main airport-city center road.

I went to Shateela on the day that news of the massacre spread through Beirut, with Leila Shahid, PLO representative to UNESCO, the first person to record the testimonies of survivors. On our way into the area - it was still quite early on the morning of Saturday September 18 - we met a dazed-looking middle aged woman leaving the area called Hayy Orsan. She had come up from the South to look for her daughter and grandchildren, and had found their bodies strewn in the road outside their home. Most of the homes in that area had been bulldozed. IRC workers wearing white masks were moving the bodies, which by then had been mostly covered and were lying in ragged lines along the main street. For me the worst part of this grim scene was the mass of wailing women who had come to look for - or had found - slaughtered loved ones. Two bulldozers were still standing there, symbols of destruction.

I began regular visits to Shateela camp soon after, linked to a group of foreign doctors who had come to assist the civilian population during the Israeli invasion. After the massacre they decided to offer 'international protection' by setting up a clinic in the camp, choosing the semi-ruined Popular Front kindergarden as a site. There were few men around - many had been evacuated with the PLO, many had been taken prisoner, others had been killed. With the Lebanese Army back around the camps, and Lebanese militias emboldened by to enter West Beirut at will, it was a dangerous time. Haddadists and Lebanese Forces sometimes lobbed sticks of dynamite into the camp, or kidnapped men who tried to work outside. Men the Army arrested often didn't reappear. There were further massacre scares which, unlike the real massacre, cleared the camp within minutes. I began hanging out at the foreign doctors' clinic and at Umm Mustafa's, as a way of getting to know people. By now, I had registered to do a doctoral dissertation, with the intention of doing something about women and gender. It was a difficult time to work, because of the war trauma and fear that gripped Palestinians in Lebanon. Connections between camps

in the Israeli-occupied south and other regions of Lebanon were almost cut off, with roads to the north and the Bekaa controlled by the Lebanese Forces. The largest camp in Lebanon, Ain Helweh, had been completely bulldozed. Most men in the south over the age of 16 were in the Ansar concentration camp. The Israelis had set up a collaborating group in Ain Helweh, where it was impossible to obtain a nail or a brick except through them. In all areas it was hazardous for men to go out of the camps to seek work. A taxi driver from Shateela was picked up by a passenger in Sabra, and later found dead in his car. No one knew what might come next.¹²

Palestinians in Lebanon were looking at a grim future. "We're back to zero" was the way that Abu Abdullah expressed it -- he used to sit outside the tenement block where Abu and Umm Mustafa lived. But in reality it was worse than that. When Palestinian expulsees first arrived in Lebanon in 1948, those from rural areas were destitute, but at least only a small segment of anti-Muslim Maronites were hostile to them. By the aftermath of 1982, only a small nationalist and progressive minority still supported them. And these groups were also under threat. During and after the Israeli invasion, another less visible war was being waged against Lebanese secularists and progressives. They too were kidnapped, assassinated, and 'disappeared'.¹³

Within days of the massacre, surviving inhabitants were back amid the chaos, and hard at work rebuilding their shattered homes.¹⁴ Danger of kidnapping or arrest of men left women to cope with repairs and trying to earn money as well. Umm Mustafa, in spite of her large family, took a job teaching adult literacy with a local NGO. In the first year after the massacre, Abu Mustafa hardly ever left home, except occasionally to visit a friend on the corner. Daily the family expected an Army sweep to pick up men who had been with the Resistance. I remember Abu Mustafa looking thoughtfully at his bookcase, with its books about Cuba, the USSR, and China. "There are several books here that will have to go," he said. Umm Mustafa remained outwardly calm. Perhaps her enormously heavy work