By Michael S.Arnold, Jerusalem Post, 19.6.00
Special to the Chicago Sun-Times (June 16) - Michael S. Arnold visits a
refugee camp in south Lebanon, where almost all of the residents still harbor
hopes of returning to what is now Israel.
The streets of the Ein el-Hilweh refugee camp outside Sidon are narrow
and strewn with garbage. There is barely enough room for a single car to pass,
and when two meet head-on a game of chicken ensues until one driver is forced
to the side, crowding pedestrians into corner stores, barber shops and butcher
shops where withered hunks of raw meat hang from the ceiling.
Telephone and electricity poles are plastered with pictures of martyrs
killed struggling for their people's rights during the long half-century that
the Palestinians have managed to eke out their survival in Lebanon.
One does not find here many pictures of Palestinian Authority Chairman
Yasser Arafat. His willingness to enter into the Oslo peace process with Israel
is considered an act of treachery by many Ein el-Hilweh residents, who still
nurse the hope that they will return not only to Palestine, but to the very
homes they left behind in 1948 - places like Acre, Tzippori and Haifa.
Abed Makdeh - better known as Abu Nada - coordinator of the various camp
committees in Lebanon and the closest thing to a mayor in Ein el-Hilweh, clucks
his tongue in disgust when Arafat's name is mentioned.
"Arafat is a catastrophe," Abu Nada says. "He doesn't
speak for us or for any of the Palestinian refugees. He has sold out the
Palestinian cause and any agreement he signs will not last. Even if it takes
another 50 or 100 years and I won't live to see it, we will return to our
land."
ISRAELI leaders who think the Palestinian demand for a right of return
is primarily symbolic would do well to listen to the voices issuing from Ein
el-Hilweh and other refugee camps across Lebanon.
Hizbullah's success in south Lebanon, as well as the impromptu reunions
along the border fence with relatives living in Israel, have strengthened many
refugees' conviction that their return to their former homes inside Israel is
imminent.
Several themes surface repeatedly in conversations with camp residents:
Any peace without a return will prove only temporary. An armed struggle against
Israel will resume, whether from across the Lebanese border or from within
Palestinian Authority areas. All are prepared to wait uncounted generations to
retrieve the homeland the Jews stole.
The stories of loss and personal tragedy are heart-rending, the desire
to return all-encompassing. It is also a sure recipe for continued, even
unending, Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Far from the air-conditioned rooms in Oslo and Stockholm and Wye
Plantation where Israeli and Palestinian negotiators have struggled to find a
formula for tenuous coexistence, it is in gritty and desperate places like Ein
el-Hilweh that one begins to fear that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will
not be solved by agreements over settlements and water rights, but is, as
pessimists long have argued, an insoluble existential struggle.
"A Jew from Poland will go back to Poland. A Jew from America will
go back to America," says Amina Nawfal, who left her home in Safurriye
(Tzippori) when she was 10. "We're not going to agree to [financial
compensation]. It is either us or the Jews in Israel."
THE LARGEST of the country's refugee camps, Ein el-Hilweh is home to
some 70,000 of the estimated 340,000 Palestinians living in Lebanon, most of
them refugees from the Galilee who fled or were expelled in the summer campaign
of 1948.
Barely tolerated in most Arab countries - Jordan is the only one to have
offered them citizenship - the refugees' situation is even more precarious in
Lebanon than the rest of the Arab world. Stripped of many basic civic and
social rights, camp residents are prevented from working in some 70
professions. Those who have specialized training, such as doctors, are allowed
to work only within the camps.
In part their treatment is a product of history. The Palestinians are
remembered for upsetting Lebanon's ethnic balance - plunging the country into
civil war in 1975 - and for the murderous cross-border attacks from
"Fatahland" that led to Israeli invasions in 1978 and 1982 and the
18-year Israeli occupation of south Lebanon.
Many Lebanese have reasons of their own for supporting the Palestinians'
right of return: the Palestinians, they frequently say, are
"troublemakers."
In part, too, it is a question of numbers. With some 18 groups competing
for power in a society that has shown itself unable to bridge ethnic divides,
the addition of 340,000 refugees, mostly Sunni Moslems - a figure roughly equal
to 10 percent of the country's total population - could destabilize the fragile
balance Lebanese leaders managed to establish after a 15-year civil war.
"We have a small country with a lot of unemployment," explains
Lebanese Prime Minister Salim Hoss. "We have always looked at the
Palestinians as guests in our country who will go back to their homes when the
opportunity is open to them. They have been treated accordingly."
While many in Israel and the West criticize the Arab countries for
cynically exploiting the suffering of Palestinian refugees as political
ammunition in the struggle against Israel, camp residents actually praise the
degrading treatment they have received from the Lebanese government. Otherwise,
they say, they might have gotten too comfortable in their new homes, and given
up on returning to their old ones.
"Lebanon has been our host for 50 years and it is their right to
keep us in this state," Abu Nada says. "We don't want to remain here.
We want to return to our homes."
UNLIKE the younger generation that has known nothing but the misery of
the camps, Nawfal has personal memories of Palestine.
"Our memories are like a dream, like something seen faintly in a
mirror," she explains. Palestine, in the stories she and other refugees
pass down to their children and grandchildren, is a place where the vineyards
produced the sweetest grapes known to man, the orchards the juiciest lemons.
Like many camp residents, Abu Nada's nephew Munir Makdeh has a huge
picture of the Dome of the Rock on the wall of his living room. Beneath it, in
the shade of a potted plant, he keeps a rocket launcher. Weapons are an
integral part of refugee homes, he says, as much a part of the furniture as a
vase or a coffee table.
"President [Emile] Lahoud says there are tens of thousands of armed
Palestinians in Lebanon," Makdeh says. "I say he is wrong. Since 1948,
all Palestinians have been an armed nation."
Makdeh, affiliated with Fatah, describes himself as the head of a
unified Palestinian militia in Lebanon, but experts disagree.
Nizar Hamzeh, a political scientist at the American University of
Beirut, says each Palestinian political party has its own armed force in
Lebanon and takes orders from forces outside the country.
A Fatah militia gets its orders directly from the West Bank and Gaza,
even from Palestinian Preventive Security head Jibril Rajoub. Hamas and Islamic
Jihad militias take orders from the leaders of those movements abroad. One
faction is closely tied to Syria. An Islamic faction known as the Supporters'
League gets its orders from Saudi-born terrorist Osama bin Laden, Hamzeh says.
Makdeh's authority in the militias has made him a figure of wealth and
power in Ein el-Hilweh. A strikingly handsome man dressed in green camouflage
pants and a casual shirt, a garnet ring on his long and elegant fingers, he
offers visitors bitter black coffee in the courtyard of his spacious home.
"Our problem with Israel is not a question of borders, it's a
problem of their very presence in Palestine," Makdeh says. "Our war
is a long-term war. You're going to witness in the coming period of time the
resumption of war from within the Palestinian border and from across other Arab
borders."
Palestinian groups participated in "hundreds" of military
actions in the Israeli security zone incorrectly attributed to Hizbullah,
Makdeh boasts.
Israeli officials, meanwhile have warned that Syria and Iran are
preparing to use Palestinian militias to launch cross-border attacks into the
Galilee.
Makdeh rejects this assessment in part; the Palestinian groups, he says,
do not need outside training; they themselves taught Hizbullah and other groups
their resistance tactics.
Fighting last month between the Palestinian Police and Israeli soldiers
is a sign of things to come, says Makdeh, who received a phone call in the
midst of the fighting so he could listen to the sweet sound of the bullets
being fired.
"Without this method we won't reach our goal. Anybody who's
occupying my land, I don't want to talk with him, I want to kill him," he
says. "For the last half-century we've been resisting this occupation, and
we're prepared to resist for another half-century."
WHEN Makdeh talks of "Occupied Palestine," of course, he means
all the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. So, he believes,
do the Israeli; he asserts that Israel's territorial ambitions - from the Nile
to the Euphrates, he says - are inscribed on the door of the Knesset.
Peace talks under the auspices of the Zionists in the US State
Department will go nowhere, Makdeh predicts. Anyone who believes in the
durability of a two-state solution "is fooling themselves."
"I vow that the Jewish state will leave our land, either today or
tomorrow. This is not a hope or a dream, but a vow. And the Israelis know this;
have you ever seen a Jew living at ease in Israel? They live with worry and
insomnia all their lives," he says.
"It is our responsibility not to sell out Palestine, but to raise
our children with a jihad upbringing until the day of victory comes. From south
Lebanon they can retreat, but from Palestine where will the Israelis go?"
Prime Minister Hoss says that he "wishes" Palestinians won't
stage cross-border attacks against Israel, which are sure to bring heavy
retaliation against Lebanese and even Syrian interests.
"We actually don't approve of such acts, and we wish that the
Palestinians will respect Lebanese law and Lebanon's commitment to cooperate
fully with the United Nations force in implementing its mandate in south
Lebanon," Hoss says.
Hoss has refused to disarm Palestinian militias, however, attempting to
pass the responsibility to the United Nations. Such a move would be not only
dangerous but fraught with regional political ramifications, and is unlikely to
happen anytime soon, the AUB's Hamzeh says.
Many Palestinians in Lebanon talk of the necessity of armed struggle and
praise the intifada as the only Palestinian policy that ever proved effective.
Others are more moderate, but their views are unpopular in Ein el-Hilweh.
A DENSE crowd forms around a visiting journalist who is interviewing
several young men smoking a narghile against a corrugated iron storefront.
"Before or after the withdrawal, nothing has changed for the
Palestinians in Lebanon," says Raid Cana'an, 23, a dental assistant whose
family fled Nazareth in 1948. "I have no future here and my presence or
absence makes no difference."
His words are drowned out by the deafening call to prayer from the local
mosque, but a solitary voice pipes up through the din.
"Give me $5,000 and I'll go to Canada," calls out one young
man, who is instantly berated by camp members who hiss at him to remain silent.
He hesitates to give his name, and the crowd chuckles when he says he is called
Osama. His family originally hails from the village of Zib near Acre; he is
unemployed, he says, like everyone else in Ein el-Hilweh.
"Insha'allah I will return to Palestine, but if I can't go there I
will go to Canada," Osama says. "Here, we have nothing. We're not
allowed to work, nothing. People are not bought by money, but I want to
live."
Osama's boldness encourages Mohammed Miali, 38, to step forward.
"I want to direct a word to the Arab leaders. Do all the Arab
leaders approve that the Palestinians live in such conditions for 50
years?" asks Miali, who sells vegetables in the camp.
His words win the encouragement of the crowd, but as he continues they
whisper to a journalist that Miali is unstable and not to be taken seriously.
"We don't want Palestine by force, we won't take it by force,"
he says. "We want to live together with the Jewish state, side by side. We
hope the Arab leaders find a way to make this happen. We're not saying to the
Jews that we want to throw them into the sea.
"The Palestinian people want to live next to the Israelis, in peace
and security."
Though his family hails originally from Acre, he would be satisfied to
settle in the West Bank once a Palestinian state is established, Miali says.
The crowd shouts him down.
HOSS insists that the only solution for the Palestinian refugees is to
return to their former homes inside Israel, but Hamzeh says most Lebanese know
this is unrealistic.
Instead, he says, a compromise might be struck that would allow refugees
from the 1967 war to return to the West Bank and Gaza Strip. If Israel signs
peace treaties with Syria and Lebanon, some of the refugees in those countries
also might be allowed to return to a future Palestinian state, perhaps as many
as 100,000.
Israel has also talked of allowing a certain number of refugees, as many
as 40,000, to return to integral Israel on the basis of family reunification. Another
100,000 or so refugees could be offered citizenship in Europe or North America,
Hamzeh says, while Lebanon itself might be able to absorb some 100,000
Palestinians if a way could be found to import Christians from elsewhere in the
Middle East or from the Lebanese Diaspora to maintain rough demographic parity.
"It would be a solution that would not fulfill what you hear in the
camps, but it would be practical," Hamzeh says.
Such ideas for compromise are anathema in Ein el-Hilweh, however.
"Why should I settle for 50 percent when I deserve 100%? The land
is ours and I want to return to it," says Cana'an.
"I'm not bloodthirsty but our rights are being trampled,"
agrees Nawfal. "Arafat only speaks about [the]1967 [borders] now, but this
is an incomplete and unfair peace."
America, however, will never let the Palestinians get more than that,
she says.
Typical of the conspiracy theories that flourish in the camps, she
declares that "John F. Kennedy was the only one who dared to speak about
Palestinian rights and look what happened to him" - murdered, she says, by
that devout Jew, Lee Harvey Oswald.
Abu Nada also says that whenever leaders like US President Bill Clinton
prepare to pressure Israel to make concessions, scandals like that with the Jewess
Monica Lewinsky mysteriously crop up and obstruct the political agenda.
IT'S NOT hard to understand why such theories are given credence in Ein
el-Hilweh. From the dingy and depressing perspective of the camps, the tragedy
that has befallen the refugees appears so enormous, justice so unattainable,
that explanations must be found outside the ken of diplomacy and history.
The IDF withdrawal from south Lebanon has proven a two-edged sword: a
source of hope for refugees who pray that Palestine will be liberated next, and
a source of desperation for those who have had their first glimpse of the neat
red roofs of Israel towns across the border and fear that their mythical
Palestine has disappeared forever
"If we have to fight we'll fight. The Palestinian people are
prepared to fight and it's within their rights. This is what the success of the
southern resistance has shown us," says Nawfal's son Mufleh, 36, an
engineer.
A few minutes later, however, his mood has swung to despair.
"We've lost hope that we'll ever return to Palestine," he
says. "We know we won't get our land back because agreements have already
been signed that we won't return.
"The Lebanese government says they won't naturalize us but they're
just holding out for more money. This is what 50 years of politics has taught
us."
Last in a five-part series.