Authors: Caroline Moorehead
It is only in the last ten years that historians and researchers have started committing to film and archive the store of oral memory that almost alone conserves the history of the Palestinian people. This is the only way to preserve the meaning of what it is to be a Palestinian, and prevent the Palestinians from scattering into twenty different peoples. “Basically,” the Palestinian historian May Seikaly wrote in July 2002, “people turn to memory when they are afraid they have lost it.”
By the Israeli invasion of 1982, Ghazi and his family had been living in Ein el-Helweh for over thirty years. Early in August, the camp was surrounded and Israelis and Falangists shelled it from the hills, before posting snipers to pick off Palestinians who were driven out into the streets below in search of food or water. When the Palestinians decided to fight back, they lost a hundred men trying to take the hill directly above the camp, where a lighthouse with an ungainly stone Madonna perched high above its beacon looms. After houses around the perimeter had been knocked down, bulldozers were sent in to flatten what remained.
Over loudspeakers, orders were given for all men between the ages of fifteen and seventy to leave the camp, carrying white flags to indicate that they intended to do so peacefully. The men fetched white sheets and bedcovers and came out; they were led down toward the beach in a long line. It was, says Ghazi, repeating what Marwan had said to me in Shatila, like 1948, all over again. With the others, he was taken to Ansar, a prison camp run by the Lebanese military. In 1982, I had just started writing about human rights for
The Times
of London, and I remember hearing about the camp at Ansar in southern Lebanon, about the way 9,000 Palestinian men of various ages had been rounded up and how there were stories of disappearances and deaths under torture. Palestinians throughout the country were now subjected to threats, kidnappings, and attacks, and with most of the fighters and weapons gone they had little protection from the assaults coming at them from all sides. The Palestinians, it was said, would rather be arrested by the Lebanese army, from whose camps they usually returned alive, than by the Lebanese security forces, where torture and summary executions were common.
Khang
, strangulation, is the word used by people in the camps today to described what happened to them after 1982.
Even so, they were not quite crushed. The PLO, who had been generous employers, were gone, the Lebanese economy was in ruins, and the war had seen their homes and livelihoods destroyed. The day nurseries, nursery schools, clinics, and workshops had all closed down. But the younger women, in particular, had been galvanized and strengthened by their role in the resistance, and a spirit of retrenchment settled over the camps. Families long used to hardship pulled in their belts and returned to the strong roots of their traditions. The Palestinian flag and photographs of the martyrs, those who had died in the five years of conflict, were potent symbols of resistance. Bit by bit, new projects flowered in the ruins. The Internet and e-mail have brought the outside world to the camps, particularly to the young, who have been helped by international organizations to make contact with other teenagers in the Occupied Territories,
meeting online. They call these meetings the electronic intifada, and the players global nomads.
Ghazi is one of the very few Palestinians to have visited the village in which he spent his childhood. In 1982, at the time of the invasion, one of his daughters became very ill. The road between Sidon and Beirut was blocked, and the nearest hospital with the treatment she needed was in Haifa, across the border in Israel. He asked and received permission to take her there. On the last day of his ten-day visa, he took a bus to Sousouf, now renamed Bar Yochay. Two of the original houses, standing on the main road, were intact, but the rest of the village had been bulldozed. Piles of stones, buried by rough grass, were all that remained of the houses he remembered so vividly. His father’s fields, once covered in wheat, tobacco, and corn, were now planted with apple and peach trees. The olives had gone. The land around was thickly forested. It all looked absolutely different. He found the visit extremely painful. He does not want to go back, at least not as a visitor, not before the return he believes is rightfully due him.
But when he returned to Ein el-Helweh, he felt more like a stranger than ever. “I had regained my sense of belonging, and now it had gone again. We are not Lebanese. We are strangers here. I cannot change.”
• • •
THERE IS
DEPRESSION
in the camps, though no suicide: in Ein el-Helweh, Ghazi can recall just one case, thirty years ago. And there is little or no crime, for no one has anything to steal. But there is much anxiety, and when problems arise people are quick to quarrel and come to blows. The mood is wary and conversations are full of ambiguity. Children fight and argue as they never used to in the 1970s and 1980s, say the teachers who work in the camps, and the noise is far louder than it ever used to be. The failure rate at school is high, and since space is so tight children seldom get a second chance. Many of the classes have fifty pupils or more. One woman in three is said to be illiterate. Fatima, who runs one of the rare successful projects in Shatila, a vocational training center for women,
where they encourage one another while learning how to type and read and write, says that thirty years ago, when she was a thirteen-year-old in the camp, there were open spaces where the children could play. Now, in the damp, sunless winter days they sneeze and wheeze and their noses run. Television flickers in the murky light of the camp, where it is as hard to see along the pinched alleyways as inside the houses, and parents try to monitor programs for the violence and consumerism that they fear can only feed their children’s keen sense of discontent. To these children, Fatima says, everything seems expendable, impermanent, unstable, especially where there has been so much destruction. “Why,” asks her small daughter, seeing the Barbie dolls and tricycles on television, “can’t I have a doll with its house and its wardrobe? Why can’t I go on holiday to the seaside?” Fatima’s regret is that she does not know what to say to her daughter; she does not really know the answer herself.
Nor does she know what to say to her own mother, who came as a girl to Shatila in 1949 and who sang ballads about Palestine all through Fatima’s childhood, and who now tells her that her one wish is that someday, someone will take her home. Fatima’s mother has very high blood pressure; in the camp, she lives in one small room. Last summer, a former neighbor from their village in Palestine, who now lives in Sweden, was able to return to see what had become of their lands. He visited Shatila on his way back to Sweden and showed her parents a video of what remained of their childhood homes. Fatima’s mother, who had not talked much about the past for some time, began remembering and describing her home all over again. At night, she again began to dream of when she was a girl. “Where is home?” asks Fatima. “We have no home. I feel conscious only of being a refugee.” Fatima has two brothers and five sisters. Her eldest brother is in Utah, where he buys and sells cars; the younger is in Germany, where he fled after the war of the camps and now has asylum. One of her sisters is in Denmark and another in Canada, having moved there after working in the Gulf. The three married sisters are all in Shatila, and the last, who is single, lives in Ein el-Helweh.
Refugee populations have long attracted the attention of statisticians. UNHCR, for many years barred from work with Palestinian refugees through its mandate and the existence of UNRWA,
*
is now carrying out a project to identify the unmet needs of the Palestinian diaspora. Lebanon is one of the countries it plans to look at. It is said, for instance, that well over half the Palestinian men in Lebanon are unemployed, and that what little work is to be found is only of a laboring kind; that the Lebanese camps have a particularly high number of “hardship” cases—widows, single mothers with children, the handicapped; that only a handful of Palestinian children manage to go on to higher education; that the number of hospital beds available to Palestinians has dropped by half in recent years. Exiled Palestinians are the subject of countless statistics, percentages, graphs, made more poignant by the fact that so much of their documentary history, their family papers and photographs, their maps and civil records, were lost with the Naqba, and the 45 million documents said to survive lie scattered, like the Palestinians themselves, through the Occupied Territories, in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, in the American Friends Service Committee headquarters in Philadelphia and the International Committee of the Red Cross archives in Geneva. History, the oral history that is now the subject of much attention in the camps, is coming to be seen as a potent form of resistance against the suppression and distortion of Palestinian culture and history by Israel. “In the end,” Edward Said once remarked, “the past owns us.”
The events of the last decade have not been kind to the Palestinians in Lebanon, and across the Arab world it is now accepted that they are the most unfortunate of all the Palestinian refugees, for the once friendly Lebanese government has in recent years closed many
doors against them. After the Gulf War, the rich Arab states where so many had found work and from where they sent money home began to expel the Palestinians, whose labor they no longer needed. Professional people and laborers alike found their contracts abruptly terminated, the salaries that had supported large extended families in Shatila and Ein el-Helweh and Burj al Barajinah stopped. I remember writing a story for the London
Times
about a Palestinian who was put on a plane from Kuwait because his visa had been withdrawn, and who was then not allowed back into Lebanon. Instead, he was shuttled around the world, as country after country closed its doors to him, and he spent his nights sleeping on the benches of airports, before being put on another plane to another country and another airport. Then, the story attracted attention; now, the odyssey of refugee life is not remarkable.
UNRWA’s funds in Lebanon, once ample for sustaining the 70,000 or so Palestinians of the Naqba, have been diminishing steadily and make little headway against the needs of the well over 380,000 their numbers have now reached, including the children and grandchildren of those who fled. It is a very long time since tins of tuna and sardines made their way into camps along with the rice, oil, and sugar. Like the rations of the Liberians and Sierra Leoneans in Guinea’s long-term camps, the Palestinians’ rations have been cut again and again. Today about 3,500 people live in buildings destroyed during the fighting in the 1970s, heaps of rubble patched up by cardboard or strips of corrugated iron, which they are forbidden by law to rebuild. Without sanitation, electricity, or heat, without papers or identity cards, unregistered by UNWRA because not living inside the camps, these are the most dispossessed of all refugees. Like the rejects in Cairo, the “File Closed” asylum seekers, they are not subpeople but nonpeople, human beings without official existence.
Within Lebanon today, Palestinians may not work as doctors, dentists, lawyers, architects, taxi drivers, bankers, or teachers—in all, seventy-three occupations are forbidden them—and recently the Lebanese government passed a new law prohibiting them from
owning property or, if they already owned it, from passing it down to their children. There are stories about the Lebanese guards who man the checkpoints around the camps forcing the young Palestinians to remove their sunglasses as they pass in and out, and about the way that they have been known, as idle persecution, to order car drivers to remove all the wheels of their cars. As I was traveling into Ein el-Helweh with Mahmoud, Ghazi’s nephew, recently returned from collecting his master’s degree at the University of Malta, we were stopped by a stout young Lebanese recruit in battle fatigues, his Kalashnikov slung over one shoulder. He demanded to see what was in the trunk. It was full of books. After a thorough rummage, as thoughtless as it was arrogant, he waved us dismissively on. Mahmoud told me that not long before, a friend of his had been ordered to dismantle and remove all his car seats, and had to send for his wife inside the camp to bring him a screwdriver. When, some hours later, the car seats had been removed, the soldiers told him that they had no further interest in the car.
Mahmoud was twelve when the Ealangists and Israelis shelled Ein el-Helweh; his uncle’s house was hit and two rooms collapsed. A grandchild asleep in one of them was saved because a heavy wooden wardrobe fell across his cot, making a protective cover. Too young to be rounded up with the men and taken to the beach, Mahmoud watched from the edge of the camp and listened to the loudspeakers ordering them out. Today he has one brother in Sudan, another in Saudi Arabia.
Those who manage to travel abroad on scholarships are forced home when their visas run out, to a life with only the barest possibility of professional work with UNRWA or a foreign nongovernmental organization, while those offered the chance to visit the Palestinian Authority hesitate, fearful that the Israelis may stamp their passports so that the Lebanese later refuse to let them come home. They prefer to take buses to the border, where they stand behind the wire, looking across to the hills of Galilee, contemplating with bitter sentimentality what was once theirs. Some, driven by
poverty and enforced idleness to seek the services of human-smugglers, find themselves trafficked to Europe to battle their way past asylum restrictions and onto work quotas. In the seventies their destination was Germany, crossing from the East into the West, in search of jobs not even the Turks would take. Today, they aim for Scandinavia, Holland, and Britain.
Until recently, Palestinians were able to attend university inside Lebanon because fees were low. In the 1960s and 1970s, Palestinians were said to be the best-educated people in the Middle East, for, like all dispossessed people, forced to live by their abilities alone, they felt passionately about education; now fees have risen sharply and Palestinians have been reminded that they are “non-Lebanese” and told that they must pay the fees charged to foreigners, some three times those paid by the Lebanese students. With UNRWA’s funds falling, a decision has been made to pay for no major health care for people beyond the age of sixty—thereby cutting off older people with cancer, heart conditions, or strokes. One serious illness can cripple an entire family. Into this hermetic world, encircled by prohibitions and restrictions, it is not surprising to find that Islamic fundamentalists have made inroads, and that young Palestinians are once again joining political groups, where they receive a little money and a sympathetic hearing. In Lebanon, Hamas is said to be second only to Fatah in numbers of members, though no one speaks openly of its activities. In the camps, the language of politics is about power, not ideology; survival, not democracy.