From: L-Bueno@cup.portal.com (Louis Alberto Bueno)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.mideast
Subject: EXPELLED PALESTINIANS INCLUDE ACTIVISTS AND TEACHERS
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 93 20:10:17 PST
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Distribution: world

	Copied w/o permission from:
	The Baltimore Sun, January 23, 1993

	EXPELLED PALESTINIANS INCLUDE ACTIVISTS AND TEACHERS

	By Doug Struck

	MARJ AL-ZOHOUR, Lebanon - Ala Akel Abdulwahab shivers on a rocky
hillside each night listening to scorpions rustle about the edge of his
tent.
	The scorpions have been roused from their winter stupor by the
warmth of 415 Palestinians transplanted more than a month ago atop their
home, a barren patch of southern Lebanon.
	"You can hear them crawling back and forth, trying to get in," says
the slight young man, with a shudder not from the cold. Abdulwahab's winter
plans have been similarly disturbed: He was to move with his American wife
and three children to the United States this month.
	Instead, he is among the Palestinians Israel deported a month ago,
alleging that they are ringleaders of terrorist Islamic fundamentalist
groups, Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
	Perhaps they are. They say they are not. There is no way to tell
without a trial, which none of them had before they were deported.
	Many eyes now are on President Clinton to see how the new
administration will act when the issue comes up in the United Nations,
which has condemned the deportations.
	"Do we look like terrorists?" demands Mahmoud al-Zahhar, a short,
roundish physician and acknowledged leader of Hamas, amused by the sight of
his fellow deportees. The ragtag group has the appearance of a troop from
the city brought unwillingly for a camp-out in the wilderness.
	That they are. The expelled Palestinians include - by their count -
170 college graduates, 88 university students, 36 merchants, 17 professors,
14 engineers, 12 doctors, four lab technicians and a chemist. A hundred of
them are referred to as Islamic scholars.
	Abdul Fattah al-Awaisi is one of those scholars. The history
professor at Hebron University is a graduate of Exeter University in
England and author of 10 books on the Middle East.
	"I'm not a member of any of these organizations," he says. He has
turned a rock into a lecture podium to teach "classes" to some of the
students deported with him.
	"I ask (Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak) Rabin and his government to
take me to court, and if there is any evidence against me, put me in jail,"
he said.
	On Saturday, three British air force helicopters evacuated 17
deportees from the camp. The deportees, four of them sick and 13 expelled
by mistake, flew to the Israeli port of Haifa in an operation arranged by
the International Committee of the Red Cross.
	Israel has said that all of those deported by mistake would go
straight to jail, not to their homes in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and
Gaza Strip.
	The site of the Palestinians' deportation seems a perfect stage for
the mutual hatreds that brought them here. It is harsh, cold, unyielding
country, beautiful only to the eye that values starkness. The land's bounty
is of stones, snakes and scorpions. Walking is difficult, there are so many
rocks.
	The Palestinians were bused from the West Bank and Gaza Strip Dec.
17, but the Lebanese stopped them from going farther. They have remained
stuck in a 2-mile-wide "no man's land" between Israeli and Lebanese
checkpoints ever since.
	The deportees remain a diplomatic sore for Israel and the United
States. If the U.N. Security Council votes on sanctions against Israel for
the deportation, as threatened, the issue is likely to become the first
unwanted test for President Clinton on the Israeli-Palestinian question.
	As the deportees hold rallies for the television reporters who
reach them, and as they huddle over transistor radios for word of their
fate, the arguments continue. Both the living conditions and the politics
of the deportees are in dispute; each side offers descriptions that suit
their side of the argument.
	In two recent visits to the deportees, it appeared their living
conditions - while miserable - were not immediately life-threatening.
	They have sufficient food for now, even if it is mainly potatoes
and rice. Meat is sometimes smuggled from nearby villages. They can gather
scrub wood from the rocky hillside for heat and cooking. Their tents
provide shelter from the snow; they have blankets and warm clothing to help
ease the cutting cold.
	The doctors among them worry about emergencies. They say that they
have rushed two cases to the Lebanese checkpoint for hospitalization, only
to be rebuffed. The two men - one with a scorpion sting and the other with
a suspected blocked intestine - survived, but the doctors say the next may
not.
	The doctors say that a lengthy stay on the mountainside brings
nutrition and sanitation problems and the need for treatment of more
chronic ailments, especially among the older men.
	The Israelis say the Palestinians' politics, not their safety, is
the issue. But the political views of the deportees aren't as unanimous as
their deporters describe. They range from avowedly apolitical to those who
reject Israel's right to exist.
	Israel has acknowledged these men did not commit the slayings of
police and soldiers that led to the mass deportation. But Israel calls them
activists of the same stripe. The Palestinians say that simply expressing
political views cannot warrant exile.
	"These people are scientists, religious people, merchants,
doctors," says Hamzeh Jaber, a jeweler from Nablus, a city in the northern
West Bank. "They are people who use their mouth against Israel. They don't
use their hands."
	   
	Despite the claims of both sides, the Palestinians fit no single
mold:
	Abdulwahab is a 26-year-old father of three. He met his wife, a
Louisianian, when he was working toward a degree in physics at a small
college in Ohio.
	They are devout Muslims - she wears the black Islamic dress - but
he swears they are not involved in politics. His father died three years
ago, and he and his brother are immersed in running the family travel
agency and insurance businesses to pay off debts, he says. "I don't have
any time for anything except work."
	"I am a little out of place," Abdulwahab admits sheepishly of his
standing among more political brethren.
	"I still can't believe I'm deported," he says. "I try not to think
of anything. I try not to think of my family. It just makes me more sad.
	Ahmed al-Hajali, by contrast, was not surprised he was expelled. He
has been jailed eight times by the Israelis during the Palestinian
"intifada," or uprising.
	The intifada has been a movement carried out by the young. But
Hajali is 54, deliberate in his motions, aged all the more in appearance by
a full, gray beard.
	"I haven't thrown stones. I just teach the children," says Hajali,
a headmaster at an Islamic school in Nablus. "I teach them this is their
land. The Jews took it by force."
	He also is an "imam," a leader in a mosque. Those mosques, Israel
says, are the crucibles of extremist incitement.
	"Everybody has a right to defend their own land," says Hajali. "The
problem is Rabin is a thief. He deported us because we are the rightful
owners of the land, and he doesn't want us around. He knows the rightful
owner is a dangerous man."
Xref: sparky talk.politics.mideast:26415 talk.politics.soviet:10849 soc.culture.soviet:12520 soc.culture.greek:12678 soc.culture.europe:11510 soc.culture.turkish:15185 soc.rights.human:5028