They arrived in Lebanon expecting to go home in a few weeks, but 58 years on, up to 75,000 Palestinians are still waiting. In the first of a two-part series, Deaglán de Bréadún, Foreign Affairs Correspondent, reports from the refugee camps.
It's the children and the old people who stick in your mind afterwards. The men and women who are now living out their twilight years in the crowded Palestinian refugee camps of Lebanon were just kids when they fled their homeland ahead of the advancing Israeli forces 58 years ago. They were fresh-faced, bright-eyed and playful, just like the new generation of Palestinians. Their parents expected to be taking them home in a matter of weeks or maybe a month. The refugees were mainly agricultural people, used to the fresh air and the mountains, the sun and the sea. Before long they would be back on their farms or in their native villages, Inshallah (God willing).
But God wasn't willing. Most of the parents have since passed away and the children of 1948 are now grandparents, entering the latter stages of a life without work, dignity, nationality or even proper sunlight in the cramped homes and narrow alleyways where they live. They have spent the last six decades waiting like passengers at a railway station for a train that has long since gone.
The Palestinians are now entering their fourth generation in the Lebanese camps. Even the pressure-cooker atmosphere and claustrophobic conditions of such places as Ein el-Hilweh or Nahr el-Bared cannot suppress the natural exuberance of childhood and there is mischief and laughter as they greet foreign visitors or chase a rubber ball along a narrow street.
Reality only starts to sink in when they get to the early teenage years, I was told. The Palestinians, in Lebanon and elsewhere, have a great hunger for education and the demand is so great and facilities so limited that classes frequently have to be held in shifts, morning and evening. But what is it all for? When they get to the end of their schooling they find themselves barred from all but the most menial tasks in Lebanese society, which is experiencing serious economic difficulties at the moment.
A special UN body, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), was established in 1949 with the specific mandate of providing basic educational, health and social services to the Palestinian refugees. Most observers agree that UNRWA does a good job at the humanitarian level, under very difficult circumstances and with limited resources.
But it's not a long-term solution. Sitting at his desk in Ein el-Hilweh ("Sweet Fountain"), near the southern Lebanese city of Sidon, Palestinian official Khalid Arif points out that the camp occupied one square kilometre of land in 1948, when there were 18,000 residents, and that it is still the same area today - except that there are now between 70,000 and 75,000 residents.
Ein el-Hilweh is a troubled place and rarely out of the news. Only last Monday, a 20-year-old man died and another man was wounded in an exchange of gunfire between the mainstream Fatah organisation and members of Jund al-Sham, a radical group said to be linked to al-Qaeda. The Lebanese army checks people on the way in and out but does not enter the camp, and it's the kind of place where you are never quite sure what is going to happen next.
Born in 1946 near Nazareth, in what was then British-controlled Palestine, Arif was only two years old when his family walked from their mountain-top village into southern Lebanon to escape the fighting that accompanied the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948. For the first five years or so the refugees lived in tents before being given the right to put up four walls where they lived - provided the roof was only made of corrugated iron. The Lebanese did not want them to get too comfortable, fearing - as they still do - that the Palestinians would settle in their new homes forever.
"Life or death, it's the same for us," says Arif. As with Ireland in days gone by, emigrants' remittances are the linchpin of the refugee economy and, like most Palestinians, Arif has relatives in such places as Dubai, Germany and Canada. More than 70 trades, professions and other occupations - from barber to doctor - are barred to them in Lebanon. The Palestinians say they only want human rights, not citizenship, from the Lebanese, who are themselves concerned about upsetting the delicate balance between different communities in their country.
"I still dream of going back to the homeland," says Arif.
ALTHOUGH THEY NO longer live under canvas, the dwellings of the Palestinians are mostly primitive, jerry-built structures made from cheap materials. The interiors are bare and spartan, except for a few humble decorations and posters of the late Yasser Arafat. Such is the pressure on space that frequently only one person at a time can walk the passageways between their homes. Green space and children's playgrounds are virtually non- existent. Many people have had to turn part of their residences into tiny shops, in order to make a living. Meanwhile, in downtown Beirut, a matter of miles away, luxury flats are selling for between $3 million (€2.4 million) and $15 million (€11.9 million).
Yet for all their travails, the Palestinian people are friendly and courteous. They may be the impoverished victims of an international political shipwreck but there is no bitterness or spite towards visitors. Nor is there any fear for your purse or wallet and nobody accosted us for money or alms as we walked their mean streets and alleyways, only children trying out English phrases learnt at school: "Hellooo Misterrr! How arre youuuu?" The Palestinians have lost everything except their pride.
The urgency of the Palestinians getting their own state is brought home by a visit to the refugee camps. Not only might some of them be able to live in such a state but it could also ease their position in the labour market in Lebanon. Under current legislation, no foreigner (and they are foreigners in this land) can work in a trade or profession unless there is a reciprocal right for Lebanese to take a similar job in the immigrant's country of origin. Since the Palestinians have no state, they cannot fulfil this requirement. Nor do Palestinians have passports, only a "Document de Voyage" or "Travel Document" which is often regarded with suspicion at points of entry to other lands.
PALESTINIANS CALL THE events of 1948 the "Naqba", or "catastrophe", and there were 401,171 refugees or their descendants registered with UNRWA in Lebanon as of last October, bringing the total population of the country to four million. Most of the ones we met were from the north of what is now the state of Israel. It is estimated that about 25 per cent are living outside the camps, either in other parts of Lebanon or overseas. At Rashidieh, near the southern Lebanese city of Tyre, most of the men have left because they cannot find work in the area and the ratio of females to males in the camp is four to one.
About 11 per cent of the refugees are hardship cases who get modest extra assistance in the form of cash and food. Mohammed Khalaf (40) explained that he had been out of work for the past year due to backache and respiratory problems and that his wife suffered from high blood pressure. The couple live at Ein el-Hilweh with their five children, aged from seven to 20 years. He gets a subsidy of $10 (€7.90) per family member every three months and he also receives a supply of basic foods such as sugar, milk and flour.
"I can't support my family," he says.
There are 12 camps in five different regions of Lebanon, a country about half the size of Wales. Although their geographical spread may make them less of a threat to the Lebanese state, many of them have a stormy history. Maha Moura, a resident of the Burj el-Barajneh camp near Beirut, tells a fairly typical story. During fierce fighting, her brother, Mohammad, was killed. The camp was under siege and there was no way to buryhim, so her mother kept his body in a cupboard for 15 days. He was one of two brothers who lost their lives.
"My father lost his mind," she says.
Another Burj el-Barajneh resident, Domoua (the name means "tears") Baytam, lives with her sister and two brothers in a single room where no natural light can enter. Her father was killed in fighting with the Amal Movement, a Shia Muslim faction, in 1985 and her mother was knocked down by a car and killed in 1999. She currently has a job as a typist, but the firm is closing down.
THE BEST-KNOWN AND most tragic of all the camps is Chatila, site of the infamous massacre in September 1982 when the right-wing Phalangist militia butchered anything from 700 to 3,500 residents despite the presence of Israeli forces in the vicinity. An official Israeli commission of inquiry concluded that Israeli military personnel knew a massacre was taking place at Sabra (a poor neighbourhood adjacent to the camp) and Chatila and that they failed to take serious steps to stop it. The report sharply criticised Ariel Sharon, who was defence minister at the time, and said he should never hold public office again. He became prime minister in 2001.
Coming up to the 25th anniversary of the massacre next year, there is no proper memorial to the victims. A market is located where most of the killing took place. There is a field nearby where many of the bodies were bulldozed into mass graves. A fading photographic display commemorates the Mikdad family, which lost 38 members, including a five-year-old girl and a boy who looks about 10 or 12. The Mikdads were Lebanese, but they shared the same fate as their Palestinian neighbours.
"The Phalangists killed everybody," says our guide. There was further bloodletting in the period between 1985 and 1988 during the so-called "war of the camps", when Palestinian refugees were besieged by Shia Amal militia members in a sub-conflict of the Lebanese civil war. There is a grim legacy from that time in the form of mass tombs for between 600 and 700 young people who died in the fighting. The population of the Chatila camp was 12,000 at the time of the 1982 massacre but has now dropped to about 3,000.
A committee has been set up to promote dialogue between the Lebanese government and the Palestinian community, presided over by a distinguished diplomat and former ambassador to Ireland, Dr Khalil Makkawi.
The frustration felt by many refugees is expressed by Naim Ghuneim, a pharmacist by profession and father of eight children, who lives at Nahr el-Bared camp in northern Lebanon. He worked in Libya for six years until Col Gadaffi expelled 30,000 Palestinians in 1995 in protest against the Oslo peace agreement. Unable to get a job as a pharmacist now because of the restrictions in Lebanon, he works in construction instead and showed me calluses on his hands from his daily toil. His college degree is no use to him.
"I am looking for a job in UNRWA as a school attendant, doorkeeper or cleaner," he told me.
Summing up the position of the Palestinians, an aid worker said: "They are unwelcome guests in Lebanon and they feel it." She put the dilemma of the vast majority of the refugees in bleak and pithy terms.
"They cannot emigrate; they cannot go back to Palestine; they can't work," she said. "There is no light at the end of the tunnel."
But the dream is being kept alive by people such as Hayyat Wehbeh, who still has the precious wooden box of land deeds and other legal papers that she brought with her when, as a girl of 14, she walked across the border from Palestine with her family in 1948. Her husband, Moussa, now aged 85, still hasn't given up hope. Asked if he ever expects to return home, he places his palm on the ground as though touching the land of Palestine, kisses it and puts it to his forehead: "Only God knows but we still hope and we still believe." Inshallah.
- The visit of Deaglán de Bréadún and Frank Miller to Lebanon was funded by the Development Education Unit of Irish Aid. A gallery of Frank Miller's photographs is available on www.ireland.com/ focus/lebanon, the online edition of The Irish Times.