I spot Dina Ta’amari standing with a group of men. Dina was King Hussein’s first wife. She is a woman with an outstanding history as an Arab patriot. In the late 1950s, for example, she had used her yacht to transport arms to the Algerian revolutionaries, who were then in struggle against the French to gain independence. Her involvement in civic and nationalist causes has not ebbed since. Now she is married to Salah Ta’amari, the military commander of the Palestinian forces in southern Lebanon. A dashing, intellectual, and handsome guerrilla from a poor, refugee-camp background, Salah became the model of the Palestinian protagonist in John Le Carré’s novel The Little Drummer Girl. Le Carré had been a friend of the Palestinian leader for years and had stayed at his house in Sidon on a number of occasions.
During the invasion of Lebanon in June 1982, Salah was injured and later captured by the Israeli army and placed in Ansar, a sort of concentration camp that then held about fifteen thousand Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners. Dina’s preoccupation these last eight months has been to publicize the atrocious conditions the prisoners lived under and to petition international organizations to demand their release.
I go over to shake hands.
“What’s the news from Salah?”
“No news,” she responds, sighing to indicate her sense of hopelessness. “What makes it worse is that the prisoners think we don’t care about them. They think we’ve forgotten them.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Well, they have no access to news from the outside world. Every now and again they see a Red Cross official or two and that’s about it,” she says wearily.
I tell her that sooner or later we’ll find a way to get them out of that hellhole.
“I hope so. Have you seen the exhibition of posters about Ansar that we put up?”
I tell her that I have, and was impressed by it.
Hundreds of people mill around the corridors and the lounge. It is early evening. In three hours, the PNC, the ultimate legislative authority of the Palestinian Movement, will meet again to elect a new executive committee for its executive branch, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
There are old people and young people, people in traditional dress and others in jeans. People who have been in the struggle since 1965, or were in it during the 1936-39 revolt inside Palestine, and some who have grown up not knowing anything else. And the foreign guests. Slavic faces, Germanic faces, Anglo-Saxon faces, African faces, Oriental faces, Indian faces, Latin faces. Outside the Palais de Nations, three Algerian destroyers patrol the coast.
I join some friends in the lounge. Among them are May Sayegh, president of the General Union of Palestinian Women (GUPW), and her husband, Abu Hatem, a PLO official.
May is reminiscing about an incident in the old days, in the early 1970s, when she and two other women from the union went to the Tel Zaatar Palestinian refugee camp to “educate Palestinian women politically, about their role in society.”
“I mean,” May laughs self-deprecatingly, “here we were, a bunch of bourgeois Palestinian women, graduates of the American University of Beirut, and we meet this middle-aged woman, with that typically haughty look on her face that most women of the camps have, hanging her laundry on a line outside her ramshackle hut, with its tin roof held down by rocks and pieces of wood and branches and what have you. We tell her we’ve come from the GUPW to teach her—we actually said teach—about the politics of the Revolution. Well this lady says, ‘Listen khaltes, my loved ones, I want to tell you this. If these sheets of tin,’ she says and hits the wall of the hut with her fist, ‘did not teach me, all these years, what the politics of my life and revolution is all about, then you’re not going to.’ “
“Yes,” says Abu Hatem, “You can’t underestimate our people’s intuitive view of the world. This man I knew in Bourj el Barajneh kept telling me, every time I saw him after an Israeli bombing raid, ‘Don’t worry, it’s all vitamins for our nation.’”
We continue talking. We reminisce about Majed Abu Sharar, a mutual friend who had been killed three years before, about the Takhikhas, the fighters and civilians who were shooting in the air when the fedayeen evacuated Beirut; about Black September in 1970, our first major confrontation with an Arab army; about the battle for Sidon in 1976 against the Syrian army, when a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) hit a Syrian tank and sent it flying up to the roof of a two-story building, where it stayed right through the summer of 1982. We talk about who is living where now, since the evacuation. And in the end we talk, as if sensing that we needed relief from the excruciating subject we had been addressing ourselves to for over an hour, about May’s hometown, Gaza.
“Brothers,” says May mock-seriously, “in Gaza we eat hot peppers for breakfast.”
We all laugh.
“And don’t tell me you fellows from Haifa,” she continues, pointing to her husband, “eat anything resembling hot peppers, even for dinner.”
“You are the crown of my head,” Abu Hatem responds.
At this point another friend joins us, a man in his late twenties whom I know only be his nom de guerre, Ben Bella. My acquaintance with him was superficial, but the others know him very well. Ben Bella, an expert in karate, had spent many years in Japan, where he acquired a reputation as a champion who would not “retreat” in combat. When he returned to Lebanon, he worked in the South under Salah Ta’amari as an instructor for the Palestinian youth movement, the ashbal. The ashbal—literally, the cubs—aged anything from nine to fifteen saw themselves, and were seen by Palestinian society, as an elite group who excelled not only in sports, but in combat. Karate was their major sport, according to Ben Bella. Though “violent,” he tells us, it teaches practitioners to be “calm.” The ashbal weapon was the RPG, known in the Soviet Union, where it is manufactured, as “the weapon of the brave.” The ashbal were expected to fight “like ten fedayeen.” “Every grenade in an RPG costs 34 liras, and you only have six, so don’t waste them,” they were told. “Don’t hit your target”—usually a tank—“until it gets close to you, and then immediately move away.”
Indeed, the Israelis dubbed them “the RPG kids” in the 1982 war for the devastating number of hits they scored with their grenades and the agility with which they moved. In every battle the Palestinians waged, all the way from the battle of Karameh in 1968 to the Syrian invasion of Lebanon in 1976, from the Israeli invasion of 1978 to the one that came four years later, the ashbal played a major role.
At Karameh, by literally throwing themselves at Israeli tanks with their explosives strapped to their waists, the ashbal may have turned the tide of battle. In June 1982, at the Rashidiyyeh refugee camp in the South of Lebanon, Ben Bella tells us, a group of thirteen ashbal kept firing at the attackers, “meanwhile running around like frogs,” till they ran out of ammunition. Then they marched