Will the Palestinians Give Peace a Chance? : In the Wretched Camps of Lebanon and the Gritty Streets of Gaza, a Beleaguered Arafat’s Dangerous Step--Cutting a Deal with Israel--Has Ignited a Firestorm of Violent Protest.

Someone with a wry view of aesthetics called this outpost of misery Ein el Hilwa, which means “beautiful eye” in Arabic. Sprawling for several miles outside the port of Sidon in southern Lebanon, it is a nearly impenetrable warren of narrow alleys that wind one into another, a labyrinth of pecking chickens, shouting children and bored young men smoking quietly in alcoves.

Huts constructed of corrugated metal and green plastic sheeting dot the landscape. Along the main residential alleys, the odor of sewage and wash water mingles with the scent of stewing onions and cardamom coffee. Old women hauling sacks of tomatoes and apples push their way voicelessly through the throngs that never leave the streets. A young man in a lavender T-shirt bearing the insignia of “Club Monte Carlo” strides through the market with a pistol shoved in the waistband of his jeans.

Ein el Hilwa is the largest refugee camp in Lebanon, where 50,000 men, women and children have slipped outside time and place, a temporary city created out of the panicked Palestinian tide that fled the creation of Israel in 1948, many of whose residents have been waiting to flee it, too, every day for 45 years. Ein el Hilwa is also the last great outpost of Yasser Arafat’s empire, the heartland of a teeming Palestinian diaspora that has been waiting for deliverance since the day in 1982 when Arafat fled Lebanon in the middle of its civil war with the promise that he would one day be back to lead his followers to Jerusalem.

These days, there are not many portraits of the grizzled PLO chairman hanging in the 12 camps of Lebanon, where the PLO once operated a state within the state. Much more numerous are photographs of a nondescript middle-aged man named Abu Ali Bseiso. Bseiso, a member of the radical Fatah Uprising faction of the Palestinian resistance, spent many years in an Israeli prison. After his release several years ago, he returned to the refugee camps of Beirut and, on Sept. 13, watched on television as Arafat shook the hand of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in Washington and signed a declaration recognizing the state of Israel. Bseiso, it is said, had a heart attack that same day and died.

In Ein el Hilwa, long a bastion of Arafat’s own Fatah faction, there is a mutinous rumble in the barracks of the 4,000 PLO fighters who, in the midst of their on-again, off-again war of liberation, have found themselves cast adrift by the declaration of peace.

When the PLO’s intense young military commander in Lebanon, Lt. Col. Munir Makdah, declared his unalterable opposition to the peace agreement, Arafat promptly fired him and replaced him with a council of four other Fatah commanders perceived as more loyal. Makdah’s militiamen, cut off from their salaries for the past eight months, ever since the PLO announced it was broke, have said they will refuse the $450,000 Arafat recently offered to sweeten the peace deal among the Palestinians in Lebanon and will remain loyal to Makdah. Meanwhile, two members of Arafat’s newly appointed military council have come out in opposition to the peace plan and spend most of their time consulting with Makdah. The other two have declined to leave their homes. One of them, Lt. Col. Badih Krayyem, a strong advocate of the peace with Israel, is said to be unable to meet with journalists. “He is too sick to speak,” explains one of Makdah’s deputies apologetically. “He is in the hospital.”

“I am the closest person to Arafat within Fatah, and I have opposed him,” Makdah tells me at his modest home. A bearded 33-year-old in combat fatigues and sandals, his nerveless determination in battle elevated him to leadership on the PLO’s last remaining military front. “How could they agree on this peace agreement that would consider only Gaza and Jericho, which are a burden to the Israelis anyway, and we don’t even have the right to oppose it? And we are labeled as traitors? I told Arafat it is a project of treason, and when I asked him to resign, I did so because I have affection toward him. Because I wanted him to be able to remain as a symbol for the Palestinian people. I talked to him more than 15 times on the phone, and I always asked him one question: ‘What is our standing from this project as a Palestinian diaspora?’ And he had no answer. Is he looking for a place in Palestine to be buried, at the expense of all the Palestinian people?”

So there is trouble brewing once again within the PLO as it attempts to pull together its ranks behind a peace agreement that has been viewed with euphoria among most Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip but with increasing hostility among the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians stranded outside Palestine--in camps in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and the Gulf states and scattered in Europe, America and elsewhere. These have historically been the bedrock of Arafat’s constituency and the most significant citizenry of the State of Palestine he envisioned and declared in 1988.

In Tunis, the sunny North African city where the PLO leadership established a new beachhead after its inglorious ouster from Lebanon, a small cadre of the top leadership is attempting to fashion the details of a Palestinian government in now-occupied Jericho and Gaza, working against a tentative deadline of mid-December for the withdrawal of Israeli forces. PLO-Israeli talks in Cairo will set the firm dates for the pullout and the establishment of PLO regimes.

But even at Arafat’s headquarters, there is a whiff of mutiny over the historic deal. The grumbling comes not just from Palestinian radicals in Damascus, who, under Syrian sway, have always opposed moves to recognize Israel and whose opposition now has escalated to open threats of assassination (PLO sources say at least 13 plots on Arafat’s life have been uncovered since the peace agreement was sealed). Now, open opposition is breaking out within Fatah itself, the guerrilla movement that Arafat launched in 1965. Old-guard loyalists such as poet Mahmoud Darwish and Shafik Hout, the PLO’s chief in Lebanon, have resigned from the PLO executive committee in protest. The Tunis home of Hani Hassan, who helped found Fatah as a dissident student in Germany in the 1960s, recently was raided and his bodyguards arrested when Arafat suspected him of plotting with opponents in Damascus.

Arafat has ridden hard against defiance, calling in all his political chips. “This is our Palestinian democracy,” he says, purporting to welcome criticism of the momentous deal and insisting this is only the beginning of a Palestinian resurgence, one he provocatively claims, will end in an Israeli withdrawal from Jerusalem.

As always with the Palestinians, the situation is complex. The hardliners want no peace with Israel. Others want a better peace than Arafat negotiated. Some accept the Jericho/Gaza-first plan (those two territories would test autonomous rule for all of the West Bank) but don’t think Arafat is the man to lead the experiment. Still others are standing by the chairman. The stress among the factions raises questions of whether the Palestine Liberation Organization is up to the job of establishing a government in Gaza and Jericho.

The PLO leader is maintaining control of his militant ranks only by a razor’s edge, which is apparent in the deliberations that led to approval of the peace pact with Israel. Only eight members of the 18-member executive committee voted to approve the plan, while the rest either boycotted the meeting, resigned their posts or voted no. The central council, stuffed with Arafat-appointed independents, mustered only 63 yes votes out of a membership of 107. The two largest PLO factions besides Fatah--the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine--did not even attend the meeting. Arafat has refused to convene the PLO’s parliament-in-exile, the Palestine National Council, which most PLO observers say would likely nix the peace agreement.

And now in Ein el Hilwa, Munir Makdah sits Kurtz-like within his own heart of darkness, a huge mural of Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque on the wall of his living room. His flowing beard, a symbol of fundamentalism, suggests he is as likely to turn to the Islamic resistance as he is to Arafat’s peace plan. Indeed, in one of the most incendiary acts of violence since the peace pact was signed--the killing of an Israeli settler on the West Bank--responsibility was claimed by a splinter Fatah faction with allegiance to Makdah.

“Yasser Arafat has asked for political asylum (among Palestinians) who are behind the peace agreement,” Makdah reflects. “My answer is that my grandfather had a piece of land as big as Jericho in Palestine, where he planted olive trees, and he had several homes. Every Palestinian has the same memory. And no one has allocated to Arafat the right to forget this.”

YOU CANNOT CRUISE BY ARAFAT’S shaded villa in the comfortable Mutuelville suburb of Tunis these days. The street is blocked off by armed guards who stand at 24-hour attention. Tunisian motorists now take an alternative route.

But Arafat, who has for years nurtured the legend, only partly true, that he never sleeps in the same house two nights in a row, is not intimidated by the assassination threats that have followed the announcement of the peace agreement. His close brush with death 1 1/2 years ago, when his plane crash-landed in the Libyan desert, left him a bit more frail and easily tired, but far less afraid of the consequences of his autocratic ways, his close aides say. Arafat has learned, if not to renounce the fear of death, at least to overlook it.

These days, the charismatic PLO chairman whose peaked head scarf (folded into the shape of Palestine), combat fatigues and holstered pistol have come to symbolize the Palestinian revolution, is counting on the fact that most of his people, indeed most of the world, cannot imagine a Palestine without him.

“Our Arab nation at this historic point needs to transcend the past, with all its pains and hardships, and face the future more strong and united, so that the development of the new world order will not be at the expense of our people,” he told a meeting of the Arab League after going to Washington to seal the peace accord.

The PLO has never been a polite democracy. People disagree, and they form opposing factions; those opposing factions line up behind powerful Arab regimes, and they relentlessly attempt to undercut or even murder each other. In the Israeli-occupied territories Arafat’s Fatah Hawks and the Islamic Hamas movement have waged their political battles in the streets of Gaza. In Lebanon, Arafat’s Fatah fighters have battled the guerrillas of the radical Abu Nidal organization in the alleys of Ein el Hilwa for most of the past year. Arafat saw his top deputy, Salah Khalaf (best known by his nom de guerre, Abu Iyad), gunned down by a reputed Abu Nidal loyalist in 1991 and has listened in recent weeks as former PLO member Ahmed Jibril, a client of the Syrian government, has threatened to shed Arafat’s own blood over the peace treaty.

This time, the stakes are as high as they have ever been. The killing of pro-Arafat officials in the occupied territories in the weeks since the deal was done shows how far the Palestinian opposition is willing to go to defeat it.

Meanwhile, there is every possibility that continued violence--particularly when targeted against Israeli settlers in the West Bank--could dampen Israel’s enthusiasm for seeing the agreement through. For all the PLO’s organizational problems, violence remains the most explosive hurdle. Israel’s top leadership is counting on Arafat, who condemned one Fatah killing under heavy American and Israeli pressure, to stay the course. “The PLO is the partner,” Prime Minister Rabin recently told an Israeli newspaper. “From the moment we decided this, with all the difficulties it implies, it is with (the PLO) that the negotiations must be held, with which agreement must be reached, with which everything must be realized.”

For Arafat, everything depends on his ability to control the ranks over the next few months. Israel has made it clear--and Arafat understands--that the Jericho/Gaza-first plan will never be expanded to allow Palestinian independence throughout the occupied territories unless Arafat can demonstrate his ability to become a good neighbor. Moreover, Arafat is unlikely to hold the hearts and minds of his own people unless his headquarters in Tunis--long perceived by Palestinians in the territories as corrupt and out-of-touch--can quickly put together the pieces of a working government that will efficiently serve the needs of 1.7 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. After living out the hardships of 26 years of occupation, residents there need almost everything.

Arafat has an uncanny knack of riding out storms, usually by allowing his opponents to rage and threaten and in the end come to the conclusion that Arafat’s way is the only way. Thus it was with the tempestuous Palestine National Council meeting in 1992, when Arafat outraged the congress by proposing to join the Madrid peace conference, sat quietly as radical opponents like George Habash and Nayef Hawatmeh bitterly condemned the idea, then took Hawatmeh in his arms after the vote, as usual, went his way.

Thus it is in the occupied territories, where Arafat, at the helm of a bankrupt PLO, cut off by the rich Gulf sheiks for supporting Saddam Hussein in his war with the West, has collected enough money from nobody-knows-where to start resuming some salaries to employees of Palestinian agencies, a down payment on loyalty in the crucial months ahead.

And thus it will be in Lebanon, where Arafat’s loyalists--who still have significant numbers--are banking on the fact that Palestinians have long memories. They won’t forget the promises “the Old Man” made when he left. They won’t forget that if they’re going to be saved, the man they call Abu Ammar, who scuttled out of Lebanon as a defeated guerrilla and took up a new and dubious banner of peace, is still--to the world’s delight and annoyance--the only man who can do it.

THE PLO HAS ALWAYS BEEN THE PROVERBIAL HOUSE GUEST FROM HELL. It has meddled in local politics, launched guerrilla raids that invited Israeli military reprisals, set up its own military camps and checkpoints and mounted assorted terrorist operations within Arab countries whose patience had not been sufficiently exhausted to throw Arafat and his band of militiamen out on their heads.

Pushed out of the West Bank in the 1967 war with Israel and out of Jordan following Black September of 1970, the PLO regrouped in Lebanon, running quarters of Beirut as if it were the capital of Palestine. It was an era when Palestinians, if they didn’t have Palestine, at least had the country next door, and the 350,000 residents of Ein el Hilwa and other refugee camps could look to their fast-talking president speaking from the capital on the evening news.

That all changed with the Israeli invasion in 1982. The Jewish state, at the end of its patience with cross-border raids, pushed tanks and troops into southern Lebanon and finally into Beirut in a determined effort to drive the PLO out of its bases there.

Arafat was forced out of Beirut and finally out of Lebanon altogether. He gloomily declared he was moving “from one exile to another.” Most of his best 10,000 fighters headed for camps scattered throughout the Arab world, and Arafat, arriving at the northern Lebanese port of Tripoli to join an outbound convoy of U.N.-flagged ships, declared: “The struggle is not over. We will continue until we reach Jerusalem, the capital of our Palestinian state.” The guns of the PLO militia thundered in dubious triumph as the ships left port.

The PLO washed up in Tunisia, a country known for its white sand beaches, the Parisian ambience of its downtown cafes and its remoteness from the political turmoil of the rest of the Middle East. It was from his North African exile that Arafat watched the sands of the Middle East shift inexorably away from the possibility of a militant liberation of Palestine. Even as the occupants of the West Bank and Gaza launched the intifada , or uprising, in the occupied territories in 1987, a host of other factors were beginning to spell out an imperative of peace: the decline of the Soviet Union, which was the mothership of national liberation movements around the world; the breakup of the PLO into an increasing number of bickering factions; the long years in which the group had spent most of its energy and resources fighting other Arabs, not Israel, and finally the 1991 Gulf War, when the PLO’s support for Iraq dried up the lifeline of funding from wealthy Arab states that had allowed it to play benefactor to the millions of exiled Palestinians.

By this spring, the PLO was broke. Salaries for the fighters in Yemen, Lebanon and Sudan dried up, along with paychecks for university professors in the West Bank and PLO officials at offices around the world. Palestinian Red Crescent hospitals were left with no funds to fix failing basic equipment. On the most emotional and patriotic chord, payments to the families of martyrs killed in military operations or the intifada ceased in March. The financial debacle has become a recipe for revolt at a time when the Middle East is talking peace.

The degree to which Arafat has embarked alone on his quest for peace is now apparent. Even within the peace camp in Tunis, there are signs of an unprecedented willingness among Arafat’s top lieutenants to challenge him, to question the details of the peace plan and, more important, to demand an end to the chairman’s arrogant and autocratic ways. Many of Arafat’s best friends say openly that they are tired of PLO money disappearing with nobody to answer for where it went (despite some doubters, Arafat insists “There is no money”) and tired of a revolution run on the word of a single man armed with a bank of fax machines in his villa. Even if the peace agreement is successful and a Palestinian state is established in the West Bank, they say, is this what everyone fought for? Another Arab dictatorship, this time under Arafat?

“We are building a state now, and what we are dealing with is people’s future and their hopes,” says one top PLO lieutenant. “It is no longer a matter of requesting Arafat. He has to be forced. Arafat will continue to work the way he has been working, and what has to be done is to persuade Arafat that if he continues, he will lose legitimacy and he will be isolated and antagonize large segments of the population.”

Just how dangerous this dissent within the ranks might be became clear with the matter of Hani Hassan, one of Arafat’s closest allies. Hassan was a founder of Fatah, and throughout the years in Lebanon he and his brother Khaled were seldom far from Arafat’s side. Since the end of the Gulf War, Hassan has worked to re-establish links with disaffected Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia and has been one of Arafat’s most loyal backers for establishing a negotiated peace with Israel.

So it was a shock when Hassan, from a hospital bed in Saudi Arabia where he was being treated for high blood pressure, told Arafat over the phone that he couldn’t support his Jericho/Gaza-first peace plan. When he returned to Tunis a few weeks later, Hassan found that his bodyguards had been disarmed and his computer records searched. Arafat, furious that Hassan had met with Palestinian dissidents in Damascus, refused to issue him a badge to represent Fatah at the executive committee meeting.

“Arafat, when he called me in the hospital, he said, ‘I want only one word from you, that you are supporting this treaty. You can speak against it, but in the end, tell me you will support it.’ I told him, ‘Abu Ammar, what are you saying?’ He was believing he was going to be allowed to build a government in the West Bank,” Hassan tells me in his Tunis villa. “I told him, ‘The treaty will allow you to build an authority, but not a government.’ He thought that because he was a good boy, Clinton would close his eyes and let him do what he wanted to do. He doesn’t know the West. He doesn’t know that Western people will never do anything for you if you don’t pay for it.”

In the end, Hassan was silenced. Arafat sent another appointee to the executive committee. “Even in Fatah, people are afraid of him,” Hassan says. “He still has the salaries. If you don’t obey, they stop the salaries. How can you fight with those measures?”

For Bassam abu Sharif, Arafat’s weapon was the telephone. Sharif, one of Arafat’s most visible political advisers and the PLO’s unofficial spokesman, was coming out with an increasing number of controversial statements--only some of which apparently coincided with Arafat’s thinking.

Sharif was always talking. The telephone, it seemed, was an extension of his head. And when the Tunisian authorities presented a whopping number of unpaid phone bills to the PLO’s Tunisian ambassador, Hakim Balawi, Balawi told them to cut off Sharif’s telephone. Sharif spent the next several days locked in his villa, declining to answer questions about Arafat, whom he referred to as “Abu who?”

GRADUALLY OVER THE PAST SEVERAL months in Tunis, the pendulum of power has been shifting away from Arafat’s old comrades in arms and toward a small group of peaceniks who for years were wallflowers at the dance of revolution.

Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) has risen to prominence after quietly masterminding the secret peace talks in Norway that led to the agreement with Israel; joining him in the new corridors of power are Ahmed Suleiman Khoury (Abu Alaa), the PLO financial chief who conducted the back-channel talks; Yasser Abed-Rabbo, a former key leader of the Damascus-based Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who broke away to form his own faction closer to Arafat’s line, and Hassan Asfour, a young technocrat who was almost anonymous six months ago but rose to recognition when he helped conduct the Oslo negotiations.

The evolution is coming at the expense of some of the men who have guided the Palestinian revolution from its infancy. The PLO’s own foreign minister, Farouk Kaddoumi, was dead set against the recognition of Israel and had to be coaxed back on board. Just how far the PLO is straying from its guerrilla past was evident recently after the leadership of Fatah’s Revolutionary Command Council stormed for three days over the peace plan and gave it only a divided backing.

After the vote, longtime Fatah loyalist Abbas Zaki, wearing the characteristic green fatigues of the guerrilla fighter, sat uneasily in a rented villa in Tunis. “I have spent 30 years in the revolution, and suddenly I find there is an agreement, and there is no way I can have anything to say about the peace,” he tells me. “The central committee of Fatah was asked to take it or leave it, with no cancellation of a single word. After 30 years, I can’t be asked to take it or leave it.”

By mid-November, Fatah’s central committee was closeted again behind closed doors in Tunis, with ominous threats of a coup d’etat within the ranks. This time, the critics were not opponents of the peace agreement, but PLO moderates who didn’t like the way Arafat was single-handedly making the moves on Palestine. “Democratize or resign” was the call to Abu Ammar. But who could succeed him? The slain Abu Jihad and Abu Iyad might have gathered enough support, but now who? Abu Mazen could be the candidate of reformers, Farouk Kaddoumi of the traditionalists. If the Saudis and their money hold sway, Hani Hassan might head an alternative faction.

Meanwhile, the new politics are producing fresh leaders in the occupied territories, figures sprung from Palestinian universities rather than militant cells, some of them participants at the peace talks that started in Madrid in the fall of 1991. These Palestinians on the evening news--Hanan Ashrawi, Faisal Husseini, Saeb Erekat and Sari Nussibeh among them--have been lukewarm about the peace agreement, which Arafat concluded behind their backs while they battled for more concessions from Israel during the public peace talks in Madrid and then Washington.

Nevertheless, within the territories, the Jericho/Gaza-first has gained a popular momentum among a people desperate for any relief from an occupation that began in 1967. In Tunis, PLO leaders figure they’ll have no trouble selling peace in Gaza and Jericho, or even in the West Bank towns of Nablus and Ramallah, so long as they can muster the financial resources and the political will to mount a credible government once the plan is in force.

The naysayers are a minority, but a potentially troubling one. The Islamic resistance, Hamas, has vowed to block the plan by force, as have dissenting Damascus-based Palestinian factions, and the bloody assaults on Arafat supporters and Jewish settlers since the Sept. 13 agreement show they mean what they say.

Arafat’s real trouble lies outside of Palestine, in the diaspora, where only about 1 million Palestinian exiles--those forced out in the 1967 war--have any immediate hope of going home. The rest, especially the 1948 refugees in the stewing camps of Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, see nothing to gain by this peace; they will never be allowed to returned to their former family lands within Israel. The Palestinians of the diaspora now see Arafat setting his sights on whatever small homeland he can recover in the West Bank and Gaza--perhaps, as Makdah says, a piece of Palestine in which the 64-year-old chairman can be buried when his fight is over.

While PLO officials have argued that the Jericho/Gaza-first plan is part of a “step by step” approach that will lead to a Palestinian state throughout the West Bank and Gaza, they have little or nothing to say to the 1948 refugees, 1.5 million of them having left what is now Israel proper. They are told by Arafat that negotiations on the status of 1948 refugees will begin in three years, part of the talks on the final status of the occupied territories. He says he will push for the implementation of a United Nations resolution that calls for the “right of return” of all Palestinians to their homes--or compensation. Almost no one, after all this time, expects that resolution to be implemented.

AFTER 45 YEARS, THE FIRST PALESTINIAN refugees, many of whom with their children and grandchildren have lived entire lives like nomads in the Arab world, are ready, finally, to say no to Yasser Arafat. And he, in turn, must gamble on the likelihood that their “no” will not count as much as the support of the international community for his “yes” in the West Bank. It is a delicate gamble, and the stakes are hundreds of thousands of lives and any possibility of real stability in the Middle East.

Shafik Hout, the longtime PLO leader in Lebanon who resigned from the executive committee rather than vote for the peace plan, now spends his days closeted in his apartment in Beirut. He was the last; there is now no PLO representative in Lebanon. Hout says the peace with Israel will mean the end of the PLO as the world has known it, and he is not yet sure that is a good thing.

“Arafat apparently became desperate, and maybe I was desperate as well,” Hout tells me. “Here we’re all men very different from each other. Some surrendered to despair. Some stand to the last for struggle. He thought, and he was wrong, that this was the best that he could get. But he has thrown himself into an unknown jungle of problems that will tear him apart, literally, between the promises he made to his people and his commitment to this agreement.”

“Arafat is thinking that we are continually losing, and better to get something than nothing,” adds Suhail Natour, the spokesman for the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine at the Mar Elias refugee camp in Beirut. “He has lost his faith in his people and the intifada. He is exhausted. He has given up.

“But the PLO is the political expression of our identity,” Natour went on. “No organization makes it only by itself. It is the common factor of the trends, the parties, all the strata and classes of a society. Now, even if Arafat and his supporters who accepted this accord will try to claim the formal shape of legitimacy of the PLO, for sure he has lost the popular legitimacy. And the Palestinian opposition will continue the struggle for legitimate national rights.”

It is a sad irony that most of the Palestinians in Lebanon have never been to Palestine. After 1948, as the fighting between Jews and Arabs intensified, their fathers and mothers, many just children themselves, flooded into Lebanon and set up tents on the border.

Mahmoud Ali Moussa was one of them. He was 12 years old when he fled with his parents from northern Israel to the village of Majaldin in southern Lebanon. The family lived in a camp there until 1956, when the Lebanese government moved them to a camp near Tyre. Five years ago, fighting between the PLO and the Lebanese Shiite Amal militia forced them to flee to Ein el Hilwa, where Moussa lives with his wife, three sons, three daughters and two sons-in-law in a simple shack.

Unlike most Arab countries, Lebanon does not normally issue work permits to Palestinians to work outside the refugee camps, and Moussa’s family lives on the income of two daughters who teach at an Islamic charity school. He says there was little celebrating in Ein el Hilwa when the peace pact was signed.

“It didn’t give me any hope. We’re still lost, and we’re walking the Earth like drunk men. I feel nothing, and there is no hope.”

Fatma Tawza, whose husband was killed in the fighting with Amal, was receiving a $23-a-month stipend from the Palestinian martyrs’ fund until March, when the money stopped. “After they cut the money, only God can know how we live,” she says. “God alone knew what happened to us, or cared.

“All the wars that happened in this camp, I can’t tell you. Why? Only for the liberation of Palestine. And with this agreement, it seems my husband died very cheap,” she says. “And we are very cheap also. Because our leader shook hands with our enemy.”