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Al-Ahram Weekly 30 Sep. - 6 Oct. 1999 Issue No. 449 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 30 Sep. - 6 Oct. 1999 Issue No. 449
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Features Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Crossing the borders
By Graham UsherOn 17 September, several dozen Palestinian youths clashed with Israeli soldiers at the Rachel's Tomb checkpoint in Bethlehem. On the surface, it was just another "disturbance", as the Israelis describe Palestinian protests. The youths threw stones and torched Israeli and US flags while the soldiers fired tear gas. No injuries were reported, and after a period of cat-and-mouse between soldiers and shebab the Palestinian police moved in to end the demonstration once and for all.
But the action was unusual in one way. It was called neither to condemn the expansion of Jewish settlements that encircle Bethlehem nor the ongoing incarceration of the around 2,000 Palestinian political prisoners not released under the latest Wye agreement. It was called to commemorate the massacre of 2,750 Palestinians by the Christian Lebanese Forces and with the complicity of the Israeli army at the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in Beirut on 13-17 September 1982.
Not that such solidarity between Palestinians across the several borders that divide them was always so uncommon. During the seven-year Intifada, the massacre was remembered annually with strikes and/or protests against the Israeli occupation. But with Oslo -- and the establishment of the Palestinian Authority (PA) -- such expressions of the collective Palestinian experience have become rare, the outcome of an increasing fragmentation of Palestinian identity that Israel always sought and, with and through Oslo, is trying to achieve. Thus the small band of Palestinian protesters at Rachel's Tomb last week were not simply the last throes of the Intifada; they were also striving to arrest Oslo's dismemberment of Palestine, both physical and spiritual. Nor was theirs the only attempt.
Last July, the first Internet centre for Palestinian refugees was opened at Dheisheh camp in Bethlehem. Part of a Birzeit University initiated project entitled "Across Borders", the centre aims to teach computer literacy in the camp and create Arabic-English websites made up of news, information and oral testimony from Palestinian refugees. But there is also a political dimension, admits project coordinator, Mona Muhaisen. With the onset of the final status negotiations, "we need Palestinian refugees to communicate directly between themselves, unmediated by other interests," she says.
It is "Across Border's" potential for overcoming the increasing division of Palestinians country by country that has so excited the imagination of Palestinian thinkers like Edward Said and leading researcher on Palestinian refugees, Salman Abu Sitta. The web "is an excellent medium to unite Palestinian refugees, divided by barbed wire, closures and geographical separation," Abu Sitta wrote in tribute to Across Borders' inauguration in Dheisheh on 24 July. "'Across Borders' is an electronic 'in-gathering of the exiles' until the right of return to their homes is achieved."
Now two months old, the Dheisheh centre has already started computer courses and established "on-line" connection with Khan Yunis refugee camp in Gaza and, most symbolically of all, Shatilla in Beirut. It is a connection vitally needed, says Across Borders supporter and director of the Palestinian Arab Resource Centre for Popular Arts in Beirut, Moataz Dajani.
Of all the Palestinian communities, it is perhaps the 200,000 or so Palestinians in Lebanon whose Palestinianism has been most sorely tested in recent years. Once the cradle of the Palestinian "revolution", the Palestinians here have not only had their right to return denied by Israel for 51 years. Since 1982, they have had their political and civil rights denied by Lebanese governments and, since Oslo in 1993, their representative rights betrayed by the PLO/PA. The cumulative result of these defeats, says Dajani, has been a gradual seepage of a sense of Palestinian identity, especially among the young.
The writing is literally on the walls of Shatilla. In the camp's narrow alley-ways, Dajani points out graffiti in which political slogans by the various PLO factions have been painted out with verses from the Qur'an. "It's a sign of a rising Islamic consciousness in the camps," he says, "but it has been nurtured by the belief that the PLO has abandoned the Palestinians 'outside'." He also says it is no longer uncommon to hear young people from the camp define themselves as "A Muslim from Shatilla" rather than "A Palestinian from Shatilla". When pressed about this, "they simply say 'In Lebanon, it's better to say you're a Muslim'," says Dajani.
One way to staunch the seepage is via the recovery of the common ancestral history binding all Palestinians, be they in Israel, the West Bank or Lebanon. In conjunction with Birzeit University researchers, one of the aims of "Across Borders" is to put on the web a database documenting the 450 or so Palestinian villages destroyed in 1948, including Zakaria near Hebron, where many of Dheisheh's refugees derive. In Shatilla, projects are already afoot in which aspiring journalists and filmmakers from the camp record the memories of their elders. "At first the old were reluctant to speak about the past. They'd say, 'What we've been through in Lebanon has made us forget Palestine'," says Dajani. "But once they were faced with young people so eager to know the elders became as eager to speak."
And therein lies the hope. For the collective memory of Palestine can only be helped by new media like the web if the young have the desire to unearth and preserve it. They seem to, as witnessed by the young men who, in Bethlehem, took on both the Israeli army and the Palestinian police, assert their right to remember Sabra and Shatilla. And also by those children in Shatilla who play "Intifada games" amid the camp's still bombed-out houses but whose heroes are no more Arafat, Habash and Hawatmeh, but Hizbullah and "the children of the stones".
Taking into consideration domestic and regional factors, analysts believe that the Hamas presence in Jordan will be reduced rather than eliminated. It is nevertheless clear that, under Washington's tutelage, Jordan wants to establish its bona fides in an international environment with zero tolerance for militant groups like Hamas.
