The Mayor, the Martyr, and the Pomegranate Trees
Page 3 of 4
|
|
In the shatila refugee camp in west Beirut, I met a 69-year-old woman named Um Nizam. She sat on a thin mattress with Winnie the Pooh sheets, beneath three faded portraits of young men. Um Nizam remembered coming to Aita with her family as a refugee in 1948, when she was 11. Her town, a suburb of Haifa, had been bombed from the air, and everyone fled; they had walked for several days, over mountains, until her feet bled. They had not taken any of their belongings with them, she explained, because they had expected to return shortly. They had placed their faith in Jaysh al Inqadh, the Army of Salvation, a collection of soldiers from Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, and Syria, who fought a few battles against the Israeli forces but in the end abandoned the Palestinians to their fate.
Um Nizam's family stayed in Aita for a week in 1948, sleeping under olive trees; they could not afford to buy food from the locals, and 58 years later she still complained that the townspeople had not given them water. The Red Cross eventually took them to Tyre, and from there they moved through a series of other camps until landing at Shatila. By then, the Palestinians had begun to field their own militias—the plo, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and others. Soon, they vowed, they would liberate the homeland and return to their towns in triumph. Um Nizam, too, became a fighter and carried a gun.
I asked Um Nizam if she still hoped to go back. She paused and stared at me silently and intently, as if assessing just how dumb I could possibly be. "If I didn't want to go back to Palestine, why would I have these three martyrs?" she demanded in a raspy voice, looking up at the portraits above her. Um Nizam had had five sons, four daughters, and twenty grandchildren. Three of her sons had been killed in war: Muhamad had been martyred in the Tel al Zaatar camp in 1976, battling Lebanese Christian militias. Ahmad had been martyred defending the Shatila camp against Syrian-backed militias during the Lebanese civil war. Um Nizam's eldest, Nizam, had been martyred in 1982 during the Israeli invasion.
The most notorious camp in Lebanon is Ain al Hilweh, which is surrounded by the Lebanese army at all times, with foreigners restricted from entering. A staggering 70,000 stateless Palestinians are crammed into a space of roughly one square mile. After passing a cordon of Lebanese soldiers and then another of Palestinian militiamen, I emerged onto the broken roads of the camp, where the sky itself seemed grayer. Electric cables crisscrossed above, hanging low like old cobwebs. The streets seemed not quite wide enough for cars. I drove by faded posters of Yassir Arafat and of the slain leader of the Palestinian armed movement Hamas, Ahmed Yasin, as well as newer ones of Hezbollah's Nasrallah, and others optimistically announcing "Today Gaza, tomorrow all of Palestine!" These were the forgotten Palestinians; in the Oslo peace process of the 1990s, the plo had agreed to address only those Palestinians who lived in the West Bank and Gaza, leaving out the vast diaspora. Ain al Hilweh had been bombed several times in the July War, leaving 100 homes damaged and up to 19 people dead.
In the camp I met a young Palestinian called Muhamad Jamal whose family had fled in 1948 and landed in Baghdad. Shia militias had begun attacking Palestinians, most of whom are Sunni, after the U.S. invasion in 2003, and his family had been threatened, so they were refugees once more, back in Lebanon. When asked what he thought of the future, he scoffed: "What future? You see the outside is black. What do you think is in our hearts?" He supported Hezbollah, he said. "God be with them, the mujahideen who go fight in Iraq," he added. "God be with the mujahideen in every place."
Thirty-five-year-old Abu Walid was Hamas' director of information in the camp. He told me about his brother, Ahmad Muhamad Yasin, who in July 2005, at 30 years of age and married for just one month, had left to join the insurgency in Iraq. "He told our parents," Abu Walid said, "because you need the permission of your parents to fight jihad." Ahmad had called his family a few times from Iraq, and Abu Walid had spoken to him once. "He wished to be a martyr," Abu Walid explained. "We needed a martyr in the family for our honor." Six weeks later Ahmad had been killed; his mother cried for one hour upon hearing the news, and then changed into white clothes to celebrate Ahmad's martyrdom. Ahmad's wife did not cry, Abu Walid said. As for himself, he allowed, "Of course I was happy, but I also cried. Of course I miss him."
Abu Ahmad, the head of Hamas in the camp, kept an office that was reached by bending under a low doorpost off a dark alley and climbing up crooked concrete stairs. The Lebanese government prohibited new construction in the camps, and did not allow building materials in, on the theory that if the Palestinians got too comfortable, they might forget about Palestine. Abu Ahmad's office was decorated with Hamas flags and a red heart-shaped valentine clock. He insisted on stressing that Hamas had no problems with Jews or Americans. "The problem is occupation," he said. "If the occupier is your brother, you will fight him."
Abu Ahmad's father, Ahmad Muhamad Taha, was 92 years old. He hobbled slowly, relying on a cane and his son's arm for support, and wore very thick glasses. He was one of the rapidly dwindling generation of Palestinians who had once lived in Palestine where he had owned orchards and fields. He remembered the British proposal for a partition of Palestine in 1937, into what was to be an Arab and a Jewish state, and how the Palestinians took up arms because "the British gave the Jews the best land, and they gave the Palestinians land you can't use."
When his village was bombed in 1948, the family fled, taking only their clothes. He next saw the village 32 years later, but barely recognized it; still, when he left, it felt "as if I was leaving my country again, like in 1948." Palestinians do not have citizenship in Lebanon, but if the government offered it, he said, "we would reject it." His son chimed in, "I'll bring you my seven-year-old son, and he will tell you that he is going back to Palestine."
Outside the Hamas office, residents were lining up for boxes of weekly rations that the group provided. The streets were covered with trash and pools of dirty water, and the people seemed beaten, deprived of hope. They had been there for nearly 60 years, and try as they might to cling to hope, it was hard to imagine that they wouldn't be there for 60 more.
