were not worth the lives and financial and military
its legs," she said, and it should have better prepared
efforts that Israel has paid.
their SLA allies for the withdrawal.
Post-Intifada Israel is no longer keen on protract-
Also fearing a precedent, residents of the Golan
ed military engagements. As far as the future is con-
Heights have warned Barak that it will not be so
cerned, though, there is a tempered sense of wait
easy to create a similar national consensus around
and see.
the idea of a-withdrawal from the Golan.
Shimon Kamari, 48, and his brother Yehuda, 34,
David Maximov, 34, a committed Likud support-
grew up in Kiryat Shemona. They recalled their
er who works in the diamond trade and lives in Tel
childhood filled with days and nights of rushing to
Aviv, also expiessed disapproval with the way the
the bomb shelters when their _town was pelted with
IDF withdrew because of what he termed the lack of
rockets from the Lebanese border.
coordination with the SLA. But, he said, he sup-
It was a life of constant frustration, said Yehuda,
ported the redeployment as a whole.
who is now a doctor in Tel Aviv. As a youngster, he
"What is important is if this has helped to save
would take his guitar and hop from shelter to shelter
one soldier. It's less important if people call us 'losers'
for a few moments of relief— "Even when the army
even though it hurts to hear that," the father of two
was in Lebanon there were
said. "But we should have
Katyushas," he recalled. Now he is
first worked with our allies,
more apt to take out an oud, a tradi-
the SLA, before we left. We
tional stringed Arabic instrument, to
can't just take everything
delicately strum a tune.
apart and leave them there."
"I opposed the war from day one.
The aim of protecting the people in
The National Interest
the north was not successful and the
Gerias Khoury, mayor of the
price we were paying in terms of the
Christian Arab village of
lives of soldiers was too high. There
Fasuta, nestled in the gently
were no benefits at all from being in
slopping hills of upper
Lebanon. The soldiers there were
Galilee, said Arabs will not
only protecting themselves.
view the redeployment as an
Hopefully this will bring about
some kind of settlement."
action of weakness but rather
One done out of strategic
For Shimon, a dairy products
necessity. The Arabs know,
distributor in Kiryat Shemona and
he said, that the IDF did not
the father of three, the withdrawal
leave because of pressure
means a safer life for his children.
from Hezbollah, but rather
"My 14-year-old daughter lived
because it was the national
in deep fear of the missiles. The
desire.
attacks have definitely affected my
"The nation elected
older son and his sense of security
Moti Avraham runs a small market
Barak,"
Khoury said, "and
"I want the State of Israel to
in the northern city of Kiryat Shemona.
defend itself from within its bor-
His younger brother Nahum was killed as Barak promised a withdraw-
ders," said Shimon, whose house
al with or without an agree-
a soldier in Lebanon in 1982.
ment. I am an Arab
and two cars have been damaged in
Palestinian, but the Israeli
Katyusha attacks. His other son
withdrawal was a very strong one and a very intelli-
was serving in an elite unit in Lebanon until the
gent one."
withdrawal.
The withdrawal brings a different kind of hope
"There was no place for us in Lebanon and now,
for the villagers of Fasuta, who all have family roots
because of our presence there, we created another
in Lebanon. For more than 50 years, families have
enemy. The Hezbollah was born there. I watched the
been divided by the border, unable to visit each
television with happiness seeing our soldiers come out
other, and the village itself has suffered an occasional
— not only as a parent but for the strategic accom-
rocket attack.
plishment."
Now residents are eager for an agreement with
Lebanon so family members from across the border
What Precedent?
will be able to visit each other; said Khoury who has
In Efrat, near Jerusalem, West Bank settler activist
relatives in Lebanon he has never seen.
Nadia Matar, 34 and mother of five, was fuming.
"This will set a precedent for Palestinian terror-
No Peace Before
ists," she said, as she prepared posters and banners
Amal Abu Zniden lives and works in Jerusalem but the
for a demonstration against the withdrawal. "They
38-year-old Druse thinks often of his home village of
will see how the moment Israel is threatened the
Maghrar near Tiberias. 'As an Arab," he said, "I iden-
government caves in. They will expect us (in Judea
tify with the Lebanese and am very happy for them."
and Samaria) also to run for our lives but we are
The near future, he says, will not be worse than
staying and we demand to receive weapons if the
army leaves. Our very survival is at risk, not just that the recent past.
"I am worried for everybody, but when people
of Kiryat Shemona but of Tel Aviv. The withdrawal
is just one more blunder."
talk about what will be, they act as if there was a
Garden of Eden here before. There were Katyushas
Israel could have prepared a more structured
withdrawal instead of escaping "with its tail between
LEBANON on page 11
Hezbolla supporters at "The Good Fence."
At The 'Good Fence'
After withdrawal, expectations
change in a border town.
LARRY DERFNER
Israel Correspondent
Metulla, Israel
hen they opened the border crossing here
in 1976, they called it the "Good Fence."
Many Lebanese, fleeing the civil war in 1976,
passed through it, and over the years after the
war and the 1982 Israeli occupation of a buffer
zone in southern Lebanon, thousands of villagers
crossed here every day to work in northern
Israeli farms, businesses and homes.
When the Israeli army pulled out of the secu-
rity zone a month ago, almost 1,000 villagers —
nearly all of them family of Israel's allied militia,
the now-disbanded South Lebanon Army —
were working in Metulla.
And now the Good Fence is gone, along with a
lot of hopes for the future of Metulla, the north-
elnirldSt town in Israel and one of its oldest and
most beautifil
Only a few dozen Lebanese are left, or strand-
ed, in town. The rest are either refugees in Israeli
hostels or back in their villages — trying,
Lebanese-style, to prove their new-found loyalty
to Hezbollah (Party of God), the Islamic guerril-
la organization that chased the Israeli army and
SLA out of their country
"The Good Fence is finished," said a disgust-
ed Yossi Goldberg, scion of one of Metulla's
original 1896 settler families.
With the crossing now marked by crowds of
jeering south Lebanese villagers — a few of
whom occasionally fire AK-47s in the air or
throw stones and garbage at the Israeli side —
Metulla residents can no longer point to their
town as a symbol of Jewish-Arab neighborliness.
But the "New Middle East in action" image
isn't all that Metulla has lost in the new dispen-
sation on the border. Its aristocratic resilience,
borne of deep roots, of a history farming the
land, of withstanding a century of border wars,
W
GOOD FENCE on page 10
6/23
2000
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