Refugees in Our Own Land : Chronicles from a Palestinian Refugee Camp in Bethlehem / Muna Hamzeh
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Refugees in Our Own Land Chronicles from a Palestinian Refugee Camp in Bethlehem Muna Hamzeh Pluto P Press LONDON • STERLING, VIRGINIA First published 2001 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, VA 20166–2012, USA www.plutobooks.com Copyright © Muna Hamzeh 2001 The right of Muna Hamzeh to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 7453 1652 2 hardback Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Hamzeh, Muna, 1959- Refugees in our own land : chronicles from a Palestinian refugee camp in Bethlehem / Muna Hamzeh. p. cm. ISBN 0–7453–1652–2 (hard : alk. paper) 1. Al-Aqsa Intifada, 2000—Personal narratives. 2. Hamzeh, Muna, 1959– .—Diaries. 3. Palestinian American journalists—Diaries. 4. Refugees, Palestinian Arab—West Bank—Duhayshah (Refugee camp)— Social conditions. I. Title. DS119.765 .H36 2001 956.95'3—dc21 2001002266 Disclaimer: Some images in the original version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services, Fortescue, Sidmouth EX10 9QG Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton Printed in the European Union by TJ International, Padstow, England Contents Dedication vi Preface vii PART ONE 1. Ordinary Days in Dheisheh (2000) 3 PART TWO 2. Farewell Washington (1988) 73 3. Welcome to Dheisheh (1990) 77 4. Urging on the Scuds (1991) 81 5. Diary of a Blockade (1993) 86 6. Fatima (1994) 89 7. Dheisheh will Never Fall Again (1995) 94 8. Where is Peace? (1996) 97 9. When Time Stood Still (1996) 101 10. The French Connection (1997) 104 11. The Glory of the Intifada (1997) 108 12. Where Do We Belong? (1997) 111 13. Remembering Our Dead (1997) 115 14. Where did Santa Go? (1998) 118 15. Male vs. Female Honor (1998) 121 16. Celebrating Independence (1998) 125 17. From Dheisheh to Jerusalem (1998) 128 18. Making it in a Man’s World (1998) 133 19. Diving with a Splash (1998) 136 20. Life’s Four Seasons (1998) 139 21. Checkpoint Jerusalem (1999) 142 22. The Pope in Our Midst (2000) 150 Index 161 Dedication Between 1990 and 2000, the years I lived in Dheisheh, three people never ceased to urge me and encourage me to write a book. They are my dear friends Marianne Weiss in Paris, Sami Kamal in Jerusalem and Mira Hamermesh in London. I thank them for believing in me. When I kept an email diary during the first two months of al-Aqsa Intifada (September–November 2000), hundreds of readers sent me touching electronic messages from Japan, Jordan, Sweden, Pakistan, Canada, Syria, the United Kingdom, Lebanon, France, Egypt, Italy, Iran, the United States, to name some. There was even an email from Princess Haya bint al-Hussein (daughter of the late King Hussein of Jordan). Without these messages of support, I couldn’t have kept on writing the diary. To each and every one of these wonderful people, I say thank you for supporting and encouraging me. Of course, Refugees in Our Own Land would never have been written had it not been for the refugees of Dheisheh, female and male, young and old. They embraced me as one of their own and made me feel at home, from the moment I married and lived in the camp in the summer of 1990. My friends, in-laws, neighbors, and acquaintances opened up my eyes to the real life story of Palestini- ans in the camps. They taught me, by their sheer existence, that not only are the refugees in the camps the least understood segment of Palestinian society, but also that they are the ones who will one day lead our people to full independence and liberation. But the biggest thank you goes to my former husband, Ahmed Muhaisen. Had it not been for Ahmed, I would not have lived in Dheisheh for one day, let alone for ten years. And had it not been for Ahmed’s love and support, I would never have come to regard Dheisheh as my only true home; the one place where I’ll always feel I have family. Muna Hamzeh Austin, Texas May 2001 vi Preface “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” From the U.S. Declaration of Independence – July 4, 1776 Right from the start I must confess that this book was not easy to complete. I suppose that if I were still residing in Dheisheh, the Pales- tinian refugee camp that is the subject of this work, then the task at hand would have been easier, both emotionally and psychologically. But sitting here in Austin, Texas, tens of thousands of miles away from Dheisheh, I must admit that the pain of writing about the refugee camp that I have grown to love so much has taken its toll on me. At times, I know it is my intense longing for Dheisheh that overwhelms me. Other times, I know it is the indifference of the world to the continuing suffering of the Palestinians that pains me. But all the time, I do know that my biggest source of anguish is accepting the fact that Dheisheh is a chapter in my life that has come to a full close. Coming to terms with this fact does not leave me happy. And how can it, when Dheisheh and the nearly 10,000 men, women and children who live there, have unintentionally taken an incredibly big slice of my heart, and kept it. And so I know now for certain that I shall never get over Dheisheh. Ever! For those who don’t know it, Dheisheh Refugee Camp lies less than two miles south of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, where Jesus Christ was born. It is one of 59 Palestinian refugee camps established in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan after the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, which led to the expulsion of nearly 700,000 Palestinians from their homes, and resulted in the longest-running refugee problem in the world. Dheisheh is one of 20 refugee camps in the West Bank, and the largest of three camps in Bethlehem. Most of the 40 villages from which Dheisheh’s refugees originally came were located near Hebron and Jerusalem, in areas that are now part of Israel. After 1948, Israel destroyed all vii viii Refugees in Our Own Land these villages and built Israeli colonies in their place. Dheisheh’s refugees, who had been farmers accustomed to living on a total of about 125,000 acres of privately owned land, 5,000 of which were planted with olive trees, suddenly found themselves squeezed together in a small, overcrowded camp. Today, Dheisheh’s nearly 10,000 refugees live on a tiny 90-acre stretch of land. To some outsiders, Dheisheh may, of course, be nothing more than a squalid and poverty-stricken Palestinian refugee camp. To others, it is living proof of the immense and ongoing tragedy imposed on the Palestinians since the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. But for me, Dheisheh is the only place I’ve ever lived in where I felt completely at home. In the past 41 years, I have lived first in the West Bank, then in Jordan, then in the USA, then in the West Bank again, and now in the United Sates again. And yet, I have never felt that I could call a place home like I can call Dheisheh. I say this because Dheisheh’s closely-knit community embraced me with open arms and gave me a feeling that I lacked all my life – the feeling that I was part of a family. And this makes leaving the camp all the more difficult. But the refugee camp did more than just make me feel part of a family. It also opened my eyes to the real plight of the Palestinian refugees in the camps. Poverty, damp and closely clustered houses, meager living conditions, overcrowding in the schools, unpaved roads and poor infrastructure are only part of the hardships that the refugees in the camps have to endure on a daily basis and have had to endure for the past 53 years. Yet in the midst of all this difficulty, families thrive, children are born, weddings and funerals take place, parents work and a mini-society grapples to find itself a warm place under the sun. Between 1990 and 2000 when I lived in Dheisheh, some Western TV crews would seek my help whenever they came to do one story or another about the refugees. The shots they looked for focused on children with torn and dirty clothes, or impoverished dwellings, or any other image that depicted the refugees as those “poor”, “miserable” and “wretched” souls. They never even attempted to scratch the surface and what was lost in all this are the images of the camp as a place that is free of crime, a place where you can step out and leave your front door open. Also lost is the image of the mothers who take good care of their children and are kind to the elderly, and help a friend if she is bed-ridden after surgery. But mostly what is lost is the spirit of a people who have refused to succumb to injustice, Preface ix and who have refused to give up their right to return to their villages, no matter how many years have gone by.