CHAPTER FOUR

THE ONLY PASSION OF THE REFUGEES

For two decades, in the wake of their expulsion, the Palestinians barely registered on the Lebanese political landscape. Virtually overnight they had come to represent a good 12 per cent of the local population. Yet, leaderless, fragmented, prostrate, they lacked the collective will or means to organize and speak for themselves as a community - and for the single aim, the return to their homeland, that instantly possessed them. They fell into two distinct categories. A minority, with the skills, means and connections to do so, more or less successfully integrated themselves into the society of their host country, and even went on to acquire its fully-fledged citizenship. About 20,000 in number, they came essentially from Palestine’s middle classes. The rest, a little over 100,000, fetched up in some seventeen refugee camps dispersed around the country. These were essentially Palestine’s peasantry. Inevitably, it was in the camps that the idea of al-‘Awda, ‘the Return’, put down strongest roots. Separate from the society around them, virtual ghettoes, they became the foremost preservers of the Palestinian national identity in exile, the most visible, living reminders of the Catastrophe that had produced them, and the most fertile breeding-grounds of the determination that it be reversed. Their inhabitants made of the Return a virtual obsession. It shaped their rituals and regalia. Children were steeped in it from birth. Their schoolday would begin with their standing to attention and taking the oath:

Palestine is our country,
Our aim is to return,
Death does not frighten us,
Palestine is ours,
We shall never forget her,
Another homeland we shall never accept.¹

FROM THE ENEMY’S OPPRESSION TO THE BROTHER’S

The Return was a passionate ideal in its own right. But it was reinforced by something else - the conditions of exile itself. Driven out by the Jews from their own country, the Palestinians had become, some of them lamented, ‘the Jews of the Arab world’. It had begun, this replacement of one kind of oppression, the enemy‘s, by another, the brother’s, as soon as they crossed the frontier. In Lebanon, conditions were in some ways worse than anywhere else. To be sure, they got an official welcome. President Bishara al-Khouri had gone in person to Tyre to tell them: ‘Enter your country.’ And in later years refugees were to recall the help, the acts of kindness and compassion, which they did encounter from many Lebanese, Christian and Muslim alike.² But the negative memories dominated, some of the most painful stemming from the period of maximum adversity, shock and bewilderment, as the newly made refugees trekked through the dirt-poor, mainly Shiite villages of the south. ‘They even wanted to sell us the weeds in their fields,’ recalled a mother who was refused a glass of water for her five children because she could only muster two and a half of the three pence cruelly demanded for it.³ But even settled into their camps, they were to find that many ordinary people, not just government officials, habitually looked upon them as somehow different, threatening, or even contemptible. Merely to venture out of them was to risk taunts and mockery. A characteristic jibe was that they themselves were to blame for their plight because they had sold their land or fled it in cowardice. Lebanese children would ask their parents to buy a Palestinian to play with.⁴ It has often been noted that while Arabs may be abstractly passionate for Palestine the cause, they often display little such passion for Palestinians as persons. But whereas in other host countries the refugees found the people more friendly than their governments, that was very much less the case in Lebanon. ‘Perhaps’, wrote Rosemary Sayigh in her moving account of refugee life in the country, ‘this was because Lebanon’s peculiar combination of religious divisions and class polarization sharpens inter-group aggression far beyond that of any other Arab country.’⁵

Alone among their host countries, and in violation of agreements with international organizations, Lebanon placed severe restrictions on the refugees’ basic right to work. They were formally excluded from all public and a wide range of private employment. They had to apply for work permits for any formal occupation, and, as a matter of deliberate policy, these became harder and harder to acquire; and even when, under law, they should have been issued, they were often not, owing to the tortuous political processes, the discrimination and corruption involved. The only employment outside the camps from which they were unlikely to be debarred if it were available was casual menial labour. That brought extreme exploitation. In the early fifties it earned an average annual income of $60 a worker; a middle-class compatriot in private business would make $2,000.

Physically, camps like Sabra and Shatila on the outskirts of Beirut were dismal places, barely fit for animals, but their human residents were forbidden to make any improvement in them because that could smack of permanent residence. It is true that, to begin with, the refugees themselves, in their determined belief that their exile was only temporary, often connived in this, even to the point of protesting against any officially permitted alleviations of their own misery. Eventually they wearied of such masochistic zeal. Yet the few tents they boasted on their arrival barely evolved, over twenty years, into anything more than diminutive hovels, puny contraptions of stones, boards, zinc sheeting and canvas. Concrete, or any structure solid enough to require nails to hold it together, was forbidden. Anyone banging a nail, of course, would be heard right through the place, and everybody would ask: who’s that? Why’s he nailing? What’s he nailing? And you had to say you were nailing the zinc: that was the only thing allowed.’⁶

And where politics and security were concerned, Lebanon was for its own special reasons every bit as afraid of these intruders as another main host country, Jordan, was of its. It was not merely because their numbers were so high in relation to the local population, but because they were liable to disturb the delicate mechanisms of the sectarian state, and especially the Maronites’ pride of place within it. They were mostly Sunnis, and though in class terms there was a wide gulf fixed between these mainly untutored peasants and their typically city-dwelling co-religionists of Lebanon, it was feared that, politically, each might reinforce the other in domestic and regional causes; the pan-Arab nationalism that so alarmed the Maronites and other minorities was a Sunni credo par excellence. Small wonder, then, that with the rise of Nasser the other bitter grievance of the camp-dwellers - the harassment and humiliation they endured at the hands of the Maronite-led state security services - was greatly intensified. Small wonder, even, that the man chiefly responsible for that was none other than the ‘Arabist’ president, General Fuad Chehab, who, in 1958, had ‘saved’ Lebanon by what in spirit was a precisely opposite course - his accommodation with Nasser himself. Under his rule particularly, the security services, mainly the Deuxième Bureau, or military intelligence, dominated and blighted the refugees’ lives. The Deuxième Bureau’s sole concern was surveillance and repression. ‘The Palestinian is like a spring,’ said Joseph Kaylani, one of its notoriously harsh officers, ‘if you step on him he stays quiet, but if you take your foot off he hits you in the face.’⁷ At its most basic their policy was to isolate the refugees in their camps; residents of one could not visit another without permission, and that was hard to obtain; even to drop in on neighbours in one’s own could lead to trouble after nightfall. But there were also continuous threats and intimidations, haphazard imprisonment without trial, mass punishments, fines on ludicrous grounds, random or systematic brutality, and occasional murder. Any Palestinian association with Lebanese political parties was particularly frowned upon. Thus, the moment any demonstration, entirely Lebanese in character, began in any part of any city, security men would immediately rush to arrest this or that presumed Palestinian sympathizer in the camps, aware though they were that it would have been physically impossible for him to have joined it. Such arrests were routine, and routinely accompanied by torture and interrogation lasting for days, weeks and months.⁸

WHAT WAS TAKEN BY FORCE COULD ONLY BE RESTORED BY FORCE

But how, in practice, was the Return to be accomplished? Of one thing most Palestinians were sure from the outset: that what had been taken from them by force could only be recovered by force. That was the instinctive view of the camp-dwellers. It was also that of the first Palestinian political movement to come into being in the wake of the Catastrophe. That it did so in Lebanon was not mere chance. The Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM) was a beneficiary of what, for Palestinians as well as for the Lebanese themselves, was the positive side of the sectarian state: its relatively democratic nature, its pluralism, and its intellectual freedoms. Although, as its name indicates, it was a pan-Arab organization, its founders were predominantly Palestinian, and Palestine was its principal raison d‘être. Several of them were graduates of the American University of Beirut; they came from the typically middle-class component of the Palestinian diaspora. The most prominent was George Habash, who subsequently achieved international renown as head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and pioneer of aerial hijacking. While never to become a mass movement, the ANM commanded a popular base in the refugee camps of Lebanon and Jordan. It argued that counter-force, or ‘vengeance’, was ‘the only solution for the Palestine question’. The Zionist challenge could only be met on the terms which the Zionists themselves had laid down: expulsion or extermination.⁹

But whose force? However much its advocates, camp-dwellers or middle-class intellectuals, might originally have intended otherwise, it was to be the Arabs’ force rather than their own. A convergence of circumstance and ideology dictated that. For one thing, the refugees, indispensable foot-soldiers of any such endeavour, were to begin with simply too crushed by the mundane struggle of day-to-day existence to think about the higher, national one. For another, even when, in due course, they could think about it, they ran into the determination of the Arab regimes to prevent them from converting their thoughts into action, or at least any action over which the regimes themselves exerted no control. Lebanon was implacable in this respect. However ardent it might have been in its rhetorical support for Palestine, it was no less ardent, and sometimes violent, in its suppression of ‘Palestinianism’ on its own soil. ‘They beat us’, said a militant of the time, ‘so that we would feel it is dangerous even to talk about Palestine.’ ‘All you have to do is eat and sleep,’ refugees would often be told, ‘the Arab armies will get your country back for you.’¹⁰

However insincere in the mouths of Arab government officials, however little trusted by ordinary Palestinians, that promise was nonetheless, formally speaking at least, in impeccable accord with the pan-Arab nationalism that was the dominant ideology of the times, and with the ANM’s conviction that ‘the Battle of Vengeance’ would be ‘the battle of the whole Arab people’, with the refugees as ‘the vanguard of the Arab nation’. But - the ANM also believed - that battle could not take place before the Arab ‘nation’ had undergone a fundamental, revolutionary process of reform, modernization and unification, eliminating the ‘backwardness’ which had been responsible for its defeat in the Catastrophe. For the ANM, then, though Israel would always be the primary enemy, during the period of reform it was Arab governments, every single one of them, which bore the brunt of its hostility. At least it was until Nasser came along. For in him, after initial hesitation, it discerned the man of destiny who would unite the Arabs and harness their strength for the decisive struggle to banish Western imperialism from the region and destroy the alien entity it had planted in their midst. It gave him its complete allegiance, which meant in practice that, for the time being, it opposed any resort to armed struggle for fear that this would provoke an Arab-Israeli war before its champion, and the regular Arab armies at his disposal, were ready for it.

THE ‘BATTLE OF DESTINY’ - AWAITING IT IN VAIN

Unfortunately, however, the battle never seemed to come. And, meanwhile, the pan-Arabism in whose name it was to be waged was suffering grievous setbacks, notably the collapse of the Syrian-Egyptian union, while the Israeli enemy was inexorably consolidating its grip on the usurped homeland. The first to put their faith in Nasser, the Palestinian masses became the first to nurture serious doubts about him. It was in this atmosphere that a rival to the ANM now arose, one that was to shape the destinies of the Palestinian people for decades to come, as well as to play a key role in the affairs of several Arab countries, but in Lebanon’s more dramatically, disruptively and enduringly than any other. This was Yasser Arafat’s Fatah. Self-reliance was its basic impulse. The Palestinians should take their cause into their own hands. It was no good relying on Arab governments, even Nasser’s, which had ‘contented themselves with hysterical or anaesthetizing broadcasts and rousing speeches, stopped Palestinian mouths, tied their hands, turned them into a theatrical claque which applauds this and reviles that’. All that talk of revolutionary transformation, of Arab unity as the prerequisite for the recovery of Palestine, had become a mere pretext for endless procrastination and delay. In emulation of their revered, original ‘martyr’, Sheikh Izzedin Qassam, the Palestinians should set up a guerilla force, and launch a ‘popular liberation war’ of their own.

Fatah’s leaders were lower middle-class in origin; many of them were educated at Cairo University, and, going on to well-paying jobs in the Gulf, they had acquired a relatively privileged social status. But Fatah’s rank and file, its fighting men, were to come from the refugee camps. Thanks to the humiliations and insults of their Arab exile, they were the readiest of recruits to its go-it-alone credo, and to ‘armed struggle’ as the quintessential expression of it. ‘Life in the tent has become as miserable as death’, proclaimed the underground Fatah magazine, Falastinuna (‘Our Palestine’). ‘We, the sons of the Catastrophe, are no longer willing to live this dirty, despicable life which has ... destroyed our human dignity.’ Not that there wasn’t an Arab dimension to their struggle. But it was the Arab masses, not their governments, to whom they would look. Operations conducted from bases inside and outside occupied Palestine would win the backing of ordinary people everywhere. A ‘supporting Arab front’ would automatically spring into being. All patriots, including soldiers and government servants, would join it, if need be in defiance of their rulers.¹¹

FROM LEBANON - FATAH’S FIRST RAID INTO ISRAEL

By 1964 Arafat and his men had gathered about themselves the nucleus of a guerilla organization. Syria’s radical Baathist regime, mainly to embarrass Nasser, had agreed to give Fatah a secure base, and, in a small way, the operational support it needed to get going. As disillusionment with Nasser grew, so did Fatah’s determination to act, and, though still a puny thing, on New Year’s Day, 1965, it did. According to Military Communiqué No. of the General Command of al-Asifa (‘Storm’) Forces, ‘detachments of our strike forces went into action performing all the tasks assigned to them in the occupied territories [i.e. pre-1967, original Israel] and returning safely to their bases.’¹² Hardly anyone noticed it at the time. And, indeed, it is not surprising that Fatah’s inaugural exploit should have been shrouded in a certain romantic obscurity. For it appears that it never actually took place. Perhaps, in retrospect, the most significant thing about it was its intended country of origin. That was not Syria. The ‘beating heart’ of Arabism, and the most passionate for Palestine of all Arab countries, it might have been, but, in its relations with the Palestinians, it was from the very outset pragmatic, not to say cynical, too. There was a quid pro quo for its support, which was that they should launch their raids from other Arab territories than its own.¹³ Nor was it Jordan or Egypt, traditional starting points for the ‘infiltrations’ of the fifties and the bloody ‘border wars’ to which they led. No, it was the one country, Lebanon, which had hitherto been spared them. The raid never actually took place because the Lebanese security services, ever vigilant, had arrested the would-be raiders before they even set out.

But for the refugees in their camp, the mere attempt¹⁴ was an occasion for rejoicing. And for Fatah, it marked the start of the Revolution, which would only deem itself victorious upon the complete liberation of Palestine, one and whole. For Nasser and the nationalists, on the other hand, it was an embarrassment, so much so in fact that they instructed their mouthpieces in the Beirut press - of which, in those days, they had many - to denounce its perpetrators. These were cast as instruments of a ‘conspiracy, hatched by imperialist, CENTO and Zionist quarters’, whose purpose was to furnish Israel with a pretext to attack its Arab neighbours and foil their scheme for the counter-diversion of the River Jordan.¹⁵ It only intensified the oppression of the Deuxième Bureau, which, having captured and tortured to death one fedayi upon his return from a raid, threw his body from a high building to make it look like suicide.¹⁶ Thereafter, Fatah’s exploits, and those of lesser rivals which sought to emulate it, remained modest. By the outbreak of the 1967 war, they had killed a total of eleven Israelis for the loss of seven of their own men, either inside Israel proper or in raids from Jordan and Lebanon.

FATAH COMES INTO ITS OWN

It was only after that most devastating of Arab defeats, and the terrible blow it dealt to Nasser and the pan-Arabism he incarnated, that Fatah truly came into its own. At a stroke it not only vindicated its insistence on go-it-alone ‘armed struggle’, it rendered it virtuous - indispensable even - in the eyes of the regimes which had formerly disdained or thwarted it.¹⁷ It also vindicated what others had formerly reviled as its ‘localism’.¹⁸ During the era of nationalism, it had been a kind of heresy to suggest that individual Arab states - those creations of Sykes-Picot - had in effect become distinct and separate ‘nations’ in their own right, with an intrinsic legitimacy, at least equal to those of the larger entity of which they were a part. But now, with the manifest failure of the pan-Arab ideal, this heresy was well on the way to establishing itself not, perhaps, as the new ideal, but at least as the pragmatic reality in which the Arabs had little choice but to acquiesce. In fact, Arabic has two words for nationalism, or patriotism. One, qaumiyah, denotes nationalism in its one and only pan-Arab dimension. Wataniyah usually denotes it in those multiple, more local forms, generally speaking coterminous with the individual states. With their resort to ‘armed struggle’, the Palestinians, formerly destined to be the principal beneficiaries of qaumiyah, had become pioneers in the development and ascendancy of wataniyah.

Fatah, together with a host of rival organizations that already existed or now came into being, enjoyed a spectacular ascent, in intrinsic strength, political impact and both ‘local’ and pan-Arab appeal. The ascent was very evident in Lebanon, but in this honeymoon of the guerilla movement, the main arena was elsewhere, and first of all in historical Palestine itself.

In the newly conquered territories of the West Bank and Gaza, among their own people, they sought - in accordance with Mao Zedong’s famous dictum - their revolutionary sea in which to swim. Yasser Arafat crossed and re-crossed the Jordan, and scurried about under the noses of Israeli soldiers, trying to ignite a ‘popular liberation war’. On the face of it, judging by their communiqués, they were making an effective start.¹⁹ Officially, it was only, or mainly, enemy soldiers that they targeted; and it was not unusual for Fatah to announce that, in a single operation, they had killed and wounded fifty, sixty or even seventy of them for the most paltry losses of their own. But - attacking civilians too - they would put bombs in a Jerusalem supermarket, or a bus station in Tel Aviv.

Jordan, with its Palestinian majority and its proximity to Israel, was the movement’s next most natural - albeit external - base. They took control of its Ghor Valley. And from there, the lowest point on earth, they carried out raids and artillery bombardments across the Jordan river. The Israelis struck back fiercely. Out of such reprisals grew the legendary ‘battle of Karameh’ in which a guerilla force of some 400 lightly armed men decided to confront head-on an Israeli force of 15,000, which included helicopter-borne commandos and an armada of tanks. They suffered huge losses, but, politically, their ‘martyrdom decision’ succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. King Hussein had been doing his best to check the growth of guerilla power. He now gave up the idea; his subjects would not stand for it. Even one of his most faithful henchmen, Wasfi al-Tal, redoubtable scion of an influential Transjordanian family, urged him to turn his kingdom into a latter-day ‘Carthage’. The whole country - said this non-Palestinian - should be fully mobilized behind the guerillas, who should step up their operations ‘a hundred-fold’ to become a real torment to the enemy.

Volunteers - Arabs as well as Palestinians - flocked to enrol; some reports had it that the fighting forces of Fatah - some 300 before Karameh - and lesser, left-wing organizations had swollen to as many as 30,000 or so two years later. By their own count, their operations - of all kinds - increased from twelve a month in 1967 to 279 by 1970.²⁰ Then the resistance movement seized control of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), a docile body of well-behaved notables, which Nasser and other Arab regimes had originally set up precisely in order to control it themselves. Arafat duly became its chairman. It was all beginning to look as though Fatah theory really was working out in practice, as if the revolutionary ‘vanguards’, through a process of spontaneous combustion, really were rallying the Arab masses behind them, bringing into being that ‘supporting Arab front’ which would strike down any ruler who stood in their path.

But Fatah’s rise was as flawed as it was outwardly meteoric. Indeed, at the height of its success it was already in decline.²¹ There was to be no popular uprising in the newly occupied territories. Among other things, the inhabitants, West Bankers in particular, were not yet ready for great self-sacrifice in a cause whose success they doubted. The fedayeen were the product of a refugee society which had lost all. The West Bankers still had something to lose. They were therefore more immediately interested in the withdrawal of the occupier than in the liberation of the whole of Palestine, and they still hoped that, by political or military means, the Arabs would accomplish it for them. The guerillas found it hard to hide among the local population; Israel’s efficiency, and the severity of its reprisals, did the rest. But Fatah also had itself to blame, with its typically hasty and slipshod methods of organization, undiscriminating recruitment, poor security and a propensity, which soon became counter-productive, for making grotesquely inflated claims about its military exploits. Within six months of the 1967 war, Arafat, making a daring escape in which he apparently disguised himself as a woman, fled back across the Jordan for the last time.

That was his movement’s first great strategic setback. The loss of Jordan three years later was the second. For all their initial popularity, the guerillas began to forfeit it even in this, their most sympathetic, largely Palestinian environment. But it was the conservative, loyalist, Transjordanian section of the population whom they particularly antagonized, with their indiscipline, their arrogance and the openly proclaimed ambition of some of them to replace the Hashemite kingdom with their own revolutionary new order. In what was afterwards known as ‘Black September’ 1970, Hussein unleashed his impatient Bedouin troops, and, in ten days of fratricidal strife, he broke the back of guerilla power in Jordan. Within a year of this disaster, they were driven from the country altogether in a ruthless campaign conducted by the self-same Wasfi al-Tal, now prime minister, who had formerly urged the King to throw all his weight behind them.

THE PALESTINIAN RESISTANCE HAS NOWHERE TO GO BUT LEBANON

They now had nowhere else to go but the all too permeable state of Lebanon. Of the other ‘front-line’ countries, Egypt, with the whole of the Sinai desert separating its population centres from the Israeli border, was impractical, and wouldn’t have had them anyway. Syria was their principal sponsor, but it didn’t want them either; nor did they want it, knowing as they did that the greater their presence on its soil, the more hostage they would become to the impulse of its despotic Baathist regime to reduce them to a mere extension of itself. Of course the Revolution did not come to Lebanon because Lebanon offered better guerilla country than anywhere else, though, with its rugged hills and valleys, it actually did; nor did it come in response to official or popular invitation, or because Lebanon had the strongest belief in Arabism and its principal, Palestinian cause. It came, basically, because as a state it could not stop them coming, and, once they were there, it could not control and subjugate them. ‘The Revolution landed in Lebanon‘, as Shafiq al-Hout, the first PLO representative to the country aptly put it, ‘because it was a garden without a fence.’²²

So it was that, in 1970 and 1971, the whole apparatus, or a very substantial segment of it, into which the resistance movement had already grown, appeared on the scene. That meant not just Fatah, the original and by far the largest organization, but at least a dozen others; some of them, like the radical, left-wing PFLP, formerly the ANM, were more or less authentically Palestinian in their leadership and policies; others, like Saiqa or the Arab Liberation Front, were basically instruments, in the Palestinian arena, of those two most mutually hostile of Arab regimes, the Baathists of Syria and the Baathists of Iraq. That ‘official’ institution, the Palestine Liberation Organization, formally separate from, but in practice heavily intertwined with, the guerilla movement, was also present, in the shape of Arafat himself, as its chairman, various civil departments, and units of the Palestine Liberation Army. When the influx was complete, the original refugee community, now swollen to some 240,000 by natural growth, numbered another 100,000 more.²³ Just how many fighting men the resistance boasted was perhaps a less important question than their quality, but high-end estimates - local ‘irregulars’ included - were not far short of the 20,000 men of the Lebanese army.²⁴ The Palestinian ‘headquarters’ took root, hard by the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, in a district of Beirut called Fakhani. With its quasi-governmental bureaucracies, welfare and medical organizations, social, cultural and educational institutions, research centres, and the economic planning or industrial development boards of what was fast becoming the wealthiest resistance movement in the world, it engaged in functions that ranged far beyond the requirements of ‘armed struggle’. ‘The Fakhani Republic’ was one appellation to which Lebanon’s twelve-year ‘Palestinian era’, now beginning, gave rise; another, more familiar in the outside world, was ‘Fatahland’, essentially denoting those areas of the country over which Arafat and his men came to hold exclusive, or at least pre-eminent, sway.

Of course, when Arafat came to Lebanon he was not starting from scratch: a rudimentary Palestinian ‘infrastructure’, an embryonic state-within-a-state, was already in place. For, in its initial, meteoric rise, the Palestinian resistance movement had had the same electrifying effect in Lebanon as it did elsewhere, if not more so. At first, miracle of miracles, here was a pan-Arab cause which, just as it had done in the days of the Mufti and the Great Rebellion, appeared to unite as much as it divided this congenitally fissiparous land. The press ran riot with accounts of young men determined to enlist - like nineteen-year-old Wahib Jawad, who, opposed by his family, held up a shop to raise money for his fare to Amman, taking only 25 Lebanese pounds out of a proffered 300. A month after Karameh, Lebanon suffered its first ‘martyr’. Khalil al-Jamal had died on the Jordan front, and when the funeral cortege reached the village of Kahhaleh, a Maronite stronghold on the road from Damascus, its inhabitants insisted on carrying the coffin themselves as church bells tolled. Beirut newspapers called this a ‘plebiscite’, the ‘real face’ of a Lebanon carrying no ‘stain of confessional fanaticisms’.²⁵ The Lebanese army even offered military training of sorts to dozens of Palestinian refugees, and the Deuxième Bureau slightly eased its iron grip on the camps.²⁶

The cross-confessional solidarity may have been outwardly impressive. But it was misleading. To be sure, with the debacle of pan-Arab nationalism, the Maronites no longer had much reason to fear Nasser’s will or ability to stir up pan-Arab, pan-Islamic emotions at their expense. And they could not but welcome, as a matter of principle, the ‘localism’, the ‘wataniyah’, that was taking nationalism’s place. Was this not essentially the same thing as the ‘pluralism’, the view of the Middle East as a collection of minorities, after which they - and of course the Israelis too - had always hankered? Unfortunately for them, however, the self-same Palestinians who were, in a sense, the most militant expression of this trend, became a more potent and disruptive force, on the battlefield of other people’s wars that Lebanon was becoming, than Nasser ever had been at the very height of his power.

‘TO LET DOWN THE PALESTINIANS WAS TANTAMOUNT TO LETTING DOWN THE LEBANESE MUSLIM CAUSE’

They were not merely outsiders, like Egypt or any other such larger state in the region, with the will and ability to exert their influence from without. They were outsiders, of course, but, unlike them, in everything except possession of an official Lebanese identity, they were insiders too. Thanks mainly to the cohesion and solidarity of the camp-dwellers, they were in effect another local community, another political actor on the domestic scene. They may, proportionally, have been one of the smaller ones, but they had the potential, once enfranchised and armed, to become the most powerful one of all. They depended for their advancement, not on Lebanon or its government as a whole, but on the special sympathy and support which they could all but automatically garner in one or more communities, even if that meant, as in fact it did, earning the equally automatic fear and hostility of others. It was the country’s Muslims, mainly Sunni but Shiite too, who rallied instinctively to them. How could it be otherwise? Their hearts always lay with pan-Arabism, and the resistance had established itself - albeit in its post-Nasserist, ‘localist’ guise - as the pan-Arab cause par excellence. But they rallied to them with all the greater fervour because, in addition to the general sentiment common to Muslims and Arabs everywhere, they had their specifically Lebanese sectarian reasons for doing so. It was an elementary quid pro quo: the Palestinians promoted their cause through them, they promoted theirs through the Palestinians. Drawn together by the anti-Israeli struggle, the Palestinians were among the least sectarian-minded of Arab peoples; nonetheless, they were overwhelmingly Sunnis, and, not surprisingly, their Lebanese co-religionists looked upon them as a major possible reinforcement of their own numerical strength, as well as ally in their quest to achieve a fairer representation, and distribution of wealth and status, for their community, vis à vis the dominant Maronites, within the confessional polity. For ‘the ordinary Muslim’, wrote Lebanese historian Kamal Salibi, ’to let down the Palestinians was tantamount to letting down the Lebanese Muslim cause’.²⁷

But there was more to it than the merely sectarian. The 1960s was the era of the Paris student ‘uprising’, of new, sometimes violent kinds of left-wing European radicalism, and of Che Guevara and Third World ‘revolution’. Naturally enough, their Lebanese emulators had specifically Lebanese aims. Some wanted not merely to ‘re-adjust’ the sectarian balance, but to abolish it altogether; others wanted fundamental reform of the whole gamut of social, economic and political afflictions which the sectarian system itself was deemed to engender and perpetuate. The entrenched, unchanging elite of traditional chieftains, urban notables, business tycoons, who represented and managed the system, derived their power more from the patronage and access to resources that they could furnish their respective communities, than on national strategies for the progress and welfare of all; they effectively connived, across the confessional divide, in a harsh form of laissez-faire capitalism. It was mercantile rather than productive, steeped in cronyism and corruption, and marked by great disparities of wealth, by a sybaritic luxury that flaunted itself side by side with the poverty and squalor of Beirut’s spreading slums and shanties, by a massive brain drain, unemployment, exploitation, and a favouring of the capital at the expense of the provinces, especially the remote and mainly Shiite South.

Physically and militarily, the 1967 war might have passed Lebanon by, but it exacerbated these conditions, and its resultant discontents, and sharply intensified the radicalization of the Muslim intelligentsia, especially the students, and the urban and rural masses, mostly under left-wing banners but sometimes under newly emergent Islamist ones.²⁸ For all, there was an intrinsic link between Lebanon’s domestic woes and the shattering Arab defeat; both were part and parcel of the same general backwardness and misrule. They naturally looked to the Palestinians, especially those left-wing organizations like the PFLP which, like them, believed that only through the transformation of the whole existing order could the Arabs recover their strength and dignity as a nation, along with their lost province of Palestine. They came to be known as Muslim/leftists - although the coalition of parties, known as the National Movement, to which they belonged, included many, mainly Greek Orthodox, Christians too. Since they were mainly Sunnis it would have been normal enough, in Lebanon’s old/new political culture, for a traditional Sunni grandee to have assumed its leadership. But, instead, and more remarkably, that role fell to Kemal Jumblat, hereditary leader of the Druzes, the small but strategically located sect that, like their historic adversaries, the Maronites, considered themselves the most rooted, most authentically ‘Lebanese’ of Lebanese. A cultured, Sorbonne-educated intellectual and socialist, Jumblat was at the same time the most archetypally seigneurial of the country’s politicians. Modernist, anti-sectarian in his nation-wide, reformist ambitions, he could not but look to his essentially pre-modern, sectarian sources of authority, the clan solidarities and martial prowess of his community, as the mainspring of his bid to achieve his goals. He held sway from his family seat, the almost fairyland castle of Moukhtara, in the ancestral Druze heartland of Mount Lebanon.

It was chiefly among the Maronites, with their ingrained fear and mistrust of the pan-Arab or pan-Islamic in any form, that the automatic hostility to the Palestinian resistance arose, and automatically intensified at the spectacle of their Muslim compatriots’ adherence to it. For them it was the Trojan Horse through which ‘Christian Lebanon’ would come under generalized assault. Ultimately, they deemed their identity and survival as a community to be at stake.²⁹ There were many poor Maronites who suffered under essentially the same socio-economic hardships and disabilities as their Muslim counterparts, but, fearful about the repercussions of change of any kind, they liked the ‘revolutionary’ or leftist aspects of the Muslim-Palestinian convergence as little as they did the merely sectarian ones. There was no comparable complexity or contradiction about the persons - and party - in whom the Maronites found their principal answer to Jumblat and his disparate array of allies. It was after a visit to the Berlin Olympics, where he was impressed by the discipline and strong sense of national identity he discerned in Hitler’s Germany, that Pierre Gemayel, scion of a family of notables from the village of Bikfaya, in the Maronite heartland of ‘the Mountain’, founded the Lebanese Phalange. Fervent Lebanese nationalists, the Phalangists began life agitating- in concert with similarly rebellious Sunnis - for a sovereign Lebanon freed from French Mandatory rule. But confessionally minded as they were, conservative and authoritarian, their nationalism became inextricably bound up with a conviction that the Maronites, in their deep mistrust of Arabism, were the only true embodiment of it and that their own salvation as a community lay in a strong Lebanese state and their institutionalized ascendancy within it that their opponents were now seeking to dismantle.

There could be no ‘Black September’ against the Palestinians in Lebanon, because there was no central authority cohesive or resolute enough to carry one out. But there could be civil war, and a splintering of the central authority itself. As civil wars are apt to do, Lebanon’s crept up by stealth, in an incremental interplay of action and reaction among all the players, internal and external, involved. But, as was only to be expected of the small, sectarian state, it was to surpass all others in its complexity, qualifying, in the opinion of British journalist Jim Muir, one of its most seasoned chroniclers, as ‘perhaps the most convoluted to have stricken any part of the world ever’.³⁰

RAIDS AND REPRISALS: THE INFERNAL CYCLE BEGINS

In the immediate aftermath of 1967, Palestinians began filtering down to those southern frontier regions from where, a generation before, the Mufti’s men had operated in support of the Great Rebellion. They could do very little because, thanks to the vigilance of the Deuxième Bureau, they simply did not have the manpower for the job, and because the Lebanese army was still heavily present, and active in combating them. But after the battle of Karameh, young men went from the Lebanese camps to train in Jordan’s Ghor Valley;³¹ then, as intensified Israeli reprisals made things more difficult there, they came back to Lebanon, where Fatah had decided to open up a whole new, second front, in order to supplement the Jordanian one. And it was partly with the help of the Muslim/leftist opposition, and the oppressed and impoverished Shiite villagers of the south, that they established their first bases - and a clinic for the local population - in the wild and remote Arkoub region, high up on the flanks of Mount Hermon, and then spread westward and downward, the whole length of the frontier, towards the Mediterranean.³² A few minor operations, a mine-laying here, a mortar round there, were still all they could manage. They were enough, however, for Israel to begin those cross-border reprisals which, on and off, it has been visiting on the country till this day. In May 1968, the Shiite border village of Houle became its first victim; an artillery salvo killed one woman, injured another and a child. That was a paltry toll compared with the eighty who, in that self-same village’s last experience of Israeli violence, had died there in one of the massacres of 1948.³³ But it was also - little though they knew it at the time - the harbinger of almost unimaginably worse to come.

In fact, it was not in reprisal for one of these cross-border guerilla incursions that Lebanon suffered its first great, post-1967 shock, the first really incontrovertible, and spectacular, indication that it was liable to be drawn into the cycle of raid and retaliation which it had been spared in the first two decades of the Arab-Israeli struggle. It grew out of that other form of warfare, international terrorism, which, in addition to regular guerilla operations, the Palestinians were now embarking on. Ironically, it was the particular speciality of organizations, notably George Habash’s PFLP, which, in their earlier, Nasserist phase, had disapproved of ‘armed struggle’ of any kind, but which, in their new, Marxist, ‘revolutionary’ one, adopted it in this extreme and deliberately shocking form. In December 1968, two members of the PFLP machine-gunned a Boeing 707 of the Israeli national carrier, El Al, at Athens airport, killing one Israeli aboard and wounding another. The two men hailed from refugee camps in Lebanon. Two days later, helicopter-borne Israeli commandos landed at Beirut airport and systematically blew up thirteen passenger jets - almost the entire fleet - of Lebanon’s national carrier, Middle East Airlines. Three days after that, the PFLP fired Russian-made Katyusha missiles across Israel’s northern frontier; they killed three persons in the northern town of Kiryat Shmona, another ‘first’ (like the Israeli attack on Beirut airport) - this one in the opposite direction - which would repeat itself endlessly, and in the end devastatingly, down the years.

For a moment, the whole of Lebanon was in a daze. Given the efficiency, and sheer surprise, of the airport attack, no one could have seriously expected the Lebanese army to have countered it. But hardly had the country recovered from the shock than the Muslim/leftists went on a violent propaganda offensive against this Maronite-led institution, charging it with gross neglect of its duty- which, they said, was to defend Lebanon, as an Arab country, against Israel, not to thwart the legitimate activities of the Palestinian guerillas on its soil. The so-called ‘Student Revolution’ organized a general strike, accompanied by demonstrations in Beirut and several other cities, against the whole, dysfunctional ruling system. The traditional Muslim oligarchs, though hardly less anxious than their Christian counterparts to preserve this system, could not but bend before the strength of Muslim/leftist opinion. It tied them in knots of verbal ingenuity. Even as, on the one hand, the prime minister of the time, Abdullah Yafi, was denying, ‘for the hundredth time‘, the existence of guerilla bases on Lebanese territory, on the other he was endorsing the guerillas’ ‘sacred right’ to liberate their land from Lebanon. When Maronite leaders opined that Lebanon’s best defence lay in its weakness, in curbing the guerillas and giving Israel no pretext to attack it, the Muslim oligarchs claimed that its best defence was to protect and support them, by introducing national conscription and coordinating its defences with other Arab countries.

COUNTDOWN TO CIVIL WAR

In these contradictory responses lay the countdown to civil war. The cycle was inexorable. The guerillas steadily intensified their operations. These would come in one or other of their two, by now well-established, forms: direct incursions across the southern border against Israel proper, or acts of terror, hijackings and the like, against Israeli or non-Israeli targets in the world at large. In either case Israel would hold Lebanon responsible in its capacity as the main, and before long the only, quasi-independent sanctuary of the entire resistance movement. Its steadily intensifying retaliatory actions might be chiefly directed at the Palestinians, but, accidentally or intentionally, they took in strictly Lebanese targets, military or civilian, too. As in the case of the ‘border wars’ against its other neighbours in the 1950s, Israel’s objective, at least primarily and ostensibly, was to inflict sufficient pain to persuade the ‘host’ to turn against the ‘guest’. And if it couldn’t manage that - supposing that, in truth, it ever really wanted to - it wouldn’t really matter very much, not at least for interventionists of the Ben-Gurion school. For them it was straightforward enough: the greater the chaos in their northern neighbour the greater the opportunities it would offer them to carry out some or all of the geopolitical grand designs which, under the general heading of ‘Christian Lebanon’, they had so long harboured.

The ‘host’ did attempt to discipline or destroy the ‘guest’. But it could never do so without risk of destroying itself. It was, of course, the anti-guerilla components of the ruling system, especially the Maronite-dominated army and security forces, which were to lead the attempt, while its pro-guerilla components, led by Sunni Muslim prime ministers, checked them. So guerilla activities continued, and so did Israeli reprisals. And with state authority paralyzed, the rival camps that it was supposed to collectively represent, and reciprocally neutralize, increasingly took matters into their own hands - although the Maronites, their superior status threatened and their atavistic minority fears aroused, did so a good deal more quickly and farreachingly in opposition to the Palestinians than the Muslim/leftists did so on the Palestinians’ behalf.

Both sides drew in their respective, regional backers. Broadly speaking, that meant that the Arab states aligned themselves with the Palestinians and Muslim/leftists, albeit with all the twists and turns, equivocations and outright perfidies which those two score entities habitually deploy at each other’s expense, while the Israelis - and usually, in their guile, some, at least, of those self-same Arab states too - aligned themselves with the Maronites.

All the while, the rising violence and counter-violence across the frontiers caused ever-growing havoc and disruption in the lives of the southern inhabitants, some 80 per cent of whom were Shiites. Driven now by fear and insecurity, as well as by material want, they emigrated in ever larger numbers to Beirut. There they became by far the largest component - alongside Sunni Muslims, Palestinians and not a few Maronites as well - in the city’s outlying ‘belt of misery’, and notably the subsequently famous al-Dahzya al-Fanubiya, ‘the southern suburb’ (or simply al-Dahiya, ‘the suburb’, as it generally came to be known), the vast new slum that had arisen hard by the refugee camps of Sabra, Shatila and Bourj al-Brajneh. Naturally, too, they became a further source of sectarian friction and socio-economic radicalization.

So it was that, in January 1969, despite the airport raid, the Palestinians pressed ahead with the implantation of their officially ‘non-existent’ bases in the south. The army tried to stop them. In April, it besieged the southern town of Bint Jbeil, to which some fedayeen had just returned upon completion of a raid into Israel. The Shiite townspeople refused to hand them over. For they looked on the Lebanese army more like an army of occupation than their own. For them the Palestinians suffered a similar kind of statelessness or state indifference as themselves; for some, indeed, the Palestinians’ dispossession could be seen as their ‘Karbala’, the passion of the iconic Shiite martyr, Hussein. Furthermore, as well as deserving support as patriots in their own right, the Palestinians offered an instrument through which the Shiites could challenge Lebanon’s own negligent, corrupt- and confessionally hostile - regime.³⁴ But after a three-day siege and threat of bombardment, it was the guerillas themselves who surrendered to avoid bloodshed.

When news of their imprisonment reached the capital, the Muslim/ leftists and the Palestinians called for a mass demonstration. The government banned it. And when, on 23 April, they went ahead regardless, the riot police - or army disguised as such - fired into the unarmed crowds. Each time it did so, the throng would pause, as victims fell among them, regroup, and resume their march to shouts of ‘Asifa, Asifa’ (‘Storm’ - the name of Fatah’s military wing). The result was a two-hour confrontation in which twenty died and hundreds were injured.³⁵ The prime minister resigned, plunging the system into more or less perpetual constitutional crisis. Arab states, led by Egypt, intervened diplomatically on behalf of the guerillas, who resumed their build-up in the south.

In May, the army tried again. Clashes left seven guerillas and two soldiers dead. Arafat brought yet more reinforcements to the south, raising the total to some 600, and cross-border operations rose three-fold in less than three months.

In September, Israel issued a stern warning: either Lebanon kept the peace along the frontier, or Israel would do it in its stead. This growing truculence was not lost on the authorities, already seeking to appease Israel by striking on a new front: the refugee camps. But these, though basically defenceless still, were now boiling with revolutionary fervour. When the police entered the northernmost camp of Nahr al-Barid and demanded the demolition of the local Fatah office, they got a rude shock: the inhabitants took them hostage instead.³⁶ That triggered the resistance movement’s greatest breakthrough yet - the ‘Intifada of the camps’. There were seventeen such camps in Lebanon, and by October every one of them had thrown out police, army and the hated Deuxième Bureau in a spontaneous, largely bloodless uprising. In urban areas especially, such as Sabra and Shatila, the refugees were helped by a militant, local Lebanese populace closely intermingled with their own. Unarmed Lebanese demonstrators overran local police stations, seized their weapons, and donated them to the camps.³⁷ Everywhere, their ‘liberation’ barely accomplished and Palestinian flags raised, the camp-dwellers organized themselves as self-governing, extra-territorial entities, citadels of mass support for the Revolution and recruitment into its ranks as fedayeen; among the first of their more self-indulgent priorities was the enlargement of their squalid homes by means of the cement and solid materials so long forbidden them.

Still, the army would not give up. In October, with the guerillas’ presence in the south continuing to expand, it cut their vital supply lines from Syria, and surrounded 150 of them near Bint Jbeil and, apparently in coordination with the Israeli army, killed sixteen in a six-day siege.³⁸ Again the Sunni Muslim premier resigned; again there was uproar and demonstrations. It was accompanied, this time, by outright insurrection among the Muslim masses over whom he, and traditional leaders like him, were gradually losing their grip. Leftist militias seized control of parts of the two, predominantly Sunni Muslim, coastal cities of Tripoli and Sidon. Arab capitals erupted in street protests on the guerillas’ behalf. President Nasser proclaimed that, henceforth, any Arab government would be judged by its attitude towards them. However strictly it might control guerilla activities on its own territory, militantly leftist Baathist Syria, self-styled ‘citadel of Arabism’, had no qualms about condemning that practice in others, setting a pattern of behaviour that has persisted till this day. It closed its borders with Lebanon, attacked Lebanese military positions along them, and urged the Lebanese people to ‘sweep away their treasonable [ruling] clique and assume their full role in the Arab battle’. Even conservative Arab regimes, fearful though they were of the explosive mix of Palestinian resistance and Arab radicalism, took the guerillas’ side.

Besieged on all hands, President Charles Helou appealed for Nasser’s mediation. Under the ‘Cairo agreement’ which that mediation yielded, the guerillas converted their de facto, but officially contested, presence in Lebanon into a de jure one. They acquired the right not merely to control the camps, but, most fatefully, to launch attacks on Israel through certain ‘corridors’ in the south; to launch them, moreover, with the assistance of, and in coordination with, the self-same Lebanese army which had been so desperately trying to prevent them doing just that. It was in effect, the charter of Fatahland, of the guerilla ‘state-within-a-state’, of the vital and - following his expulsion from Jordan nine months later- the one and only politico-military power base at Arafat’s disposal for the conduct of the Palestinian struggle.

Another breakthrough, a triumph even, for the Palestinians and their Lebanese allies, it was, ipso facto, a very disturbing reverse for the other side: a betrayal of national sovereignty, a capitulation to the Arab and Muslim exterior, a body blow to Maronite domestic ascendancy, and a portent of more to come. It nurtured an already budding apprehension that, in the end, salvation might only come with the removal of the Palestinians, that this might only be attainable by force, and, if not the army’s force, then that of the Maronite community itself. There began a process of non-state militarization. The Phalangists already boasted a militia, which they now strengthened, but others, such as followers of the former President Chamoun, or the northern Maronite ‘strongman’ and future president, Suleiman Frangieh, joined in.³⁹ And, naturally enough, those ‘pro-Zionist’ tendencies within the community, always latent but in retreat since at least the mini civil war of 1958, bestirred themselves again. An Israel at the height of its military pride and self-confidence could offer much to tempt them.⁴⁰ Most Maronite deputies reluctantly voted for the Cairo agreement whose text, a state secret, they had never actually read. The Lebanese state, said Pierre Gemayel, the Phalangist leader, was ‘faced with two evils, a destructive civil war or this accord’.⁴¹ Five years later, it was to get the war as well.