Tears for Tarshiha Page 4
‘The Lebanese government does not want them here,’ he said.
When I asked why they would support a war and killing, it was my mother who answered.
‘Look at how we are living here in this refugee camp—in one miserable small room. Back in Palestine we have a large house and huge lands; our house and land are still there. Lebanon is not our home. All we want is to go back to the decent life we had before. These young men are here to protect us from the Lebanese government that is making our lives even more miserable. We’re doing nothing here. We’re just existing in this terrible place.’
That was a turning point in my life as it opened my eyes to our armed struggle. It was from those years that I began to realise we had to fight to liberate Palestine. I saw that my mother was right. Why should she do all the housework at night and early in the morning just because the Lebanese police said so? Why did we have no space to play in? Why should we tolerate being treated without respect; and why should we allow our people to be harassed, intimidated, tortured and killed? My family and all the camp residents supported these young fighters, the feda’yeen, in any way we could. We would give them olives, halaweh, and tins of whatever we had. My mother and all the women would knit socks, jumpers, hats and scarves in military green wool and send them to the fighters. All the refugees wanted to do everything they could to help the struggle to return to Palestine.
Around this time an incident occurred that brought home to me just how vulnerable we were. Uncle Ahmad, my mother’s brother, was a journalist on a local paper in Beirut. One night he failed to come home. My relatives searched for him and eventually found him in prison, arrested because an article he wrote about the PLO upset the Lebanese security forces. The Lebanese owner of the newspaper that published his article was not accused of any crime, but my uncle was in prison for more than a year. I was very close to him and during his incarceration, the family feared for his safety. My grandmother used to visit him every day and we worked hard with local lawyers to have him freed. After his release, my uncle was expelled from Lebanon, and I remember wondering why we should suffer like this. My uncle’s was not an isolated case, of course. We all knew the price of speaking out in Lebanon about our struggle for freedom.
Lebanon in the late 1960s was ripe for revolution. Lebanese unions, students and leftist organisations became more vocal and active in their fight against social inequalities. The two key issues were economic disparity and political dominance by the Christians, the latter being a legacy of the first National Pact, set up by the French colonial power that created Lebanon’s ‘confessional’ system, which divided political power between the various religious sects while ensuring Christian dominance. 10
Under the leadership of Kamal Jumblat’s Druze Progressive Socialist Party (PSP), a left-leaning and mostly Muslim group, the Lebanese National Movement (LNM) was formed to challenge this dominance and social disparity between the rich urban Christians and Muslims and the rural poor Muslims, including fishermen, in the country’s south. This LNM supported the Palestinian struggle for liberation, but its focus was on Lebanese issues. Palestinians in return supported the LNM but likewise, were focused on their own liberation. In the camps that meant rising up against the oppressive regime of the Deuxieme Bureau, as the broader PLO resistance increased its attacks on Israel both from Jordan and the south of Lebanon.
These attacks came with a price as the camps that housed and hid the PLO fighters became a target for attack by the Lebanese military. I remember in particular one day in 1969 when we were evacuated from school as Lebanese tanks and planes were bombing the camp and nearby area. We were all terrified: many students were injured and killed as they fled. I raced home to find that my mother had prepared all our UNRWA identification and a few clothes. She told us we were leaving the camp, as it was not safe to stay. Our house offered no protection and my mother had a cousin who lived in a block of flats just outside the camp. We ran as fast as we could to the flat while the bombing continued around us. More than 50 members of my family crowded into the two-room dwelling. My sister and brothers and I huddled together trembling in terror in the corner of the lounge room. Children cried and covered their ears to block out the sound of the bombs crashing into the buildings nearby. My mother and my aunts prayed for us to be protected from being killed.
That day two teenage brothers from my school were killed in the most brutal way. Lebanese soldiers shot and wounded one brother as he was coming into the camp near the airport road. They wounded the other brother when he ran back to save his sibling. The soldiers caught both of them and, in front of the crowd of refugees who had gathered, kicked and smashed them with their rifle butts until they died. The boys’ mother, who watched this brutality helplessly from inside the camp, was traumatised for months and years from grief and shock.
The brothers were in their last year of school studying for their Baccalaureate, in preparation for going to university. I knew them well and was deeply affected by their deaths; I was too young to be able to articulate my emotions, but I became depressed and slept all the time, rarely eating. At times I would feel full of anger and want to lash out and hurt the soldiers who had killed these boys. At that time, many people I knew were being killed by bombs or were shot—but the killing of the brothers was my first contact with senseless murder. The injustice of their deaths stays with me today.
Around this time, the father of my best friend, Salima, was also killed. During an intense attack on the camp by the Lebanese army, a shell hit Salima’s house and her father was killed instantly. After that, I lived in perpetual terror of a bomb, a rocket or shell hitting our house and my family or myself being wounded or killed. Not surprisingly, I never slept deeply, always afraid something would happen. Often, when there was fighting, we had to flee the house in the night to a safe place. My mother had made a belt of cloth in which she kept our refugee papers, our birth certificates and her money. She wore it around her waist, day and night; and close at hand was always a small bag with a change of clothes for us.
When the bombing started, we would race from the house through the narrow, winding camp lanes to my cousin’s place outside the camp. My brother Nader was 13, Ihab, 11, and I was nine. My sister, Hanadie, was four and my baby brother, Amer, two. One of us would carry our bag of clothes; one of the boys would take Hanadie, and my mother would carry the baby, as we ran for our lives. The men, including my father, would stay in the camp trying to protect it. It was terrifying to have this killing and death around us all the time. We children would shiver and cry, wishing we could be far away from all this noise and terror. I would think of places to which we could flee, where my family could be safe, and often it was to Tarshiha that my thoughts would travel.
While the thought of returning to Tarshiha was a momentary respite from the hell in which I lived, for my grandparents the belief they would go home never faded regardless of our circumstances. This was brought home to me in the Spring of 1970—22 years after they had been exiled at gunpoint. I was with my sisters, Mervat and Hanadie, at my grandparents’ house helping my grandmother with her annual spring clean. Under my grandparents’ bed I found a small box containing nails, a hammer and a large rusty key. When I saw it I asked my grandfather, Abu Ahmad, ‘What’s this old rusted key for?’
My grandfather answered simply, ‘It is the key to our house in Palestine’.
I laughed and said with all the hurtful innocence of youth, ‘What house! ‘Your land is occupied. The house is not yours anymore.’
My grandfather and grandmother became very angry. Abu Ahmad grabbed the box from me, berating me. ‘Don’t you know what this means? This is the key to my home. This house here in this miserable camp is not my real house. My house in Palestine is the one I inherited from my parents and my grandparents and where I have fields and crops and animals. This is not my place.’
At that moment, I felt so ashamed by the hurt I had caused them—I thi
nk it was then that I truly understood at last the terrible suffering their exile caused; and a deep sorrow I could never express, lodged in my soul.
5
A PEOPLE’S ARMY
At the end of 1969, life in the camps changed dramatically. With Egyptian President Nasser brokering the talks, a PLO delegation headed by Arafat met with its Lebanese counterparts, led by General Emile Bustani. Under a deal known as the Cairo Agreement, control over the 16 Palestine refugee camps in Lebanon passed from the Lebanese Armed Forces to the Palestinian Armed Struggle Command. The Cairo Agreement essentially created a ‘state within a state’ and gave the PLO the authority to establish educational and humanitarian services, and under specific guidelines, to maintain a military presence in the refugee camps.11
It is hard to comprehend that a piece of paper could have changed our lives so much. When the PLO moved into Burj Barajneh we suddenly felt free. The hated police points around and inside our camp vanished. We could do things we could not do before. For the first time in 20 years we could build proper houses with bricks and cement, and we could build upwards to accommodate our growing families. And while our two-storey brick homes felt more able to withstand any bombing raids, the PLO also built underground shelters in the camp to ensure we would have a safe place to retreat to during war.
For women like my mother, the PLO’s intervention brought a revolution on the home front. It arranged for power lines from the city grid to be brought to the camp and, while we could not have power regularly, for the first time we had electric lights and could cool things in the summer. At the same time the group also increased the number of water points, tapped the artesian water under the camp, and installed pumps and water pipes. We could now wash in the mornings and women could do their housework during the day. The long nights of washing and cleaning became a thing of the past and I am sure my mother was eternally grateful to regain her sleeping hours.
These small improvements in our lives were repaid with an intense loyalty to the PLO leadership. In providing us with basic services, the PLO had reclaimed our dignity and honour, and for the first time since my family had been forced from Palestine, we felt protected. Importantly we felt we had wrested back control of our lives. Palestinians were running our government and working in our services. But as always for the Palestinians in Lebanon, this semblance of normality would be disturbed by events beyond our control.
The Cairo Agreement was strongly resisted by some of the Lebanese Christian political parties, in particular, the Christian Kata’eb party, which was backed by the Catholic Maronites. Under Pierre Gemayel, the Kata’eb, which was often referred to as the Phalangist party, had long been a paramilitary organisation with established fascist leanings. As the captain of the Lebanese football team, Gemayel had attended the 1936 Olympics in Germany and had been impressed with Hitler’s National Socialism, and his youth brigades in particular. He made no secret that he was impressed by the order and discipline of Hitler’s Third Reich.12
Being a major player in Lebanon’s Christian community, Gemayel’s Kata’eb party was ideologically opposed to the socialist-leaning LNM and its support of the Palestinians. Kata’eb also spoke against the Palestinian presence in Lebanon, not because of its socialist and pan-Arabist leanings, but for the potential threat hundreds of thousands of mostly Sunni Muslim Palestinian refugees posed to Lebanon’s political ‘confessional’ system with its preferred treatment of Christians. As the PLO’s power base grew in Lebanon, direct contact between Israel and the Christian-led Lebanese Government began to grow. The Israelis saw in Lebanon a potential ally against the Palestinians, as well as a Christian buffer against its Arab enemies who were committed to Israel’s overthrow; so they began to assist and train the Christian militia.
The Christian Kata’eb party’s concern over the potential for Palestinian Muslims to upset the political balance was further exacerbated by the events in Jordan. After the 1967 war with Israel, many Palestinian fighters moved to Jordan and used the Arab nation’s border with Israel as a base for attacks against the occupation. As in the camps in Lebanon, Palestinians ran a state-within-a-state in Jordan, headquartered in Amman. As Arafat’s organisation grew in strength, funded by a number of Arab states and Palestinians living in the Gulf who paid the PLO a portion of their salaries, the group began to openly challenge the rule of Jordan’s King Hussein. The simmering conflict erupted in September 1970 when the Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacked four international airplanes, blowing up three in the Jordanian desert. In what is known as Black September, fighting erupted between the Jordanian military and the PLO. Thousands of Palestinian fighters and civilians living in the camps were killed as were many Jordanian civilians. This led to the expulsion of the PLO from Jordan. Many of these fighters and their families, mostly from the West Bank and Gaza, and enabled by the Cairo Agreement came to the camps in Lebanon, where they settled amongst us and received a heroes’ welcome.
We were extraordinarily proud of these fighters and, with my brothers and sisters, I took any opportunity to see them training on the grounds near Haifa hospital. For me, these young men and women were the strongest people in the world. Their faces blackened with kohl, they would climb ropes, jump and crawl on the ground and run in a variety of exercises. People from the camp encouraged them, clapping furiously as each exercise was successfully completed. It was while watching our PLO military graduates train that I settled on my own career ambitions as I realised that the graduates I admired most were the men and women dressed in white—the first-aid workers. I recalled the killing of the two brothers and the death of my friend’s father, and decided that, rather than be a fighter, I wanted to save lives. I would be a doctor so that I could serve my people this way.
The social and educational services the PLO provided complemented those of UNRWA. In addition to providing some preventative health clinics and emergency food, UNRWA was responsible for our education. It gave us six years in primary school and four years in high school. To get into university, we had to complete a further three years at a private school. Until the late 1960s, the content of the primary and secondary school curricula, including history and geography, was determined by UNRWA. Our Palestinian history was not part of either curriculum. But when the PLO came to the camps, that all that changed and we began to learn about our own history. This made a big difference to us as we were introduced to the ancient history of Palestine and the more recent events of 1948 that led to our exile. We were also allowed to have a student council with elected representatives whose role it was to take student concerns to teachers and the headmaster. All the Palestinian political parties were represented in the camps and at that time, in Burj Barajneh, the mainstream PLO political group was al-Fatah, but the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, (PFLP) the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DPLP) and the more radical group Sa’eqa also had offices there. The main political groups had women’s and youth groups and most young people were involved in these groups too.
Across the globe in the 1970s many teenagers were revelling in a new-found freedom and liberty their parents had never enjoyed. Jeans were the fashion item of the moment and disco was king. But these were experiences I never shared or felt I had a right to indulge. My teenage years in the late 1970s were surrounded by war and death. All teenagers like to think they are rebels, but our rebellion was real—we were fighting to liberate Palestine.
I became involved in politics proper in 1974 with encouragement from a teacher, joining the school student council. I also began to visit the youth group’s office on the camp’s edge near Haifa hospital. The PLO provided us with this office space—there was a large communal area with table tennis tables and room enough for our cultural activities: singing, dancing and other performances. On the walls were posters of our leaders and martyrs. We were thirsty for knowledge and the youth group leaders often held workshops on history and politics. I l
earnt many administrative skills including how to work with, and co-ordinate, people. In time I also started to teach other students skills such as first aid. It was good leadership training and gave me a sense that I was helping my people, which had become very important to me.
As I became politicised I began to take more notice of world politics. I saw Arafat’s 1974 address to the UN as a major breakthrough, and importantly it helped identify for me the 105 UN member states that supported our struggle for liberation. Yet it changed nothing: Israel continued in its refusal to withdraw from the Palestinian Occupied Territories and the international community remained complicit through its inaction.
The following year our world erupted as Lebanon descended into a civil war that would last 15 years. It began on an ordinary day, March 10, 1975. I was with two school friends in the centre of Beirut buying presents to mark the Lebanese National Teachers’ Day 13—a school holiday the day before—when war broke out. One minute we were shopping and laughing, the next we were surrounded by military: soldiers appeared on buildings, taking up strategic positions; tanks roared along the major roads, and fighter planes screamed overhead. Everyone around us looked at each other, their eyes wide with fear. Mothers pulled their children close, and I grasped my friends’ arms for comfort. People started asking each other nervously what was happening. We became even more anxious when we saw roadblocks being erected on the main city road where we had been shopping.
People around us ran to get a bus or taxi, but none could get through the roadblocks. Along with thousands now trapped in the city, we started walking rapidly, heads down, desperate to return to the relative safety of our camp homes. Avoiding the main roads and holding each other’s hands, we moved quickly through the city’s back streets, passing army checkpoints and numerous military patrols. We were grateful we had our refugee cards with us otherwise we would have been arrested. Outside the centre of the city, the roads were jammed with cars, taxis and buses, all tooting their horns hoping it could somehow force the vehicle in front to move. Through all this noise and confusion, it took us more than an hour to reach our home in the camp.