Views Complicated By Dual Loyalties

NAHARIYA, Israel, July 21 -- Along with almost every other resident of this seaside city, where more than 80 rockets have landed in the past week, the four old friends now spend their days in an underground bomb shelter, playing cards with their children and arguing about what the future holds.

Veterans of Israel's previous war in Lebanon, they know better than just about anyone the terrain and the people being bombarded by Israeli warplanes and artillery. After all, it's their homeland.

The men once belonged to the South Lebanon Army (SLA), a small militia composed mainly of Lebanese Christians that worked closely with Israeli forces battling fighters from the Palestine Liberation Organization -- and later from Hezbollah -- during Israel's 18-year occupation of a self-declared security zone. Fearing retribution by neighbors who labeled them traitors, they and thousands of others fled Lebanon, along with their families, when Israel withdrew in 2000.

One is now a house painter, one a builder, one an unemployed cook and one a retiree.

With Israel again engaged in conflict in Lebanon, their views are more complicated than those rooted firmly on one side of the escalating standoff involving their new country and their old one.

"We are afraid for our families. All of our relatives are still there, in the villages, where the bombs are falling, and we have not heard from them since all of this began," said George, 33, who, like other former SLA members interviewed Friday, spoke only on the condition his last name be omitted because he feared retribution against his family in Lebanon.

"We don't want any more civilians to get hurt or die. But I am pleased, very pleased, with one thing. They are kicking Hezbollah. With the help of God, no one with the smell of Hezbollah will be left when this is done."

More than 2,000 former SLA members and their families, about 80 percent of the total who moved to Israel, settled in Nahariya, a coastal city of more than 50,000 that lies less than 25 miles south of the Lebanese border, according to the city's mayor, Jacky Sebag.

When they came to Israel six years ago from a country still technically at war with the Jewish state, the Israeli government treated them much as it does other new arrivals, Sebag said, offering assistance with finding housing and jobs and, unlike most Israeli Arabs, settling them in Jewish cities and towns. Most carry identification cards that identify them as former SLA soldiers, which they say spares them the extra hassles other Arabs face here.

"They are part and parcel of the community here, they attend our schools, some even work for the municipality, and they are involved in the social and cultural life of the city," Sebag said. "This is the least we could do for them in return for what they did for the state of Israel."

Israeli soldiers who fought alongside them also remember them fondly. "They were as eager to fight as we were, maybe more," said Betzalail Lev Tov, who fought in the 1982 invasion and now lives in Mitzgav-Am, a kibbutz, or collective farm, on the Lebanese border.

But their immersion into their adopted country has been challenging. Few have earned citizenship, which would bring the right to vote, a passport and other benefits. Many of the SLA members who came to Israel have since moved on to other countries, including hundreds who returned to Lebanon after Hezbollah said they could do so with impunity.

Neither Jewish nor accepted by Israel's Arab community, those who remained here say they have long lacked a true sense of belonging. The Lebanese government and human rights organization have accused the SLA, which once boasted a few thousand fighters in southern Lebanon, of torturing Lebanese prisoners in detention facilities, an allegation that has further inflamed many in the Arab world against them.

The group was originally formed in the 1970s by former Lebanese soldiers to fight the PLO as it gained influence in the country's south. Entire Maronite Christian towns enlisted to fight. Eventually, some Sunni and Shiite Muslims did, too.

"If you meet an Arab here and you tell him you're from Lebanon, he gives you a strange look and calls you a traitor, a collaborator," said Atiyeh, 37, a former SLA corporal who now works as a janitor at Haifa's Rambam Hospital. "We protected our Lebanon, our land, our homes and our dignity, and Israel helped us. We are not traitors, we are patriots."

In Nahariya, the former fighters very much looked the part of Israelis under siege, lounging on mattresses dragged from their apartments to the cement basement, watching MTV with their children. Three Israeli families shared the shelter with them.

Most SLA fighters said they would favor a ground invasion of Lebanon to root out Hezbollah, despite the high number of casualties that would probably result. "It is the only way," said Michael, a former SLA lieutenant. "A ground fight would be very, very hard. They are the experts at shooting and then vanishing into the civilians. They shoot from churches and mosques, and schools, and houses with people in them. Many people would be killed. But otherwise they will never, ever leave."

Michel, another former soldier, said that what all former SLA soldiers want more than anything else is to return to Lebanon -- but only if Hezbollah is eliminated. When the rockets began to fall on Nahariya last week, "all of us celebrated, because we knew it meant Israel would fight."

"It is such a hard thing to leave your country. We have been waiting for this moment for six years," he said. "It is painful inside to see what is happening to the families. But Lebanon needs change. They used to call it the bride of the Middle East, but now it is like a joke. We want to be able to go back to our home with respect and honor, but with Hezbollah there, we can't."

As with every SLA member interviewed Friday, Michel said Israel's offensive should continue. While the current clashes were triggered by Hezbollah's capture of two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid last week, Michel saw their wider cause as the Jewish state's decision to leave Lebanon in 2000 without signing a truce -- a move many Arabs saw as a triumph for Hezbollah. Cutting their old Shiite foe down to size meant more hardship ahead, the former soldiers warned.

"Only God can save Lebanon now," Michel said.

"God or George Bush," George corrected.

Researcher Samuel Sockol contributed to this report.