Wednesday, July 14, 2010

What a difference a day makes...



By Christopher Robbins


Today Terry Anderson and a Samer Manna’a, program coordinator for the Human Development Center in Beirut, took a group of University of Kentucky students into two of the Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut, Lebanon. Over the past 11 days we have adjusted to the quirky nature of Beirut – undependable internet service, shaky infrastructure, snarled traffic with many of the comforts and concerns that urban areas face around the world.

 

The Palestinian camps – Bourj al Barajneh and Sabra and Chatila – give us a whole new perspective. The Palestinians in Beirut are a people living in exile in squalid conditions, severed from land that was once their own by the state of Israel and its occupation of other territories. Fleeing the terrorism of the Israeli struggle for independence and the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflicts, these people sought safety in neighboring countries like Lebanon and Jordan. In many areas they are confined to camps, denied the right to work and live as ordinary citizens and condemned to a life of poverty and marginalization.

 

However, everyone we spoke to proclaimed their hope that one day they would be allowed to return to their homes. Though thousands of people were crammed into a few city blocks of houses, some of them offered us the hospitality of their homes and shared their stories with us.

 

Abdallah Shahadhi is an elderly shop keep living in the small ghetto of Bourj al-Barajneh in the middle of Beirut. He speaks with strength and optimism only belied by his sad eyes and poor cloth – his shop sells mostly snacks, water, and knickknacks for the children who seem to be around every corner in the labyrinthine camp.

 

A trained diesel mechanic, he fled Palestine after Israel declared its independence in 1948. When he first came to Lebanon in 1953 he endured the searing levantine heat in a tent – after it was clear that he would not be able to return to his home, he built walls and a roof onto his house. Amidst the poor conditions of the camp, in a small and Spartan home, he raised eight children. Only one of his remaining children still seeks refuge in the camp.

 

Shahadhi’s small shop does not make enough money to support his survival – his remaining children who have escaped the conditions of their childhood send him $100-$200 a month, enough to survive in this small enclave.

 

Shahadhi says that he wants to see the Palestinians united to take back their land – he doesn’t think the involvement of Americans, Russians, Europeans, or any outside powers can help the Palestinian people in the long run, that they must take back their own land.

 

The camp is a maze of narrow passages beset by three story tenements. Wires and water pipes criss-cross everywhere with little sense of planning or order. One can see graffiti depicting the al-Aqsa mosque and other scenes of Palestine – from a few houses hang flags of the Fatah and Hammas factions, but most proudly fly the green, white, red and black flag of Palestine, and pictures of the late Yassir Arafat, former chairman of the PLO hang everywhere. During our experience we did not see a single photo of Mahmoud Abbas – when I asked our guide why, he told me that Abbas does not represent the Palestinians of the diaspora, those confined to refugee camps or other countries outside of the West Bank.

 

Ismail Faha’a Abdul A’mahad is a 74-year old gentleman living in the camp with his wife. He fled his family’s farm in Palestine at the age of 20 and has been a refugee ever since. He lived for 10 years in the camp in a tent before the tenement where he lives was built in the 1950’s.

 

He raised 9 children inside the camp until 1982 when he sent them to safety subsequent to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

 

A farmer without land has no work – A'mahad is supported by his children who send money from overseas, mostly in Europe and the UAE. He shares the hope that Palestinian factions might someday unite to take back Palestine, claiming that the Koran calls for the Palestinians to return and enter al-Aqsa as one people.

 

In 1973 A'mahad returned to Palestine via Jordan and visited his family’s land, which is now under occupation, and cried.

 

In his house a woman, Fawzia Mostafa Abd al-Al, sits by and chats in Arabic with our guides and translators. It is searing hot, and the fans in the house do not operate because the electricity is off. Ms. Abd al-Al rails against the failure of the camp administration to provide adequate utilities for her people – it is 10 am and no one is awake to turn on their power, so they sit in the mid-July mugginess, the only light coming from the sun peering over their roof through the narrow crevasses between houses.

 

“I  don’t want to leave the camp because I want to be the voice of Palestine,” says Abd al-Al.

 

Mr. Ahmahad’s wife is a contentious woman who challenges everything her husband says, making him think carefully about his answers to our questions. She says that she would return to Palestine if possible, because anything is better than living in the camps in Lebanon where they have no rights – Ahamad is pessimistic whether the Lebanese government’s discussion on whether to extend some rights to Palestinian refugees will bear any fruit.

 

We are told to be careful – Americans aren’t held in high regard here due to their unending support for the Israeli state that created this refugee situation. We lie and tell our hosts that we are Europeans, or Canadians, but they know better. They still don’t regard us with hate as far as I could see, but our guide is nervous and claims that we cannot understand what is being said in Arabic around us – he is right, we are ignorant outsiders here in a world that is very different from our own.

 

After leaving the camp we head to Sabra and Chatila, a camp teaming with vendors stalls selling bootleg cds and movies, cheap clothes, used appliances. It looks like a southeastern Kentucky flea market, but buried under the red dirt of this camp is a deeper story. We go through a gate into what looks like an overgrown abandoned lot. Upon closer inspection there is a single marker in the middle in Arabic proclaiming it to be the site of the Sabra and Chatila massacres of 1984, carried out by Lebanese Christian militias under the supervision of the Israeli Defense Forces and Ariel Sharon. We are standing on a grave of 1500 people. There are small billboards set up to inform us of the massacres against the Palestinian people that have taken place in Lebanon since the diaspora. Our guide quietly describes for us the technical aspects of the burial – how the trenches were dug, the bodies placed in 10 rows of 150 people, men, women, and children, covered with lime and fertilizer, and then bulldozed over. He points out that along with the Palestinians and Lebanese Shi’ite family was killed as well, and shows us a small memorial to them. Most of the faces on the billboard are painfully young, grade school age faces who once had a whole lifetime of possibilities ahead of them. The children of the refugees we spoke to before escaped the poverty and violence of the camps and the wars and made lives for themselves elsewhere. The children of Sabra and Chatila never had a chance.

 

Very quietly, with no emotion in his voice, he tells us of a mother who was gunned down during the massacre. Her baby, still dependent on mother’s milk, crawled onto the still-warm body of its mother, sought out her breast, and began to drink. The militias, hearing noise inside of the house, pulled the baby off of it’s dead mother and took it to the place where we now stood. They threw the child against the wall, he said, pointing as if to the very spot where it happened, but the baby kept crying. And then, he said, one of the militia men raised his gun.

 

I did not hear the end of the story. I do not want to return to that place.

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