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Al-Ahram Weekly 28 Oct. - 3 Nov. 1999 Issue No. 453 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 28 Oct. - 3 Nov. 1999 Issue No. 453
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Profile Study Special Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters 'One day we'll rise again -- and return'
By David Hirst
Hussein Miari once owned 750 dunums (1 dunum=900sq.ms) of land in Palestine. With his commanding demeanour and forthright tongue, there is still something of the patriarch about him, even after a full 51 years of confinement, with a growing tribe of descendants, to a concrete hovel in the mean and teeming warren that is the refugee camp of Ain Hilweh in Sidon, Lebanon.
He is one of that rapidly shrinking proportion, under three per cent, of exiles who were actually born in Palestine. But unlike most who were driven out or fled in Al-Nakba, the Calamity -- as they still call the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 -- he left behind a house that stands till this day.
He produces a photograph of it, an old stone farmstead in the hamlet of Akbara, taken two years ago. Then, in a time-honoured ritual, he unwraps the heavy iron key of this abode, along with the deeds, in the English of the pre-Israeli, British Mandate era, proving his possession of the land. "You British," he said, "not just the Jews, did this to us. But one day we'll rise again -- and return."
The dream of the Return lives on in the Palestinian Diaspora, nowhere more strongly than in camps like Ain Hilweh, Lebanon's largest. Its various neighbourhoods are still called after the Galilee locations, Zeeb, Sufaf, Hattin, from which the original refugees came. Ask any of the 40,000 inhabitants about "returning" to a land which 97 per cent of them never saw, and, like Miari, most will insist, after their own fashion, that they want to do so, or that it is an inalienable right they will never renounce.
In theory, at least, the fate of the Palestinian refugees should soon be settled once and for all. Last month, three years late, Israel and Yasser Arafat's Palestine Authority began the "final-status" negotiations which, in accordance with the Oslo agreement, should bring the whole Arab-Israeli conflict to an end. The refugees are one of four main issues which have been left to the end precisely because they are the most intractable.
More than half of some 8 million Palestinians cannot return to what they consider their rightful homeland. Some have formal citizenship in a state, Jordan, which discreetly discriminates against them as a group. Others have laisser-passers only, and the variable, but often very limited, rights that go with them. Of 3.5 million -- 1.1 million in 59 camps -- who are served by the 50-year-old United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), 2.1 million are outside Israel\ Palestine.
Nowhere in this Diaspora have "final status" prospects generated such alarm as in Lebanon. This comes from the 361,000 refugees, who fear their forced and final "resettlement" in Lebanon itself, or, worse, their transfer somewhere else -- to an Iraq, for example, for which this would be the price of its international rehabilitation. But it comes mainly from the Lebanese. One thing on which that otherwise fractious, confessionally divided society overwhelmingly agrees is that there can be no politically disruptive, Palestinian "implantation" in their midst; a poll showed that 56 per cent of Maronite Christians, 50 per cent of Shi'ite Muslims think it should be "militarily resisted".
But, for the young men of Ain Hilweh especially, the mystique of the Return is now rivalled, as never before, by another impulse: escape, by any means, from this misery and squalor. For Miari senior, Britain remains a prime cause of his woes, for his son Mohamed -- "get me a visa", he begs -- it has come into fashion as the latest, if slight, chance of salvation, competing with more traditional European asylums like Sweden, Norway and Germany. This has more to do with international flight patterns than British hospitality. One "Abu Bakr" achieved local fame by getting a round trip flight to Chile -- a device to secure transit rights -- tearing up his laisser-passer at Heathrow and announcing that since Britain was responsible for his plight he was seeking British protection. It worked. But that -- and other stratagems -- have not worked for many others.
A Palestinian holds his transit papers as he was about to cross through the "safe passage" opened on Monday
(photo: AP)
Such as Abdallah Mansour. "My son," said his mother, "used to pace around here muttering 'death or departure'." The family spent $5,000 -- an astronomical sum for such people -- trying to infiltrate him into Britain. He ended up at a technical college in Lithuania instead. The $5,000 went to Lebanese "middlemen", who promise forged visas and passports, and smuggled entry, on chancy vessels or across remote land frontiers, into Europe. Like Iraqis fleeing Saddam Hussein who fetch up in Lebanon, many a Palestinian now entrusts himself to this emigration mafia.
The quest for the immediate, individual solution has supplanted the never-never collective political one. "You must realise," said Ziad Kaoush, headmaster of the UNRWA school, "that there's nothing called hope in this camp any more." Formerly, besides being a yearning and an ideology, the Return was seen as a feasible objective; the same kind of young men now desperate to get out would once have joined Yasser Arafat's "armed struggle" to achieve it. The great turning-point was not Arafat's expulsion from Beirut in 1982, and the destruction of his last great politico-military base, it was the Oslo agreement of 1993. Oslo not merely ignored the Palestinian Diaspora, it has actually, researchers say, made their conditions worse, partly because of the diversion of international aid and interest to promoting Arafat's "autonomy" in Gaza and the West Bank. But the sense of betrayal was greatest in Lebanon, where, through 16 years of civil war and Israeli assault and invasion, the camp-dwellers sacrificed far more than any other Palestinian community for "the cause" as Arafat then defined it.
Indigence aggravates the hopelessness. Lebanon is the least poor of Israel's neighbours, yet Palestinians' per capita income here is lower than anywhere except Gaza; and the proportion of 'special hardship cases' -- those who qualify for UNRWA's basic food hand-outs -- are higher, at 10.2 per cent, than anywhere else. The four main resources have all declined. Most families have an income-provider in the Gulf, but opportunities are drying up there. A cash-starved UNRWA, the Palestinians' main employer, has made 'austerity' cuts in basic services to a community it already describes, in its official reports, as "extremely poor".
Since Oslo, Arafat -- who to this day signs the cheques for the paltriest PLO disbursements throughout the Diaspora -- further reduced the flow of funds to institutions in communities where his policies are opposed, including even the fund for the families of "martyrs", who died in the combat he led. Lebanon has officially closed some 60 occupations to Palestinians. If local institutions take them, it is because they defy the widespread anti-Palestinian sentiment or they hide them during government inspections. Otherwise, all that is open to them -- for perhaps $10 a day -- is casual labour in construction, agriculture, or local workshops. By and large, the educated can only work for UNRWA or inside the camp itself. A Palestinian doctor with the Palestine Red Crescent earns in a month what a Lebanese, in a clinic just down the road, can make in a day.
The number of graduates with nothing -- or nothing dignified -- to do grows. Atef Dawali, an engineer fresh from Moscow University, is lucky: he sells bread from a camp store; others like him push vegetable carts. "You get the feeling," said a political activist, "that the Lebanese want to make us so miserable and desperate that we'll accept anything."
But what? After 51 years of total paralysis on the refugee question and the refusal, by even the most moderate Israelis, to contemplate any other solution than Palestinian "resettlement" in Arab countries, no one knows what, if anything, "final status" talks can yield. But certainly most people in Ain Hilweh understand that, even in the best of circumstances, it will fall far short of Return in the pure and literal sense to which Miari senior still clings. "In my view," said Shafiq Al-Hout, PLO "ambassador" to Lebanon who broke with Arafat over Oslo, "what the refugees crave, above all, is national identity. They loathe their statelessness. They want the protection that citizenship of an officially recognised state can offer, even if the state is only established on a fragment of the Palestine we consider ours."
But few in Ain Hilweh believe that even this is possible. "We are certainly not on Israel's agenda," said Umm Abdallah, "and I doubt if we're on Arafat's either." The dominant view is that Arafat sees this and other camps as nothing more than a bargaining counter in what one called the "dirty politics of Oslo." He recently made a determined bid to strengthen his grip on Ain Hilweh -- which lies conveniently beyond the deployment of Syrian troops in Lebanon -- by expanding his Fatah militia there to 400 men.
The richest patron on the Palestinian scene, it is easy for him to recruit unemployed youngsters for a couple of hundred dollars a month. The fear is that he wants to use them to stir up trouble as a means of demonstrating his indispensability.
So would Ain Hilweh be here for another half century? No one could produce a convincing reason why not. Anything up to 1,000 of the camp's young men are said to have made it to Europe, by hook or by crook, in the past two or three years; a remarkable figure, but -- with Europe now tightening its controls -- it is not going to empty the camp. Nor, unless Arafat achieves the kind of success which has signally eluded him so far, will the "final status" talks.
Some of the camp's opposition groups -- but not the Islamists -- support a reconciliation with Arafat in return for an agreed strategy that takes the Diaspora into account. But, amid all these tactical manoeuvrings, there is one thing on which most of the elder generation agree: if conditions go on deteriorating the way they are, some new movement will eventually emerge that harnesses the latent militancy, and readiness for renewed "armed struggle", of young men for whom the outlook looks even darker than it once did for them.
