Deportees Get Used to Life in No-Man’s-Land

Tea and tuna served on the side of a barren, wind-swept mountain was Sunday breakfast for 415 Palestinian deportees stranded in southern Lebanon since their deportation by Israel on Thursday.

“Hey, it’s roast beef for lunch,” someone joked in English. In fact, canned meat, boiled potatoes and rice made their appearance around 2 in the afternoon.

The surrounding snow-capped mountains created a Christmas-card scene for the makeshift camp, but the men said they had suffered during the bitterly cold nights. “We have three blankets apiece and a fourth to share between each two,” explained a young deportee.

With winter working against them, the men spent Sunday making the camp livable and passably comfortable at the 2,750-foot elevation.

From a hillside, a team sent down a shower of rocks that a second group laid in sidewalk fashion. This called for another joke: “Back home, throwing rocks would land us in detention for three months.”

The 5-year-old Palestinian uprising has been characterized by stone-throwing youths confronting Israeli soldiers in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

There’s no such thing as “women’s work” in a camp of all men. Potato peeling, basic laundry and setting the pots to boil busied teams of men taking advantage of the few hours of above-freezing temperatures.

The exceptions to the work-if-you-want-to-eat rule were two blind deportees, a man with a broken leg and another with a crippled leg.

Jamal Hamarah was hit by Israeli gunfire when leaving a bakery near Bethlehem in early November, he said. The three wounds in his leg required two operations. The Israeli doctors who treated him told him to keep the leg warm, but the soldiers who dragged him from his home last Thursday refused to consider his case. He had to walk the two kilometers across no-man’s-land here in southern Lebanon on crutches.

“I showed them my medical report from Hadassah Hospital,” Hamarah said, gesturing to show how a soldier had ripped it up. “ ‘Thanks to Israel you are alive. Now you will die,’ ” he quoted the soldier as saying.

Winter isn’t the only enemy of the deportees. The men understand that it’s the holiday season in the United States--not a great time for focusing attention on their plight.

Hamarah’s brother, Nasser, is another deportee. He was working at the Paradise Hotel in Bethlehem, where, he said, the tourist season is looking good--so good that there’s no room in his inn. But there’s no problem finding room in jail, according to Nasser. He’s been picked up by the Israel Defense Forces nine times.

Journalists asked dozens of deportees why the Israelis had arrested them. Typical was this answer from one, who drew a parallel with the treatment of Muslims by Serbs in Bosnia: “Because I pray. We are good Muslims, and that’s a crime in Palestine.”

Those who claimed to be active in Hamas, the most militant of the Islamic fundamentalist groups in the occupied territories, defended their “right to free speech.” And when asked to define Hamas’ membership conditions, many answered, “To pray and be good Muslims.”

Israel expelled the 415 men after Hamas claimed responsibility for kidnaping and murdering a sergeant major of the paramilitary Israeli border police last week.

Ablutions before prayers are followed to the letter by those brave enough to strip off socks and roll up sleeves to wash their feet, hands and arms in the frigid water available at the camp. A strip of plastic serves as a prayer carpet.

“The one who bought refugee-hood rather than kebab” is the nickname given to one man who asserts he was picked up just to increase the number of deportees. Shair, who gave no last name, was telephoning his wife to tell her he would bring home grilled kebab for lunch, he said. Israeli soldiers grabbed the owner of the cafe he was calling from and dragged Shair away too, he said.

Many of the deportees from the Gaza Strip had never seen snow before, and none had been to Lebanon.

Now into their fourth day of statelessness, they are getting the hang of camp living. Tent lines serve as towel racks, and rows of washed socks dry in the wintry sunlight.

Water came compliments of the International Committee of the Red Cross and U.N. peacekeeping troops stationed nearby. Heavy clothing, cooking and heating supplies and food have come from the Red Cross, the United Nations and Islamic groups in Lebanon, including the militant Shiite organization, Hezbollah.

The head of the U.N. Works and Relief Agency for Palestine Refugees arrived from Vienna to assess the situation and immediately sent for more water. Concrete blocks for building latrines have arrived.

The 10 physicians among the deportees have health matters in hand, but they expect respiratory ailments, especially coughs and colds, to become widespread with 10 men living in each tent.

Letters to families back home went out the first day through the Red Cross. The writing that goes on now is less personal, more political. Statements to the press are prepared in the shelter of the tents. “What we need is a compact computer with printer,” one of the men said. “We have lots of computer-trained guys here.”

The talent list in the camp is long. Of the 415 deportees, 108 have college degrees, many in the sciences.

According to a Hamas spokesman, Dr. Abdul-Aziz Rantisi, the deportation was a kind of evacuation “to empty the land of its talent.” Rantisi said that none of the 415 had ever been tried in court.

For one young man, who had spent five years living in the United States, the reality of what had happened to him had not sunk in. But a smile came to his face when someone pointed to a steaming pot and invited him to step up for “rice a la Rabin,” a reference to Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who ordered the deportations.