Deheishe Refugee Camp

One Thursday afternoon...one towards the end of all of this...I end up in the Deheishe refugee camp in Bethlehem for a tour organized by a (newly arrived) French activist at the Faisal.

One more wait through the Bethlehem checkpoint while I listen to the French girl tsk tsk the security process that's keeping her Vichy Western face from being potentially blown off. I don't really hate her, I'm just tired of the noises people make while equating security with inhumanity and banefulness.

We're going to tour the kind of poverty that accords such a Frenchie the moral raison d'etre for Palestinian suicide bombing and she is already cementing her belief from having spent a night in East Jerusalem and fifteen minutes in a van to the West Bank. Ok, I hate her.

We met Jihad (on the left with the Frenchies), who while Kuwaiti-born, hates how the oil-rich Kuwaiti upper crusts (and progenitors of his rearing) never do anything to help the other Arab people. Jihad is now helping the Arab cause by acting exceptionally smug to a few French people unwaveringly on his side, being insensitive, hostile, and argumentative toward an English-Iraqi fellow Arab Muslim, and flat-out attempting to ridicule this close-minded American who is so heartlessly breaking the lines to see firsthand the plight of the people that his country "intentionally abuses and neglects." Way to go Jihad.

We walk around and like most other places I've been, the people are friendly to us when they see us with an Arab/Arabic speaker. The people seem desperate to show us their lives or speak some English with us. I feel intrusive...at some points scared when I see teenagers with no uniforms passed by us with rifles...otherwise, everyone else's nonchalance permits me a little corridor of emotional repose in a place where I'd otherwise never set foot.

Jihad lays it on thick, about the thousands and thousands of people that live within this square kilometer camp. The reason I am insensitive is because this is one of the fifty-nine refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza...and Jordan and Syria and Lebanon.

Jihad blames Israel for the fact that these facilities are cramped, but as he tells us that the camp was built in 1952, I interject to ask whether this meant that this camp was built by Jordan because the West Bank was under Jordanian control for some fifteen years after the construction of the camp...and most refugee camps. Jihad says yes, it was built by the Jordanians before making fun of my American accent and launching into a tirade about how the conditions have only worsened since the Israeli took over in 1967.

Listen, I'm not happy about the fact that over a million Palestinians are living in squalid conditions in the territories and other Arab nations, but the problem is that they have been pushed around most by the Arab countries who will not let them become part of their citizenships and give them a better life. Jihad explained that after the Nakba (meaning disaster, meaning the establishment of the Israel), these Palestinians were told to live in these camps temporarily until the "situation" (ahem...Israel existing) could be "solved" (destroyed).

Almost sixty years/five or so wars later, new generations of refugees have been waiting to go to homes that no longer exist. But they wait because they are told to and the other Arab leaderships will not absorb them or take care of them. The bottom line (in my absurdly biased view) is that there were millions of refugees after World War II who were able to find homes. Nearly a million Jewish residents of all the Arab nations that were expelled from their homes after the founding of Israel settled in homes in Israel and abroad. This all took place at essentially the same time that the Palestinians fled their homes, or by some accounts were removed from them, during the Israeli War of Independence.

There is no reason that twenty-two Arab nations can't help take care of these people. Israel is not asking any of these people to leave (it's not doing a great job of asking them to stay either), but for the Arab countries that have spoken for the Palestinians even back in 1947 when peace was possible to do something positive would not be a concession of pride towards legimitizing Israel's existence (although it's probably high time they accept it). Giving shelter or just giving help to build infrastructure instead of armies doesn't signify any end for the Palestinian dream of statehood, but it does mean at least a suspension of the Palestinian nightmare of poverty.

Jihad takes us to a house demolished by the Israeli army, which had apparently just left about ten minutes before we arrived. This is the one picture that everyone in the group took.

This picture is taken from ten feet behind...

it includes the front of the late-model BMW of the member of Fatah that had parked across the street from the demolished house...and likely the reason that this house was destroyed. Here's a quick shot of the Palestinian National Authority parking stickers.

$30,000 car in a refugee camp. This is the symbol of Fatah. The party of Arafat. The most popular party in the West Bank. Arafat dies with close to a billion in the bank and almost every shop in the entire West Bank is closed and everyone is on strike because the government can't pay its teachers.

At this point, Hassan and Jihad get into an argument about about Saddam Hussein and Iraq. Jihad loves Saddam because Hussein "stood up to America" and did something for the Palestinian people (by paying $25,000 - $30,000 to the families of detonated suicide bombers).

Hassan retorts by saying that if you give someone five pounds of charity and then kill millions of your own citizens, you don't get much credit for the charity. Here I am tempted to ask how Jihad felt when Saddam invaded his native Kuwait in 1991, but decide to stay out.

By this point, it's gotten tense. Jihad defends gassing the Kurds because they were trying to separate from Iraq and asks Hassan how he feels about the Kurds trying to break up the borders of his father's country. Hassan explains that the lines drawn arbitrarily by the British almost a century ago don't mean much and he doesn't care if the Kurds want their own state, they can have it. Hassan asks Jihad how he would feel if the people of Gaza decided that they didn't want to wait around and decided to declare themselves an independent state.

I would be the first one to Gaza to blow myself up.

We tour around pretty much the rest of the way in silence. Jihad talks about the community programs and medical help and school assistances that his organization is bringing to this refugee camp, but it's all lost on me at this point.

We sit down over coffee and no one asks him questions, so I do. He bags on America. He bags on the West. Jihad tells us his dream of a one-state solution. He doesn't care where the Jews live, they are welcome in his state. He doesn't use the word bi-national. He just says one state. One that's not called Israel. Sounds like a sensible idea from a sensible guy.

We head to the city center and after touring around Bethlehem for a bit. We get into a taxi to take us to the checkpoint. Jihad wishes everyone goodbye and the last thing he says is to me.

I wish a nakba (disaster) on your country. Not your people though. Just the government .