Return Visit to Despair

The tattered, canvas tents that once billowed across the South Lebanese val ley near Saida (modern Sidon) have long since rotted away, and in their place the residents of Ein el Hilweh have built a Mediterranean Hooverville of plaster-sided shacks whose tin roofs clatter in the chill winter wind. The Arabs who occupy the camp are Palestinian refugees, who were assigned their 25 flat, barren acres by the United Nations after the Israeli army had driven them from their homes in north ern Palestine. The first of the homeless arrived there in 1947 just before Christmas. As their numbers swelled, TIME Correspondent James Bell was a frequent visitor to the refugee camp. Last week Bell returned to Ein el Hilweh to see what two decades had done to its people. His report:

For the most part, 20 years have brought extraordinarily few changes to Ein el Hilweh, whose inhabitants, like their homes, deny any appearance or admission of genuine permanence. The camp, which held only a few hundred people in 1947, now has 16,563. Unlike the first days, the people of Ein el Hilweh now see scant hope of ever returning to their homes, but they continue to live in the spirit of cruel dispossession. The roads and fetid alleys are still either choked with dust or, during the winter rains, awash in light brown mud. A few shops provide essential services--shoe repair, clothing--and the U.N.'s daily ration (1,600 calories in winter) can be supplemented at ramshackle fruit and vegetable stands. Menfolk gather, as they always have, in coffeehouses, to talk and sip thick, dark coffee.

In Their Mouths. Usually, conversation turns to the young, to the generation born and reared in Ein el Hilweh.

Though they have never glimpsed Palestine, barely 40 miles across the low hills to the south, Mayor (Mukhtar) Said el Khatib believes that, "some of them know more than we do about the property back home." It is a knowledge that is cultivated. "When our sons first speak," says Masa'ad Haidary, 43, a holdout Arab warrior until 1948, "Palestine is in their mouths, and each morning before they eat we speak to them of Palestine."

Yet when they leave school, most young men must also leave the camp. Roped off from Lebanese jobs by an inability to get work permits, just as they are isolated from Lebanese daily life in modern Sidon, hundreds of them have left to take jobs in Saudi Arabia and such oil-rich sheikdoms as Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar, sending part of their paychecks back to their families. Several hundred others have gone by secret mountain trails into Syria, where they undergo training with El Fatah or one of the other terrorist groups that send commandos into Israel to avenge their fathers' sufferings by murder, arson and sabotage. At least four of the camp's sons died in raids last month alone. This activity is a source of fierce but guarded pride among the camp's fathers, who tell visitors rather unconvincingly that they "don't try to know about" such activity.

Blaming the Americans. Strangely, like most Arab refugees, Ein el Hil-weh's patriots view the Jews less as blood enemies than as unlawful occupants of their homes. "It is the Americans who are to blame," says the Mukhtar. "Without them, the Israelis would never have been able to gain what they did." The men in the coffeehouses have little use for any Arab ruler but Egypt's Nasser, speak cautiously of the Russians as "the only people who will be our friends." As for U.S. largesse in pumping more than $400 million into the U.N.'s Relief and Works Agency--the source of its food--the camp shows no gratitude whatever. "I want to go to my home in Haifa," says Nayef Rashid Salameh, "and no money or honor can replace that."

This determination is repeated endlessly throughout the camp without a wisp of hope that it will lead to anything. If peace in the Middle East stays out of reach, it is not only because of new tensions from the June war but also because of old ones that continue to fester in the memories of the 1.5 million Palestinian refugees. As unwanted guests in an unfriendly world, they devote their lives to kindling militance in the young. In Ein el Hilweh, every child begins the school day with the "Palestine Students' Motto," which ends: "Palestine--ours--ours--ours."

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