An elder from the
Beit Jibrin refugee camp in Bethlehem gives a group
of teenagers a tour of the village he fled in 1948.
(Photo by Evan Roberts.)
I've been traveling to the Holy Land for about ten years now, and
early on in my journeys I came across something deeper, quieter,
and more melancholy than the noise and blood and rage of endlessly
recurring headlines. I could see it in the faces of aging women
in exile, transfixed before the television screen on Christmas Day,
gazing at the Church of the Nativity, just at the end of Star Street,
where they were born. I could hear it in the voices of grandfathers
remembering a family lemon tree, or the silk and indigo of the Wednesday
market, or the truckloads of zetuns bound for the olive
press at harvest time. This was longing: an attachment to land and
village going back to 1948, when 750,000 Palestinians fled or were
driven out of their homes in the new state of Israel.
In my trips to the West Bank, Israel, Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon,
I would come to understand that this sense of longing could not
be disconnected from the current violence, or from the "peace
process" that never leads to peace.
Meerna al-Azzah stands
in a field in the
abandoned village where her family
lived before the war in 1948. (Photo by Evan Roberts.)
Indeed, the longing for 1948 seems the one main thing unexamined
in the countless words of copy and miles of videotape spilled over
the Arab-Israeli conflict.
For the elderly refugee living in a camp in southern Lebanon, who
can gaze upon the lights of his native land, or for the middle-aged
exile in Nebraska whose mother still holds the key to a stone house
that no longer exists, the longing forges into political and human
aspiration, embodied in a phrase that is never far from Palestinian
lips: the right of return. Yet the longing also creates a physical
and psychic disembodiment. For many refugees, the memories, even
passed onto the third generation removed from the village, seem
more vivid and real than the camps where their families have lived
for more than 50 years.
Dheisheh, near Bethlehem,
is one of 59 camps for Palestinian refugees. More than
10,000 people live on one half square kilometer of land.
Work, water and electricity are in short supply. (Photo
by Evan Roberts.)
"My home," a young man in a camp near Beirut told me,"is
the homeland I have never seen."
Despite several UN resolutions, and after years of ambiguous language,
the United States has now endorsed Israel's long-standing position:
that a Palestinian return to the 1948 homeland is no longer an option.
And indeed, that homeland is, in some ways, imaginary. Yet the aspiration
is real, and as deep and abiding as it has ever been.
Abu
Hani
