Israeli Pullout From Lebanon Fuels Palestinian Call for Renewed Struggle

EIN EL HILWA, Lebanon — For Palestinian guerrilla leader Munir Maqdah, the lessons of Israel’s sudden exit from southern Lebanon could not be clearer.

“The only method that has been successful against the occupier is armed struggle,” said Maqdah, a grizzled 40-year-old who heads the biggest armed faction in this Palestinian refugee camp, the largest and most militant in Lebanon. “This is the path we must take to return to our land.”

The Israeli troop withdrawal, completed May 24 after an occupation that lasted more than two decades, has unleashed a torrent of emotions among the thousands of Palestinian refugees who live in Lebanon.

Some, such as Maqdah and the fighters he leads, are drawing inspiration from what they regard as the routing of Israel’s powerful army by Lebanon’s Hezbollah guerrillas. For these Palestinians, the Israeli departure from nearly all of southern Lebanon--a tiny sliver remains disputed--proves not only that Israel can be beaten but that occupied land can be recovered by force.

Their own armed struggle against Israel, all but dormant since 1982, must now be renewed, the guerrillas say.

Other Palestinians, many with a more moderate agenda, are celebrating the sudden freedom to enter the formerly Israeli-occupied zone and are streaming to the border to gaze through a double row of wire mesh and barbed-wire fences at a land many have never seen. Lebanese too are making the southward trek, but it is the Palestinians who seem the most moved.

All along the Lebanese border these days, one can see them: Men and women stand in front of their cars, gazing south into the distance, lost in a kind of reverie.

As their eyes caress the undulating green hills and try to peer down into faraway valleys, they explain, in voices tinged with longing, that they are looking for the first time at a promised land they have only heard about: Palestine.

“It is beautiful, because it is our land,” Hassan Atayah, a 30-year-old merchant, said last week as he videotaped the scenic views from a roadside overlooking Israel. He wanted to send the pictures to relatives in the United States and Germany.

But for many Palestinians, the sight also underscores a frustrating reality.

As they watch joyful Lebanese celebrate the return of a long-lost region of their country, they must confront the painful truth that a solution to their own plight appears no closer than before. Many say they feel abandoned by the Palestinian leadership, which, in tortuous negotiations with Israel since 1993, has stressed its desire for land and statehood above a solution for the refugees.

About 400,000 Palestinian refugees are registered to live in the 12 camps scattered throughout Lebanon. (Some Palestinian leaders here say the actual number of refugees may be considerably smaller; thousands have emigrated in recent years.) Most of those registered are descendants of the refugees who arrived here more than half a century ago after fleeing the upheaval that accompanied the creation of Israel.

But even now, as negotiators for Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak hold talks aimed at producing a permanent peace deal by September, the refugee issue is far from the discussions’ front burner.

Barak and other top Israelis insist that there will be no “right of return” for the more than 3.5 million Palestinian refugees worldwide who are registered with the United Nations. Arafat is just as adamant that they should be allowed to go home. Perhaps because the issue is so complicated and seemingly insoluble, it has never received priority in the negotiations.

Now that Israel has pulled out of southern Lebanon, however, Lebanese officials are voicing increasing concern about the Palestinian presence here, which they view as a time bomb in their midst. They are adamant that a solution must be found for the refugees--but not here.

“We cannot afford to keep the Palestinians on our territory,” said former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, now a member of parliament. “Our country is very small, and the Palestinians represent 8% of the population. It is not normal to add 8% just like that.”

In Lebanon’s political system, based on representation according to religion, the permanent presence of such a large foreign element would “upset the balance,” Hariri said.

The Palestinians also face significant discrimination here. A 1990 amendment to Lebanon’s Constitution, negotiated as part of the accord that ended the nation’s bitter civil war, forbids them to settle permanently in the country. Other restrictions bar them from working in about 70 occupations, to minimize competition with native Lebanese.

In a nation still deeply divided by religion, politics and the legacy of the 1975-90 conflict, “this is one of the few things on which there is consensus,” said Farid Khazen, who teaches political science at the American University of Beirut. “There won’t be any settlement of Palestinians in Lebanon.”

The Lebanese also fear that Palestinians, emboldened by the success of Hezbollah, may launch their own attacks against Israel in the wake of the withdrawal and bring about the massive Israeli retaliation that Barak has threatened. That in turn could draw in Syria, the main power broker in Lebanon, and escalate into a regional conflict.

Many Israeli and Lebanese analysts also believe that the Palestinians and others could prove a handy tool for Syria, which is unhappy that Israel left Lebanon without first reaching a comprehensive peace agreement. The Syrians hoped that such an accord would allow them to regain the Golan Heights, captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East War. But Israeli-Syrian peace talks broke down early this year, and Barak decided to keep his pledge to pull Israeli troops out of Lebanon by July with or without a peace deal.

“Syria has said the withdrawal from Lebanon will not give Israel peace,” said Tewfik Mishlawi, a political analyst in Beirut. “What does Syria have as tools? The Palestinian guerrillas who are ready and waiting.”

Khazen agreed: “These people live within walking distance of Palestine. They are highly mobilized, informed, armed and very close to their homeland.”

Of all the refugee camps, Ein el Hilwa is the most heavily armed, he said, with “more than enough weapons to cause trouble.”

In the hopeless atmosphere that hangs heavy in this camp near the southern city of Sidon, Maqdah said recruits for his armed faction are not difficult to find. Eight months ago, he said, a class of 1,000 new members--an offshoot of Arafat’s Fatah group--graduated from a training course.

There is little else for camp residents to do. Unemployment hovers between 60% and 70%. About 60,000 people are crammed into a single square mile of narrow, garbage-strewn alleys and chaotic cinder-block structures, with jumbles of electrical wires hanging overhead.

Unable to work, residents spend their days drinking coffee, smoking water pipes and discussing politics, endlessly.

“What is our fault as Palestinians?” asked Maqdah, dressed in combat fatigues--with a burly bodyguard nearby--as he sat in a tree-lined patio outside his home, an incongruously grand structure amid the squalor of the camp. “We were born with Kalashnikovs [automatic rifles] in our hands, looking up at walls covered with pictures of martyrs from our families” killed in battles with Israelis.

Between 1993 and 1996, he said, his group launched “daily” operations against Israel in southern Lebanon. “But after we saw that Hezbollah was fulfilling its mission completely, we rearranged our ranks and prepared for the next step. The important thing is that this occupier should not be allowed to rest.”

Now that Hezbollah has achieved its goal of liberating southern Lebanon, however, the Palestinians will renew their own military struggle against Israel, Maqdah said. “We have 4 million Palestinians in the diaspora, and 90% are willing to advocate armed struggle.”

And if Syria profits as a result, “we don’t mind,” he said, smiling.

Not all here express such militancy. Some say the military commander and those who follow him are exaggerating their ability to launch attacks against Israel. And Maqdah cannot leave Ein el Hilwa without risking arrest by the Lebanese army, several camp residents noted.

“We are not discussing anymore to throw the Jews into the sea,” one resident said, asking that his name not be used. “But we can’t accept a peace that isn’t peace. We want to be treated like human beings, with the right to return to our homes.”

“We are afraid,” said Serrieh Hijazi, 30, a social worker at an orphanage in the camp. “The solutions for us are being drawn up elsewhere. We’re lost between all these great powers, and the Lebanese government doesn’t want us here. We are afraid we will remain as refugees, like our fathers.”

Television reports in Lebanon, she said, depict the camps as “islands of violence, outside the Lebanese law. But most people here just want to live in peace, like anyone else.”