The New York Times has an article on Fatah-Hamas relations in the West Bank, that points to some of the problems the two will have in implementing their unity agreement (i.e. there’s bad blood and minimal trust between the two). Among other things, the article mentions “the Amari refugee camp, abutting the city of Ramallah…” In fact, the Amari mukhayyam (refugee camp) does not abut Ramallah but is fully inside it, a 15-minute walk from Manarah square (below, my photos), which is the heart of the city.
Here are some photos I took of the Amari mukhayyam two years ago:
During the stroll I told my friend, a Palestinian from Ramallah (not of refugee origin), that I thought many of Amari’s inhabitants originally came from Lydda (Lod). She didn’t know but then we got the confirmation:
Fatah rules the roost, of course.
The NYT article says that Amari “looks today like a poor neighborhood of the city…” Well, I would call it a quartier populaire more than a poor neighborhood; it’s not the slums and not everyone who lives there is poor. E.g. poor people tend not to drive late model cars. And when one enters private homes, one notes that the inhabitants do not live lives of deprivation. We were spontaneously and graciously invited in for coffee by one family (when it comes to hospitality, no people on earth can beat the Palestinians).
I’m not sure what the occupation of the father (on the couch) was but it was no doubt skilled, enough to give the family what appeared to be a middle-class standard of living. One of the sons (the father of the girl above), who didn’t stay for coffee, was wearing a t-shirt with the logo below (I wasn’t able to get a photo of him before he left):
When I told my friend—who’s in her 30s, educated, politicized, and doesn’t particularly care for Israel, to put it mildly—after we left how deliciously ironic I found the older son’s t-shirt, she didn’t know what I was talking about. For her, it was just the emblem of a football team and which, she informed me, has numerous Palestinian fans this side of the separation barrier. Who knew? I told her about Beitar and its origins in Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionist movement and Menachem Begin’s Herut party, which was the predecessor of the Likud, etc, etc. She hadn’t heard of any of it. It meant nothing to her. She just went “Oh”… No reaction. No indignation.
Back to the family above, the parents were refugees from Lydda/Lod. They had no memory of it—nor of the expulsion in ’48—, as they were children at the time (ages 8 and 6). They didn’t once go back there during the two decades that followed the ’67 Israeli conquest—when there were no checkpoints and West Bankers could freely visit Israel—, as they had heard that their families’ homes no longer existed. So no point. But they still insisted on the sacrosanct “right of return,” that Lydda was home—even though they’d lived in Ramallah/Al-Amari almost all their lives—, and, yes, they would indeed return there at the first possible moment inshallah. When I asked the son (seated next to me) how he felt about this, he started to timidly say something to the effect of “Well, I’ve lived my whole life in Ramallah, this is the only place I know, I guess this is home…” This got his parents all agitated, prompting my friend to tell me that I had posed a question on a very sensitive issue. Basically, his parents shut him up and told him that Lydda was his home, not Ramallah, end of discussion. They were enforcing the narrative. Afterward my friend recounted an incident from several years earlier (which I had remembered reading about), of how the Ramallah office of the Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki was trashed by armed Fatah men and with employees beaten, as Shikaki had merely asked, in one of his polls, if ’48 refugees and their descendants would give up the “right of return” in return for monetary compensation. Physically attacked for merely asking the question… (The incident occurred in 2003). Message: do not mess with the narrative!
In my mind, the attitude of the parents—really nice people—on this particular question is not entirely reasonable. If it were just the personal sentiment of individuals, it wouldn’t be a problem. But as it is the core narrative of an entire people—of a nation in formation—, then it becomes a problem. Indeed a huge problem. The Palestinian narrative on the “right of return” is not only unreasonable, it is dysfunctional. But no Palestinian leadership—now or in the future—will cede on it, just as no Israeli leadership—now or ever—will accommodate it, even symbolically. So even if the Israelis and Palestinians could resolve all their other problems, a potential peace deal will collapse over the “right of return.” And here, the Palestinians will be the ones responsible for the failure. That’s my position, at any rate, and which I’ll develop at greater length at the opportune moment.
As I’m on the subject, I also visited the Dheisheh mukhayyam during my 2009 trip. Dheisheh was outside of Bethlehem when the camp was created in ’48 but is now part of the city. My main interlocutor there said that there are hardly any ’48 refugees left in the mukhayyam. Just about everyone is a descendant of refugees, not refugees themselves, but who, according to my interlocutor, still insist they will return to the bucolic (now non-existent) villages of their forefathers some 20 km away in Israel, till the land, cultivate the olive groves, and live the mythic rural life… Oh, well.
The narrative – as narrative – is very interesting.
Great photographs; I don’t see very many in the media of such quality.
Thanks. When it comes to taking photos, I’m as amateur as they come.