So you immediately start to descend down into the tunnel network. The tunnel network is 200 metres long. It's basically a circuit that halfway through, it really had the vibe of when you go to the nocturnal animal section of the zoo, how it's really low, it's very dark. And then you've got these glass placards that have got low lights, which usually might be, you know, hosting a fruit bat or.

• 8:44Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, you don't want to bother the wombat. Yeah, yeah.

• 8:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, but in this case, it's hosting machine guns, like the little dugout where people would sleep, a couple of Hezbollah flags, some radios blaring.

• 8:55Speaker 03

  Oh, yes. Yep.

• 8:57Speaker 04

  And I'm 6'1", but my head was scraping the top, so it's not very high. It's, it is quite low.

• 9:02Speaker 03

  From the look of it, I'd be able to walk through this tunnel without bending too much. But, you know, it's level. You don't have to clamber over anything. It's a pretty luxurious looking tunnel. So this is what it's like to be inside a Hezbollah tunnel, or at least this is what Hezbollah wants you to think that it's like to be inside a Hezbollah tunnel.

• 9:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's, so this particular tunnel was specifically from the 2006 war.

• 9:21Speaker 03

  So, um, we've been to the abyss, which is trying to show the destruction of Israel. We've been to the tunnels, which try to show what it would be like inside the tunnels of Hezbollah. Where do you go then?

• 9:35Speaker 04

  And then it kind of spits you out after you go in a roundabout circle into Liberation Square.

• 9:40Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 9:40Speaker 04

  Which is kind of an opening, kind of grass, kind of lookout area, and it's surrounded by a bunch more weapons. And then you kind of end up back at the abyss.

• 9:48Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 9:48Speaker 04

  And then you cross the abyss, you're up high on the hill. So the view is actually beautiful. The big one is called Martyrs Hill, and they have a list of a lot of the fighters that were, you know, as they would call it martyred or made shahids fighting in the war.

• 10:01Speaker 03

  So it would be sort of the equivalent of our war memorial, sort of a setup vaguely.

• 10:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, something similar to that. There's actually a Reuters article that was written a while back that cited that approximately half a million people were estimated to have visited the theme park in its first 10 weeks. Given there was two other people when we were there, maybe everyone who wanted to see it, you know, got in nice and early when it opened first in May, May 25th of 2010.

• 10:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 10:29Speaker 04

  You know, I'm not an expert on these things, but I think the real art is, you know, having a reason for people to come back over and over again. And, you know, I think maybe that's where the Hezbollah marketing team haven't really taken a consideration of how we, uh, how we change it.

• 10:41Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, look, you know, I mean, that's the reason that you're in Brisbane. They've set up Bluey's World there in Brisbane, and that's there for a sort of a limited time only. That's going to be moving to other places. And I assume that they just assume that everyone in Brisbane will go through Bluey's World and then eventually they can move it to Melbourne. You go through there one time, you get all the surprises, doing it again, uh.

• 11:00Speaker 04

  Well, you know, with, um, like Dreamworld in Queensland, that they keep, you know, adding new rides or getting some new tigers or koalas or something like that. Maybe that's what they need to do at the tourist landmark of resistance in southern Lebanon. Then maybe they need to just add the occasional new roller coaster or, or, you know, stuffed mascot or something like that to keep people coming back. Because of those half a million people that visited in the first 10 weeks, none of them seem to be particularly interested in returning nine years later when we were there.

• 11:26Speaker 03

  Okay, then something that you would not necessarily expect to see at a regular theme park is a shooting range. You went and checked out the shooting range, did you?

• 11:36Speaker 04

  It's kind of like, if you ever played the game Time Crisis.

• 11:39Speaker 03

  Like an arcade game where you point a gun at a screen and shoot the zombies or whatever. Yeah.

• 11:43Speaker 04

  Correct. But in this instance, the guns they're using are actually decommissioned machine guns. And on the screens are Israeli soldiers that come at you like bloodthirsty zombies.

• 11:54Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 11:54Speaker 04

  And it's done in kind of poor eight bit. For 2019, it, we, you thought it would have looked a bit sharper. It definitely looked a little bit dated.

• 12:01Speaker 03

  Right. So the graphics not up to scratch. This is for kids to, to do?

• 12:05Speaker 04

  This is for children. Yeah. We asked them when we were there, the whole thing is designed for kids.

• 12:09Speaker 03

  To shoot the Israeli soldiers. We've really entered into an area of this does not have really an analog in any of the, uh, Western military museums that I've been to. I haven't been to a Western military museum in Germany where you get to shoot Soviets running at you. No, I haven't seen that.

• 12:24Speaker 04

  No, keeping with the theme of activities for the kiddies.

• 12:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:27Speaker 04

  When you walk out of that shooting range, there's a playground.

• 12:31Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 12:31Speaker 04

  Which is covered in beautiful horizontal pavers with grass peeking through. It's actually quite pretty and there's beautiful trees around. And all the fixtures are painted orange, like the park benches and the fences.

• 12:43Speaker 03

  Hmm. Looks like a nice playground until you look carefully.

• 12:47Speaker 04

  When you take a look, all the steel, so the fences and surrounding, they're all actually made out of muzzles from, uh, Kalashnikovs. Everything is just made of guns.

• 12:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, the struts of the fence are all Kalashnikov barrels. And up on the walls, we have what looks like more rifle barrels. Yeah. Okay. So it's a gun playground.

• 13:11Speaker 04

  And then, you know, as you walk around from that museum, there's also up on the hill, a restaurant. Uh, you know, often when you go to, you know, the local koala park or whatever, and here in Australia, you go to the cafe, they're usually pretty poxy and serve, you know, chicken nuggets or stale hot dogs. But the cafe at the Hezbollah museum, it's actually fantastic. We had some beautiful falafel there and some kufthas. Very large, you know, 60 seat cafe looking over the mountains. The view was amazing. And then the food was really good, but there was just no one there. Once again, it was very surreal and eerie.

• 13:42Speaker 03

  Okay. So you went to the cafe. Please tell me there's a gift shop.

• 13:45Speaker 04

  So that was our last thing we visited on our way out. There should be a video there of us entering the gift shop.

• 13:51Speaker 03

  Oh my goodness. It's all of the junk that you see at a tourist gift shop, except all of it is Hezbollah themed. So we've got a Hezbollah themed tea towels, framed photos of Nazrallah.

• 14:08Speaker 04

  There's hats. Yeah. There's some framed photos of the Ayatollah as well.

• 14:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:12Speaker 04

  But also there's all these painted ceramic pirate ships.

• 14:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:17Speaker 04

  But the flag is either a Palestinian flag or it's the Hezbollah flag. It probably just makes for a nice, uh, ashtray or something like that.

• 14:24Speaker 03

  Look, the company that was making the scented candles possibly just went, you know, we could also do up a bunch of pirate ships for you.

• 14:31Speaker 04

  And if you also look down, there's snow globes there as well.

• 14:34Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 14:35Speaker 04

  Many different kinds of ashtrays as well. You know, instead of when you might find tea towels with local birds on it, you've instead got caps with decorated military fatigues and stuff like that. So, you know, there's something, something for everyone.

• 14:47Speaker 03

  I can't overstate the similarity of the vibe of this gift shop to the gift shop that you'd be in at Scenic World Khatumba or something like that. The shelves look the same, the lighting is the same, the layout is very similar. And I'm sure it's not the same company that makes these things for Hezbollahers, makes them for Koala Park or for Taronga Zoo. But it really looks really similar and that's very upsetting to me.

• 15:17Speaker 04

  I actually bought a hat for a friend of mine who's got some pretty staunch right wing politics. I thought it'd be a hoot if I bought him a yellow Hezbollah trucker's cap, but I left it in the taxi. Um, on the way home.

• 15:27Speaker 03

  It's a shame.

• 15:28Speaker 04

  And then I tried to buy a replacement by going to Southern Beirut, listed as the no go area on the DFAT website. Within Beirut itself, that's kind of the Hezbollah stronghold. On my way to the airport, a couple of days later, I was like, oh, we'll just stop in in Southern Beirut on the way to the airport and see if I can find a hat. And no hat was found, but I did get a lot of strange looks because not a lot of foreigners visit that part of town. Yeah. No, no hat was forthcoming.

• 15:51Speaker 03

  Before we wrap up, what was the staff like? Like, were they friendly and helpful?

• 15:54Speaker 04

  The staff upon the entry were very cold and I think they were really confused while we were there. But I do remember the gift shop staff were quite friendly and thought it was really funny, the stuff we were looking at and thought it was quite quirky that we were buying this stuff. There was also not many staff there.

• 16:09Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 16:09Speaker 04

  There was a couple of armed guards around, but besides that, I can't stress how much of a ghost town the place was and how it made it all the more eerie. It's kind of weird for a beginning, then you kind of think near the end, you go, if something happens to me here, no one will know.

• 16:26Speaker 03

  No, no one's going to come looking for you at the Hezbollah museum. No.

• 16:29Speaker 04

  No. And from memory, there's very limited reception there. There's no taxis around. You're really out in the middle of nowhere.

• 16:35Speaker 03

  Okay. So how did you get back to Beirut?

• 16:37Speaker 04

  We definitely stuck around for a while in the car park, waiting for another taxi to turn up. And then I think from memory, one of the security guards actually called us a taxi that turned up and requested rather princely sum from us to take us back to Beirut.

• 16:50Speaker 03

  He really had you there.

• 16:52Speaker 04

  It was definitely a seller's market on the taxis to get out of there. He really had a win there. He'd be getting both the large fee to drive us back to Beirut as well as a very funky Hezbollah trucker hat.

• 17:01Speaker 03

  How did you and your friend reflect on this outing together? What did he think? What did you think? How did you feel about it afterwards?

• 17:06Speaker 04

  At the time, we just thought it was really crazy. We went for a drink afterwards, reflected on how odd the whole thing was. It kind of didn't dawn on us until kind of much later that night, that we were probably really playing with fire a bit. It might raise some eyebrows by various parties as to what in the hell we were thinking by going there. As we were ruminating on it afterwards, we were in a, a small bar in downtown Beirut where people were, you know, banging on the, banging on the, uh, the bar and dancing on the tables. And we thought, look, it might've been a bit hairy today, but this place is all right. It's good fun. It wasn't the highlight in terms of the most hospitable or warm thing we saw in Lebanon. There's a lot of great things to do and see in Lebanon. Lebanese people are great. But, um, at least we got a really good story out of it. That's the main thing.

• 17:49Speaker 03

  You sure did.

• 17:50Speaker 04

  Because obviously COVID happened in 2020 and then the subsequent war. I haven't been back to Israel since, after having been about three times prior to that. But all these videos are like public on my Instagram and they're still on my phone. So I'm looking forward to the interesting conversation I have with customs and, and border security when I next arrive at Big Gwain Airport.

• 18:06Speaker 03

  I wouldn't recommend wearing your, uh, Hezbollah trucker hat. Maybe it's a good thing that you left it in the taxi.

• 18:19Speaker 03

  Alex, thank you. It certainly is a good story. You certainly did get that out of it. It's a ripper. Thank you very much for, uh, telling us all about it and sharing your pictures and videos. It's very scary, but it was fascinating. Thanks so much.

• 18:31Speaker 04

  No worries. Thanks for having me, Matt.