In the week since their
panicked exodus from Lebanon into Israel, the South Lebanese Army refugees are
finding it hard to understand the bitter truth of their exile. Some are even
thinking of returning to their homeland.
Simon Louis Helou, the only South
Lebanese Army man among those who have found refuge at Beit Feldman in Netanya
who agreed to be interviewed and identified by name, was never involved in
battle in the security zone. He was just a maintenance officer at Marj Ayoun
for nine years, and for the past four years he worked in a shoe store in Kiryat
Shmona. However, he is clinging to his conviction that only one fate awaits him
back in Lebanon: death.The sights of the past few days, which have shown that
the Hezbollah is being directed to content itself with looting and wild victory
celebrations, have not convinced him otherwise. "They laughed at all of
them, at all the people who turned themselves in to the Hezbollah," he
said. "I'm sure that all of them are now in the hands of the Syrian
intelligence, languishing in Syrian prisons. For me there is no prison, they're
looking to kill me," he added with miserable insistence, swinging between
painful despair and games of lost honor. "I worked too close to the
Israelis, when I brought supplies from Israel to the outposts, and then I
opened a restaurant in my village and I would bring provisions from Kiryat
Shmona and make felafel, just like in Israel, with salads and everything. It's
not allowed."
Blue-eyed and lean, he sits on his bed
in the small room full of army cots that was allocated to him, his wife and his
three children in one of the hospitality centers run by the Va'ad Lema'an
Hahayal (soldiers' welfare committee).
Depression overwhelms him. The noise of
the children outside and the weeping of his 10-year-old daughter whose friends
threw sand in her eyes while they were playing brought a faint smile to his
lips. "All my work in the SLA, all my work in Israel, an entire life, all
the money I saved," he muttered, his eyes moist. "I invested it all
in trucks, cars, a home for my children, the restaurant. All of it was taken by
Hezbollah agents, our neighbors. I know them all. We worked together in the SLA
and suddenly overnight they're Hezbollah, stealing, setting my house on fire. I
worked day and night and now it has all collapsed. Now I'm zero, zero I tell
you, beginning all over again. I'm tired, very tired. For 20 years I've just
been working all the time for my wife, my children. How could they do this to
us?"
A living and pride
The family originates in Jezzine. His
father is a priest who opposed his service in the SLA ("Every father
doesn't want his son to go to the army," he explained). He was born and
married in Clea, a Maronite village on the border with Israel - it is located
in the midst of the cluster of Christian villages around Marjayoun in the heart
of the Shi'ite area of southern Lebanon.
Clea was among the first villages to
have collaborated with Israel. Many of its children were born during the
Israeli rule over the security zone, and knew the reality of the occupation,
poverty and forced alienation from northern Lebanon, with total economic
dependence on Israel. The most accessible source of a living, which ensured a
good life with about $500 a month ("In southern Lebanon, that's a
fortune"), was the SLA. The SLA people got rich quickly and accumulated
power. This is the name of the game in a torn, crushed country, slashed by
ethnic wars, without a strong central government, easy prey for generations of
colonialists - French, British, Israeli and Syrian. The Israel Defense Forces
(IDF), "strong, organized and no Arab army can beat it," as Helou
puts it, was greeted with open arms in Clea.
In contrast to the West Bank and the
Gaza Strip, in the security zone Israel also invested in infrastructures,
health care and education, happily nurturing false Christian rationalizations
of carrying the flag of progress, democracy and Western civilization.
"Those who wanted to take the SLA apart wanted to wipe out Lebanon, to
take it back 2,000 years, to camels and donkeys, without universities, without
progress," confided Hashem Nazim, a relative of Helou's, who thanks to his
fluent Hebrew and his military connections became the Lebanese refugees'
representative at Beit Feldman. He exudes self-confidence and his manner is
almost Israeli, but his boastful humor does not disguise his vulnerability and
anger. "Today, we cannot speak out. We are refugees and it's
inappropriate, but in the near future, the truth will come to light," he
warned aggressively, pointing an accusing finger, rather surprisingly, at
America. "Do you know how much he lost?" whispers Helou. "His
son alone left behind a store for Tambour paint products worth $100,000, a Mercedes
300, a Mercedes 190, a transporter van. They took everything."
Simon Helou continued to try his luck
marketing cosmetic products for seven years after Israel invaded Lebanon.
"It was hard, people didn't pay, they took merchandise on credit and I was
ashamed to ask my relatives for money." He married a woman from his
village, whose father was the head of Anton Lahad's personal bodyguard and
whose brothers also served in the SLA in 1989. Nine months after he was
married, when his wife was in her seventh month of pregnancy, he too went the
way of his in-laws. "I went into an existing situation, but it was my
choice. I went to earn a living and nobody made me do it. My primary aim was to
live respectably and with pride and to defend our area so that we could have a
better future, so that we would lack for nothing, so that we would have what to
eat and drink. We were strong, the only ones who weren't doing whatever Syria
said, not afraid of anyone, expressing our opinions without fear, like in
Israel. In Beirut, for example, anyone who opens his mouth against Syria
disappears.
"I want everyone to know,
including those who stayed behind in Lebanon, that we have lost houses and
vehicles but we have not lost our honor and pride, even when we are in
Israel."
Had he known the end of the story in
advance, he would not have chosen this path, admits Helou as he curls back into
his hurt, like a deflated balloon. He has a lot of friends in the IDF, and one
of them is even a lieutenant colonel, but he cannot trace him. For some time he
understood that Israel would withdraw, it was no surprise, but he did not
expect it to be like this. He believed that Israel would see to it that the
vacuum it left behind would be filled by UNIFIL and that the SLA forces would
continue to function as a Christian militia that would stop the Hezbollah.
He knew that they were strong,
especially in Clea, and he never imagined that anyone was intending to topple
them intentionally, he said cautiously. It was not at random that the IDF withdrew
first from the central front, he said, voicing the complaint that is most
common among the SLA refugees - and not devoid of hatred for Shi'ites. Shi'ites
were serving in the outposts in this front. They were forced to enlist in the
SLA, were not as devoted to struggle as the Christians, and rushed to turn
themselves in to the Hezbollah. This is what started the panic that caused the
SLA to collapse like dominoes, they say.
Helou watched the takeover of Ras al
Naqura, Remeish and Bint Jebail by the Hezbollah on television. When they got
to Adisa, 18 kilometers from Clea, he understood that it was all over. The next
day there was no school and he and his family crowded into his restaurant. The
telephone never stopped ringing and he and his friends exchanged information
all the time. The shooting grew closer. They were experienced in civil war and
the psychological warfare of the Hezbollah did not fall on deaf ears. "We
will kill them inside their houses, and we will not even leave their dead on
Lebanese land. They are unclean," threatened Hassan Nasrallah in a
television broadcast. General Lahad was in Paris. There was no one to tell them
what to do.
Until the last minute Helou did not
believe that he would have to abandon his home. "We looked at one another,
and we didn't now what to do. We were all on our own, and if we hadn't fled
there would have been a river of blood, because we were the first to have held
out a hand to Israel and we said that the IDF and the SLA were one," he
protested. Only at the very last minute did he and his wife pack whatever they
could lay their hands on and joined the flow of cars heading for the border.
Like thousands of others he was not
allowed to bring his Mercedes into Israel. IDF soldiers ordered him to leave
the car with the keys inside and he saw the Hezbollah people who pursued them
smashing the windows. "I lost a home, and a restaurant, and now a
car," he wailed. "I don't want to go back to Lebanon. It's over.
There's nothing left for me there. I don't even want my Lebanese identity card.
Enough! why should Lebanese do this to Lebanese? I want to be an Israeli, an
American. Enough. Why is everyone in Lebanon so bad, all of them?" He
wiped a tear from his eye. "I don't want to hear about Lebanon. Why, did we
wrong them? We worked, we just wanted peace. Lebanon is not a state. Only if
they wipe out the militias and get rid of the Syrian rule, then maybe I'll go
back there, but this won't happen, even in another 150 years. What do our
children know of Lebanon? They've never seen Beirut, they've never seen
anything, they're outcasts, because we're from the SLA."
Like thieves in the night
It has been a week since the panicked
exodus from Lebanon into Israel, and as the days go by the South Lebanese Army
refugees are feeling that they have come to a dead end. Within 24 hours they
disappeared from the main headlines in the Israeli media and have been
forgotten. They have begun to taste the bitterness of being uprooted and are
still finding it hard to digest the meaning of being refugees, of having
nothing, of being defeated, humiliated, deprived of all their assets and bereft
of the positions of power that had been their lot. With all their might they
are defending myths that collapsed in one night of chaos.
Many of them are playing with the idea of returning to their
homeland. The key: a peace treaty between Israel and Syria that would not
ignore them, for a change. This week they were taken by Interior Ministry
officials for private talks in their rooms and offered the choice between
tickets overseas, returning to Lebanon or staying in Israel. They do not dare
to admit it, but they have an unhappy feeling that they are not wanted here,
despite their blood covenant with Israel.
"I don't care whether I'm wanted
here or not, but I'll get all the rights of a new immigrant here. Not as a
favor, but by right. Every one of us has had a blood transfusion in an Israeli
hospital, and our blood is Jewish," said a Maronite man in all
seriousness. Generously proportioned, his dark, chubby face radiates calm and
his blue eyes are challenging. He has nothing against Israel; everything he did
was "normal," he said. Only the Lebanese Christians need blame
themselves for not taking advantage of the golden opportunity they were given
by Israel, when it set a Maronite president, Bashir Jumaiyel, over them in the
1980s.
It is hard for them to come to terms
with the elimination of the SLA, even though most of them realize that Israel
cannot abandon the security zone to a war between militias on its northern
border; and who better than they know to respect the Israeli interests that
justify everything. But why, they ask, was it necessary to sneak out within 24
hours like thieves in the night, under cover of false and insulting propaganda
about the unexpected collapse of the SLA, while SLA commanders had received
direct orders to disperse the outposts. In some of the villages, they say, SLA
soldiers formed up at the approaches along with boys of 10 and 12 who were
given weapons in order to stop the Hezbollah, but the senior officers showed up
there and ordered them to retreat. "Israel wanted a quiet withdrawal and
we paid with our souls, with our future, with our fate," they said
exhaustedly. "We accepted this like a flock of sheep, as if we were
standing at a stoplight that suddenly changed from red to green and everybody
started driving."
"In Lebanon I wouldn't have looked
at this twice," sneered a young man of 27, holding a second-hand shirt,
but in the end he took the entire pile to his room. He was nine years old when
Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982. His father left the shelter to bring them food
and water and never came back. Since he was 15, he has carried arms. He grew
accustomed to killing, ambushes, and war became second nature to him, an
everyday fact. Every morning he went to the outpost and every evening he came
home to run his family affairs. He was wounded three times. "What could I
do? I had to work," he shrugged. He needed money to support his mother and
his younger siblings. Later, he absorbed the "SLA ideology" that only
Israel can help southern Lebanon ("The Lebanese government doesn't even
have paper to feed southern Lebanon," he snorted).
He has not ceased to make his reckoning
with the defeat, restlessly, with repressed anger. "We would never have
turned ourselves in. We would have fought to the end, but Israeli soldiers came
to the outpost and said to us: 'This is it, we're folding, right now. Anyone
who wants to come to Israel, should come.' I was afraid of the Syrians. They're
cruel. I knew that I had to take my family with me. They left us no
alternative." Today, in retrospect, he thinks that he would prefer Lebanon
without any foreign control - Israeli, Syrian or Iranian. For Israel, he is
nursing a sweet prediction of revenge, when its chosen policy hits it in the
face. "I have information that Syria has stopped supporting the Hezbollah
and has begun to train Palestinians from the refugee camps again," he
revealed angrily. "I hope that [Prime Minister Ehud Barak] picks this up
and makes peace with Syria, so that we can go back to Lebanon."
The Israeli plot
"The IDF simply betrayed us,"
muttered a man of about 35. Rosy-cheeked, choked with anger, his blue eyes red
with pain, he has just come back from the hospital. He removed his two
prosthetic legs and stretched out on the bed. Twelve years of service in a
commando unit of the SLA have exacted a high price from him. He, like others,
is not prepared to talk about his injuries and the action he has seen in
battle, for fear of the Hezbollah should he return to Lebanon. "What will
become of people like me, who will take care of them, who will give disability
payments to 250 wounded veterans, to widows, to orphans?" he burst out.
"Enough. I want to tell the truth, I want to rest. It was only out of fear
that we ran away. Officers promised us that we would be able to continue to
fight for our villages, to cling to our land, but Israel plotted with Hezbollah
and allowed it to use children as a living shield. Israeli soldiers see how
they throw stones and insult their prime minister by the fence and they don't
do a thing, because there is an agreement between Israel and Syria and the
Hezbollah to hand over southern Lebanon to them."
"I'm finished." His young,
pretty wife grasped her head, her plentiful hair wild, a tremor of exhaustion
in her jaw. For the past two years, ever since her husband was injured, she
worked as a secretary in the SLA. "Maybe you'll come tomorrow? The
children think we're on a trip here. What will become of us?" she
stammered.
"We are loyal to Israel and we
love our country, but we never wanted it to become an Islamic state. By what
right did Israel stop us from fighting?," continued her husband furiously.
"Why is it that in Beirut when they see (Likud NK Ariel) Sharon they begin
to shake all over and when they see Barak they make obscene gestures? The
Hezbollah must be crushed. if you let go it will raise its head like a snake.
No question about it. We love Sharon and (former prime minister Benjamin) Netanyahu."
A hawkish rhetoric of Israeli
nationalism that is more Israeli than the Israelis' own has met with impotence,
facing betrayal in a reality in which betrayal and cynical exploitation are
in-built. "Why do I need to feel sorry for Israel?" the wife wept.
"This is it's responsibility. Cursed be the day that we put our trust in
Israel. How could we have thought that it was possible to make friends with
Israel? We helped them be in our country, we made friends with them, even
though everyone told us not to get close to the Jews, and within six hours they
abandoned us. We want to know what will happen to us. Maybe tomorrow they will
come to an agreement with the Hezbollah to send us back to Lebanon, without an
agreement. Israel wanted to get out of Lebanon and all the dirt lands on our
heads. For 25 years we were with Israel, half of its life as a state, and it
left us."
A Christian dream
Outside, on the lawn, the SLA men
surrounded Anton Lahad, who came for a surprise visit, surrounded by Shin Bet agents.
The former head of his bodyguard walked about with a smile of enjoyment on his
face and muttered: "The general, the general." There were also others
who still took pleasure in his soothing words, but most of the men, nervous and
impatient, listened tensely, particularly the younger men, who wore on their
chests gold chains with crosses. 'You're a maniac, a cheat, a liar. You raised
the price of gas and you stole the money. You took the money and you fled to
France. Where were you when we needed you? And now you come along to cheat us,
to tell us fairy stories," screamed a young Christian man.
One of Lahad's Shi'ite followers tried
to quiet him. Within seconds a fight broke out between Lahad's supporters and
his opponents, and yelling was heard from all quarters. "I'll kill him,
the son of a bitch." Shin Bet men skillfully whisked Lahad out of the
arena, and then turned to calming things down, but the tension remained in the
air for a long time. Young SLA men went about with strained faces, eaten up by
bitterness. "Yes, the Christians are angrier at him than anyone else. He
has betrayed the Christian cause," explained one of the young men.
And as the adults complain, the children are more enthusiastic. "Israel is beautiful and quiet. Everything is good. It's like a dream and I hope to stay here," says tanned and enthusiastic a boy of 14 wearing a baseball cap. "I'll go home only if Syria pulls out and Lebanon becomes a Maronite and Christian country. In Syria the Muslims have a lot of room, and in Iran too. Lebanon must not be stained by Muslims, because it is very beautiful. There is nowhere more beautiful in the whole world, but it has become a war zone, and that's why I don't want to go back.