Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Nir Rosen, Scapegoats in an Unwelcoming Land, WP, December 16, 2007

Last Wednesday, a car-bomb blast on a crowded Beirut street killed Brig. Gen. Francois Hajj, one of Lebanon’s top generals. The capital began buzzing with speculation that Hajj had been assassinated in retaliation for his role as the operational commander of the army’s bloody three-month battle with an armed Islamic group last summer. In May, Fatah al-Islam — a foreign jihadist group inspired by al-Qaeda, led by veterans of the struggle in Iraq and made up mostly of Saudis, Syrians and even some Lebanese — ensconced itself on the outskirts of Nahr al-Bared, a Palestinian refugee camp in northern Lebanon, and massacred Lebanese troops at an army checkpoint. Hajj’s forces responded by indiscriminately bombarding the camp in the name of the war on terror, and the Lebanese public rallied ’round.

Palestinians had once again become Lebanon’s scapegoats, victims of a land in which they have long faced slaughter and discrimination…. I’ve heard followers of assassinated president-elect Bashir Gemayel, whose Maronite Christian militia massacred Palestinians in 1976, brag that he was stopped at a checkpoint in the early years of the country’s 1975-90 civil war with a trunk full of the skulls of dead Palestinians….

Last summer, I witnessed yet another chapter in the book of the refugees’ misery. By late June, most of the Palestinians from Nahr al-Bared had fled to Badawi, another refugee camp nearby. In a schoolyard there, I was stopped by a man named Abu Hadi, born in Haifa in 1946. “I am a person without an address,” he told me. “I wish I was a donkey or a horse so I would have doctors and lawyers for my rights.” He showed me a plastic bag with a sponge and a towel. “My bathroom is in my hand,” he said….

Only in October did the army finally begin to allow a trickle of Palestinians back to their homes, and then only in the so-called new camp, a small area on the outskirts of the original camp that had housed 2,000 families and been safely under Lebanese army control throughout the clash.

When about 1,000 families finally passed through the checkpoints, to the jeers of soldiers and demonstrators, they found only destruction. Every single home, building, apartment and shop that I saw had been destroyed. Most buildings had been burned from the inside; the signs of the flammable liquids that the soldiers had used were scorched on the walls, and empty fuel canisters were strewn on the floors. Ceilings and walls were riddled with bullets, shot from inside, seemingly for sport. Most homes that I saw had been emptied of furniture, appliances, sinks, toilets, televisions and refrigerators. Most shockingly, soldiers had defecated in kitchens and bedrooms, on plates, bowls, pots and mattresses; they had urinated into olive-oil jars.