A hole in the fence

Patrick Cosgrave

Metulla Near Metulla in Galilee the Lebanese and Israeli border fences are separated by a strip of road perhaps twelve feet across. Since the Lebanese civil war took its harsh grip on the entrails of that country the Arab side has been infrequently patrolled : when armed men appear there they belong to the PLO or to the Lebanese Arab Army—that section of the official Lebanese Army which defected some time ago in the belief that their Palestinian brethren were going to win the war. On the Israeli side, naturally, security precautions were stepped up as the ferocity of the Lebanese conflict increased.

Last January, a young Israeli soldier on night duty was called to by a Lebanese woman from the nearby village of El Kleah. She was carrying a sick baby. She told the soldier that the Lebanese clinics (including that at Nabatea run by the PLO, of which more later) were denuded of staff, equipment and medicines; and she asked him to help. It was dark ; the soldier was scared; his Arabic was imperfect. He called his commanding officer.

The CO called the battalion doctor. A hole was cut in the fence, and the baby treated. Over the next weeks and months more and more sick Lebanese came to the hole in the fence. For some time the scale of what was happening was not understood by the government in Jerusalem. By the middle of the year, however, it was apparent that a major development in Israeli-Arab relations was taking place. And, as in the case of the 'open bridge' across the Jordan River, the initiative had been taken by the Israeli Army on the ground. rather than by their political masters. In June, Shimon Peres, the Israeli Defence Minister, a man with a knack for coining phrases which catch on, decided not only to help, but to christen the phenomenon. It is now called the 'good fence' policy; though the Hebrew Hagada Hatova —fence of goodwill--conveys a more accurate and more poetic meaning.

Last week the Syrian government agreed

to open a similar fence on their ceasefire line with Israel, this time to allow families from Druse villages on either side to meet. The one Syrian condition—according to the UN observer who carried the message of agreement—was that the Israelis should not allow journalists to visit their side of the fence. The condition expresses the belief that Israel has gained far too much political capital from the gaps—now three in number, at Metulla, Doves, and Hanita in the Lebanese fence.

The first good fence is a drear sight. Under Israeli guns two khaki-coloured caravans stand at a slight angle to one another. They contain a reception centre, a consulting room, and a field hospital. Having entered, if not casually, then automatically, into the commitment to help, the Israelis have found that obligation feeds upon itself. At first the good fence doctors dealt with wounds, cuts and acute illness, not asking questions about the identity of victims, or the way in which wounds were acquired. Now, however, the chronic cases are making their way to the gates replacing the original hole in the wire.

A minute later we walked from the caravan through a series of corridors to the road, and the border, itself. Our little column was led by a soldier. When he appeared the fifty or more people--only across a road, after all, but, after all, behind a fence—moved to the gate. They—some with arms in slings, one with a bandage over an eye, one bent, one pregnant—clearly thought that the young man with the Uzzi submachine gun had come to bring the next group to the doctor. He—perhaps twenty years old at the outside—was just doing what he was told, and showing journalists around. Even then, one South African reporter wanted an Israeli girl soldier (everybody wants pictures of Israeli girl soldiers) in the photograph he took of the sick and wounded on the other side of the fence.

But other vultures than journalists prey on the stricken beneficiaries of Israeli charity. Once official recognition was accorded to a patched-up health service it seemed logical to go further: if aid, why not trade? After all, before 1970—when the Fatah wing of the PLO made its guerrilla appearance opposite Metulla—Jew and Lebanese happily traded to, and smuggled for, one another, governments on both sides turning a blind eye. So, Lebanese traders and workers began to cross through that ever-growing hole in a fence. The Lebanese prudently remove their car number plates (if they have cars) before leaving their villages. Israeli police in nearby Kiryat Shimona—recently the object of a terror raid in which the occupants of a block of flats were indiscriminately killed—ignore unidentifiable cars. However, the nature of the trade which followed the aid is now becoming apparent.

Food prices in Israel are controlled through subsidy. So, Lebanese merchants began buying—for example—eggs at three Lebanese piastres, and selling them on their own side of the border at eighteen piastres. They bought corn and melon seed; cement, tractors, and hydraulic oil. I even spoke to a Lebanese merchant on his way in to Kiryat Shimona to buy shoes 'in any quantity'. About two hundred Lebanese have begun to work in Israel and-among many currencies one that I found mysterious--a thou sand Dutch guilden were spent on the Israeli side of that narrow road. Somebody was making a lot of money.

Even the purely humanitarian side of Israeli activity increasingly 'demands an involvement nobody wants. In their first flush of generosity the Israelis agreed to advise the Lebanese on public health and agriculture. Some of what followed was comic. For example, a group of Lebanese farmers were taken to visit a particularly affluent kibbutz. They gazed in wonder at one of the crane-like automatic applepicking machines and, when its cabin dipped to reveal a bikini-clad Swiss volunteer worker, one exclaimed, 'This isn't a farm. It's Hollywood.'

But there were more serious developments. Israeli scientists agreed to inspect Lebanese water, and discovered salmonella and typhoid germs in it. The temptation to go across and show the Arab villagers what to do was very strong, and it takes considerable will not to get too involved with the citizenry of what is, after all, an enemy state. There was, too, bitter irony, especiallY when the chief Israeli Army doctor received a letter from his opposite number in the PLO clinic at Nabatea. It was in English and appealed in the name of the Hippocratic oath for ointments, drugs, syringes and other medical equipment unobtainable in South Lebanon. Everything asked for was sent, but not before intense debate on the Israeli side.

After all, Muslim Arab doctors in Israeli Galilee (unlike their Christian Arab counterparts) refuse to help at the fence clinics: they will not face the sight of their race appealing to the Israelis. Then, too, the villagers of El Kleah recently came to the fence to tell the IDF (Israeli Defence Forces) that the PLO had mounted eight Russian rockets on their highest building all pointed at the Metulla infirmary. (After discussion the villagers disarmed the rockets and the IDF went over at night and removed them.) PLO pressure as well as PLO appeals from Nabatea caused a reappraisal of the whole 'good fence' system.

After all, what did stricken Lebanese villagers want with large numbers of tractors, large amounts of cement, and substantial quantities of hydraulic oil ? It quicklY emerged that the PLO were constructing a four-kilometre airstrip in the Lebanese hinterland. Four kilometres is an outrageously generous length for even M1G fighters, and Israeli intelligence became convinced that the strip was intended for Russian cargo planes and that the no s Moscow allies, convinced that the Syrians and the Christians were going to enterge triumphant in the North, were preparing a redoubt in the South.

Even apparent exploitation, it emerged in the course of reappraisal, may have its justification. For, reproached by Lebanese and Israelis alike for their activities, the.por" chasers of grain and clothes and machinery explained that once past Israeli checkpoints with what they had bought, they had to face,

and pay toll at, road blocks erected both by the PLO and the Lebanese Arab Army. The presence of Arab terrorists in the area, if much more diffuse than when this whole patch of Lebanon was dubbed 'Fatah land', is still both strong and sinister. Hence the removal of number plates lest a PLO spy should be able to trace who it was who went to the fence for treatment ; or to Kiryat Shimona for food. Hence the fear the sick show of cameras: their faces might, after all, get on a file. Hence the peculiar sight of Lebanese removing Israeli labels even from purchases which are the bare necessities of life, before taking them home. Hence the feeling of local Israelis against their government's and their army's practice of allowing any journalist who wants to come and see the fence: on the morning I was there the villagers themselves drove off two men claiming to be representatives of a communist newspaper in Beirut. Hence, finally, the appeal of many village headmen to the IDE to take over their land completely, and provide them not only with succour, but with real security.

It cannot, and will not, be done. Aside altogether from the general political implications the IDF is both over-stretched and dug in on the Lebanese border as efficiently as it wants to be. But trade was suspended for a few days last week while the Israelis tried to work out what goods could be sold or given, which, if appropriated by the enemy, could not be put to military use. No doubt Israel has gained a good deal in the eyes of the world for what she has already done, but the implacable hostility of the prowlers on the other side of the fence, and the apparently irremediable chaos that is South Lebanon creates problems set against which a rather better public image seems a small reward. In the dirty business of war and politics even helping a sick baby has unforeseen, troublesome, and even dangerous implications.