Southern Lebanese Torn Between Two Worlds

Every day before dawn, several thousand Lebanese men and women pass through the barbed-wire army checkpoint on Israel’s northern border and take up jobs as maids, farmhands and factory workers in the Jewish state.

They return home to their Lebanese towns each afternoon, often to the sound of artillery fire.

Most of these commuters are the families of soldiers who have been fighting as Israel’s proxy in Lebanon for more than two decades. As Israel moves to end its traumatic war with Lebanon and withdraw its troops in the coming weeks, the fate of both the allied soldiers and the civilian workers is wrapped in uncertainty, fear and anger. What happens to them will influence whether Israel’s withdrawal leads to regional peace or new convulsions of bloodshed.

“If I had the opportunity, I would stay in Israel,” said Georgette Rizk, a 29-year-old Lebanese woman who sells coffee and falafel at a snack shop on the Israeli side of the border crossing and whose brother fights for the militia trained and financed by Israel. “It is not easy leaving your home, but we are very afraid of what will happen to us. All we are looking for is to survive and not die.”

Like other Lebanese who aligned themselves with Israel, Rizk these days is torn between a love of home and a desperate desire to flee.

Israel first invaded Lebanon in 1978 and since 1985 has occupied a 9-mile-deep strip of southern Lebanon as a buffer zone, ostensibly to protect Israel’s northern communities from guerrilla attacks. From the outset, Israel built up the South Lebanon Army, or SLA, to battle Palestinian and later Shiite Hezbollah guerrillas. Initially the SLA was made up predominantly of Christian forces, but its rank and file became increasingly Muslim.

Today, many of the Lebanese who remained in the southern occupied zone, not to mention those who overtly fought for Israel, are afraid that the Hezbollah militants will exact a brutal revenge once Israeli troops are gone.

Gen. Antoine Lahad, the SLA’s commander, last week demanded that the Lebanese government grant a blanket amnesty to his soldiers as the only way to avoid a fratricidal blood bath. Lebanon, so far, has refused.

Hezbollah in recent days has stepped up its attacks on SLA posts in what Israeli officials believe is a concerted campaign to devastate what’s left of the militia’s morale. After several deadly Hezbollah strikes, the SLA has abandoned three of its outposts in the last week. Some defections have been reported, and Israel fears more. On Sunday, Hezbollah offered a pardon to any SLA fighter who killed an Israeli or SLA officer.

Many SLA members and their families are convinced that they will be sold out by their Israeli patrons. Israel is under international pressure to disarm and dismantle the SLA, something Lahad said he would resist. And Israel is reluctant to do so. Yet if the SLA disintegrates--a distinct possibility--in whose hands would those weapons end up?

Israel originally had assured its proxy fighters that it would withdraw only under the auspices of a broader peace agreement with Syria, the real power broker in Lebanon, that would protect all combatants. Talks between Syria and Israel collapsed earlier this year, however, and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak is insisting on quitting Lebanon without the agreement.

Barak and other government officials say they have a “moral duty” to safeguard their Lebanese allies and have set aside half a million dollars to evacuate those who want to move to Israel.

Officials have told Western diplomats that they expect to resettle 2,000 to 3,000 Lebanese--about 700 officers or soldiers plus their families--in Israeli towns. The South Lebanon Army numbers about 2,500 fighters, but when relatives are counted, the population is put at 17,000 or more. The remainder will either risk staying in Lebanon or opt for other countries.

One Israeli city, Nahariya, and several kibbutzim have said that they will welcome the Lebanese families into their midst. But it remains to be seen how large a welcome mat communities will extend to people who are, in some cases, hardened soldiers and whose Arab customs, language and, for many, Islamic religion are very foreign to most Jewish Israelis.

Nahariya Mayor Jackie Sabag acknowledged that there may be tensions but said he was proud to proclaim his city as the first to offer to take in SLA families.

“They were our brothers in arms, true allies who made the ultimate sacrifice with their lives,” Sabag said in an interview at his office. “We have to help. The hour of truth has come, and it is impossible to ignore what they did for us.”

Among Israeli Arabs, however, resentment at the possibility of having to absorb the Lebanese is enormous. One ad hoc Arab association based in the Galilee ordered members not to rent apartments to Lebanese “mercenaries,” and the Jewish mayor of the mixed Jewish-Arab city of Akko warned that the arrival of “collaborators” would destabilize his tense community.

The mantra among the SLA leadership, meanwhile, has been: We did not fight 20 years to become refugees. Many continue to say they will not leave their homeland and will take their chances by staying behind even after Israel pulls out. Most would face prison terms; a number of senior officers, including Lahad, have already been sentenced to death in absentia.

Within the Israeli leadership, a debate rages about whether Israel should oversee the disbanding of the SLA and confiscation of its tanks, artillery and heavy weaponry. It seems unlikely that Israel would be judged to have withdrawn completely, under terms of two U.N. resolutions, if its surrogates continue to operate on Lebanese soil.

Yet some Israeli officials, especially the military but also key aides to Barak, oppose disarming the militia unless there is an amnesty agreement. Otherwise, stripping the SLA of its arms is tantamount to sending it either to slaughter or into the ranks of the Hezbollah.

“Once we try to take away their weapons, you will have another 2,500 Hezbollah fighters,” said one senior Israeli army officer, who estimated that the SLA has enough weaponry and supplies to sustain limited combat for a year or two.

A U.N. peacekeeping force is to be deployed along the Lebanese border, but no one seems to have much faith in such a mission.

For many of the SLA fighters, the fear is for their safety. For many other people in southern Lebanon, the worry is over their livelihoods.

At the busy Metulla crossing, workers who were trekking back from their shifts one recent day spoke of Israel as their economic lifeline. They have learned to speak Hebrew, and they spend their shekels on Israeli products. Losing their ability to work here, they said, would doom them to utter poverty.

Rizk, for example, rises at 3:30 every morning in her village of Kelya, drives to the border and walks into Israel to open the snack shop by 4:30 a.m. The sole wage earner in her Maronite Christian family, she makes about $600 a month, three times what she could make in Lebanon.

Israel too would suffer the loss of a reliable, cheap labor force that has emerged as a byproduct of the war. Although Rizk and others earn a lot more than they can at home, it’s considerably less than Israel’s minimum wage. Already, some Israeli employers have begun using Thai and Chinese workers.

Metulla, Israel’s northernmost city, also traditionally attracts a number of tourists, who come to see the ironically named Good Fence, the border crossing set up in the 1970s and meant to reflect peaceful relations between Israel and Lebanon.

Mingling with the Lebanese workers at the snack shop and souvenir kiosks the other day were Israeli Bedouin 11th-graders on a field trip and a couple from Los Angeles.

A 35-year-old Lebanese Druze named Hussein said he has been crossing into Israel for the last eight years to pick apples and apricots in the verdant orchards outside Metulla. It earns him about $500 a month, which he sees as good money. He is worried, he said, that it may soon be coming to an end.

“There is a lot of fear that there will be more war,” said Hussein, who asked that his last name not be published. “Maybe war between Israel and Syria. Or Israel with Lebanon. Or maybe between the Christians and Muslims. Or maybe Christians against Israel. We would so much prefer peace.”

Hussein, who was dressed in the pleated bloomer-style pants and white skullcap typical of the Druze, had a brother who fought with the SLA and was killed in 1990. The father of three boys, Hussein hopes that he will be able to continue to live in his ancestral Lebanese village.

“Only if it turns into a situation of life and death--if it’s death for me or for my sons--we will leave,” he said, pausing on the stone path that leads through the barbed wire into Lebanon. “But it will be the last resort.”