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Women of Shatila May 9, 2005
Isabelle Humphries*, a researcher based in Palestine, traveled in April 2002 to visit exiled Palestinians in Shatila camp, Beirut. While Palestinian exile in Lebanon is the direct responsibility of the Israeli state, I think what hit me the most on visiting Beirut was that it was not just the Israelis who had made life hell for the Palestinians. For sure I knew that it was the Phalangists (Christian militia) who, under the watch of the Israelis, had slaughtered hundreds in Sabra and Shatila. But it was only when I was actually drinking coffee with women in Shatila that I started to understand the relevance of the title Too Many Enemies, Rosemary Sayigh’s invaluable oral history of Shatila. From kidnap and incarceration by numerous militia, to death and injury by the Shiite Amal shelling in the 1980s, people in the camps were victims of Muslim as well as Jewish and Christian forces. Abeer’s friend had said she would like to talk to me, but when she started she just burst into tears. Feeling guilty for raising the subject, I tried to explain that we could just have coffee and chat, but she said that she thinks about her father all the time anyway, so nothing could make her misery worse. It must have been a decade or so since her father was tortured to death in a Damascus jail, but she was still in shock, here in this tiny room overlooking a dirty alley in Shatila 2002. After her father’s disappearance, Abeer thought that she was one of the lucky ones, because unlike so many families across Lebanon, she not only learned where her father was held, but she was able to travel across the border to Syria in order to visit him. Without passports and in time of bloody conflict, it could be impossible to move around Beirut, so to get to Damascus was an achievement in itself.
“But when I got there, instead of seeing my beloved father, they told me I could collect his body,” she wept. “I didn’t understand. How could he be dead? He was only young and he was strong.” But he was dead, and like so many others, Palestinian and Lebanese, she will never know exactly how or why he died. And for sure there will be no justice or compensation. I was not quite sure how people would take to knowing that at that time I was actually living in the Galilee, among the Palestinians who had managed to remain on or close to their land at the Nakba (Catastrophe). What disgusting irony that I could have traveled here and then would return to my home in Nazareth, the largest Palestinian town still existing in the Jewish state. Within a radius of an hour’s drive, I could visit the land of any of their villages. In fact, without a border, two or three hours in a car would take these people home, too. But Najwa was excited to hear that I had traveled from Nazareth. She came from Nahaf, a village in Western Galilee from which not all the villagers had fled into exile. Today the village still stands and is part of the million-strong Palestinian part of the Israeli population. My mother succeeded to stay in her home village of Nahaf, close to Haifa, but her fiancé (my father) and his family had fled to southern Lebanon. He tried again and again to return home to my mother but he couldn’t find a way. My mother had been given an Israeli identity card, but he had no papers. … She had to choose between staying in her village with her family, or going to join him in Lebanon and to be a refugee. After four years of hoping he would return she left her family and went alone to find her fiancé. When she crossed the border she tore up her Israeli papers. She could never go back and see her family. Najwa herself did go back to see her family in Nahaf, the family she had never met because she was born in Lebanon. Some years ago, she managed to get a visa to travel for a short visit for purposes of family reunification. “I was so happy to go. … My uncle is living in the house of my family, and he showed me the rooms and the land that I can have if I get to go back.” She smiled in the dingy little room in which we sat. It was as if a light shone from her face as she spoke. Unlike many of the people of Shatila, Najwa has a home to go to if only she were allowed. Her village is still standing, living and breathing, albeit under Israeli rule. It transpires that one time while the Israelis were in the camp, a Druze soldier broke into Najwa’s house. And here she has an incredible story. Perhaps people who see death around them can sometimes forget their fear. I don’t know. But in any case, Najwa asked the Israeli soldier, in his native Arabic, if he would carry a photograph of her family in Shatila back to the rest of her family in Nahaf. And when she finally got to visit her family herself, she discovered that this man had delivered the photograph, given to him in the middle of an Israeli raid on a refugee camp, and had made no problems for the family.
Life in exile in Beirut is a cruel mass of contradictions. So near geographically to her home in the Galilee, yet so far. The Israelis caused the family to be torn apart, yet here she is living in squalor in a neighboring Arab country, while the rest of her family lives in a considerably better economic situation under Israeli rule. And such was her bravery in asking the Druze soldier who had burst into her home to carry a photo, yet she was frightened to give me a home video to take back to the family in Nahaf. On my first visit she had been eager to give it to me, yet when I returned later to pick it up she had changed her mind, worried that the Israelis would do something at the airport and make trouble for her family. On reflection, perhaps she was even worried who I was. I don’t blame her. Najwa’s daughter was killed as she ran in the alleys of the camp with her grandmother during one of the Amal sieges. The grandmother was wounded but the little girl, not yet a teenager, died from her injuries. A large picture propped up against the wall immortalizes her. Although she would be in her twenties now, for her mother she will always be the little one in the photo. Everybody I met had their own tale of misery from the sieges, a relationship between two oppressed communities in Lebanon—the unwanted Palestinian refugees and the marginalized Shiite community—which had gone terribly, terribly wrong. And what of the return? Najwa says she would move anywhere to be closer to Nahaf, even to a refugee camp in the West Bank in a two-state solution, which is what some Israelis define as the limits of return. And of course many other Israelis would not even countenance an increase in Palestinian numbers in the West Bank. This is not Najwa’s goal, but she says she would accept anything in the hope that it would lead to an eventual return.
But Najwa has a place in which she can visualize a return. Manal does not. “I will only go back to Sa’sa’,’’ she said, “Otherwise I stay here.” But Sa’sa’ isn’t there anymore. The wind still blows through the trees on the highlands of northern Palestine so close to the Lebanese border, but the village has been wiped off the map by the latest in a long line of occupiers of the historic land of Palestine. “But I don’t like to talk about it,” she said as she hospitably made us lunch in the tiny kitchen with the window overlooking row upon row of ramshackle housing outside. “Some people like to talk about the suffering all the time, but I don’t.” Her small baby crawled about near her feet. People have plenty of things to worry about in the here and now, employment for one thing. Employment is not easy to come by for Palestinians, the bottom of the pile among many jobseekers. Many jobs are barred to them to start with, or it is declared that they do not have the correct papers for working. “I don’t really leave the camp,” says Abeer, “What reason have I got to? I am not a part of out there.” The juxtaposition between life in the camp and the expensive shopping malls, hotels, and fashionable cafes in the streets of Beirut encircling them is impossible for a visitor to absorb. “Don’t go in there, they’ve got guns,” one Lebanese girl confided to me when she learned that I was entering the camp. “They are crazy.” When I pointed out to her that she had a Palestinian mother, she dismissed this. “Oh, she used to be, but my father is Lebanese, and so she is, too.” The tragedy of this girl with her roots in Jerusalem is that she saw the Palestinians as “the other,” the ones in the camp. Such boundaries are all the more confused when one learns that there are actually Lebanese Muslims, mainly Shiite, living inside the Palestinian refugee camps. For the most financially marginalized of Lebanese society, the camps may be the only realistic option. When camp children found out that I had traveled from Palestine, they crowded round me with a mixture of curiosity and concern. For my visit was in the middle of what the Israelis defined as “Operation Defensive Shield.” Two weeks later after my visit to Jenin camp I would realize the terrible extent of what was happening, but at this point I, and the people of the camp, were only seeing garbled accounts on the television, as Israel almost succeeded to put a total bar on the media. “She’s come from Abu Ammar in Ramallah,” they shrieked in childlike delight, not seeming to understand the difference between living in Nazareth in the 1948 occupied Galilee, and next to the besieged Muqata. With Manal’s family I joined the winding trail of people leaving the camp to join a massive demonstration in the city against Israeli action in the West Bank. “Over there they buried the dead from the massacre of 1982,” someone said, pointing to some trees behind a wall. The sky above threatened rain again. Resources: *Isabelle Humphries has lived and worked in the Palestinian community based from Nazareth and Jerusalem. You can contact her on innazareth@yahoo.co.uk 1-Personal interview with Isabelle Humphries, Shatila Camp, Beirut, April 2, 2002. 2-The secret Druze religion is in a sense a “breakaway” from Islam, but has some fundamental differences with key Islamic beliefs. Druze are conscripted into the Israeli army, but are as much Arab as the majority Muslim and Christian population who are not conscripted. Israel has largely succeeded in dividing this group from the rest of the Palestinian Arab population in a classic case of colonial divide and rule. Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza often complain that Druze, with whom they share the native language of Arabic, are the cruellest of soldiers at the checkpoints. 3- The Amal movement is a Lebanese Shiite militia formed in 1974, led since 1980 by politician Nabih Berri. 4- Arafat’s nom de guerre 5- Arafat’s headquarters
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