Human Cargo Page 26
While the civil war between the alliance of the Christian Falangists and the Israelis on one side (Israel had been training and arming the Falangists since 1976) and the Muslims and the Palestinians on the other was becoming more bitter, Tariq was rising through Fatah’s ranks, coordinating missions of fighters against the Falangists. Wounded one day by a sniper, he came around from a series of operations to find that his injuries had relegated him to office work. Fretting at the inactivity, he agreed to go to Moscow to learn Russian, most of it now, he says, forgotten. The plan had been for him to stay seven years and take a degree. He liked life in the Soviet Union, and he was intrigued by Palestinians from other parts of the diaspora whom he met in the university halls, but he felt too distanced from the things he really cared about. Before the first year was over, he was making his way back through Egypt and into Beirut. When he got there he found that seventeen of his own recruits were dead, killed in the fighting. He blamed himself for having recruited them and began to drink heavily, uncertain about his own future. The Syrians were now bombing Beirut; Tariq and the rest of his family, who had connections in Ein el-Helweh refugee camp in Sidon, moved to greater safety along the coast.
Then, on June 6, 1982, the Israelis again invaded, in response to a series of Palestinian guerrilla attacks launched from Lebanon. Bombing and shelling, they made their way along the coast, reaching Beirut, their tanks bowling along the Corniche. The highest casualties were in Beirut itself, but many also died in Sidon and the Palestinian refugee camp of Ein el-Helweh, and hundreds more in the villages of southern Lebanon. It was a while before people realized that the Israelis were using cluster bombs, having bought them from the Americans on the express understanding that they would never be used against civilians.
Tariq was in Shatila in late August when the PLO agreed to evacuate the camp under a UN-sponsored cease-fire agreement, taking its fighters into exile in return for guaranteed safety for the civilians and families left behind. He was not among the 12,000 or so who left, but instead avoided the dragnet and hid himself and some weapons, fearing some dark event of retribution, but not knowing how and where it would come from. He was in the camp the night of September 14 when Bashir Gemayel, the newly appointed Falangist prime minister, was assassinated and the Palestinians were blamed for his murder, and he was at home, in the family house, the night the Israelis began advancing on Sabra and Shatila. He began to try to organize some kind of resistance, seeking out those few Palestinians who still had weapons, bringing together one with a rocket launcher, another with a Kalashnikov. Most of the night of September 16, the Israelis and the Lebanese forces shelled the camp; inside, the rubble from the falling houses, their cinder-block walls and powdery foundations pitifully inadequate as protection, blocked the path for those trying to reach the wounded. Tariq decided that his job was to rescue the injured. His friend Jamal, shot in the head, died as he was carrying him in his arms. Talking of the killings now, Tariq weeps.
His family had scattered in the shelling. Some of his relations were taking shelter in Sabra, where the massacre would continue next day. Others were hiding in a basement under the offices of Fatah, or behind the main water tank supplying the camp. For the next three days, the killings and arrests and disappearances continued, but Tariq and his father and uncles succeeded in getting the family together and to safety. Israeli soldiers with loudspeakers were rounding up all Palestinian men and Fariq fled to Lebanese friends at the other end of Beirut, only to be turned away. He felt bitter, but not surprised. Returning, he was arrested with his father and two brothers. A Lebanese friend, working with the soldiers, intervened to have them released. Many Palestinian men were led away to the sports stadium whose tall stands still loom over the camp; few were ever seen again.
No one has ever established precisely how many people died in the attacks, though it was later said that the Israeli offensive, and particularly the shelling of Beirut, killed 18,000 people and wounded 30,000. When reporters were at last able to approach Shatila they noted, first of all, the smell, and then the flies. As they advanced, they found bodies everywhere—small children, women, elderly people—lying in the alleys, inside the houses, by the roadside, on the rubbish dumps, knifed or machine-gunned to death. When they reached a hundred corpses, they stopped counting. There were pools of blood on the ground, still wet.
Tariq escaped and was hidden by American friends in the city. Three weeks later, he took up an invitation from a printing school in the UK to study abroad. “My mother told me to go. She was terrified that I would be killed if I stayed.” He was slipped out of Lebanon and eventually found himself in London, in the gray solitariness of a foreign autumn day. He had become not just a refugee, but doubly an exile, without possibility of return. Behind him, he left attacks and resistance against the Israelis fueled by Amal, an increasingly vocal Shiite Muslim militia. He was in Oxford, not in Shatila, where he felt he should be, when in 1985 the Israelis withdrew, the Syrians returned, and Amal launched an attack on Shatila, which was still largely in ruins. The “war of the camps,” pitting Amal against the Palestinians, would last until the end of 1987. Sabra, and Gaza Hospital, which stood along its edge, were destroyed; patients and staff from the hospital were led away by Amal militia, many never to reappear. Those who had survived the massacre in Shatila now lived through a series of sieges that took them to the very edges of endurance. Intensive shelling drove them as far underground as they could burrow, in garages and basements. Medical services for the wounded and dying became minimal, as the one trained doctor remaining used coins and Band-Aids to stop air escaping from perforated lungs and made splints out of wooden doors. Under assault, Shatila’s inhabitants grew close together. Communal kitchens produced food, contributed by those who still had supplies. Zainab and the other women left their dark houses, with a freedom they had never had before, and carried food to the fighters. The rationed water and cigarettes were shared until they ran out altogether. At one point, 6,000 shells a day were falling on the 245 acres of the camp.
Unable to carry the dead for burial to the cemetery on the edge of the camp, the people buried them in the mosque, in the concrete floor. Today it is a shrine to 350 men who lost their lives in the fighting. A flat platform of gray marble covers the place where they were laid, swaddled roughly in sheets, alongside and on top of one another. It is one of Shatila’s stopping points for visitors, with its grille looking into the makeshift tomb, decorated by Palestinian flags, the names of the dead engraved down one marble wall. After the invasion and the wars, a floor was built above, where today the men gather to pray.
Between the three sieges, which saw 2,500 Palestinians dead and three of every four of their houses destroyed, it was, says Marwan, Tariq’s elder brother, like 1948 all over again, with the women queuing for powdered milk and building materials. Only now the camp was poorer and dirtier, the women queued in filthy water that reached above their ankles, and the camp looked like a war zone. Rosemary Sayigh, a British writer and academic working on a study of Palestinian women at the time, listened as they compared massacres, the old and the new. There was a story in the camp about how someone had found the bodies of three small children blocking the drains. Children slept fitfully, wet their beds, woke screaming from nightmares. It was not like 1948, the women said, it was worse. They were now hated by the Lebanese, who blamed them for the savagery of the invaders. When peace finally came, Shatila was little more than rubble surrounded by a wasteland, and the road to Jerusalem, so it was said, no longer led through Beirut but through Washington.
A wasteland, in many respects, Shatila remains: a wasteland of garbage and ruined buildings, the jagged fragments of former houses left standing empty, or camped in by the poorest of the refugees; a scene of devastation both utterly violent and utterly ordinary. To this day it is illegal for the PLO to have a presence in Shatila, or for the Palestinians to have their own militias. The memories of those days are violent, and when the inhabitants of Shatila talk abou
t the massacre and the sieges, they talk about the snipers who waited in the surrounding houses to pick them off as they ventured out for food, or the day that someone found a head, impaled on a pole.
In twenty years, Tariq has seen his sisters only once, the time that he was smuggled back into Beirut. “Tell him how long my hair is,” Souha, the younger of his two unmarried sisters, said to me as I was leaving, shaking her thick black hair loose so that it fell right down her back. “Explain to him how much it has grown.” When they last met, she said, it had been cut very short. “That is how long we have not met: almost two feet of hair.”
Zainab visited Tariq in Oxford once, sixteen years ago, when his first daughter, Hanan, was born; she has never seen his second, Rasmiyya, who is now thirteen. His father has also traveled to England once; he stayed for six weeks, then said to Tariq that though he found it peaceful and the countryside green, and though he liked the fruit and vegetables, he could not bear to stay any longer. One uncle went to Libya for eight years to earn money to rebuild his house in Shatila: it had been destroyed three times by shelling. Another uncle has worked in Abu Dhabi. A nephew is in Norway, where he has asked for asylum. Tariq used to keep a record of where the members of his family live, the uncles and cousins and nephews and nieces. Three years ago, he reached thirty-six living scattered among Abu Dhabi, Britain, Sweden, Jordan, Denmark, and Germany, and then he stopped counting.
For Tariq, too, displacement is mostly about loss, though it is also about memory. When he speaks to his mother on the telephone, he asks her what she is wearing, and what she is cooking for dinner that night. “When I think of her,” he says, “I think of a little girl who never left her home in Balad al Sheik. Everything that happened to her afterwards is a nightmare, with happy moments. For my mother, her children became the personal possessions she had lost. It is cruelest for her. What she wants more than anything in the world is to have her four sons together in one room. She will never have this.”
Hanan is embarrassed by the insistence with which her father talks about the past. She does not like to see tears come into his eyes when he speaks of his own father, and the way that he cleaned his sons’ shoes and was so proud of them. “My daughters,” Tariq says, “have become English. They understand Arabic but speak very little. My wife and I speak Arabic together, but now we speak to the girls in English. They are growing up, and the most important thing is that we communicate properly. I try to avoid confusion. The worst, for us all, is a clash of cultures—one world with their friends and another with us. But I have to live knowing that if I told my mother these things, if I told her that I can accept that they may marry English boys, she would be devastated.” Hanan herself, a neat, pretty girl who seems sensible and reflective, is clear: “I do not feel like a refugee,” she says. “I feel Palestinian. But England is my home.”
Tariq, like Zainab, dreams of a return to what was once Palestine, where he has never been but which he feels he knows better than the orderly English terraced houses and green fields that surround him. But for him, return is only a notion. The quality of his life, the possibilities for his daughters, have come to interest him more; less angry now, more accepting, he wants a settlement, the right to something, if return is denied. “Something” might only be, perhaps, the world’s recognition that the Palestinians exist as a distinct group and that though they may have left the lands on which they lived, they cannot be simply absorbed without trace into surrounding Arab countries. “I always talk about myself as a refugee,” he says. “I will never be anything but a refugee. Even if some day I manage to go back to finish my life in Balad al Sheik, I will call myself a refugee who returned. I was born a refugee, I grew up a refugee, it is how I think.” Tariq has indefinite leave to remain in Britain and has applied for citizenship. Under his current status, he needs a visa to travel to an Arab country, and may not go to either Israel and the Occupied Territories or to Lebanon. Laughing, a little embarrassed, he says that he has an obsession with boxes and cases, and that he keeps every container that comes into the house. “Always I feel I might need it to pack things in. In my heart, I know that I will be moved on. I own this house, but I forget.” “Record!” wrote Mahmoud Darwish, in “Bitaqit Hawia,” a poem that has become famous throughout the Arab world, “I am an Arab/Without a name—without title/Patient in a country/with people enraged.” Where collective existence assumes the shape of a philosophical paradox, where a civilization is regarded as essentially disposable and its people transported, dislocated, and dispossessed, then awdah, the right of return, becomes a matter of identity, too.
For some years after the Naqba, the Palestinians were silent. The “black cave of obliterated memories” was so shocking that no one cared to write about what had happened. It was not until 1953 that the first literary work by a Palestinian appeared in Arabic, a collection of poems by George Naguib Khalil called Roses and Thorns. Novels, as a literary genre, are not part of Palestinian cultural tradition. It was only when the Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz began writing his novels in the 1950s and 1960s that a fictional voice emerged among the Palestinians; even so, it was not until the 1970s that Palestinian women began to write and publish. The voice that has developed since is distinctive, but more, Edward Said has argued, for its form than its content. The themes are those of dispossession and exile, of houses and lands wrecked, abandoned, destroyed, rebuilt, and destroyed again, of collaborators—”tails,” slanderers, dangerous scorpions—and of Israeli domination in the figures of soldiers, security men, officials, employers. In Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun, three Palestinian refugees choose to suffocate inside a tanker transporting them illegally over the border into Kuwait, rather than make the fuss that would alert the driver to their existence. These writings employ little narrative in the recognized sense of one scene following sequentially upon another, but rather a series of broken, fragmentary compositions. It is through this form that the vulnerability of Palestinian life comes across, with sentences expressing instability and fluctuation, and self-conscious set pieces and testimonials, in which the present is always subject to echoes from the past.
To talk to Palestinian refugees today is to understand what dispersal and loss really mean. A higher proportion of Palestinians than of any other people in the modern world live away from the place they identify as home, and they can neither return to the places of their youth nor travel freely, nor do they feel safe in countries that were once open to them.* They also live, to a great extent, away from each other. A people singularly attached to and dependent on family, for whom, until recently, to have fewer than seven or eight children was seen as a misfortune, they live separated not just by distance but by papers. Palestinians have identity cards, not passports. They are moved around at the whim of others’ governments. To succeed, to be educated, to find jobs and send money home, they are obliged to travel, but not necessarily to places they wish to go. The “stability of geography and the continuity of land,” wrote Said, do not exist for them. Many are required to live with the certainty that they will never see a child, a parent, a cousin again. Listening to a Palestinian describe his family is a long and complicated undertaking.
Not long ago, Mourid Barghouti wrote: “At one thirty in the morning Mounir [his brother] informed me from Qatar of the death of my father in Amman. I was in Budapest. At two fifteen in the afternoon, seven years later, my brother ‘Alaa informed me from Qatar of the death of Mounir in Paris. I was in Cairo.” This is how Palestinians live.
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THERE ARE TWELVE official Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, of varying sizes and degrees of segregation from the Lebanese, and more than 380,000 Palestinians, around half of whom are registered with UNRWA and live in the camps. No one knows the exact figure, for more Palestinians live in seventeen “informal” camps, in conditions of great hardship. According to recent research, camp “dwellings” average two rooms for every six people, and less than two thirds of these dwellings are connected to any for
m of sewage system. Among the larger families, those with seven children or more, 96 percent are said to live below the poverty line.
The camps in the south, near the border with Israel, are those the Lebanese patrol most assiduously. The largest, the one people talk of as the most Palestinian, in which the life of Palestine is least diluted, is Ein el-Helweh, the camp on the edge of Sidon to which Tariq and his family fled in 1979. The name means “Sweet Spring.” Here, in a dip between the sea and the mountains, surrounded by hilltops capped by Lebanese gun posts, encircled by wire and walls, entered only via checkpoints run by casually contemptuous young Lebanese soldiers, live 45,000 Palestinians; or so says UNRWA, for the Palestinians themselves, for whom there is no census, put the figure at closer to 60,000. Unlike Shatila, with its cocktail of displaced people, Ein el-Helweh is regarded as a “pure” camp, for it has no outsiders. The only exceptions are a handful of wanted people, hiding out in the alleys and turned over to the Lebanese when the military search for them becomes too insistent. Ein el-Helweh is poor and cramped but has none of the claustrophobic intensity of Shatila, though the former villages of Palestine are reproduced in the same way and families live in the same kind of compounds, new rooms sprouting above and alongside the old ones on the sites of the first tents. Yet the place has a more robust, lively air. Ein el-Helweh, say its inhabitants, is truly Palestine, a Palestinian town that might just as easily be on the West Bank; unlike Shatila, it is also highly political, with eleven political parties, and a Fatah headquarters, which is itself a source of employment.