The pictures on television had a disorienting familiarity: a Lebanese city and the neighboring Palestinian refugee camp decimated by the surrounding heavy artillery of an occupying army. The bombardment's goals were to drive out the armed forces of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and ultimately to destroy the PLO as an independent political and military force in the Middle East.
At makeshift press conferences held in abandoned buildings, PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat proclaimed his intention to fight to the finish, but finally negotiated a truce that allowed him and his troops to retreat to various points in North Africa and the Persian Gulf. In the end thousands of homeless Palestinians and Lebanese were left to mourn the dead and try again to pick up the pieces of their lives.
The plot was familiar. But the setting was not Beirut in August, 1982. It was Tripoli, the largest city in northern Lebanon, in the late fall of 1983. The occupying army this time was not Israeli but Syrian, and its local ally was not the Lebanese Phalange but a militarist Palestinian faction that had broken from the PLO last spring. In spite of these differences, the result of the siege of Tripoli was the same as it had been in Beirut: pointless suffering and death and another step away from the possibility of a just peace in the Middle East.
For the Palestinians the lesson was also the same. The Syrian attack again brought home the fact that the Palestinians are a marginalized and outcast people, exploited and despised by all sides in the Middle East conflict.
Ever since the establishment of the state of Israel and the ensuing Arab-Israeli war in 1948, the Palestinians have had no geographical territory where their identity and potential as a people could be lived out and defined. Through most of those years the greatest number of them have existed either in crowded and desperately impoverished refugee camps, usually tightly controlled by their "host" Arab governments, or under a repressive Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, the remaining fragments of former Palestine. But out of these most unpromising circumstances the Palestinians have slowly over the years carved out their own independent political territory.
The Palestinians' reclamation of their identity and reassertion of their rights did not come cheaply. They have paid for it in repression, imprisonment, and death at the hands of both the Israeli government and the Arab states. For instance, in 1970 King Hussein of Jordan killed more than 10,000 Palestinians in the process of driving the PLO out of the country. Along the way the Palestinians also sullied their own cause with unconscionable acts of terrorism against Israeli civilians and others around the world.
Now the history of the Palestinian people has reached a crossroads. What the Palestinians now face in Lebanon, in the West Bank and Gaza, in U.S. politics, and even in the chaos of their own leadership is the possibility that they will again become a forgotten people scattered across the earth as permanent victims of a historical injustice.
This would clearly be the case if Syrian President Hafez Assad had his way. Assad's war against the PLO has many causes. Setting himself up as the spokesperson for Palestinian nationalism could lend legitimacy to his widely hated minority regime at home. Assad also professes a desire to restore the lost glory of ancient Greater Syria, which included present-day Syria as well as what is now Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, and Jordan. Assad would make the Palestinians subject to his domestic political needs and quixotic imperial ambitions.
Elsewhere in Lebanon the Palestinians have, for the last year, been the target of a campaign of harassment and terror by the Phalangist militia and the Lebanese government security forces. The campaign has been particularly intense in southern Lebanon, where the American Friends Service Committee reports that more than 3,000 Palestinians have been evicted from their homes by the Phalange since the 1982 Israeli invasion. A U.S. State Department memorandum, made public last August, noted that the Lebanese government of Amin Gemayel hopes eventually to evict as many as 75 per cent of the Palestinians in Lebanon. The memo concluded, "There are serious threats to life and freedom for many Palestinians in Lebanon solely because they are Palestinians."
In the West Bank and Gaza, the establishment of Israeli settlements aimed at irrevocably absorbing those territories into Israel has continued to accelerate. At least 70 per cent of West Bank land is now under Israeli control.
The pervasive repression of Palestinian political activities, economic development, and social institutions is unabated, as is the vigilante violence against Palestinians by the many right-wing extremists among the West Bank settlers. In an article recently published in the New York Times, Jonathan Kuttab, a Palestinian Christian and human rights lawyer in the West Bank, expressed the fear of many West Bank Palestinians that armed settlers may eventually force many of them across the river into Jordan as the Israelis seek to decrease the Arab majority in the territories.
As for the United States, after a halfhearted stab at the issue of Palestinian rights in the September, 1982 "peace initiative," the Reagan administration now seems to view the Palestinians' problems as an unseemly distraction from the more important business of imposing unquestioned U.S. dominance over the entire region. Toward this end U.S. military activity in Lebanon continues to escalate, and the "strategic cooperation" agreement with Israel has been revived and completed. Simultaneously, criticism of Israel's settlements policy has disappeared from the administration's lexicon.
The Middle East situation is always a difficult subject for Christians in this country to address. Its ambiguities do not yield easily to the kind of moral discernment by which we try to shape our political stands. Israel's policy toward the Palestinians is, like that of our own country, fundamentally unjust and oppressive. And Israel's stance toward its Arab neighbors is often belligerent. But we must also acknowledge that the history of the Jewish people, as well as the bloodletting and tyranny so tragically widespread in the Arab world, gives substance to the fears of Israeli Jews. At the same time, the PLO's goal of full self-determination in a Palestinian homeland is undeniably just. But it is clouded by past terrorism, by the manipulation of transparently ambitious powers like Syria, and by a lingering tendency in the PLO toward hateful rhetoric and military posturing.
If there is beneath the complexities and power-plays a clear moral imperative in the Middle East for U.S. Christians it is heard in the cry of the marginalized and outcast Palestinian people. That cry impels us to stand with them in their daily struggle for survival. The Palestinian people are not the mythical nation of "terrorists," or "freedom fighters," of propaganda lore. They are mostly a nation of landless peasants, unemployed or exploited workers, homeless families, and children raised amid constant insecurity and violence.
They don't deserve to be the scapegoats of the Middle East or the cannon fodder of geopolitical rivalries.
Like every other people, they deserve a home, a future, and a measure of control over their destiny. Above all else at present, they do not deserve to be forgotten—especially not in the United States where their fate and that of the entire Middle East is in large part decided.
Danny Collum was an associate editor of Sojourners magazine when this article appeared.
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