Visitors to Lebanon Say Their Experience Contradicted Reports in the American Media

Four New Yorkers who returned this morning from a visit to Israel and Lebanon, said today that their experience contradicted reports in the U.S. media which portray a country devastated and its population conquered by Israel forces.

The participants, who travelled to Sidon, Damour and Beirut together with some 150 people from cities throughout the United States, were all officials of the United Jewish Appeal-Federation of Jewish Philanthropies Campaign, the organization that sponsored the four-day “fact-finding tour.” Their report resembled the accounts publicized by several officials of various Jewish organizations who have returned from Lebanon in the last couple of weeks.

“We were prepared for devastation which we didn’t see, animosity which we didn’t feel, and the pitiful chaos of war which we didn’t encounter,” the delegation reported in a statement to journalists. Instead, they said, the group found “the devastation of seven years of terror. The ghost town of Damour in which 5,000 Christian Arabs were slaughtered by the PLO and whose glassless windows stared out in mute and hollow testimony to the terrorists’ gruesome power.”

The participants acknowledged that “there was some damage,” but maintained that what they saw indicated deliberate efforts on the part of the Israel Defense Forces to limit the destruction to areas occupied by terrorists, such as a single apartment that was destroyed in Sidon when a sniper was encountered there, with the rest of the building left intact.

They were told by a Moslem social worker that some 300 apartments had been damaged in Sidon, 150 badly. But the group returned convinced by their discussions with Lebanese civilians that they welcomed the Israeli operation, after years of living in terror of the PLO.

EFFORTS TO PROVIDE EMERGENCY RELIEF

The participants, in their statement, stressed the efforts being undertaken by both Israel and the American Jewish community to provide emergency war relief. They cited a program established by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee to innoculate 60,000 Lebanese children against polio, coordinated efforts by the Lebanese police and Israeli military to control the traffic created by the flood of refugees returning to their homes in the south, Israeli arrangements with Lebanese hospitals to care for civilians who cannot afford to pay for treatment, and the distribution of mattresses and cooking equipment to Moslem and Christian Lebanese by the JDC.

Stephen Peck, chairman of the Board of Directors of the UJA-Federation Campaign, said that his group met with Israeli Labor Party leader Shimon Peres, who declared his “absolute support” for the operation in Lebanon and had “no negative feelings whatsoever” about the government’s action there.