By February 4, 2018 Read More →

April 2004 Inside Deheisheh Refugee Camp

Arab Refugees

Inside Deheisheh Refugee Camp

The handsome young man’s hair is gelled into little spikes.  He stands, rather uncertainly, outside the main entrance to the Deheisheh refugee camp.

There is no gate: The barbed wire that enclosed the camp before the Oslo peace process has been dismantled.  Yet there’s still a sense of separation between the camp and the outside, more a psychic barrier than a physical one.

I approach the man and start a conversation.  He is 22 and his name is Sha’adi.

“I don’t have plans for the future,” he tells me rather stiffly. “What future? I was born in Deheisheh.  My present and future are in Deheisheh.  Outside, it’s another world, but I’ll never, ever leave here – except to go back to Ajour, where my grandfather was thrown out in 1948, with my parents and aunts and uncles when they were little.”

“Don’t you want to find a job?” I ask.

“What job?” Sha’adi replies.  “The only job is the Palestinian people’s fight for its liberation.”

“So you don’t want to become a lawyer, or a computer expert, or a doctor?” I press.

“Maybe, but there’s not time to think about that.”

“No time? You have all the time in the world,” I say.  “And when you get married, you’ll have the time of your children, too.”  I show that I am exaggerating, and Sha’adi becomes much more personable.  He even smiles.

“I’ll get married in 20, 30, 100 years,” he says.  “My life isn’t mine until I go back to Ajour.”

“Do you want peace – two states for two peoples?”

“Peace isn’t possible with the Jews,” he explains.  “Maybe you don’t understand, but my house is in Ajour, and they forced us out, violently.  I don’t care if Jews lived there, too, I don’t care if I live close to them eventually.”

“In the Jewish state?”

Of course not.  Not in a Jewish state, not even in a state where we both live.  In time we’ll see what will happen.”

Will you throw the Jews out?”

They’ll leave by themselves.  Or if they stay, it’ll be in a Muslim state.”

Will you eliminate them?” I ask.

If they don’t accept living in a Muslim state.”

Why a Muslim state?”

“Because there’s no religious freedom among the Jews.”

“But don’t you want to live in a nice apartment in Bethlehem, or Ramallah or Hebron, rather than here in Deheisheh?  Don’t you want to live in a Palestinian state after we achieve peace?”

“There can be no Palestinian state unless it includes my house in Ajour,” is his answer.

“I ask if he has ever been to Ajour.

“No, but with God’s help, I hope to go there,” Sha’adi says.

“”Have you seen what it looks like?”

“I saw it in a film by a European director, but you could only see a few ruins, a few trees.”

Source:  Moment Magazine, by Fiamma Nirenstein

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