From The Holy Mountain (45 page)

I
knew from my reading that the Byzantines had built a fine basilica in the middle of the temple as part of one their periodic attempts to suppress the town's militant population of pagans. Yet despite the temple's generally excellent state of preservation, I looked in vain for any sign of Byzantine work.
I
have since learned from archaeologists in Beirut that the reason for this was not so much a pagan wrecking campaign as a piece of French colonial
dirigisme.
Apparently when French archaeologists dug the ruins in the 1930s they removed the Byzantine basilica, assuming, with typically Gallic certainty, that posterity would find their reconstruction of a pagan classical altar more interesting than the Byzantine basilica that succeeded it.

I
sat in the small Temple of Jupiter, watching a handful of Lebanese tourists circle the ruins. There was a couple with a pushchair, a few modest Shia women in dark headscarves and a carload of noisy Maronite babes in tight hip-hugging jeans, thick lashings of mascara and great bouffant beehives of back-combed hair. Despite the recent kidnapping of the Danish diplomats and Nouri's nervousness, the visitors seemed relaxed and happy as they clambered around the pillars taking photographs of each other, giggling and smiling, determined to make the most of their day out from Beirut.

Then, quite suddenly, a burst of automatic fire echoed over the ruins. A few seconds later there were two more loud bursts of rapid fire followed by a massive explosion on the hillside above the town. As I watched a great brown mushroom cloud of dust and smoke exploded into the air from a ridge half a mile from the temple. I immediately took shelter behind a capital, but to my embarrassment none of the Lebanese jumped or even looked twice at the menacing plume of the explosion. One businessman filming his family with a camcorder swung briefly around to record the cloud of smoke, then swept back to pan over the pediments of the temple and his smiling wife and baby. He saw me picking myself up, dusting the dirt from my jeans, and smiled. 'It is only the Hezbollah,' he said. 'Probably they are just training. Almost certainly they are just training.'

Nouri was waiting, as arranged, in the lobby of the Cavalier at nine this morning. With him was his friend Abed, another taxi driver who said he had good contacts in the Palestinian camps. Abed said he could take me to some Christian Palestinians and suggested we try the Mar Elias refugee camp, not far from the notorious massacre site of Chatila.

The camp was a very different place to the squalid shanty towns I knew from the West Bank. Rather than rotting behind some high-tension razor-wire fence, it lay instead behind a line of smart boutiques - Valentino, Lagerfeld and Benetton - their exquisitely dressed dummies frozen in strange sartorial contortions behind the spotlit plate glass of the shop fronts. No clear boundaries separated the camp from the surrounding houses. Only the extreme, visible poverty of its residents and the density of shrapnel holes pockmarking the facades of the buildings marked it out from its unexpectedly prosperous surroundings.

Abed parked his battered old Mercedes just outside the camp and led me confidently through the narrow warren of breezeblock houses. Mar Elias, he explained, had been one of the luckiest camps in the war. Sure, it had been intermittently shelled by the Israelis, who had used phosphorus and even cluster bombs on the refugees' shacks, but unlike some neighbouring camps it had never been completely flattened by Israeli carpet bombing or Phalange bulldozers, nor had it ever suffered a major massacre like nearby Chatila, Sabra or Karantina. Its residents were very poor, of course, and suffered the same disabilities that hamstring all Palestinians in Lebanon - banned from all but menial jobs, forbidden from buying property or travelling freely, refused access to state schools - but, relatively speaking, they had been lucky. Moreover they were not in any immediate danger of eviction. Lebanese politicians were currently threatening to tear down the Palestinians' camps elsewhere in Beirut and dump the refugees out of sight somewhere on the front line in southern Lebanon. But Mar Elias was built on Greek Orthodox Church land, and if there was no obvious hope of the Palestinians ever being allowed to go back to their homes and farms in what was now northern Israel, then at least they were not in any immediate danger of being expelled from their makeshift camp in Beirut.

As Abed led me through the fetid lanes of the camp, he bumped into a friend, a burly man in a leather jacket. Abed shook his hand then embraced him, kissing him on either cheek in the Palestinian manner. He asked a question in Arabic and his friend pointed out a nearby three-storey house.

'He says that all the residents of that house are Palestinian Christians,' said Abed after the man had gone. 'Let's see if anyone is at home.'

'Who was that?' I asked as we climbed the stairs. 'Abu Nidal.'

"The
Abu Nidal? The hijacker and bomber?'

'No, not the man himself,' said Abed casually. 'His representative here. He runs the Mar Elias branch of Abu Nidal's Fatah Revolutionary Council '

We knocked on a door at the top of the stairs, and after a minute it was opened by a Palestinian woman in a knotted kerchief. Abed talked to her, and after sizing us up to see whether she believed what he said, and conferring with someone inside, she opened the door to let us in.

'Salaam alekum,'
she said. 'Welcome.'

Inside, we found the room full of Palestinian women. Our host was called Sarah Daou, and we had dropped in on the morning she happened to be entertaining her mother, Samira, and her pretty teenage sister Ghada. Her two small daughters, Rana and Rasha, fetched us a pair of plastic chairs, while Sarah went off to the kitchen to make us coffee. It was a bare, simple flat, small and undecorated except for a framed picture of the Virgin and a cheap Japanese wall clock; but it was spotlessly clean.

None of the family spoke English, so Abed acted as interpreter. Soon we were hearing a recital of the depressing, but familiar, Palestinian story of loss and dispossession.

'Since the time of Saladin my family had owned several hundred acres of land in the village of Kafr Bir'im,' said Samira, Sarah's mother. She was a large, cheerful middle-aged woman with a wide smile, but her face was heavily lined and there was a weariness in her voice as she told her story. 'The village was north of Acre, near the border with Lebanon. I was only five when we fled, but I remember that Kafr Bir'im was a very beautiful place.'

She made a sweeping upward gesture with the palm of her hand, as if trying to brush away the vision rising before her.

'My father was working in Haifa at the time of the catastrophe,' she said. 'I was at a Sisters of Charity school. I very well remember when the planes were bombing and a house nearby was destroyed. We were all very frightened. We had no idea what was happening or what to do.

'My father was about twenty-five at that time. He was a butcher and worked for a Jewish company in Haifa. He had a very good relationship with his Jewish employer. The man said, "If you are frightened, send your family to Lebanon. Stay here and work for us. Then when the war is over go and collect them." But my father was too afraid. Everyone knew what had happened to the Palestinians massacred by the Jewish terrorists at Deir Yassin, and he was worried that maybe the border would close and he would be separated from us. Then the Jews began firing their mortars into the Arab areas of Haifa and our building was completely destroyed. Luckily, by some miracle, none of us were in at the time, but it made up my father's mind.

'His employer gave him a month's leave and lent us his van. That was how we left Palestine, with my father driving a Jewish van to exile in southern Lebanon. My father's mother-in-law, my grandmother, was a Maronite from that region, so he drove us straight to her house. By that stage the Israelis controlled much of the road, but they did not bother us because we had a Jewish truck. Sometimes the Israeli planes were flying just above us, but they probably thought we were Jews because of the Hebrew writing on the van and they did not bomb us. We were very lucky, but we made one big mistake: we didn't bring anything with us, because we thought the war would only last two weeks, a month maybe. We left everything behind. The only thing of any value that we had with us was my mother's gold earrings. How were we to know the Israelis would never let any of us return to our homes? Later, when the Israeli planes destroyed Kafr Bir'im -they bombed every house in the village - everything we owned, everything we had worked for, was destroyed. Only the church was left standing. Our land was divided between new Jewish settlements, and given to people from Poland and America.'

At that moment, from outside, there came the unmistakable
clack-clack-clack
of automatic gunfire. After my humiliation the day before in Ba'albek, I stayed rooted to the spot and tried to look as if I regularly sat inside Palestinian refugee camps listening to the ominous sound of approaching machine-gun fire. This time, however, I was clearly not alone in being anxious. Everyone immediately got up from their seats and went over to the windows to see what was happening.

'It's outside the camp,' said Sarah.

'Its probably just the Syrian army firing into the air,' said her mother. 'Probably celebrating someone's birthday.'

'The cars are moving normally on the roads,' said Abed, looking over towards where his car was parked.

'Maybe it's an assassination,' said Ghada, our hostess's sister. 'Maybe someone has killed Arafat and now the people are firing into the air to celebrate.'

'Maybe it's the anniversary of the beginning of the
intifada.'

'Wrong month.'

'Maybe they are celebrating Mr William's visit,' suggested Abed. 'Is this dangerous?' I asked Abed. 'Should we go?' 'It's safer to stay,' he said. 'At least until we know what the problem is.'

Sarah and Ghada stayed by the window, peering nervously in the direction from which the firing was still coming, but their mother, clearly used to such alarms after a life spent in besieged camps, returned wearily to her seat and continued her narrative.

'We stayed all that year in southern Lebanon in my grandmother's house. It was very primitive, and my father couldn't find work because he was a Palestinian. The Lebanese wouldn't even let him drive the van, and eventually he had to sell it. After the nice school in Haifa I hated the life on the farm. My grandmother's house was very small. My uncle was living there with his family, so there were already eight people in the house even before we arrived. It was unbearable: there was no space, no privacy. All the small children were quarrelling all the time. I remember always being hungry. Often we slept without eating. We suffered a lot.

'After a year, when it became clear we would not be allowed back home for some time, we got a tent in the Baas refugee camp near Sidon. The camp had originally been built for the Armenians when they fled to Lebanon in 1916, but they had since become rich and moved out. I remember it was very cold, and when it rained the tent leaked. At night when we were all in the tent there was no room to move, and my brothers had to sleep with their legs outside the tent because they could not fit them inside.

'After some time, in 1953, my father got a job as a UN bus driver between south Lebanon and Beirut. But he never really recovered from losing everything. He hated the tents and he missed his village and his old life in Palestine. He would have given anything to return, but he knew that all his friends who had tried to sneak across the border to their old villages had been shot dead by the Israelis. They gunned down any Arab they saw crossing the border, calling them terrorists. So he had no choice but to stay in the tent. Sometimes he would just sit there looking at the keys of his house in Kafr Bir'im and the title deeds the British had given his father to prove the ownership of our land. He got ill and very depressed. It was as if something had broken inside him. He died in 1956. He was only thirty-four years old.