Beirut Tumult

"I and my brother against my cousin. But I, my brother and my cousin against the outsider." That old Arab proverb aptly described the tenuous unity that emerged last week among factions of the Palestine Liberation Organization as they literally fought for their lives in Beirut. The Shi'ite Amal militia had set out in mid-May to seize control of three Palestinian refugee camps -- Sabra, Shatila and Burj el Barajneh -- to make certain that the P.L.O. would not regain the power it once had in Lebanon. Amal Leader Nabih Berri was convinced that Syrian-backed P.L.O. splinter groups opposed to Chairman Yasser Arafat would not assist beleaguered Arafat followers in the camps. Accordingly, Berri ordered 5,000 of his militiamen, aided by a predominantly Shi'ite brigade of the Lebanese Army, to storm the Palestinian strongholds. To his surprise, the Palestinians in the camps, supported by some of the anti- Arafat factions, not only held their ground but counterattacked. By week's end, after nearly a fortnight of fighting, there were signs that Syrian forces were about to move in to restore order.

Losses on both sides were estimated at more than 400 dead and 2,000 wounded. But in the to-and-fro of battle, no accurate casualty assessment was really possible. Cease-fires were announced but not kept; the International Committee of the Red Cross repeatedly tried and failed to enter the areas to evacuate the injured. Eventually, it managed to bring out 32 wounded Palestinians, but many others were left behind without medical attention. According to some accounts, several Palestinians who had been taken to a hospital were slain in their beds by Amal militiamen. Amal leaders in turn charged that angry Palestinians had murdered some sleeping Shi'ite militiamen in a building outside the Sabra camp.

Berri had clearly underestimated the Palestinians' determination to resist the onslaught. From hilltops east of Beirut, Palestinian gunners belonging to anti-Arafat P.L.O. groups fired artillery and rocket volleys into Amal positions. Whatever their differences with Arafat, his P.L.O. opponents were furious at the strong-arm tactics of the Shi'ites. Said George Habash, head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine: "No force on earth can take away the arms of a people who defend their just cause." Abu Mousa, another leading P.L.O. dissident, accused Amal of "disseminating lies to cover its crimes against Palestinians." While the battlefield alliance hardly amounted to a permanent reunification of the bitterly divided P.L.O., it demonstrated to Syria, which had given at least tacit backing to the Amal offensive, that its control over the anti-Arafat Palestinians could not be taken for granted.

In midweek, whether by accident or design, two rockets of unknown origin struck the presidential palace in Baabda, setting part of the building afire. Lebanese President Amin Gemayel emerged unhurt and soon afterward flew to Damascus for talks with Syrian President Hafez Assad. At Gemayel's urging, Assad agreed to try to stop the fighting in Beirut by sending Syrian troops back to those parts of Lebanon from which they were removed during the Israeli invasion of 1982.

In the meantime, the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon was expected to be completed sometime this week, exactly three years after Israeli forces poured across the border and pressed on to Beirut. For the departing Israelis, nothing could be more grimly ironic than the reports of the fighting in the Palestinian camps, scene of the 1982 massacre by Christian Phalangist militiamen, and of Syria's difficulties in dealing with the Lebanese maelstrom. Said a senior Israeli official in Jerusalem, with ill-concealed satisfaction: "We can almost sympathize with Syria's reluctance to send its troops into Beirut. They will find it as big a can of worms as we did."