Tears for Tarshiha Read online

  Initially, the PLO steered clear of the conflict. But on 13 April when the PLO and several busloads of mourners were escorting the body of a Palestinian officer back to his family in Jordan a Christian Kata’eb militia group attacked them on the road between Beirut and Damascus. Many innocent civilians from Burj, and the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps were killed. The Palestinian military response was to take an active part in the civil war, supporting the left-wing Lebanese groups.

  The initial months of conflict were marked by fierce shelling and fighting across Beirut, but it was heaviest in our part of the city. We were lucky, as we were able to leave the camp and go to my uncle’s flat about two minutes walk from the camp in the Lebanese suburb of Burj el Barajneh (after which the camp was named). We sheltered there often. During the fighting my mother, my aunt and my grandmother would stay awake all night, sitting on the mattresses on the floor, praying together, trying to calm their fears. We would stay close to them, huddled together for comfort; the young ones crying, terrified by the noise of the bombing, the crashing of masonry falling and glass shattering.

  The shelling was ferocious: we were overwhelmed with the smell of burning buildings, the dust and cordite leaving us gasping for air and coughing, choked by the fallout. During lulls in the bombing, we could hear the cries of people in the nearby flats. Relatives and many young people I knew were killed. One neighbour was blown to pieces in their home, another left the camp and never returned.

  It was a terrifying time and I began to have vivid, horrifying dreams. I could not eat. I would think of these young people, of the happy times we had had together, and I would be filled with an overwhelming sense of sadness and loss. But at the same time, I would feel a fury and frustation that we were trapped in someone else’s war. It was confusing and incomprehensible. We as Palestinians did not fight each other because of religion. Christian and Muslim Palestinians fought side by side to liberate Palestine and I could not understand why in Lebanon there was so much hatred.

  While we would wait in the flat for a lull in the bombing, my grandmother would remind us that people were not always divided by religion. She would point to the example of the refugees from Tarshiha who rejected attempts by the Lebanese government to separate them along religious lines in the camp. She talked of the experience of her Christian friend, Miriam, from the Palestinian village of Safid. When they had fled the Israeli attacks with their Muslim and Christian neighbours, they had to resist efforts to separate them, rejecting offers of Lebanese nationality for the Christian members of their village. The UN even constructed a special camp for Palestinian Christians in East Beirut called Dbeyeh and another one in West Beirut called Mar Elias. But the religious lines of these camps were soon broken as Muslims moved into the camps because they wanted to be with friends from their own villages, irrespective of their religion.

  By September 1975, Lebanon was effectively split into two major cantons. In fierce fighting the leftist, mostly secular, LMN had gained dominance in West Beirut and the south of Lebanon, while the Christians were dominant in East Beirut and in some parts of the north. Kata’eb head, Bashir Gemayel, formed a new and expanded militia alliance: the Christian Lebanese Forces. Israel provided increasing aid training and military support to this group. But nothing is ever simple in Lebanon and in early 1976, trying to avert a complete collapse, the weakened Lebanese National Parliament asked Syria for military help. Its armed forces were to stay in Lebanon for the next 30 years.14 The war quickly escalated and soon Christian militia in East Beirut started to ‘ethnically cleanse’ the area of Muslims, mostly Shi’a, who fled to the slums of West Beirut. The Palestinians in the refugee camps in East Beirut were targeted as well, but unlike the Shi’a, they were not allowed to escape.

  The UN camp of Tel al-Za’atar (Hill of Thyme) was inhabited predominantly by Muslim refugees who came from an area in Palestine called Ghoor. Their skin was dark and the women were tattooed on their chins and faces much as Palestinian Bedouins do. They, like all the Palestinians, tried to stay together as a community; the camp housed around 30,000 refugees as well as many impoverished Lebanese from the south, mostly Shi’a Muslims. Internally and on the periphery, the camp was protected by the PLO, but the Kata’eb was dominant in the district. On 4 January 1976, the Christian Lebanese Forces surrounded and sealed the camp. No one could enter or leave, not even UNRWA or the local or International Committee of the Red Cross.

  In the seven-month siege of Tel al-Za’atar that followed, more than 2,500 people died in the fighting or from injuries. Thousands were wounded and thousands more disappeared. On 11 August alone more than 1,500 unarmed civilians—women, children and old men— from the camp were executed by the Kata’eb as they tried to walk to safety. By the time the siege was over a camp that had housed more than 30,000 UN-protected refugees had been erased. 15

  I was 15 years old and I can remember the events as if they took place yesterday. The survivors were brought to Sports City Stadium in Beirut where Palestinians from across Lebanon, myself included, came to help them. The stories I heard as I spoke with survivors are imprinted on my soul. I wept that day and my heart felt as if it was shattering into pieces as I tried to absorb the horrors these people had endured. Many Palestinians had relatives in Tel al-Za’atar and people from all over Beirut, outside and inside the refugee camps, opened their houses for the survivors.

  In our camp my neighbour was looking after Umm Afeef, a widow in her late sixties who had lost three children and a son-in-law in the massacre, and was looking after her daughter’s baby girl. Although strongly believing in her faith, Umm Afeef would say over and over, ‘How could God let this happen? There is no God in this world.’ My mother would sit with her and calm her; and call on God to give Umm Afeef the strength to live with her great loss. This gentle understanding and the quiet prayers of my mother, would cause this poor woman to burst into tears, crying and wailing with uncontrollable grief.

  There were many eyewitness accounts but one that is etched in my mind is the brutal killing of a 10-year-old boy. His mother, a survivor herself, told me the story. She had lost all her sons in the massacre and the last was this child. The mother was with a large group of people who had gathered together in preparation to leave the camp. The right-wing Christian parties who had attacked the camp stopped this group and arbitrarily singled out this woman and her son. She pleaded with them, ‘Please, do not harm him. He is the last boy I have. Please, do not harm him.’ They said, ‘No, no just sit down. We are not going to harm him. We are not going to do anything to him.’ They put the boy in her lap as if to let him sleep, and then they shot him in the head right there, on her lap.

  After this, the mother, like many of these women, became severely mentally disturbed. How could they remain sane? In time, with the loving support of women such as my mother, she recovered as best as she could and lived amongst us with her remaining family, in Burj Barajneh camp.

  Another woman who survived these war crimes became mute after witnessing the brutal killing of her brother. He was killed at one of the Kata’eb checkpoints. When the siblings approached the militia they asked the boy, ‘What are you eating?’

  When he replied, ‘I am eating nothing’, one of them pushed his cheek with a small pistol, saying, ‘No, no, you are eating something. You are chewing something.’

  Her brother again said, ‘No there is nothing there. I am not eating.’

  The soldier said to him, ‘Okay, open your mouth so I can see’.

  The minute her brother did as he was asked, the soldier shot him in the mouth, as his sister looked on frozen in horror. In her extreme shock, this poor woman was never able to speak again. She too settled in our camp, and later worked as a cleaner at Haifa hospital.

  While these events affected me deeply and were profoundly horrifying, they actually made me stronger in my determination not to abandon my people, but to fight, to make a contribution in the best way
I could.

  6

  NURSING THE ENEMY

  My second last year of high school, 1978, would turn out to be a pivotal one—personally and politically.

  The Arab-Israeli conflict moved to a new phase in March when Israel invaded Lebanon for the second time in a massive ground and air assault. More than 25,000 troops occupied the country to the Letani River, in what was called the Bridges War. More than 2,000 Lebanese civilians were killed, and more than 200,000 people, most of them Shi’a Muslims fled, as Israeli bombs and rockets destroyed their villages along with roads, bridges, wells, and water and electricity infrastructure. The displaced residents from southern Lebanon swelled the slums in West Beirut, creating even more conflict.

  At the international level, the UN passed Resolution 425, calling for a ceasefire and an Israeli withdrawal from the south of Lebanon, and deploying 6,000 UN troops along the border of a 10-kilometre buffer zone to monitor the peace. But Israel, in effect, remained in control of this southern zone by handing over control of this border strip to its proxy South Lebanon Army, made up of Christian militia. Its role was to keep the PLO and its Lebanese supporters away from Israeli settlements.

  Through its invasion, Israel had created a small Christian canton on its border, but its support of Lebanon’s Christian community did not end there. When Christian forces clashed with Syrian troops in East Beirut, Israeli military jets screamed over Beirut, skimming the tops of the buildings in the seaside area of Corniche Mazraa, terrifying the city’s residents; while Israeli gunboats simultaneously shelled West Beirut in support of their Christian allies. By the end of 1978, the Syrian-led Arab Deterrent Force was forced out of East Beirut and this section of the city and the surrounding mountain came under the full military control of Christian forces, armed and trained by the Israelis. The country was by now divided with Beirut split along the so-called Green Line. In the east were the Christian Lebanese Forces, supported regionally by the Israelis and internationally by the US. West Beirut was under the control of the Muslim-dominated LNM, supported by most Arab nations and internationally by the USSR.

  Throughout that year, the war was an everyday part of my life. I never slept without hearing the sound of shooting, shelling and bombing. But 1978 was also the year I met the man who would later become my husband, Mahmoud Khazaal. We were studying at the same school and Mahmoud, a determined young man, was agitating for the students to hold a demonstration against Israel’s invasion. Mahmoud’s older brother had been killed when Israel had invaded, along with many other Palestinians and Lebanese fighting in south Lebanon. Even before his brother died, however, Mahmoud had been urging all the students at our high school, run by UNRWA just outside the camp, to express their anger by boycotting classes and going on strike. When the bell rang at the start of the day, we normally had to stand in a row before filing into class.

  One day, we all agreed that we would refuse to go into our classrooms. The school director came around and began to threaten us with expulsion, so eventually most of the students caved in. With some others, Mahmoud included, I refused to go inside. Because I had been a model student and was top of my class, the school director approached me and said he was surprised by my actions.

  ‘I must keep my word when we all have an agreement, and you should not encourage us to break our word,’ I told him. ‘We supported Mahmoud’s suggestion to boycott classes and we should all take responsibility for that agreement. If you want to build a good generation of people, you should respect our views and ideals. Because of this I will not leave those whom I have supported.’

  The director agreed that there was logic in my argument but said that he did not want us to miss our studies. I replied that our feelings about our people were important too. So, we maintained our strike, which is how I met Mahmoud.

  The war and cultural considerations meant our social life as teenagers was quite circumscribed. Going into the centre of Beirut to the cinema or other public places was out of the question as they were often targets for car bombers. Also, in our culture girls and boys did not mix socially in the way that western teenagers do, rarely spending time alone together. So Mahmoud and I spent our time with our friends in a group situation. We looked on boys as our comrades and concentrated on doing various things to improve camp life and to care for our family and friends there. I was attracted to boys because of their work for our cause and our community; and by their honesty, punctuality and energy. It was all of these qualities that attracted me to Mahmoud, although his good looks added to the attraction. At our student strike he had demonstrated that he wanted to do something for our people and was prepared to face the consequences of these actions. But the line between propriety and intimacy was never crossed. Love was not sexual or romantic; it was more a caring, worrying and fear of loss. Our greatest concern was that the person we cared for would die. This fear overwhelmed any sexual or romantic feelings. So, our lives were centred in the camp, at school and in our struggle to liberate Palestine.

  In Burj Barajneh and at school, I continued with my various student activities. We produced newsletters, displayed articles on the walls, undertook various cultural activities such as traditional dancing, and held workshops on traditional Palestinian embroidery. My sisters and I were so skilled in this last craft that we actually made quite lot of money by selling various items. This enabled us to help with the household budget as well as have some pocket money. Like many others, my father had lost his job at the start of the civil war as his work had been in the Christian sector in East Beirut, so our embroidery became an important source of income for my family.

  Of course, all the Palestinian political parties were active in the camp, and many of them were recruiting young people for their political work. At one point, a woman who belonged to al-Fatah, came to our student group and started to run courses on politics. I liked the way this woman was teaching, so I joined, but only for a few weeks as I was not happy to do things without informing my parents. They were not against me being involved in student politics, but they wanted me to put my studies first. They would say that when I was an adult, I would be able to make the right decision about which political group I wanted to actively support. At the same time, we would talk openly about the situation with my parents, our neighbours, our friends and our teachers. We felt that politics was like bread and we needed to have it every day. But at that time, I agreed with my parents—it was too early for me to be involved in a political party.

  Nonetheless, when the fighting stopped towards the end of 1978, and the city was divided into West and East Beirut, I could not help but get caught up in the political developments in the camp. I started to talk with Mahmoud and the rest of the students and began to deepen my understanding of Zionism and the role this ideology was playing in Palestine. The boys in the camp and Mahmoud too were politically active in their support for the PLO, attending meetings, discussing the situation in the south of Lebanon, developments within the PLO and the need for international support.

  During these years we students supported the PLO’s attempts to bring our cause to the attention of the international community. Leila Khaled was a member of a group called the Palestinians for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), whose members were involved in hijacking planes. As a teenager I was very proud of her. We all felt the world should know about our situation, and her actions were giving our plight global attention. Unlike other hijackings later, those Leila were involved in did not result in deaths. The people she hijacked were released, all unharmed, and while they caused international outrage, we felt the actions of these militants were totally justified—yes, those planes were not ours, and our actions were illegal and against international rules and laws. But the same argument applied to the Palestinian territories—the Israelis had stolen our lands and their actions were illegal under international law. So where was the outrage for Palestinians at that time? Our people had lived in misery in camps for decades, and ha
d been killed and massacred in thousands—and the world was shocked when we took action?

  I always ask people what they would do if someone kicked them out of their house and said, ‘Sorry this is not your home. You must leave.’ Of course, that person would be furious. In most countries there are laws to protect people’s possessions, but Palestinians have had their entire lives stolen; and all the international laws that should protect us and give us our rights are ignored. As a result, millions of us have existed in miserable camps for decades. What are we expected to do? Are we expected to be silent and just slide into more poverty and despair? I was young, but I could see this was not fair; and inevitably, the injustice of our position fired my revolutionary spirit. As a teenager, I supported the hijacking of planes and I think if someone had asked me to help with a hijacking at that time I would have done so. I was so angry at all the things I had witnessed that I was ready to sacrifice my own life to liberate Palestine.

  As these events raged around me, I graduated from school in 1979 with excellent results. Although I had dreamed of studying medicine for many years, I knew my father would not be able to support me financially to study in Lebanon. I confidently applied to the PLO for a scholarship to study in Russia or Bulgaria, translating all of my papers into English and copying my academic transcript. I took them to the relevant PLO office, going back each week, to see if they had any news. At the same time staff at the office were telling me to come back the following week for news, other students were already being awarded their scholarships and starting to leave the country.