Authors: Caroline Moorehead
Zainab remembers Shatila as she first saw it, in the winter of 1949, a hostile, unwelcoming place, where the winter winds blew the sand and grit into the food and the tents, loosening the tent poles and making the canvas flap. In those days, the hundred or so tents, of many shapes and sizes, were scattered among the cactus; and in the daytime, when the men went off to look for casual labor on Beirut’s building sites, the women would take the children and sit in the shade of the pine trees at the edge of the camp to escape the glare of the sun. At night, there was no room for the boys under the canvas, so they slept outside, on the sand; when they woke they found themselves covered in dew. There was very little water; what there was came by truck, brought by UNRWA and rationed, distributed by the Palestinian men too old or frail to go looking for building work. Some of the water vats had been used to transport oil, so the water came out dirty, undrinkable. With the water came food rations: flour, sugar, rice, a little oil. The newcomers were destitute, wholly dependent on charity. The life was harder on the city Palestinians, educated and professional people from Haifa and Jaffa and Acre, not readily absorbed into the idle and impoverished existence of a camp where they were closely controlled by a foreign power and denied citizenship, working permits, or travel documents.
Zainab did not go to the first school, opened in a tent not far from the newly built mosque and the separate latrines for men and women, though her younger brothers did. She stayed with her mother to look after the youngest children. She has never learned to write, but Marwan says that when he was a boy, it was his mother who knew when he had failed to finish some part of his homework
and sent him back to study until it was done. Two of Zainab’s sons today have master’s degrees; one of her four daughters is a teacher.
The first years in the camp, for all the hardship, were the best years. Then, the Lebanese people in the villages around were welcoming and sympathetic; they had been told, and they believed, that the Palestinians were temporary visitors, soon to go home. They saw them suffering and gave them fruit and vegetables. As the tents grew old and worn, they were reinforced, first by low walls, to keep water out, then by tin walls and roofs, the tin taken from the drums used to supply oil and flattened with a hammer. However carefully they prized open the drums, there were always holes, which let in the rain at night, and the tin was covered with the logos and names of charities and suppliers, so that the camp looked like a mass of billboards. It was a long time before there was anything on the ground except for bare earth and the sand, which seemed always too hot, so that the children were given wooden clogs to wear. Water pipes, of a kind, were laid. Electricity appeared, after two enterprising refugees negotiated with a man who owned property near the camp to tap into his source. It was rationed, like everything else, but it was enough to power a radio and provide dim lighting after dark. As the years passed, it became clear that there were more and more people in the camps, more children, more arrivals fleeing fresh fighting in the villages of Israel; as the camps grew and as economic conditions in the Middle East worsened, so the neighborly Lebanese became suspicious, resentful. When those of the Naqba talked at night about all that they had left behind, their longing was greater. They were not just poor now; they had been betrayed—by the British, by the Israelis, by the Arabs. No one, it seemed, was willing to see in the Palestinians a people dispossessed of their land and in need of political and economic support; truly they had become objects of charity without voice and without rights. It gave the past a sharper edge.
• • •
THERE IS NO
one single culprit for the Naqba, no one cause to explain how or why, in a little less than a year, between 700,000 and
800,000 Palestinians—almost two thirds of the population—fled their houses and lands, taking with them little more than the clothes they were wearing. It was not only the British who were responsible, though the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which promised a homeland for the Jews and respect for the rights of the Palestinians, is spoken of today as if it had appeared last week, and with the full force of blame. Nor was the flight caused only by the Arab countries’ irresolution in supporting the Palestinians, or by the fact that the Palestinian leaders were divided and poorly organized, while the fighters with their few thousand rifles, of varying ages and efficiency, were equipped neither physically nor psychologically to fight side by side with others. Nor was the cause just the particular brutality of the Haganah and other Zionist groups, though they were indeed better led, better equipped, and more than willing to make the most of all weakness they encountered. By the early autumn of 1947, the Yishuv, the Zionist party, was said to hold over 10,000 rifles, 702 machine guns, and many submachine guns and mortars; and, unlike the Arabs, they had factories in which to produce more weapons. The Naqba began and grew out of war.
On November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly voted to support the partition of Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. There were attacks by Jews on Arabs, whose leaders completely rejected partition—which would have given the Jews much of the coastal plain and Galilee—and attacks by Arabs against Jews. The skirmishes grew sharper. The exodus of the Palestinians began in late December 1947, starting with middle-class families from West Jerusalem, Haifa, and Jaffa, towns already earmarked as lying within the borders of the new Israeli state. Their flight proved infectious. As household after household packed what they could into cars, taxis, and rented trucks, and onto the backs of mules and horses, so neighbors lost their nerve and began packing too, mindful of the spreading brigandage, the stories of attack and revenge, the outbreaks of fighting, and the ominous shadow of future Israeli rule. Palestinian businesses closed, then in their wake clinics, offices, schools. Already by January 1948, before the British left, the clashes
between Arab irregular forces and the well-trained Haganah were growing more murderous; there were snipers, bomb attacks, kidnappings. A sense of imminent catastrophe clouded people’s thoughts.
When, in the late spring, the Haganah launched a number of carefully targeted attacks, it was against a people already fragmented and disoriented by departures and defeats. With every Haganah victory, the resolve of those who had determined to stay and fight weakened. Tiberias, Haifa, Jaffa, Safad fell, one after the other. Their populations joined the exodus. By the beginning of May all but 3,000 to 4,000 of Haifa’s 70,000 Arabs had left. The inhabitants of the villages and the countryside, who had always looked to the city dwellers for leadership, followed them, though they, like the city people, assumed that they would soon be back. No one bothered to take much with them. Right up to April 1948, it had not been part of the official Zionist strategy to precipitate Palestinian evacuations, though the assumption had always been that the fewer the Arabs who remained within Israel the better the prospects for the new state. The Haganah expulsions, which started as isolated decisions to clear areas of particular strategic concern, soon turned into conscious efforts to encourage people to leave.
Events were now moving very fast, with Israelis taking over Palestinian lands, and Palestinians continuing to leave, their departure hastened by killings. As villages were deserted, so they were destroyed, to make way for new Israeli settlements. Walid Khalidi, author of a study of the destroyed villages,
All That Remains
, calculated that 416 villages were occupied and razed. There were massacres like the one at Deir Yassin, a village near Jerusalem, where at least 107 people were killed by the Stern Gang, a Zionist group calling for the occupation of all Jewish territories in the Bible, in April 1948. The Arabs had abandoned their cities, David Ben-Gurion said, speaking to the People’s Council, the Provisional Government of the Jewish State, “with great ease, after the first defeat, even though no danger of destruction or massacre confronted them…. Indeed, it was revealed with overwhelming clarity which people is
bound with strong bonds to this land.” The rest of the world found it convenient to believe him.
By the summer of 1948, it was apparent that almost a million people had crossed the borders into Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN mediator for Palestine, appalled by the enforced exodus, began pressing Israel to accept repatriation as part of a comprehensive settlement for the area. In December, the “right of return” for all Palestinians was endorsed by the UN General Assembly. But by now the Zionists had perceived that an almost completely Jewish state was a real possibility, and that to let the Palestinians back would be to accept a fifth column in their midst. Where, in any case, would the repatriated Palestinians go? Their villages had already been bulldozed and their lands occupied by Jewish refugees newly arrived from Europe. In the spring of 1949, while Zainab and her family lingered in the house near the Lebanese border, trying to gauge the possibility of return, the United States tried to force Israel to take back 250,000 people, a third of all those who had left. Tel Aviv’s offer to take 65,000 to 70,000 was judged too derisory to discuss, and the United States proved unwilling to press further.
In any case, it was too late. Palestine’s exiles had become refugees, to be used in the decades to come by Israelis and Arabs alike as pawns for propagandists and politicians. And they were not simply refugees: like Zainab’s family, most had left nearly everything behind—photographs, deeds of ownership, family records, mementos, clothes, books, furniture, the fabric of each and every history. Only a very few have ever been able to reclaim a single item. The Palestinian refugees had become a people without a past, and their minds, as the Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury would write, “a black cave full of obliterated memories.”
• • •
IT IS
ZAINAB’S
son, Tariq, working today as a manager in a printing firm in Oxford, who talks most easily about the violence that came to Shatila in the late 1970s. Tariq is forty-eight. With his
three brothers and four sisters, he grew up listening to his grandfather talk of Balad al Sheik; and not just to his grandfather, but to members of all the other families who came to Shatila from the villages above Haifa, united under a renowned fighter called Fakhri el Hassan. In exile the Palestinians have chosen to keep to the configurations of their villages, neighbors often living close together within the camps. The different quarters take the names of villages. One day, when Tariq was already a grown man, he saw a photograph on a calendar of a view overlooking Haifa; “And I knew,” he said, when I met him in Oxford, in a small trim house with a garden out along the Cowley Road, “that it was Balad al Sheik, just by seeing the photograph. All my childhood my parents had talked about it. I came to be able to almost feel it.” He has never been there.
Tariq was born in the tent into which Zainab moved when she married. By then she was sixteen; Tariq was her third child. He remembers his first years of tent life as perfectly normal, though even as a small child he was conscious that it was considered a temporary arrangement, which would end any day, when the family returned to Balad al Sheik. He was a naughty but loving child, a tyrant to his mother, whose favorite he knew himself to be. When she walked to collect water in a pitcher, and carried it back balanced on her head, he demanded that she carry him as well.
Tariq’s father, who had spent the first years in the camp as a casual laborer on Beirut’s building sites, had gone to work in the Red Crescent hospital, in the sterilizing unit. The family collected the tin drums from their UNRWA rations, beating them into flat sheets to use as walls and anchoring them to wooden posts; Tariq remembers the tent gradually being transformed into a shack, with a corrugated iron roof and a mud-and-straw floor. There, was always trouble with the door, the tin proving too flexible to keep upright; his father, says Tariq, became very skilled at mending and repairing. By 1973, when Zainab was twenty-five, there were eight living children, but Tariq believes that there had also been some stillbirths. Shatila had only one midwife, and many newborn babies died. Those who survived started life in clothes made out of UN flour
sacks and Tariq remembers how the women artfully used the logo of two hands meeting over the flags of the UN and the United States to adorn the children’s underclothes. In the summer, Shatila was full of small children running around with the flags and logos on their pants and undershirts.
They were the first family in Shatila to have a refrigerator, and a gramophone, inside a wooden box, on which they listened to recordings of famous Arab singers. His father, says Tariq, insisted on the boys wearing clean shoes to school and later to work. “He was proud of us. He made us proud. He spent all his time looking after us, working.” Their house, then as now, was “rubbish,” as Tariq puts it, “and we all knew it. But my father made the best out of every square centimeter.” His own father, Tariq’s grandfather, treated the Halimi family’s tent site exactly as he treated his land in Balad al Sheik: if he discovered anything out of place, he was furious. “He was a very small man,” says Tariq, “very short. He sat guard on a chair and watched.”
Tariq grew up angry. He hated hearing about what had happened in Balad al Sheik, and hated the position he saw his family reduced to. “It was the most important thing in my life,” he says, “being a rebel.” He hated the way that the sitting room was also the bedroom and the room in which they ate, and he was ashamed that they ate on the floor. He wanted to become someone, someone who could fight back. His chance came in 1968, when the Palestinian Liberation Organization took root in Lebanon. It started with a soccer club. His grandfather, still a respected figure in the community, had a friend who had rented rooms bordering on the back of the camp, and the rent included a small backyard. Tariq persuaded him to let him use this yard. He got hold of some bricks and some sheets of corrugated iron and built a shack; along the front he painted the words “Cubs of Palestine” and invited his friends to join, Lebanese boys as well as Palestinians. He managed to find uniforms and booked his team to play in tournaments. He was fourteen.