What do you imagine a refugee camp looks like? Most westerners probably think about the camps set up after disasters or wars, filled with temporary shelters for displaced people who cannot be accommodated any other way. But what happens when temporary becomes permanent, or at least sixty three years permanent. The refugees build a town. That's what we toured today, the Dheisha Refugee Camp, a town built by three generations of Palestinians still administered by the UN Refugee Authority, alongside the West Bank city of Bethlehem. We visited the Phoenix House, a community center for residents of Dheisha and Bethlehem on the edge if the camp. Our guide was Marod, a resident of Dheisha for his twenty-five years, grandson in the family that was moved here during the 1948 war.
Among many things that he said that moved us deeply was the story of taking his grandmother out of the camp for the first time ( prior to the last intifada) and illegally visiting his home village. He was not surprised how much that village was alive in his grandmother's memory, but he was surprised when she told him where their well was located. There was no indication of any well. "Dig!" she said, so Marod obeyed, and after considerable digging hit something hard. When he uncovered it, he found the stone that covered a well, and it still had fresh water.
There are some wellsprings of the Palestinian refugees' ongoing resistance to the Israeli occupation, and a little digging with our questions helps us find them. One of them is the conviction that the homes that they lived in prior to 1948 are theirs, regardless of whatever arcane property documents are required from the four different administrations that have had jurisdiction in Palestine since that time. Another is outrage at the injustices and human rights violations that have been carried out against them by the nations that colonized and ruled their homeland. The most important is hope, hope that is sustained by their loyalty to their culture and identity and the belief that it will prevail. For some Palestinians, their religious faith helps sustain that hope - whether it be Islam, Christianity, or even Judaism (there are indeed Jewish Palestinians!).
We came away from our visits refreshed by the wellsprings of resistance we had found and inspired by the stories of Palestinian resistance we had heard. Some of that resistance happens in courts of law, some of it consists of telling their stories to us, yet again, some if it consists of enduring the daily indignities created by the settlers and the soldiers and not letting them crush your spirit or make you want to surrender.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Location:Bethlehem, Palestine, Israel
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