Human Cargo

by Caroline Moorehead

  To the north of the camp, on a slight elevation and some way back from the camp’s main street, where the market takes place each morning, lies the proxy village of Sousouf. It covers some hundred square yards of ground and contains about forty families, all descendants of men and women who fled the real Sousouf near the Lebanese border in the spring and summer of 1948. In Roman times, Sousouf was Safsofa, a village with many goats and beehives. In September 1948, Ghazi was a boy of seventeen. His family was the last to leave the village. They would have left sooner, but on the ninth his father, pressing oil from their olive crop, harvested early in response to the conflict coming their way from the valley below, was kicked by their horse, fell, struck his head, and was killed, leaving a widow and seven children. On Saturday, September 18, not long after night fell, planes began to bomb the village. The bombing lasted all night, says Ghazi, and soon there was also shelling. At dawn, Israeli soldiers entered the village. Some of the men were lined up, in batches, in front of a wall, and shot; others were dropped into the village well. A fourteen-year-old girl was raped. One old man was shot in his bed. In all, says Ghazi, forty-five died; he would have fought, but he had no weapon, the only gun owned by the family being with his uncle, who was away fighting in the hills. Ghazi on this point is absolutely clear: the British are to be blamed for the Naqba, for arming the Jews and repressing the Palestinians and for spreading propaganda that Palestine was a free and empty land; for the rest, he blames the Arabs, for promising but then failing to support the Palestinians with arms and men. The Naqba was indeed a catastrophe, not for any one person alone, but for a whole people. The Palestinians, he says, calmly but also firmly, have lived in uncertainty for fifty-four years. This uncertainty has marked his life and ruined it. It has ruined all their lives. For him to talk to me, to tell me what the last fifty-four years have been for him, was “like pulling off a plaster, opening a wound. I want to do it, but then I cannot stop talking.”

  Like Zainab, like many of the 2,000 or so people still alive today who remember the flight from Palestine, Ghazi recalls life before the Naqba as a time of happiness and ease. His father had three wives and seven children; his mother was the middle one, and he her middle child. They were farmers, growing wheat, corn, tobacco, watermelons, chickpeas, and figs; they had an olive grove and vines. They kept the chickpeas, beans, and small crops of vegetables for their own consumption, and sold the figs, olive oil, and grapes. When his mother judged the moment had come when they had no choice but to flee, they crept out from where they had been hiding and ran toward the mountains during a lull in the shooting. They rook nothing with them. The border with Lebanon lay just over an hour’s walk away; they crossed over to a village called Yarcun, then on to Bint Jubeil. From there, after a month wondering whether they might be able to go home, they moved on to a camp outside Tyre, Bourj el Shemali, from which UN officials were already distributing the Palestinians to camps farther away in Lebanon as well as to Jordan and Syria. In May 1949 all those who had survived the killings in Sousouf were moved to the new camp of Fin el-Helweh. They were given tents close together. In 1950 Ghazi married a girl from another Sousouf family.

  It was, says Ghazi—at seventy-one a strong, upright man, with thick wiry gray hair cropped short—better than chaos, though it was not perfect. The two families built a fireplace near their tents, and made piles of firewood they collected from the hills around the camp. UNRWA handed out flour, sugar, and rice, and, for the first year or so, occasional tins of fish. Water was delivered in barrels to the different village quarters: theirs was known as the fountain of Sousouf and it ran out every evening, around seven. Relations with UNRWA were good: most of its employees were refugee Palestinians like themselves. The camp was surrounded by wheat fields and citrus orchards, later cut down by the Israelis when they invaded Lebanon in 1982. Ghazi got occasional jobs as a building laborer in Sidon. “I used to roam and wander the fields looking for work,” he says. “But it was very hard.” He was the eldest son, and he and his younger brother were responsible for his mother and sisters. Electricity reached Ein el-Helweh only in 1970. Until then, the younger children studying for their exams carried their books out of the camp in the evenings and sat along the highway, under the streetlights, in order to be able to read.

  It was about three years, he says, before he began to realize that they were not just about to go home; then he started to talk about the need for independence, the importance of not relying on the people around them. He began to make plans; he planted a tree and found work with local farmers. But he went on thinking about Sousouf, and at night he would dream that he was still there; in the daytime, when he was working in the farmer’s fields, he would look up at the mountains around, very like his own mountains, and pretend that he was working his own fields. “I lived in the past,” he says, “remembering, all the time. At night, we sat and talked about what it had been like.” Ghazi was then nineteen. He has not stopped remembering since. “Every moment,” he says, “something reminds me. This is how I live. I remember how we used to take our olives to the press and how I used to stand around with the others and we used to laugh and joke. I remember the weddings and parties in the village and how in the summer we used to dance. I remember the way the men sat together and talked and how as I grew up I used to sit with them, listening. I remember the way the richest man in Sousouf always had coffee ready for visitors and how the women used to visit each other in their houses while the men sat in the rich man’s house and talked. Yes, we live here with our neighbors from Sousouf and, yes, we meet and talk. But you cannot transport the life. There, our houses were surrounded by our lands. Here, it is like a prison. The land we look out at is owned by others. There, the weddings and celebrations and burials were all part of our lives, and we all shared in them. Here, unemployment and stress have driven all that away. We have become too busy thinking how to pay the rent and feed our families. We still do those things, but not with our hearts; we do them out of duty. We bring up our children to keep to our ways. But we are frightened that they will become thinned with exile.”

  It is only in the last ten years that historians and researchers have started committing to film and archive the store of oral memory that almost alone conserves the history of the Palestinian people. This is the only way to preserve the meaning of what it is to be a Palestinian, and prevent the Palestinians from scattering into twenty different peoples. “Basically,” the Palestinian historian May Seikaly wrote in July 2002, “people turn to memory when they are afraid they have lost it.”

  By the Israeli invasion of 1982, Ghazi and his family had been living in Ein el-Helweh for over thirty years. Early in August, the camp was surrounded and Israelis and Falangists shelled it from the hills, before posting snipers to pick off Palestinians who were driven out into the streets below in search of food or water. When the Palestinians decided to fight back, they lost a hundred men trying to take the hill directly above the camp, where a lighthouse with an ungainly stone Madonna perched high above its beacon looms. After houses around the perimeter had been knocked down, bulldozers were sent in to flatten what remained.

  Over loudspeakers, orders were given for all men between the ages of fifteen and seventy to leave the camp, carrying white flags to indicate that they intended to do so peacefully. The men fetched white sheets and bedcovers and came out; they were led down toward the beach in a long line. It was, says Ghazi, repeating what Marwan had said to me in Shatila, like 1948, all over again. With the others, he was taken to Ansar, a prison camp run by the Lebanese military. In 1982, I had just started writing about human rights for The Times of London, and I remember hearing about the camp at Ansar in southern Lebanon, about the way 9,000 Palestinian men of various ages had been rounded up and how there were stories of disappearances and deaths under torture. Palestinians throughout the country were now subjected to threats, kidnappings, and attacks, and with most of the fighters and weapons gone they had little protection from the assaults coming
at them from all sides. The Palestinians, it was said, would rather be arrested by the Lebanese army, from whose camps they usually returned alive, than by the Lebanese security forces, where torture and summary executions were common. Khang, strangulation, is the word used by people in the camps today to described what happened to them after 1982.

  Even so, they were not quite crushed. The PLO, who had been generous employers, were gone, the Lebanese economy was in ruins, and the war had seen their homes and livelihoods destroyed. The day nurseries, nursery schools, clinics, and workshops had all closed down. But the younger women, in particular, had been galvanized and strengthened by their role in the resistance, and a spirit of retrenchment settled over the camps. Families long used to hardship pulled in their belts and returned to the strong roots of their traditions. The Palestinian flag and photographs of the martyrs, those who had died in the five years of conflict, were potent symbols of resistance. Bit by bit, new projects flowered in the ruins. The Internet and e-mail have brought the outside world to the camps, particularly to the young, who have been helped by international organizations to make contact with other teenagers in the Occupied Territories, meeting online. They call these meetings the electronic intifada, and the players global nomads.

  Ghazi is one of the very few Palestinians to have visited the village in which he spent his childhood. In 1982, at the time of the invasion, one of his daughters became very ill. The road between Sidon and Beirut was blocked, and the nearest hospital with the treatment she needed was in Haifa, across the border in Israel. He asked and received permission to take her there. On the last day of his ten-day visa, he took a bus to Sousouf, now renamed Bar Yochay. Two of the original houses, standing on the main road, were intact, but the rest of the village had been bulldozed. Piles of stones, buried by rough grass, were all that remained of the houses he remembered so vividly. His father’s fields, once covered in wheat, tobacco, and corn, were now planted with apple and peach trees. The olives had gone. The land around was thickly forested. It all looked absolutely different. He found the visit extremely painful. He does not want to go back, at least not as a visitor, not before the return he believes is rightfully due him.

  But when he returned to Ein el-Helweh, he felt more like a stranger than ever. “I had regained my sense of belonging, and now it had gone again. We are not Lebanese. We are strangers here. I cannot change.”

  • • •

  THERE IS DEPRESSION in the camps, though no suicide: in Ein el-Helweh, Ghazi can recall just one case, thirty years ago. And there is little or no crime, for no one has anything to steal. But there is much anxiety, and when problems arise people are quick to quarrel and come to blows. The mood is wary and conversations are full of ambiguity. Children fight and argue as they never used to in the 1970s and 1980s, say the teachers who work in the camps, and the noise is far louder than it ever used to be. The failure rate at school is high, and since space is so tight children seldom get a second chance. Many of the classes have fifty pupils or more. One woman in three is said to be illiterate. Fatima, who runs one of the rare successful projects in Shatila, a vocational training center for women, where they encourage one another while learning how to type and read and write, says that thirty years ago, when she was a thirteen-year-old in the camp, there were open spaces where the children could play. Now, in the damp, sunless winter days they sneeze and wheeze and their noses run. Television flickers in the murky light of the camp, where it is as hard to see along the pinched alleyways as inside the houses, and parents try to monitor programs for the violence and consumerism that they fear can only feed their children’s keen sense of discontent. To these children, Fatima says, everything seems expendable, impermanent, unstable, especially where there has been so much destruction. “Why,” asks her small daughter, seeing the Barbie dolls and tricycles on television, “can’t I have a doll with its house and its wardrobe? Why can’t I go on holiday to the seaside?” Fatima’s regret is that she does not know what to say to her daughter; she does not really know the answer herself.

  Nor does she know what to say to her own mother, who came as a girl to Shatila in 1949 and who sang ballads about Palestine all through Fatima’s childhood, and who now tells her that her one wish is that someday, someone will take her home. Fatima’s mother has very high blood pressure; in the camp, she lives in one small room. Last summer, a former neighbor from their village in Palestine, who now lives in Sweden, was able to return to see what had become of their lands. He visited Shatila on his way back to Sweden and showed her parents a video of what remained of their childhood homes. Fatima’s mother, who had not talked much about the past for some time, began remembering and describing her home all over again. At night, she again began to dream of when she was a girl. “Where is home?” asks Fatima. “We have no home. I feel conscious only of being a refugee.” Fatima has two brothers and five sisters. Her eldest brother is in Utah, where he buys and sells cars; the younger is in Germany, where he fled after the war of the camps and now has asylum. One of her sisters is in Denmark and another in Canada, having moved there after working in the Gulf. The three married sisters are all in Shatila, and the last, who is single, lives in Ein el-Helweh.

  Refugee populations have long attracted the attention of statisticians. UNHCR, for many years barred from work with Palestinian refugees through its mandate and the existence of UNRWA,* is now carrying out a project to identify the unmet needs of the Palestinian diaspora. Lebanon is one of the countries it plans to look at. It is said, for instance, that well over half the Palestinian men in Lebanon are unemployed, and that what little work is to be found is only of a laboring kind; that the Lebanese camps have a particularly high number of “hardship” cases—widows, single mothers with children, the handicapped; that only a handful of Palestinian children manage to go on to higher education; that the number of hospital beds available to Palestinians has dropped by half in recent years. Exiled Palestinians are the subject of countless statistics, percentages, graphs, made more poignant by the fact that so much of their documentary history, their family papers and photographs, their maps and civil records, were lost with the Naqba, and the 45 million documents said to survive lie scattered, like the Palestinians themselves, through the Occupied Territories, in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, in the American Friends Service Committee headquarters in Philadelphia and the International Committee of the Red Cross archives in Geneva. History, the oral history that is now the subject of much attention in the camps, is coming to be seen as a potent form of resistance against the suppression and distortion of Palestinian culture and history by Israel. “In the end,” Edward Said once remarked, “the past owns us.”

  The events of the last decade have not been kind to the Palestinians in Lebanon, and across the Arab world it is now accepted that they are the most unfortunate of all the Palestinian refugees, for the once friendly Lebanese government has in recent years closed many doors against them. After the Gulf War, the rich Arab states where so many had found work and from where they sent money home began to expel the Palestinians, whose labor they no longer needed. Professional people and laborers alike found their contracts abruptly terminated, the salaries that had supported large extended families in Shatila and Ein el-Helweh and Burj al Barajinah stopped. I remember writing a story for the London Times about a Palestinian who was put on a plane from Kuwait because his visa had been withdrawn, and who was then not allowed back into Lebanon. Instead, he was shuttled around the world, as country after country closed its doors to him, and he spent his nights sleeping on the benches of airports, before being put on another plane to another country and another airport. Then, the story attracted attention; now, the odyssey of refugee life is not remarkable.

  UNRWA’s funds in Lebanon, once ample for sustaining the 70,000 or so Palestinians of the Naqba, have been diminishing steadily and make little headway against the needs of the well over 380,000 their numbers have now reached, including the children and grandchildren of those who fle
d. It is a very long time since tins of tuna and sardines made their way into camps along with the rice, oil, and sugar. Like the rations of the Liberians and Sierra Leoneans in Guinea’s long-term camps, the Palestinians’ rations have been cut again and again. Today about 3,500 people live in buildings destroyed during the fighting in the 1970s, heaps of rubble patched up by cardboard or strips of corrugated iron, which they are forbidden by law to rebuild. Without sanitation, electricity, or heat, without papers or identity cards, unregistered by UNWRA because not living inside the camps, these are the most dispossessed of all refugees. Like the rejects in Cairo, the “File Closed” asylum seekers, they are not subpeople but nonpeople, human beings without official existence.

  Within Lebanon today, Palestinians may not work as doctors, dentists, lawyers, architects, taxi drivers, bankers, or teachers—in all, seventy-three occupations are forbidden them—and recently the Lebanese government passed a new law prohibiting them from owning property or, if they already owned it, from passing it down to their children. There are stories about the Lebanese guards who man the checkpoints around the camps forcing the young Palestinians to remove their sunglasses as they pass in and out, and about the way that they have been known, as idle persecution, to order car drivers to remove all the wheels of their cars. As I was traveling into Ein el-Helweh with Mahmoud, Ghazi’s nephew, recently returned from collecting his master’s degree at the University of Malta, we were stopped by a stout young Lebanese recruit in battle fatigues, his Kalashnikov slung over one shoulder. He demanded to see what was in the trunk. It was full of books. After a thorough rummage, as thoughtless as it was arrogant, he waved us dismissively on. Mahmoud told me that not long before, a friend of his had been ordered to dismantle and remove all his car seats, and had to send for his wife inside the camp to bring him a screwdriver. When, some hours later, the car seats had been removed, the soldiers told him that they had no further interest in the car.