Plans for a Lebanon Pullout Roil Residents of Israel’s North

Bilha Gat steps the 200 or so paces from the front door of her home to the barbed-wire fence marking Israel’s border with Lebanon.

“You see?” she says. “How long does it take to walk from there to here? Just minutes!”

Pushing past verdant pines and brilliant redbuds, Gat points to the spot where terrorists once breached the fence and to the hills on the horizon where Katyusha rocket fire is often heard. “I don’t even know how afraid to be,” says the teacher and mother of four.

Gat and her neighbors in northern Israel’s Galilee communities along this hilly, forested border are bracing for the Jewish state’s expected withdrawal of troops from Lebanon within the coming weeks.

Ending a 22-year occupation, Israel’s unilateral retreat and its aftermath may be a violent, messy affair. Thousands of Israelis who live in the kibbutzim, collective farms and towns that dot the country’s northernmost territory worry that they will become sitting ducks for what military officials warn could be a surge in terrorism and cross-border mortar attacks.

They are demanding that the Israeli government give them weapons, bomb shelters, army guards and other protection against Palestinian and Lebanese Shiite militants who, they fear, will take up ground as quickly as the Israeli army leaves it.

The government, while keeping many details of the pullback under wraps, is promising to deploy the army in greater force along the border and to retaliate deep into Lebanon if a northern community is harmed. In southern Lebanon, guerrillas of the Islamic Hezbollah movement and Palestinian militias are refusing to swear off armed operations.

For some residents, such as Gat, the withdrawal evokes very dark memories.

It was 20 years ago this month that her toddler son was seized by Lebanese-based Palestinian commandos who stole into the kibbutz under cover of darkness. They took over a nursery where six babies and young children were sleeping, held them hostage and killed an adult caretaker. One child and an Israeli soldier died in an initial, bungled rescue attempt. Ten hours later, troops stormed the building and killed all five Palestinians.

Gat’s 4-year-old son, Yoav, was wounded but survived.

The attack and similar cross-border terrorism were used by the Israelis to justify the occupation of southern Lebanon, where the Israeli army in 1985 carved out a 9-mile-deep “security zone” meant as a buffer. This is the area that is about to be evacuated. Although fighting through the years exacted a higher death toll on the Lebanese side, attacks on people regarded by Israel as the Jewish state’s northern pioneers had a devastating psychological impact.

Gat, 49 and petite with sharp blue eyes, recalls that the kibbutz back then was armed and well organized. When the Palestinians invaded that night 20 years ago, she grabbed the Uzi under her bed, and everyone in the settlement mobilized, putting into practice the defensive tactics they had drilled time and again.

Today, she said, Israelis in the northern communities have grown complacent.

“We were like an army in those days,” she said. “We knew what to do. But in the last years, we’ve been living relatively quietly. Now the kibbutz is more of a home than an army base. People got used to living normal lives, and we want that to continue. We cannot go back to the way it used to be.”

A Panoramic View at ‘Confrontation Line’

Founded in 1945 and almost idyllic in its isolation and neatly manicured lawns, the kibbutz is abutted by Lebanon on three sides. Each stucco home in Misgav Am is built on slopes, with a terrace that offers a panoramic view of the Golan Heights to the east.

Elsewhere along the northern “confrontation line,” as it is called here, the residents of Margaliyot and Avivim were burning tires and blocking roads early this month to demand that the government protect them. The residents claim that they have suffered from decades of neglect and that this is the last straw. Many speak of abandoning their dairy farms and orchards.

At Margaliyot, a moshav, or collective farm, mortar shells have landed three times this year. One shell two weeks ago destroyed a chicken coop, and last month another hit the yard outside a kindergarten minutes before children were scheduled to arrive. Last week, a Hezbollah bomb at the border cut electricity to the moshav.

Like Avivim, Margaliyot was established in the late ‘50s and settled by immigrants from Iraq and Morocco. As Sephardic Jews with no clout at the time, these immigrants were essentially forced onto the remote farms, exploited by the government to populate a northern bulwark against Arab aggression. The angst of these communities now comes atop layers of resentment and anger at what they feel is historic slight.

“In Margaliyot, we have taken a lot, and our parents suffered even more, and we do not want to give the legacy of suffering to our children,” said Eitan Davidi, the moshav leader. “We want the world to know that there are real people here on the front line, with families, and they deserve as much safety and peace of mind as the people in Jerusalem.”

Davidi gestured outside his office window. Along a ridge overlooking Margaliyot’s western flank runs the border with Lebanon. Two Israeli army outposts, identifiable by their radar towers, sit on the ridge. But if all goes as planned, the posts will be removed and the ridge will revert to Lebanese control. Some of the community’s homes, Davidi noted, are just 40 yards from Lebanon.

A tall, strapping farmer, Davidi was born on the moshav 30 years ago to Iraqi Kurdish parents. But like many residents, he would leave tomorrow, given the right conditions, such as alternative housing and money to compensate for the loss of property. This generation displays little of the Zionist zeal found in other Israeli settlements and sees its confinement to the northern moshavim as a perpetual denial of better education, jobs and social standing.

Already two families, one among the moshav founders, have packed up and left, and up to 80% of Margaliyot’s 420 residents have expressed interest in doing the same, Davidi said.

Alarmed at how militant some of the demonstrations by the northern residents became this month, senior government officials, including Prime Minister Ehud Barak, met with Davidi and others in an attempt to calm their fears. Barak promised the residents a detailed plan of security measures by the end of April.

“I don’t believe people will leave” the northern communities, Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh said in an interview several days after the meeting. “If they do, it is our failure.”

Army Base at Site of Terrorist Attack

At the Avivim moshav, about nine miles southwest of Margaliyot, a small army base sits at the end of the driveway, which is about 10 yards from the border. Three decades ago, 12 children were killed in a terrorist attack on a school bus leaving Avivim.

Israel Peretz, wearing the kippa of an observant Jew, said that the army promised guns for the residents but that he knows that will not be enough. Residents hope to strike a balance, fortifying their community with surveillance cameras and strong fences without turning it into a forbidding military bunker that would prevent work in the orchards or discourage Israeli tourists who seek the Galilee flora.

The withdrawal from Lebanon became especially complicated and potentially more violent when peace talks between Israel and Syria, the power that controls Lebanon and Hezbollah, broke down earlier this year. Syria wanted the pullback to come only as part of a wider deal in which Israel would also return the Golan Heights, seized during the 1967 Middle East War. Israel is prepared to yield most or all of the heights but wants to retain a sliver of land on the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee.

At the same time, however, Barak was bound by an election campaign pledge to remove Israeli troops from Lebanon by July, and he has faced mounting political pressure from an Israeli population no longer willing to tolerate a deadly war of attrition.

Despite reported opposition within the army leadership and the absence of a wider peace agreement to provide cover, Barak has vowed to go ahead with the withdrawal. Senior military officials believe that Syria may order Hezbollah to fire on the departing Israeli army to further pressure Barak to give in on the Golan Heights.

Throughout the rolling hills of the northern Galilee, awash this time of year in a palette of fragrant wildflowers, there are signs that preparations for the withdrawal are in progress. Earthmoving equipment is clearing ground for new military installations, roads are being graded, and new communications cable is being laid.

At the Tabak army post, five 155-millimeter howitzers are arrayed on an apron that juts into Lebanon. In the event of a withdrawal, the artillery pieces and the post will be moved a short distance into Israeli territory.

“It will be complicated,” said Nadav Kfir, a 21-year-old soldier. “We cannot leave anything here, not one single stone. We have to erase everything because we don’t want anyone to know how we built it in the first place.”

Adi Brosh, a 19-year-old radar specialist who calibrates the shots fired from Tabak, summed up the apprehension of much of northern Israel. “I have my doubts that it will be better if we leave Lebanon,” she said. “I don’t think less people will get killed.”