The Hundred Years' War on Palestine by Rashid I. Khalidi

Author:Rashid I. Khalidi
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2019-02-20T16:00:00+00:00

AFTER WE LEARNED of the massacres in Sabra and Shatila, we knew that it was not safe for us to remain in Beirut, especially with our two small children and with Mona about to have a third. Our journalist friends put us in touch with Ryan Crocker, the senior American political officer and the only US diplomat still at the embassy in West Beirut.57 Crocker not only offered to arrange our evacuation as US citizens, he would also escort us out of Israeli-occupied Beirut in an armored vehicle belonging to the embassy. But he could take us only to the Israeli-Syrian lines between Bhamdoun and Sofar in the Lebanese mountains, because of reports of the presence of Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Syrian-controlled territory. When I told him that we had to get farther than that, to nearby Shtaura in the Biqa‘ Valley, whence we could take a taxi to Damascus, he assented. Crocker was as good as his word. On September 21, the day Amin Gemayel was elected president of Lebanon in place of his assassinated brother, we left Beirut with him and a driver, crossed the Israeli and LF lines, reached Shtaura, and went on to Damascus by taxi.

Once there, however, instead of taking us to our hotel, the driver deposited us at one of the many offices of the Syrian intelligence services. There Mona, now seven months pregnant, my brother, and I were treated to several hours of detention, punctuated by separate interrogations of each of us that featured such penetrating questions as “Did you see any Israeli soldiers in Beirut?” The Syrian security apparatus fortunately did not interrogate my sixty-seven-year-old mother or our two little daughters, and eventually we were released, after which we went to our hotel, and then left Damascus as quickly as we could.58 We flew to Tunis, where we reunited with some of our Palestinian friends from Beirut who had been evacuated there. In Tunis, I first developed the ideas that eventually became my book about the decisions taken by the PLO during the 1982 war, Under Siege, and began discussions with some of the PLO leaders whom I later interviewed for the book. We then went on to Cairo, where Mona and I both had family, and we realized how badly the war had affected the girls: they went into a wild panic when they heard the screeching rumble of trolley cars in an adjacent street, thinking they were Israeli tanks.

As soon as the Israeli army withdrew from West Beirut and the airport opened, we went back to the city. Mona insisted on having our third child delivered by the same obstetrician who had delivered our two daughters (and whose father had delivered Mona herself over thirty years earlier). Our son Ismail was born in November 1982,59 and I returned to teaching at the AUB and continued to work at the IPS. After a tense few months marked by the suicide bombing of the US embassy in the spring of 1983, we left Beirut for what we expected would be just a year away.

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