Lebanon Consoles... the Wounds of Sister Palestine

Much has been said of late about the lamentable state to which our Palestinian brethren have been reduced; talk of them is on every tongue, and some have taken to inventing stories and false rumors for purposes of their own. To refute these fabrications I wished to offer a brief account of some of these abnormal circumstances and of the feelings that surround them. So I visited some of the shelters and spoke with a great number of these families, the stricken and the unstricken alike, and came upon truths at whose horror the limbs tremble, and from whose atrocities every proud soul recoils — if it holds within it even a little justice and mercy!

I approached a lady in her fifth decade, surrounded by four young men and one young woman. From my first glance I could tell that they were all her children. I greeted her and asked after her; she thanked God and thanked me. I did not dare multiply my questions, for the air was heavy, saturated with grief; and it was as though this lady took comfort in my visit, for she began to tell me of the dark thoughts wandering through her distracted mind. She said:

"They were five young men, and one of them fell a martyr some days ago in the battle of Tiberias. It was my eldest son's turn to guard our Arab quarter at night against the assaults of the Zionists. He was stricken with a sudden acute attack of illness, so his second brother gallantly stepped forward and volunteered to keep the watch in his place; he armed himself, kissed my hand, and asked my blessing. He had gone only a little way when the bombs began to pour down upon the streets and the houses without any warning, and through the windowpane I saw my son's body flying apart, limb from limb... I saw his hand fly off and his head torn to pieces. I crawled out to gather those beloved fragments of flesh and bone scattered upon the dust, and we continued our crawl to the convent under cover of night — and there was the convent, refuge of all the Arab families... The shelling went on for three days running, and when we stole secretly, under cover of darkness, back to our houses to fetch what we needed, we found the houses empty and bare, the doors and windows wrenched off and smashed. So we came to Lebanon as we are, owning nothing — and all this counts for little for the sake of the cause..."

Then she added: "The warm welcome we meet from our Lebanese brethren, and the kindness we have known from the Permanent Palestine Committee and the body of the Lebanese Red Cross — all this plants a beautiful consolation in our hearts, for we feel that you share our sorrows out of true feeling... And we pray God never to let you see the like of what we have seen and known."

I calmed her fears as best I could, and passed to a second room...

Here was a young woman, her brow knotted, her wits astray, surrendered to despair; her visitor could hardly find strength enough to greet her and question her! Her calamity, beyond doubt, is one of those that break the strength — here she was, all but touched with madness!

— Good day, my sister; can I be of any service to you?

She raised to me an eye tearful and bloodshot, and told me, sobbing, how during the shelling of Haifa she had rushed to her house, wrapped up her infant daughter, gathered her jewelry and her few coins, and fled to the car under a hail of bullets; and it was her lot to escape death and to reach Tyre safely... And in Tyre, when she looked to her baby, she found that she had been clasping a bolster of straw, and that her baby was still in the locked house! How, then, should her eye ever dry, or her eyelid know rest? Here I found myself unable to speak, for I am a mother and I know a mother's feelings — the more so as this wretched woman had fallen prey to tormenting whispers telling her that it was she who had killed her child; and that feeling alone was enough to unseat her reason! I asked her about her husband; she said he was a volunteer, and word had reached her that he was well.

And I saw... I saw many of the wretched, men and women, and it pained me to see what I saw. But of all these many groups, differing in their tendencies and creeds, the one that pained me most was the conscious, cultivated group — the ardent patriotic group that was forced to abandon its homeland under the weight of terror.

At the house of a friend I met a physician whom I had known for a long time, one of the most patriotic of men. He told me, deeply moved, the story of his flight — how he was driven to it, not free to choose; and how, had any of his friends predicted a week beforehand that he would flee, he would have slapped his face and counted his words an insult. But when dread and violent panic spread through the hearts of the Arabs — most of the inhabitants being stripped of arms — they found in staying a certain death; and under the shells and the roar of the bullets they pushed one another onward against their own will... They had imagined that in getting away from the guns and the fire they would find rest; and here they are instead, under the weight of a fearful crisis of the soul, burning with a fire from within, finding no justification for their presence in the safety of Lebanon while Palestine bleeds and fights in defense of her sacred soil.

Some of the young Palestinian men assured me that had they possessed arms to defend their lands and their lives, the thought of flight would never have crossed their minds; and they now long to return at once and to join the Arab armies, on condition that they be furnished with arms and adequate equipment — for their return in their present state would be closer to suicide and rashness than to patriotism and wisdom.

A friend, his pain plain to see, declared to me:

"I lost my father two months ago, and you know what burning grief a father's death brings. But I assure you that leaving Jerusalem was far harder upon me; I shall have no rest whatever until Palestine is Arab and free again."

This universal feeling grew great in my eyes, but it did not surprise me, for I believe in this national sentiment that drives peoples to martyrdom in the cause of right.

A. J. S.

Since our eyes first opened to the light there has been an idea in our heads, handed down among us, that the Jew is a coward. I remember my mother once scolding my brother with the words: "Are you as timid as a Jew?" It never crossed our minds that this coward had filled the corners of his soul with hatred, so that he would fall treacherously upon the pure peasant women of Deir Yassin, the unarmed people of Haifa, and the maidens of Tiberias and her children — killing and scattering.

Welcome, a hearty welcome to the brethren; welcome to the dispersed. Among your own people and your kin you are not dispersed. You have lost your money, your people, and your possessions, but you have not lost what remains, and will remain, in this world: your dignity remains to you, and the voice of your martyred women and men remains, to remind humanity of the injustice of the Zionists and of those who back them. History has recorded for the Arabs a struggle of morals — the struggle of good against evil.

I am in the Quarantina quarter, where thousands of refugees are received. The refugees of the events of Haifa, Safad, al-Harawi, Ein al-Zeitun, and Jaffa are received by the Scouts, who secure their lodging and their keep; and the Red Cross organization brings them what the people of Lebanon have sent them of clothing, cleanses and disinfects it, takes each family in turn to the baths, disinfects their clothes, sees what clothing the family needs and provides it. The Red Cross has organized its work in a satisfactory way, enlisting the ladies of the country to supervise with it the distribution of clothing and the cleanliness of the refugees, to prevent the spread of disease.

I approached a group of children and asked them to tell me what they had seen before leaving Palestine; the little ones raced one another to speak, and I could make out only: the Haganah... and the bayonet... they shot my father... they shot my mother... the Communist and the machine gun... By God, what psychological and social effects will all this have, later on, upon these little ones? I have forbidden my maid to tell my daughter anything frightening, or to threaten her with anything that would turn her toward fear, lest any flaw cloud her thinking for the future... And these children?!

I spoke with one of the arrivals from the outskirts of Haifa about his reason for coming to Lebanon. He said: to set my mind at rest about my parents and my brothers. I leave them in safety and go back.

— And what threatened them there?

— Everything, madam: the fear of assault upon the women, the helpless, and the children, and of the robbing of lives, of property, and of honor. The Arab, madam, is not like the Jew — he has many things to fear. The Jew's property is guarded for him by the Jewish Agency, which arms him well and so guards his life; and as for his honor, he fears nothing on its account — so he fights with an easy mind.

— And why do you not stop them?

— We have no cartridges. I was with thirty fighters, and when our cartridges ran out the Haganah fell upon us. What can we do without cartridges? There was with us a stout-hearted man, nicknamed Abu al-Rasas — Father of Bullets. When his cartridges gave out, he took up his only son, brought along his wife and his empty rifle, and tried to bring them to safety. But the Haganah fell upon him: they snatched the boy from him and flung him into the air as one throws a ball, dragged the woman off and handed her over to his comrades; then one attacked Abu al-Rasas, who tried to defend himself with his empty rifle — and ripped open his belly with his bayonet.

Near my informant sat a refugee, listening to what he was telling; he broke in:

— Is Abu al-Rasas dead, then?

— Yes...

— A pity — such men!

And my companion asked him: and what did you do with your empty rifle?

— I returned it to my commander and went back to the village to bring out my father and my brothers; I did so, and brought them near to Beirut. But I still remember the poor thing, the wife of Abu al-Rasas: I saw her in the village — the Jews had burned out her eyes, and had slit the ears of her child. Only that...

And I rode in the car of the Lebanese Red Cross, in the company of Dr. Salwa Nassar, to the southern frontier to inspect conditions in general. The refugees in their thousands have moved into Lebanon because of its nearness to Palestine. Seven thousand five hundred came ashore at Tyre. The delegate of the General Security received them there, having set a chair and a table on the beach, registering whoever came to him and letting pass unheeded whoever slipped away... to cut the telephone lines or wreck the bridges... Of the seven thousand five hundred, some were sent on to Beirut and Damascus, and the rest were housed in the houses of the Armenians who had emigrated to Armenia. At once a committee of men was formed, headed by the benefactor Mr. Suleiman Arab, to house and feed the refugees, and a committee of ladies, called the Girl's Renaissance, under the presidency of Mrs. Fatima al-Khalil, to secure milk for the children and clothing for all.

But the work most worthy of appreciation in Tyre, over and above what has been mentioned, is the hospital project founded by Dr. Saadallah al-Khalil: a small building on the shore, in which at the outset he received 25 wounded men and performed upon them 25 surgical operations in a single day, with the help of one nurse.

At the hospital we saw Dr. Afif Nassouli, a member of the American University of Beirut mission in Bint Jbeil, come to take Dr. al-Khalil's place during his absence in Beirut. He told us about the wounded, and informed us that the battle of al-Harawi had been very fierce. And we saw the late Muhammad Zgheib, hero of al-Harawi and al-Malikiyya. I shall never forget the look in the eyes of the hero of al-Harawi as he sat upon his bed watching his comrades play checkers. He is a caged lion, wounded in the leg — as though it were he who inspired the late Ibrahim Tuqan to say:

Silent — but had he spoken,
he would have uttered fire and blood.
Say to him who faults his silence:
resolution was created dumb.

And we saw a wounded man in whose leg a dumdum bullet had played, opening a hole big enough to hold an orange. We talked with the wounded — they were forty — and saw in them nothing but restiveness at sickness and its long duration, and a pressing desire for recovery. To return to the field.

We made for Sidon at the hour when food was being distributed to the refugees. They are scattered among the houses of Mieh Mieh, the Qishla barracks, the houses of the Jewish quarter and its synagogue; their number is four thousand.

Dr. Zayn al-Badri supervises the government hospital.

And from Sidon we visited Deir al-Mukhalles, and there enjoyed the conversation of Father Bardaweel, the Superior General of the monastery. Father Bardaweel has only 21 orphans from among the refugees; the remaining fifty came before the events, after the partition resolution. Father Bardaweel had anticipated events, and sent word to the dioceses under his charge to spend the monasteries' funds on securing shelter for orphans and individuals whenever the need should call.

We left South Lebanon with an unaccustomed rancor in the soul and an unaccustomed thirst for requital; but joined with them is a pride in the great works our brethren have accomplished, whether in the hospitals or in the sheltering and feeding of the refugees. These are glad tidings of reassurance that we are alive — and that calamities awaken our sleeping intelligence and the noble ancestral qualities latent within us.

Mina