Three Years After Mountain Exile, Palestinian Expellees Home Again

By Marilyn Raschka

The day began with an order called "OUT." Israel, on Dec. 17, 1992, rounded up over 400 Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza, both free civilians and incarcerated ones, and bused them out of Israel and into Lebanon.

Then Lebanon's Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri stood up to the Israelis and said "no." Lebanon would not be a party to Israeli expulsions of Palestinians from their country. He ordered the Lebanese army to prevent the 400 men from leaving no-man's-land. Caught between many a rock and a hard place to spend the upcoming winter, members of the group were saved by the Lebanese Red Cross and the International Red Cross, which delivered tents, food, blankets, and then basic cooking equipment, foodstuffs and medical supplies.

Next the Lebanese army was ordered to stop all further deliveries from passing their lines. This gave birth to a rigorous campaign of smuggling from villages across the mountains. Twenty mule train caravans delivered 40-pound bottles of cooking gas and battery-operated TV sets.

From day one, journalists flooded the scene. We were the only people allowed into no-man's-land to see the 400 men who occupied the barren, rocky slopes with Lebanon's most majestic mountain, snowcapped, 9,232-foot Mt. Hermon, in the distance. We covered the story for the full year that Israel kept the men exiled from their families and their professions for their alleged support and/or membership in Hamas, the Islamic group which is opposed to the terms of the peace process.

On my first trip south to the mountainous borderland, I had no idea what to expect and no idea of how they would receive me, a U.S. journalist. From Beirut to Marj Zuhuur, the little village that lent its name to their encampment, is a long haul in the winter. Drivers had to stop half an hour out of Beirut to put on chains. Delays were inevitable after snowfalls as snowplows opened the route. The string of Lebanese-Syrian army checkpoints were a standard drag in any kind of weather.

On my first visit, we left Beirut at six in the morning, and, after chains and pains, arrived at noon. We were hungry. And they were preparing lunch: canned meat and french-fried potatoes. The men raised humorous objections to our photographing them peeling potatoes. "Don't let our wives see this," they would call out.

I wandered away from the center of activity, up the slopes to where I saw a tall young man hopping around the stony "lawn" of his tent, his foot in a cast. He had broken it playing soccer just days before the Israelis had decided he was a big Hamas troublemaker. Mousa always had a smile that blossomed into a laugh. Back in his West Bank hometown, Ramallah, he worked at Rukkab's ice cream shop. Mousa could rattle off all the flavors, and describe the ice cream creations he scooped up on hot nights. He quoted prices, told anecdotes about his customers, and after several of my visits promised that "when this is all over and you come to Ramallah, I'll treat you to a banana split."

One of his tent mates was another young man named Alaa. Alaa was three weeks away from getting his U.S. green card, which would have protected him, when the Israelis grabbed him. His wife and kids were already green card holders. Alaa had a travel agency near Ramallah and an uncle in Indiana. He asked if I would call the uncle from Beirut and relay a message to his wife and family back in Ramallah. Then he asked just one more favor. Could I bring an International Herald Tribune with me on the next trip down? He wanted to know how his stocks were doing.

A third tent mate, Ahmed, asked me to call his sister who lives in Illinois and assure her that he was OK, a message he needed passed on to his family in the West Bank.

After these favors had been promised, I had lunch.

When the year was up in 1993, my buddies in tent 56 returned to their homes, to their families, and to their old jobs. Life does go on. Their parting comment to me was, "See you in Ramallah." From Beirut, the invitation seemed more like a challenge.

A Challenge Accepted

I took it. From Beirut to Damascus to Amman, across the bridge and into the West Bank—a day and a half of long taxi rides and tedious borders. I gave no advance warning. I wanted to surprise them. I knew the ice cream shop would be the easiest to find, and the driver of the taxi I had taken from Jerusalem knew exactly where to drop me.

The scene was chaotic. The shop was being remodeled. The only thing being served was scoop after scoop of tile putty. I explained to the owner who I was and whom I wanted. "He just went off for a haircut," he told me, giving me directions to the barber.

Mousa's brother just happened to be driving by so I was chauffeured off to the barber, who said he thought Mousa had gone home after having his hair cut. Mousa's father was tickled pink to meet the U.S. journalist who had written about his son, but Mousa had gone back to the ice cream shop. Back we went through snarled traffic, and there he was. The only clue his boss had given him was that a foreigner had come looking for him.

His smile brightened and then faded. "But I can't get you a banana split," he said as he looked around the topsy-turvy shop. Then he said, "Come with me." He led the way to his shop's office across the street. "We have some ice cream in here." I protested that it was Ramadan and high noon and hot. I would have felt guilty taking even a glass of water, much less a triple-scoop cone. But Mousa would not have it. And a triple-scoop cone it was. I could never have imagined that I could make a fasting Muslim so pleased by eating an ice cream cone in front of him. "And next time you'll have two banana splits," were his parting words.

Alaa was next on my itinerary. There he was, feeding a fax into the travel agency machine and answering the phone. The posters of far-away places and ads for five-star hotels seemed out of place next to someone who had lived in a tent with only sheep and goats and a bunch of foreign journalists to look at for a year. Alaa was insistent that I share the iftar meal, the evening breaking of the fast, with his family. I argued that I had to be in Nazareth by 11 that night, a prearranged meeting I could not break. "No problem," he assured me. The agency's driver, a Christian named George who had worked for Alaa's family for years, could get me there.

And so it was. Iftar with a Palestinian family with green cards.

Ahmed was easy to find as well. He was busy in his job as a court recorder but stepped out to say hello and chastise me for not staying longer so I could have iftar with his family as well.

Three very different individuals, but all share the Arab gift for hospitality. There was much to talk about, but I couldn't resist asking if their thoughts ever strayed to that year of deportation.

"You won't believe this," they each answered. "We miss the place."

The struggle and the challenge and the unity of purpose (survival) and problem (Israel) had created a unique experience. They would like to go back and see the place again someday, "but just as tourist," kidded Alaa the travel agent.

"Could you go back?" Each asked of me. "Please go. Take pictures. Send them." And so I did return. The Lebanese army officer at the village of Marj Zuhuur remembered me and was curious why I had returned. "Nothing there," he told me. And indeed I had trouble finding it. Only the sun glinting off a pile of tin cans indicated the spot. Slowly, other "archeological" evidence revealed itself. Signs of fire, an old shoe, the remains of a small garden where one man had cultivated corn. "So I can see something green," he had told me.

I found the culvert where the deportees took their baths in freezing cold water. I looked up the mountainside, expecting to see the mules that once carried contraband potatoes and cooking oil and medicines, and even a fax machine, from Lebanese villagers who smuggled anything and everything into the camp.

This isolated spot—occupied by humankind for only one year in the millennia of its existence—has again slipped into desolation. But in the personal histories of 400 men, and a handful of journalists, it remains a soft spot between those rocks and a hard place.

Marilyn Raschka is an American free-lance writer and long-time resident of Beirut.