From Mesoamerica To The Middle East: Exile #2
Post by Helen Pearson [This is the second post of an article- click here for part one]
In April of this year GSN member Helen Pearson, went on a trip to the Occupied Palestinian Territories (West Bank) and Israel for a week. It was an immensely powerful experience. In an attempt to talk about what she witnessed there she has planned a series of articles comparing her experience in Palestine with that of Guatemala 10 years earlier.
I : Exile [continued]
Almost 60 years after the Nakba, Deheishe refugee camp now has the character of a small town in many ways. The word ‘camp’ implies temporary structures but Deheishe has been there so long that buildings which once might have been intended as temporary have become rooted. The houses pile one on top of each other in ramshackle, close proximity with narrow, winding streets between them creating a medieval, oppressive feel.
At first the camp was in an area designated for the Palestinians but under the administration of Jordan; later the refugees became residents of an occupation, when Israel seized the West Bank in 1967 (3). Samir, our Palestinian guide, told us that after 1967 the camp had been enclosed in barbed wire as a way of controlling and containing the refugees who were considered by the Israelis to be potential terrorists. The barbed wire is no longer in place, but the one turnstile gate that was the only way in and out of the encircled camp remains as a reminder of those times.
Hearing this story about Deheishe took me back to a visit I had made in Guatemala to a community of returned refugees who had been interned in a camp in Honduras during the 1980s. This was during the Cold War and the height of the United States’ interference in Central America. The refugees were labelled as Communist subversives by the Honduran government which was receiving massive amounts of US support in return for allowing Honduran territory to be used by ‘Contras’ fighting to bring down the left wing, democratically elected government of Nicaragua. The Honduran camp had the ironic name of El Tesoro (Treasure) but was described to me as like a prison, surrounded by barbed wire and impossible to leave without permission. Doña Paula, who told me about El Tesoro, said that once a man had been shot for leaving the camp without a permit. Innocent people who had fled for their lives, leaving behind everything they had, losing family members to massacres, were then subjected to further inhuman treatment and suffering. Having such a personal connection with Guatemalan refugees helped me to understand something of the profound suffering the people we met in Palestine had undergone.
The trauma of exile through the generations is compounded by dependency and a feeling of abandonment. Residents of Deheishe are still reliant on United Nations support and international aid and 70% of the 11,000 inhabitants are unemployed. The employment situation has considerably deteriorated since the start of the second Intifada in 2000 and the building of the ‘separation barrier’, whereby travel for residents of the West Bank is very restricted (4). Previously many more people were able to travel into Israel and work. Without land, property or the prospect of employment it is almost impossible to get out of the dependency cycle. As Ziad Abbas, director of the Ibdaa Cultural Centre in Deheishe, put it, “I am not a citizen but a United Nations number”.
There is an obvious contrast with the Guatemalans I worked with as the Palestinian refugees have not been able to go back to the land they were born in because Israel does not recognise their right to return. The Guatemalan refugees managed to achieve something unique. After seven or eight years in exile, organised groups formed in the refugee camps in southern Mexico and with the support of the UN and the governments of various countries, including Mexico, they negotiated the terms of an organised and collective return to Guatemala. This negotiation took place in the context of the restoration of democracy in Guatemala (a very flawed democracy it is true, but at least it was not military dictatorship). Since the first collective refugee returns to Guatemala in 1993 there have been numerous obstacles to reintegration, but it is a success story when compared with the Palestinian experience.
However, listening to the Palestinians talking in Deheishe I was struck by some parallels with the Guatemalan refugees which illustrate a more positive side of the exile experience. For example, there have been more opportunities for women to organise than would likely have been possible within Palestinian society at large. Deheishe has the first women’s volleyball and basketball teams in a refugee camp. Ziad Abbas acknowledges that a significant amount of money coming in from abroad to support projects in the camp comes from women’s organising ability, for example setting up micro enterprises to sell their embroidery to people in Japan and the USA. This parallels developments for women Guatemalan refugees in Mexican camps and constitutes an irony whereby the experience of exile acts as a catalyst to the development and recognition of women’s rights and contributions.
Another side effect of long term refugee status for both people has been the importance of education. In Mexico many Guatemalan refugees had access to education through services provided through official aid agencies and non governmental organisations (NGOs). I have friends who arrived in the camps with not even a primary school education and left with qualifications as health or education promoters. In Deheishe education services are extremely limited and only cover primary education. If young people are to continue to high school they have to go outside the camp and this costs money. However, often the community helps out even though people have such limited resources because, as Ziad told us, education is highly prized as a route out of a dead end where families have lost their land and property. As happened in the Mexican camps, education serves both as a form of self help and as route out of dependency.
In the case of Palestine, there is another factor which has led to the acquisition of education. Almost every Palestinian man we talked to had been in prison at least once. These were people who were intelligent, held down responsible jobs and contributed to their communities: in other words did not fulfil the typical offender profile. In fact an estimated 40% of Palestinian males have been in Israeli jails (5). Ziad Abbas spoke excellent English which he had learned in an Israeli prison. There is something satisfyingly subversive about this: Israel’s criminalisation of its ‘enemies’ who emerge from incarceration better prepared in many ways to resist.
The Palestinians I met are determined to continue striving for their rights and believe that this is best done by non-violent means in collaboration with Israeli Jews committed to an equal and just solution for all people sharing the tiny piece of Earth that is historical Palestine. However, I believe that unless a solution is found to the Palestinian refugee issue, the lack of justice, stretching back to the past and into the future, will corrode and undermine prospects for peace for both Palestinians and Israelis.
(3) Palestine has more refugees than any other country, some 5 million, of which in 1998 652,855 lived in the West Bank. Towns and Villages Depopulated by the Zionist Invasion of 1948. Salman Abu Sitta, 1998
(4) I will talk more in a later article about the ‘Separation Barrier’, sometimes called the ‘Apartheid Wall’.
(5) ADDAMEER (Prisoners’ Support and Human Rights Association, www.addameer.org)
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