Human Cargo (31 page)

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W
hen Mahmut went to collect the few belongings, the mattresses, quilts, and cooking pots that his family had salvaged from their house, he brought them piled high on a camel that had been borrowed for the journey over the mountains. His daughter Zainab remembers the animal well. She had not been expecting anything as exotic, and she can recall it with the sharpness of a photograph, just as she remembers with perfect clarity the earlier flight from Balad al Sheik, stumbling without shoes across the rocky hillside as dawn was breaking and the first slit of sun touched the horizon, crouching down in the gullies, dragging her younger brothers and sisters by their hands, while behind them she could hear the crack of the rifles and see the flames as the soldiers set fire to their house. It was cold and very still.

That was New Year’s Eve, 1947. She was twelve. The Haganah, the Jewish underground armed organization, was beginning its assault on the mountain villages above Haifa, flushing out the Arab fighters, of whom her father was one, driving them farther back up
into the mountains, toward the isolated stone shack that her grandfather had built for the hot summer months, when he lent his village house to guests.

The attack on Balad al Sheik, one of the first acts of reprisal in the war between Arabs and Zionists, had been prompted by the killing of forty-one Jewish oil refinery workers the night before, itself a gesture of revenge for the deaths of six Palestinians at the gates of the refinery. Mahmut, unlike many of the other villagers, owned a gun; he was a man of standing and land, some of which he had sold to buy the gun and the ammunition to go with it, for the Arab resistance was very short of weapons. He was a farmer, she explained to me when I visited her in the autumn of 2002, who grew carrots and cabbages, as well as corn, wheat, and barley; he grew olive trees and grapevines, pressing oil from the olives and fermenting a little vinegar from the grapes; her mother supervised the making of jam, and there was a small shop in which the produce was sold. There were cows, large black and white Dutch cows that gave milk three times a day, and some sheep. Their house had many rooms because her father was a well-known man, and many people came to call on him and drink the coffee that was always kept ready for visitors.

Zainab can also remember, and can recite, step by step, the stages of their journey into exile, the weeks in Majed al Koroum, while her father crept back to their village under cover of dark to see whether it was safe to go home; the drive on by hired truck in search of greater safety when he returned to tell them that there was little left standing of the fine house, with its two stories and many rooms, and that many people in the village had been slaughtered, whole families lined up against the village wall and shot in reprisal for Haganah deaths. An account written later recorded that orders had been given by Haganah to “encircle the village, harm the largest possible number of men, damage property, and refrain from attacking women and children.” After they left Majed al Koroum, they heard that twelve of those who elected to stay had been executed in the village square by the Israel Defense Forces. Zainab can describe the months spent in a rented house over the border in Lebanon, waiting,
trying to understand the nature of the war, while Mahmut crossed and recrossed the border, visiting his family only by night, and the women prepared food and provisions for the fighters up in the hills; and the arrival, many months later, at Shatila, the refugee camp opened not long before on Beirut’s western slopes.

Fifty-four years later, she remembers these things very clearly, and particularly the family house and their lands and the way the fruit trees grew and the many celebrations of village life, and the occasional trips into Haifa, by Bus Number 1 from the village square, to see her aunts, or to buy clothes and shoes and the fruit that could not be found in the hills, because she rehearses these memories every day, savoring the image of lost and stolen happiness. Balad al Sheik had, she says, two coffee shops, and a school dating back to Ottoman times. And when Marwan, her eldest son, who has never been to what are now the Palestinian territories, takes his mother out on Fridays in his car and up into the hills around Shatila, she points up at the bald ocher mountains that surround Beirut, their lower slopes spotted by trees and scrub, and says: “That is what our mountain was like. That house, over there, on that hillside, was what our house was like. Those fields, below, those could be our fields.” Memory is, and has been for half a century, the defining element of her life.

Zainab is sixty-seven, a mild, silent woman with a soft, round face and sad eyes. On her face can be seen what Edward Said once called the “marks of disaster uncomprehended,” the reflection of “a past interrupted, a society obliterated, an existence radically impoverished.” In her expression there is a look of profound resignation and a complete absence of all expectation, as if her life has been a series of improvisations and suspended hopes. For the past fifty-four years Zainab has been a refugee, a displaced person living in the Palestinian refugee camp of Shatila, which, in 1982, became a byword for Israeli violence and aggression. Among its inhabitants there are not very many today who remember the Naqba, the “disaster,” the name Palestinians all over the world give to the uprooting from their homeland in 1948, when the British pulled out of their former
mandate territory and the new state of Israel was carved out of land the Palestinians believed to be theirs. There are few still alive who experienced the flight into exile, either in Shatila or in Lebanon’s eleven other official Palestinian refugee camps, or in the diaspora that has taken Palestinians to camps in Jordan, Syria, and Kuwait, and scattered them from one end of the world to the other. Refugee life is hard on the elderly, and diabetes, high blood pressure, respiratory problems, and heart disease have all taken their toll on those who fled as children in 1948. Zainab, like all the older refugees, looks much more than her sixty-seven years. She is severely diabetic and has had one heart attack. She walks slowly, with a slight stoop. The “notables,” the men and women who were already adult and leaders in their communities when they fled, are regarded as people apart, both for what they have been through and for what they remember. They are custodians not simply of the Palestinian collective history, but of the affirmation that the Palestinians exist, and have always existed, despite all the attempts to make them disappear from the mind and conscience of much of the world.

Over half of those now living in Shatila are children, the grandchildren of the Naqba. Neither they nor their parents—born when the camp was a rocky field of tents, tethered precariously in the hard ground—have ever been to the territories, but they hold on to the dream of going home with an intensity that, like Zainab’s, defies questioning. Ask a passing child in the camps where he comes from; he will reply with the name of the village from which his grandparents came over half a century ago. Ask him to draw a flag, and he will draw the flag of Palestine. The “right of return,” in Palestinian Arabic “awdah,” the much debated, much disputed Resolution 194,
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which no one except the Palestinians really any longer believes could possibly be enacted, is more than a tenet of their faith; it is an immutable fact, a necessity. “I want to go home,” says Zainab. “I
want to go home and grow old there and be buried in our cemetery.” That the village of Balad al Sheik has long since been bulldozed; that the square in which the men once sat and talked is now a concrete playground played on by Israeli children; that the marble slabs have long since been stolen from the tomb of Shaykh Izz al-Din al-Qassam, the great lighter against British rule; that a Jewish settlement stands on what were once her father’s olive groves; that apples grow in place of corn; and that her identity card, categorizing her as a Palestinian without a state, forbids her from going anywhere—these facts are neither interesting nor important to her. Balad al Sheik does not even exist as a name any more: it is now Tel Chanan, part of the larger town of Nesher. But what concerns Zainab is very simple: it is her right to go home, and the right of her children and grandchildren to inherit the land of her father and her husband. That dream, the certainty that return will happen, has sustained her for over half a century; it has held her together during the years of poverty and deprivation, through the shelling and the civil war, the fear and the uncertainty. It has made possible an entire life lived in a corridor of the mind. Like all dreams, it has become an alibi, a shadow; and like all such shadows, it does not bear disturbing.

Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, writing about his boyhood in Bethlehem, described his childhood as a “blend of memory and dream, of existential intensity and poetic trance, a blend in which the rational and the irrational interpenetrate and intertwine.” Jabra, who spent his life in exile in Iraq, said that these memories formed a well full of water gathered “from the rains of the heaven and the flow of experiences—to go back to when we are seized by thirst and when drought afflicts our land.” But childhood memories, as he noted, are susceptible to alteration, and when a person draws on that particular well, he can never be sure that the water will rise cool and clear or turbid and muddy, while the memories of the lost Palestine are frozen in time, immutable and forever happy.

Return to Palestine is not, of course, all that Zainab wants. She wants, so much that it makes her cry to talk about it, to see her third son, Tariq, again. Tariq was forced to flee Beirut after the Israeli invasion
of 1982 when he was a young fighter for the Palestine Liberation Organization, and he now works in Oxford. In the last ten years, she has seen Tariq just once, when he was living in Cyprus and was smuggled into Shatila for a three-day visit when she was ill, but he had to leave early when it became known that the Lebanese army was still looking for him. “Tell him,” she said, when I explained that I would soon be meeting Tariq in Oxford, “tell him that I am well and healthy. Tell him that you found me…” She paused, looking for the right word, her expression of anxiety and defeat barely visible in the dim room. “Tell him that you found me fresh.”

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SHATILA, IN THE
pale twilight of an early winter evening, is a wretched place. Long before you reach the camp itself—walking past the bombed Gaza hospital, once the pride of the Palestinian doctors and now home to some 900 “displaced” refugees; walking through the street market that divides the former camp of Sabra from Shatila—you begin to notice the smell. It is sweet, heavy, sickly, and it catches in your throat. It comes from the meat, newly butchered and piled on barrows; from the chickens, penned in wicker cages and piled one on top of another; from the vegetables rotting on the ground; and from the sewage, which seeps up steadily from the gutters, so that the dirt road is wet and sticky. It is a smell of too many people, living too closely together, in too great poverty.

There are said to be a few more than 12,300 people in the camp of Shatila, occupying an area of six hundred yards by six hundred yards where Palestinians mix with Syrians, poor Lebanese from the south, Kurds, and Africans seeking asylum. It has one of the densest populations outside Gaza in the world. Walking deeper into the camp—because there is no perimeter fence, no army checkpoint, the residents of Lebanon’s other camps dismiss Shatila with scorn as not a true camp—among people shuffling their way past stalls and donkeys and carts and barely moving cars, the road narrows first into alleys, and then into passages and corridors, some no wider than a man’s shoulders. Below, where water pipes coil along the uneven
ground, and rubbish and rubble choke the gutters, lies a patina of dirt and water. Recent plans by the UN Relief and Works Agency and the European Union to install sewage, drainage, and water systems have stalled; there is never enough water, and what there is arrives by main pipes laid alongside sewage drains, with latrines that flow into open drains and along the pathways. The descendants of the original families have built rooms one above another, precarious cinder-block boxes that seem to teeter as they rise. The buildings almost touch. Forbidden to build outward—the Lebanese are reluctant to confer any sense of permanence on the refugees whose arrival they were forced to accept—the Palestinians have built upward, accommodating children and grandchildren on the same site where the first arrivals pitched their tents in the 1940s and 1950s. When there was no space left between the buildings, the owners filled the air above.

Today much of the inner camp is almost completely dark, the daylight reduced to a pale glimmer by the overarching buildings and the canopy of wires that dangle not far above the head. Windows open onto walls. The air smells damp. Within the houses, the flickering of uncertain electricity—supplied for eight hours a day—and the twenty-watt bulbs are hardly enough by which to distinguish expressions on people’s faces. Talking to Zainab, wanting to learn what being a refugee means to the Palestinians of her generation, I couldn’t see what she was thinking. I peer at my notes, unable to make out what I was writing.

Zainab has three ground-floor rooms, which she occupies with her two unmarried daughters and her husband, who, like her, fled the Naqba as a child from Balad al Sheik, and to whom she had been betrothed long before the families came to Shatila. There is almost nothing in the main room to suggest a past: no early photographs, no pictures, no ornaments. There was no time, she says, to bring them. To one side, at the end of a damp, almost entirely dark passage, lives one son, Eyad, with his family; on the floor above, Marwan, her eldest son, now fifty, with his wife, Naifa, and their three sons. A third son, Ghassam, was knocked down by a car when
he was ten; he spent many weeks in a coma and his speech has never fully come back. A daughter, Aziza, who is married to a pathologist, is close by. Zainab has fifteen grandchildren, two of them, Tariq’s daughters, in Oxford. Her father was one of the first refugees to settle in Shatila. The site of his tent, chosen by another leader in the community, near to his own tent and to the mosque, was a good spot in the early days. Now it lies in the dark inner heart of the camp.