Background Report Lebanese Jews Face Terrorism

The murder of two Lebanese Jews within the past week by a radical Shiite Moslem group indicates an intensification of the terrorist campaign against Lebanon’s tiny and defenseless Jewish community.

The latest victim is Dr. Elie Hallak, 60, a prominent pediatrician and vice president of the High Council of the Lebanese Jewish community. In a statement published Wednesday in the Lebanese daily An-Nahar and in the French press, the group, which calls itself “The Organization of the Oppressed in the World,” said it would not release Hallak’s body until the Israelis had left Lebanon.

A Polaroid photograph accompanying the statement confirmed that Hallak was in their hands, but it could not be determined from it whether he was dead or alive.

The caption provided by the group depicted him as “a leader of the Mossad,” the Israeli intelligence service.

AN OMINOUS STATEMENT

This is ominous since the charge of spying for Israel was used by the group to justify its killing of three other innocent Lebanese Jews within the past three months.

The Organization of the Oppressed had not earlier admitted to holding Hallak, although he was kidnapped at the end of March 1985 together with three other Lebanese Jews, presumably because it knew how patently false the charge of spying was.

Hallak was a much-loved and highly respected doctor whose patients came from all ethnic and religious segments of Beirut’s society. Indeed, some years back he treated the son of one of the leaders of the PLO.

When news of his abduction was revealed, the kidnapping was condemned by Christian and Moslem officials including Lebanese Justice Minister Nabih Berri, the leader of the mainline Shiite group, Amal.

Following Hallak’s kidnapping, his wife, Rachel Hallak, who was in Paris at the time, went to Beirut and remained there for several months, trying, in vain, to obtain his release. She is back in Paris now with the couple’s three sons–Andre, Alain, and Marc, who range in age from 17 to 21–who were sent there to study several years ago because of the turmoil in Lebanon.

During Hallak’s months of captivity, he was reported to have served as a physician. The Organization of the Oppressed is apparently connected to the pro-Iranian Hezbullah (the Party of God), as one of the Americans held captive by the fundamentalist Hezbullah at the time of the TWA hijacking reportedly saw Hallak treating patients.

OTHER KILLINGS BY THE GANG

The Organization of the Oppressed kidnapped and murdered Haim Cohen and Prof. Isaac Tarrab, in late December. At that time, it threatened to kidnap and kill additional Jews unless its demands–that “Shiite mujahidin (holy warriors)” captured by the Israel-backed South Lebanon Army were promptly released from a detention camp in Khiyam–were met.

Ibrahim (Abraham) Benisti, a Lebanese Jew in his forties, and his 68-year-old father, Yehuda, were kidnapped in the past few weeks. Yehuda’s other son, Youssuf, 33, had been seized in May 1985.

The Organization of the Oppressed brutally murdered Ibrahim Benisti on February 15. According to the Beirut police, his body was found the morning of February 16, wrapped in blankets in a street in west Beirut near the line dividing the predominantly Moslem section from Christian east Beirut. The coroner’s office reported that Benisti’s body bore signs of torture and beatings to the head. He was shot twice and then strangled.

Near the body was a copy of the statement issued by The Organization of the Oppressed to the press, declaring that Benisti had been “a prominent agent” of the Mossad. The charges were categorically denied as “nonsense” by the Israeli Foreign Ministry.

VICTIMS NOT INVOLVED IN POLITICS

Indeed, none of the kidnap victims had been involved either in internal Lebanese politics or the Arab-Israel conflict. Outraged students and friends of Tarrab attested that the distinguished retired professor of mathematics had only nominally been Jewish and had had no connection to Israel.

Cohen was a department store accountant known as a kind and gentle person, who chose not to go to Israel, his sister-in-law Rosemary Cohen declared in Los Angeles, because “he did not wish to face the possibility of killing his Arab friends in battle.”

It was precisely because they felt fully integrated in Lebanese society and had both Moslem and Christian friends that the kidnap victims chose to remain in Lebanon even after the overwhelming majority of Lebanon’s 6,000 Jews left in the years after the 1967 Six-Day War and the decade of internal strife following the eruption of the civil war in 1975.Today fewer than 75 Lebanese Jews remain, most in east Beirut.

TRAGIC FATE OF THE BENISTI FAMILY

The tragic fate of the Benisti family is typical of the misplaced trust of those Lebanese Jews who remained. The family lived in the Wadi Abu Jamil section of Moslem west Beirut near the main synagogue. Yehuda Benisti operated a gift shop and general store near the Beirut airport, which adjoins a Shiite and Palestinian neighborhood.

When his other son, Youssuf, was abducted last May 18, the father at first did not notify the police or the Jewish community, because he believed that his friends and customers from within the Shiite community would discreetly intervene on behalf of his son and arrange for his release. It was only toward the end of last year, when all quiet interventions had failed, that Yehuda Benisti approached the Jewish community in east Beirut for help.

According to the February 15 statement by The Organization of the Oppressed, they had seized Ibrahim Benisti — as well as Yehuda and Youssuf–because “all three were part of an Israeli spy network.”

In its statement, published in An-Nahar the next day, The Organization of the Oppressed declared that Ibrahim had been slain in revenge for Israel’s presence in south Lebanon, the alleged “violation of the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. . . by the filthy boots of Jewish Israeli occupation,” and the shelling of Shiite Moslem villages in south Lebanon.

The fanatical Shiite group also threatened that “all those interested in having any kind of relations with Israel” would face “adequate measures from us.” It added that “the punishment of the spy Ibrahim Benisti should serve as a warning.”

The latest kidnappings bring to 10 the number of Jews known to have been abducted in the past two years. There are hopes that five are still alive. The Organization of the Oppressed had earlier claimed to be holding Elie (Youssef) Srour, 68, who was in charge of preparing the dead for burial according to Jewish rites, and Isaac Sasson, in his mid-60’s, a pharmaceutical executive who is the president of the Lebanese Jewish community. Both were kidnapped at the end of March 1985.

On July 1, 1984, Raoul Sobhi Mizrahi, 54, an electrical engineer who ran an electrical supply company, was kidnapped by three armed gunmen from his apartment in west Beirut. There were no ransom demands. He was beaten to death and his body was discovered on July 3. A group calling itself the “National Resistance Army–The Nation’s Liberation Faction” said it had killed Mizrahi “because he was an Israeli agent.” This was firmly denied by his family.

Still missing is Salim Jammous, secretary general of the Lebanese Jewish community. He was kidnapped on August 15, 1984, reportedly by three armed men who abducted him from his car near the communal office located in the compound of the main synagogue in west Beirut.