Middle East Taking "Hostages" to Israel

By Janice Castro

A mass homecoming took place in southern Lebanon last week after the Israeli army released 752 prisoners, mostly Lebanese Shi'ite Muslims, from the Ansar detention camp twelve miles north of the Israeli border. As the men emerged from buses, some carrying the insignia of the International Red Cross, they were received with wild jubilation and festooned with flowers. Some had rifles immediately thrust into their hands. But the men were less than half the number who had been held at the camp. A day earlier, 1,200 other blindfolded and bound Ansar prisoners had been loaded onto buses with covered windows and taken south to another detention center in Israel. The transfer at once set off international protests over what many regarded as an illegal action.

The Ansar camp was built by the Israeli army in 1982 on a bleak, boulder- strewn plateau in southern Lebanon to hold Palestinians taken prisoner during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The detention center was emptied in 1983 after Israeli, Syrian and Palestinian groups arranged a prisoner exchange, but it filled up again over the past 16 months as the Shi'ites of southern Lebanon waged their own war against the occupying forces. Israeli authorities explained that although the freed prisoners were members of various terrorist organizations fighting the Israeli army, none was known to have actively participated in attacks on Israeli troops. Those removed from Lebanon to Israel last week, on the other hand, "took an active part in terrorist activities against Israel."

The movement of prisoners across the border into Israel sparked heated protests over possible violations of the fourth Geneva Convention. Under the agreement, which Israel ratified in 1951, individuals can be detained only within an occupied area and cannot be taken to the territory of the occupying power, regardless of the reasons. Said the U.S. State Department: "We have consistently taken the position that the fourth Geneva Convention applies to areas of Lebanon under Israeli occupation. It appears that Israel's actions are inconsistent with certain provisions of the Geneva Convention." The International Red Cross and other organizations joined in the protests.

Israel argued that the fourth Geneva Convention did not apply to its actions in Lebanon because Israel had never declared the southern part of Lebanon to be occupied territory. The Israeli government also claimed that under the convention it had a right to move the prisoners as a security measure--in this case, to prevent the guerrillas from mounting more attacks on the withdrawing Israeli army.

The detention of the prisoners in Israel may well be related to secret negotiations to obtain the release of three Israeli prisoners being held by Palestinians in Syria. Western diplomats in Beirut put the matter bluntly. Said one: "In plain language, they are hostages. They won't be released for as long as the resistance keeps up its attacks."

As the Israelis struggled to disengage from southern Lebanon, they were also facing new unrest on the West Bank, where turmoil reached its worst levels in three years. In Ramallah, an Israeli settler was shot to death while shopping in the open-air market. The shooting prompted the Israeli army to impose a curfew on the town and on nearby El Bireh. To protest the death, the Jewish settlers' council decided to establish an illegal settlement on an isolated hilltop northwest of Ramallah. Their bulldozers and tractors were leveling the site when Israeli soldiers arrived. Acting on orders from Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the soldiers ordered the settlers to leave. Said Otniel Schneller, the West Bank Settlement Council director: "We decided to move out because we didn't want to clash with the army. But we will return."

In other West Bank towns, Israeli soldiers were pelted with stones by angry Arabs. The most serious incident occurred in Bethlehem, where Palestinian students attending a protest over Israeli land policies against Arabs in Israel hurled stones at an Israeli patrol. Shots were fired, and four students were wounded.

The Israeli government's West Bank policies were critically examined last week in a report by the Jerusalem-based West Bank Data Base Project, an independent research organization funded by grants from the American Enterprise Institute and the Ford and Rockefeller foundations. The study claimed that Israel has taken effective control of more than half of the land in the West Bank during its 18-year occupation. Development on some Arab land in the area was said to be restricted because of Israeli building and land-use regulations. According to the report, "The Israelis, by imposing direct control over half of the West Bank, have actually created two spatially segregated regions, ethnically divided, separate and unequal."

The study, which was prepared by Meron Benvenisti, a city planner and former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, was described by some Palestinian Arabs as the most thorough examination of Israel's land policies in the West Bank. But the official government reaction to the report, which was based largely on public documents, was that it contained nothing really new. Still, there are signs that the Israelis now favor more restraint in the West Bank. In a poll last week, 52% of Israelis questioned said that they opposed the establishment of more settlements there.

With reporting by Roland Flamini and Robert Slater/Jerusalem