Expellees in Lebanon Halved as First Contingent Returns Home

By Marilyn Raschka

"Here, take my address in Jericho. I have a shop right downtown." The invitation was extended by one of seven Jericho residents expelled by Israel from their homes last December and granted the right to return nine months later this past September.

The Israelis issued a list of 189 expellees allowed to return in September. Eight chose to stay behind, fearing they would be jailed upon return. Some 200 others will be repatriated in December.

The Jericho seven had packed, given away clothes and odds and ends to other expellees and to friends among nearby Lebanese villagers and were vigorously celebrating their imminent return. Empty plastic water containers—the five-gallon variety—served as drums to beat out songs of freedom. Hamas political posters hung prominently in the tents. One poster included tiny, individual pictures of the original 415 expellees.

Anything but tiny is the number of pictures of the expellees' families that fill homemade bulletin boards in all the tents. Smuggled into the camp along with their needs are letters from the families back home, bulky with the inclusion of snapshots and professional photographs.

"This is Mohammed. He's nine," pointed out a Gaza resident whose name was not on the list of returnees. "Here, listen to this tape." The man records his phone calls home made on a satellite phone that has kept the men in touch with families. The boy had begged his father to return home. "Never mind if you go to jail at least we can visit you there," the child had pleaded.

The Gaza man and his tentmates had landscaped their "front yard" with sunflowers and corn. "Gives the place a bit of green," they said.

A scientifically classified exhibit of flora and fauna of the area was prepared by expellee and professor of biology Dr. Musa Al-Aqtum as part of his course for fellow expellees in research methods. He told how several of the scorpions—now safely immersed in formaldehyde—had been caught crawling across the mattresses of his students. Lebanese villagers and journalists joined the expellees attending the two-day exhibit and accompanying lectures.

Soon after their expulsion, the Palestinians organized a university with professors teaching the same courses they taught back home. A large tent serves as both mosque and university. The registrar's office is a simple plywood shelter. A similar structure houses the university's natural history museum—home not only to those scorpions but to lizards, tortoises, snakes and a stuffed mole, hedgehog and badger. Each specimen is labeled with its Latin scientific name, plus popular name in Arabic and in English.

On departure day the biology professor, whose name was not on the list, said a sad goodbye to a number of his students and to the man in charge of student affairs for the university.

"When you come to Nablus, visit me at my shop in the gold souk," said one expellee, jeweler Hamzeh Jaber. Hanging on to him at the camp were two young Lebanese boys. Jaber had been their soccer coach for the past couple of months.

He had discovered the team in his talks with kids from the nearby village of Marj Al-Zahour. By taking the trails across the mountains he could avoid Lebanese army checkpoints on the roads and reach the village soccer field. (The Lebanese government decided last December to deny the Palestinians entry to Lebanese territory, but turned a blind eye to the transport of goods into the camp.)

The boys, both 14, didn't want to say good-bye. Jaber's coaching had made all the difference. The day he was leaving they were basking in their recent victory—their team had won the area soccer cup.

The jeweler coaches back home in Nablus, too. That's where he got in trouble with the Israelis. His team is drawn from boys whose fathers attend the same mosque as Jaber in Nablus. The Israelis accused him of using his coaching position to teach the boys the "ways of Hamas."

Jeweler and coach, this man of different talents had his sleeves rolled up just before leaving to wash the pots and pans the men had used to make kanafe, an Arabic sweet.

As for the returnees from Jericho and Gaza, they expressed their determination to work against the PLO-Israeli peace accord. "But we will do it without violence," they vowed. "There will be no bloodshed between Palestinian brothers."

Strong bonds among the expellees made parting a bittersweet sorrow. Early on the morning of their departure, the 181 departing expellees stood in a receiving line while the Palestinians staying behind and friends among the Lebanese villagers bade them good-bye. Then the barren hills echoed to the sound of duMe bags fitted with wheels rolling along the two-mile stretch between the makeshift camp and the crossing into Israel's "security zone" in south Lebanon.

There, as members of the Israeli-sponsored "South Lebanon Army" militia called out the deportees' names, they passed one by one under the gate that signified the end of one phase of the Palestinian struggle, and the beginning of another.

Marilyn Raschka is a free-lance writer who lives in Beirut, where she is an editor of the Americans for Justice in the Middle East newsletter.