The New York Times · 13 August 1976

CP-1976-032

The Fall of Tell Zaatar

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Transcribed from the clipping

In many ways, Tell Zaatar was symbolic of the Palestinian plight in the Middle East. A heavy fortification in the midst of an industrial suburb, home away from home for a whole generation of displaced peoples; nothing in the Tell Zaatar refugee camp held out any promise of a better life for the tens of thousands who lived there.

A strategic obstruction on a vital communications route, Tell Zaatar became the focal point of Lebanon’s civil war, just as the Palestinian issue stands astride the Middle East peacemaking process. The camp was too pivotal to be bypassed, it acquired an abstract meaning too emotional to be abandoned.

At Tell Zaatar, humanity was made to suffer for ideological advantage; the defenders chose resistance to the end.

The fall of Tell Zaatar yesterday, after seven weeks of siege, wanton murder and duplicity, gives Lebanon’s Christian community its long sought territorial contiguity between its strongholds of eastern Beirut and the Mediterranean littoral northeast of the capital. In itself, that solves none of Lebanon’s real problems.

But it may begin to set up the situation in which those problems can finally be addressed, the start of a new political dispensation for Lebanon’s heterogeneous society. For the Palestinians, the loss of their Tell Zaatar base could generate a trauma far deeper than would normally follow the collapse of a strategic position.

In the weeks to come, Palestinians of all factions—no less than the influential forces outside—would benefit from a fundamental rethinking of an ideology of war and revanchism that has sapped the energies of a whole generation, and achieved nothing.

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