Thaer Abbas wrote in Asharq Al-Awsat:
On this day 40 years ago, Palestinian President Yasser Arafat left Beirut, besieged by the Israelis, to Tunisia, his first stop, on a journey back to a homeland smaller than he dreams of, announcing the end of an era in which the Palestinian player was a mainstay and part of two conflicts; Regional with Israel, and local with the Lebanese right.
Arafat’s departure left a void in the Lebanese decision-making circle, which was filled by a new leadership, the most prominent of which was the head of the “Amal” movement, Nabih Berri, and the head of the “Progressive Socialist Party” Walid Jumblatt, while the irony was that Iran entered the Lebanese arena through the establishment of “Hezbollah”, which became the title of the stage. He was inherited by cadres from “Fatah”, and then the Syrian role inherited it after 2011.
Walid Jumblatt, in an interview with Asharq Al-Awsat, remembers the day he stood with Berri and other Lebanese leaders to bid farewell to the Palestine Liberation Organization before it left besieged Beirut in 1982, describing that day as “the end of the independent Palestinian national decision phase that Arab regimes and Israel fought against.” ». He says: “The problem with the Palestinian revolution is that it was a revolution on a different land.” He continues: “Later, Arafat returned to Palestine, but he returned through the Oslo Agreement, which did not specify the final joints of settlement and Jerusalem. The two issues were left vague, and the American administration came later and benefited from these gaps. Negotiation was for the sake of negotiation, and one of its heroes was Mr. Martin Indyk, who We later found a new book about the ingenuity of (former US Secretary of State Henry) Kissinger.”
In terms of “emotional struggle,” Jumblatt says: “The most beautiful days we lived in the joint Lebanese-Palestinian struggle were the days of the siege of Beirut, which did not fall militarily, but later fell politically.” He recalls, “The battle of the museum (crossing) was pivotal. At that time, the Israeli shelling began at midnight and stopped at five in the evening the next day. Then my first visit was to the then Soviet ambassador, Alexander Soldatov, at the embassy. I remember that he greeted me at the entrance, and warned me not to approach the cluster bombs that were scattered in the embassy garden. The embassy had no shelter, so the ambassador and his wife were sheltering in the building during the bombing with minimal protection. I remember at that time that I walked in the streets of Beirut and saw the people picking up the aftermath of the bombing, and one of them shouted at each other: “Praise be to God, peace be upon him.”
Jumblatt believes that “Arafat’s circumstances made him withdraw because he was on a land that was not his, and he accepted Oslo because he was between the anvils of the regimes and the Israeli hammer.” He added: “Later in Beirut, the resistance started, from Kamal Jumblatt’s house in Mar Elias, and it was one operation after another of the Lebanese national resistance from Beirut to the mountain, Sidon and every occupied Lebanese land.”
In the internal file, Jumblatt believes that “there were errors in the calculations…the Israeli invasion should have stopped for some at the Awali River line near Sidon, while the calculations of the Lebanese right and then Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon were different, and led to the invasion of the mountain and Beirut.” It led to disastrous results for (Christian-Islamic) coexistence and national unity.”
On the other hand, former Minister of the North Bar Association, Rashid Derbas, told Asharq Al-Awsat, “It is difficult to say that Lebanon learned what happened at that time, and the problem is that the sects are learning separately since the establishment of Greater Lebanon and made it a state with full descriptions, and until today. …So these experiments took a hundred years.” He explains: “In the first stage, the center represented by the Christian sect came, and neglected the vital scope, which encouraged other sects to search for another refuge, reaching the main juncture in the so-called defeat of 1967, which shocked the Arabs. The Muslims’ search for other means and alternative destinations became firmly established in our minds. That there is no solution except through the war of liberation, and at that time it was the “Palestinian resistance.” We walked away behind our illusions, thinking that it would bridge the gap caused by the defeat, until we discovered in the end that this resistance had become a system like any other, and we came to load Lebanon through “the movement.” “Lebanese nationalism” is more than what can be expected, and the Sunnis tasted the bitterness of Arabism in relation to the Palestinian resistance and Syria, and they discovered that they have nothing but the Lebanese state.
And Derbas adds: “At that time, after France, the tender mother, the reference for Christians, they returned and resorted to a loving brother, Israel, and they discovered in turn at that time that it was a failed adventure and they only had the Lebanese state,” noting that “it seems that today we are in the stage of the Shiite experience.” . While Derbas expresses his conviction that all sects will return to their senses, he says, “The danger remains at this stage that what remains of the state may not bear the repercussions of this matter, and we may lose it in our hands as a result of the failure of the Shiite-Iranian experiment.”