An Ugly Episode in the Hills of Lebanon : 415 Palestinians are in limbo as Israel and Lebanon argue their fate

The 415 Palestinian Arabs deported by Israel last week remain camped on a bleak and frigid hillside in southern Lebanon, suspended between two worlds. Israel, its government fortified by a Supreme Court refusal to cancel the expulsions, has restated its determination not to allow the deportees back any time soon. Lebanon on its part not only refuses to give them haven but now says it won’t even allow the International Red Cross and other relief agencies to truck food and water to their camp.

Meanwhile, the same Arab states that said nothing when 300,000 Palestinians were booted out of Kuwait and that responded with indifference to years of starvation and chaos in Somalia--a member of both the Arab and Islamic Leagues--suddenly find the plight of the expellees a matter of profound humane concern.

And so it is, whatever the hypocritical self-interest politics that have now become attached to the deportees’ fate. Israel was wrong, legally, morally and politically to thrust this large group of men into another country and then pretend that the problem had become strictly a Lebanese one. What the Israeli government did was a gross overreaction to the security threat lately presented by two Muslim fundamentalist groups, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The stepped-up attacks on Israeli soldiers and police that the two groups claimed to be responsible for certainly were serious and demanded a response. The proper response should have been through better policing and action in the courts. Instead the government made mass arrests, chose about one-fourth of those it had seized for deportation, and without any effort at due process sent them into exile for as long as two years.

No allegation was raised that those deported were responsible for specific crimes. They are in Lebanon today because they are members of the two fundamentalist groups. Let it be said flatly that there is nothing to admire about these groups; moderation, conciliation and coexistence are political concepts utterly alien to them. Hamas and Islamic Jihad are dedicated to Israel’s elimination. They represent that same strain of extremist contemporary thought and behavior that a rising number of Arab governments, especially in Algeria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia fear and are trying to suppress, often with methods far more brutal than those used by Israel. Noting all this, the fact remains that 415 men--some quite elderly--are for now condemned to live in cold and squalor in south Lebanon. The U.S. government continues to express its concern over their fate. A special U.N. envoy is due in Israel this weekend to talk about the deportees. Maybe, by some political miracle, a quick, decent and humane conclusion to this ugly episode can yet be devised.