Loneliness Haunts Families of Deportees

Adallah Taamari insists that she has no time to feel lonely. The twins, Hamdi and Bissan, 4 months old, always want to be fed. Mariam, 2 1/2, wants her mother’s attention. And Shahadeh, a year older, can get into a lot of mischief.

Taamari, 27, seems to have them all in hand as she deals with one twin and then the second and gets Shahadeh to help his sister, Mariam. But it is all a brave face: Without her husband, Mohammed Taamari, there is an unquantifiable loneliness for Adallah.

He is not there to help with the children, to take little Shahadeh in tow. He is not there for breakfast or dinner. He is not there to fix things around the three-room flat, to take the trash out, to bring in the groceries, to get the balky room-heaters going when it gets too cold down in their valley.

He is not there to simply wrap his arms around her when the children get to be too much, and Adallah Taamari has no idea when her husband will come home.

One of the 415 Palestinians whom Israeli authorities expelled to southern Lebanon last month as an “Islamic extremist,” Mohammed Taamari was exiled for two years under the military deportation order, his wife said, and his return is not assured.

“It’s not like prison--it’s more like death, like they killed him,” Taamari said as she fed little Bissan, bundled in a blue blanket against the winter chill. “We can’t visit him, we can’t talk to him, we can’t see him, we don’t know how he is.”

Mohammed Taamari, 29, a senior guard at Jerusalem’s Al Makassed Hospital, has been able to send only the briefest of notes to his wife through the International Committee of the Red Cross, letting her know he had been arrested, exiled and was in the deportees’ tent camp between Israel’s self-proclaimed “security zone” and Lebanese lines in southern Lebanon.

“Why? What for?” Adallah Taamari demanded angrily. “We are told only he’s ‘Islamic,’ he’s a ‘fundamentalist,’ he’s a ‘militant,’ he’s a ‘lunatic.’ That is all he is accused of. My husband is a ‘lunatic,’ according to the Israelis. So they put him down in the snow in Lebanon. This makes sense?

“What is the crime, and where is the evidence against him? There is none, absolutely zero--otherwise, the Israelis would have arrested, charged and tried him in their military courts. They did not even have enough evidence for that.”

In family after family in Bethlehem and other West Bank towns, there is as much puzzlement as anger over the expulsions. Why their husbands, why their sons, why their brothers? And why now?

“ ‘Round up the usual suspects,’ ” said Ikram Muktasseb, the sister of Mohammed Muktasseb, 32, a telephone repairman who was among the 23 deportees from Bethlehem. “That’s what the Israelis did.”

The diplomatic struggle continued Saturday over the fate of the deportees--Lebanon refuses to take them in, Israel insists it will not take them back, at least not now, and neither the Red Cross nor the United Nations has succeeded in mediating between the two governments.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin offered to allow the deportees to return in nine months, cutting short their terms of exile, if the Palestine Liberation Organization and other groups end the intifada , the five-year rebellion against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

“This is a sort of taking hostages,” Faisal Husseini, head of the Palestinian delegation to the Arab-Israeli peace talks, replied in Jerusalem. “I don’t believe that taking hostages will help us reach an agreement.”

In southern Lebanon, leaders of the deportees also told correspondents that the Rabin proposal was unacceptable. “Our people are not going to abandon their struggle against the Israeli occupation,” said Dr. Abdel-Aziz Rantisi, a Gaza physician. “If we become casualties, it’s a martyrdom we accept.”

Israel had yet to arrange the return of 10 deportees it acknowledged were exiled in error. Lebanon will allow them to return to the Israeli security zone but only the way they had come--and that route has been mined.

On Saturday, the Red Cross was trying to find an alternative that would be acceptable to Israel and Lebanon. All but a 16-year-old youth will go straight to jail if they return.

“All 10 of us have packed and are ready to go,” Izadeen Nimer Ali Basher, who had been taken from his detention cell at an Israeli prison and deported, told correspondents at the encampment. “I want to go back because the Israeli authorities want the Palestinians to leave their land, so it is better if I am back even if in prison.”

For those families whose men are not among the 10 Israel said it would accept back, the shock of the expulsions is slowly yielding to the cold, hard realization of what life will mean without them.

“When I first learned what they had done to Mohammed, I shouted in anger, and then I began to cry in despair,” Adallah Taamari said. “My husband, the father of my children, exiled. What would become of us? I could not cope with the very idea of it. . . .

“Now, I am making plans. I will remain in my home. I am looking for work at a hospital; I studied nutrition at college. My older two will go to the day nursery; my mother will take the twins. I will do the best I can until Mohammed returns. We will survive.”

Taamari maintained that her husband, who was convicted in 1981 of membership in Fatah, the mainstream Palestinian guerrilla movement, and released after serving five years of a 25-year sentence, is now out of politics.

“He works from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the hospital. He is the father of four small children. He is studying business administration at university part time,” she said. “It is home to work, work to home, home to school, school to home. Where would he get time for politics?”

Palestinian political sources said that Mohammed Taamari had become active in Islamic Jihad, one of the two militant Muslim groups targeted in the roundup after the killing of six Israeli soldiers and policemen in early December.

“He is a nationalist, as are we all, but not particularly religious,” Adallah Taamari said. “He does have a beard, however, and a beard to Israelis means fundamentalist, and the bigger the beard the bigger the Islamic threat. Well, Mohammed’s beard is pretty big.”

Beards, in fact, have become a Bethlehem joke since Israel’s anti-Muslim crackdown. “Why didn’t Santa Claus come this year?” goes one popular gag. “Well, he had a beard,” is the reply, “and the Israelis deported him.”

Taamari speculated that her husband was arrested with a neighbor because the Israeli intelligence officers had been given immediate quotas to meet.

“There he was, having coffee with a neighbor with our Shahadeh, and Hosni (the local Israeli intelligence officer) burst in with two squads of border police,” Taamari said. “The soldiers started to drag him away, and Shahadeh is crying, ‘I want to come with you, I want to come with you.’

“Mohammed asked Hosni if he could take the child home, 100 meters away, but Hosni said no. ‘It’s orders,’ he said. ‘Rabin wants it this way.’ What Hosni was telling us was this was to hurt us, and hurt a lot, because Rabin was angry. Well, I can tell Mr. Rabin that he did hurt our family, he has hurt us. But why? Why us?”

This is a question that echoes throughout Bethlehem and other West Bank towns.

Some of the Palestinian deportees’ families proclaim total innocence of the attacks that brought the Israeli crackdown; others express sympathy. But in virtually no case does there seem to be an immediate connection.

“Collective punishment,” said Bethlehem Mayor Elias Freij, who ranks as an ultraconservative in West Bank terms. “This is a term that Jews know well and that Israelis should abhor. Yet here we are, more than 20 families punished for a crime that they and their loved ones did not commit, that no one here committed. . . .

“But punished we will be, and it will just steel people’s resolve. Collective punishment did not deter Jews in British Palestine nor in Nazi Europe. Why should it deter Palestinian nationalists under Israeli occupation? A family whose father or son has been deported will be an angry and rebellious family, right down to the 4-year-olds. Count on it as those 4-year-olds grow up.”