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At a protest against Annapolis in the Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp in Lebanon, a boy holds up the key to his family’s home in Palestine and the identification paper his grandfather was given when he fled to Lebanon seven years after the creation of Israel in 1948. Speakers from hard-line Palestinian factions denounced the US-sponsored conference as a “surrender” and said they would never give up their right to return to Palestine by resettling in their country of exile. |
Right of return – an unbending faith
The San Francisco Chonicle
November 28, 2007
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/11/28/MNLBTJVRF.DTL
By Hugh Macleod
Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp, south Lebanon
Palestinian and Israeli leaders may have agreed at the US-sponsored peace
conference in Annapolis yesterday to work towards a full peace deal by the end
of next year, but in this tinderbox refugee camp the lives of 75,000
Palestinians are defined by the single issue neither side has ever expressed
willingness to compromise over: the right of Palestinian refugees to return
home.
“No-one can negotiate on our right to return to Palestine. There is only one country called Palestine and we will never return there except by resistance to Israel,” said Abu Yousef, a fighter with the radical Palestinian faction Ansar Allah, as a group of about a hundred anti-Annapolis protesters waved flags and guns behind him. “We’re going to Jerusalem with millions of martyrs!” they sang. “We’ll never sell Jerusalem for American dollars!”
The right of return polarises the seemingly intractable conflict between the Palestinian and Israelis like no other issue.
For most Palestinians, the right to return home of the up to six million refugees who can trace origins back to the exodus from Palestine that followed the creation of Israel in 1948, is an absolute.
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Weapons are a way of life for the over a dozen armed Palestinian factions in Ain al-Hilweh, who say they keep their guns in order to run their own security affairs in the camp, thereby resisting resettlement in Lebanon and keeping their dream of returning to Palestine alive. Tragically, the guns of the rival factions have been too often turned on each other, with civilians paying the price. |
For Israeli officials – whose historians dispute the figure of six million and also the reason for the mass exodus – the issue is existential: the sheer number of Palestinian refugees who can claim a right to return to their pre-1948 homes are a demographic danger to the world’s only Jewish state.
In his speech to Annapolis Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas pledged to begin “deep negotiations” with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on final status issues, including the question of refugees “in all its political, humanitarian, individual and common aspects, consistent with Resolution 194”.
That UN General Assembly Resolution and Article 13
of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights asserts the refugees' unconditional
right of return to live at peace in their old homes or to receive compensation
for their losses.
But if the issue of the refugees’ fate has largely been ignored in previous
rounds of Mid-East diplomacy - which have focussed on resolutions pegged to the
withdrawal of Israeli troops from additional land occupied during the 1967 war –
the question has not been forgotten in the dusty, dangerous cinderblock camp of
Ain al-Hilweh, on the outskirts of Lebanon’s southern port Sidon.
“I was born here in a small tent in 1958,” said Abu Ahmad Fadel Taha, leader of Hamas in Ain al-Hilweh. “I have lived all my life here with my father, who is now 94, and my eight children. We live with hardship every day and we live the dream of return every day.”
From his office in the heart of the camp, Fadel Taha’s staff broadcast TV tapes of Al Aqsa and Reesala, the Message, on free satellite wavelengths to households in the camp. The message is often uncompromising.
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Home to around 75,000 Palestinian refugees and their descendants - driven from their homes in 1948 by the creation of Israel – Ain al-Hilweh, or ‘Beautiful Eyes’, was built on the site of a former British World War II army base just outside the southern port city of Sidon. The camp today is a two square kilometer pressure cooker of tedium and despair, punctuated by moments of terror. Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction has long held sway in the camp, including manning security checkpoints around the camp, but is under challenge from rising power of Islamic radical groups. |
“Israel wants the Palestinians to admit Palestine is the home of the Jews. It wants us to give up on the right of return,” said Fadel Taha. “Palestine is for us and for our grandchildren and can only be liberated by resistance. Oslo and Madrid [peace conferences] brought only shame. We don’t believe in negotiations.”
Even among Abbas’ own Fatah movement in Ain al-Hilweh, support for Annapolis was muted.
“We have been used to the total support of the Israelis by the US, but now we had no other way but to be with the conference,” said Mounir Maqdah, representative in south Lebanon for the Palestine Liberation Organisation, of which Fatah is the dominant faction.
Besides their dream of return, Palestinians in Lebanon face a unique array of hardships.
Unable to gain citizenship in this country because of fears such a move would upset its delicate sectarian power sharing system, Lebanon’s 400,000 Palestinian refugees live in a double limbo: refusing resettlement in their host country but demanding better rights, such as the right to work in over 70 professional jobs from which they are now barred.
According to UNRWA, the UN’s Palestinian relief organisation, Lebanon has the highest percentage of all Palestinian refugees living in abject poverty, and the worst of that is felt inside the 12 official refugee camps.
Under a 1969 Arab agreement, Lebanese authorities have no right of access inside the camps, with Palestinians running an autonomous security system.
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Sheikh Abu Sharif says his Islamist radical group Ozbat Ansar is the largest faction in Ain al-Hilweh. The Sunni extremists – who define themselves as global jihadis fighting Israeli and American occupation and for the establishment of Islamic rule across the world – have been involved in a number of firefights with secular rival Fatah. Abu Sharif criticised both Hamas and Hezbollah for their “narrow agendas” of seeking an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestine and Lebanon and said Ozbat Ansar had established a military wing inside occupied Palestine which would fight against any two state solution that could arise from Annapolis. |
Not only do camp residents fear repeats of brutal attacks on the camps during the 1975-1990 Civil War by Israel and its Lebanese-allied militias, but for many their arms signal their refusal to relinquish their refugee status.
“We maintain our weapons as a guarantee of our right of return to our homeland,” said Sheikh Maher Oweid, commander of the Ansar Allah faction in Ain al-Hilweh.
Too often though, the weapons of rival factions have been turned on each other with regular deadly gun battles over the past two years between Islamist radical groups, such as Ozbat Ansar, which claim to be the largest faction in the camp, and its secular rivals, such as Fatah.
The catastrophic destruction of the northern refugee camp of Nahr al-Bared in a three-month battle this summer between the army and Islamist fanatics, many of them foreigners, who had holed up in the camp further spiked tensions between Islamist radicals and secualr moderates.
“Fatah have shot on us many times but our religion tells us we must protect our Palestinian civilians here in the camp,” said Sheikh Abu Sharif, spokesman of Ozbat Ansar.
The Sunni extremists define themselves as global jihadis fighting Israeli and American occupation and for the establishment of Islamic rule across the world. They criticise both Hamas and Hezbollah, the Shia Islamist movement, for their “narrow agendas” of only seeking an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestine and a disputed corner of south-east Lebanon.
Ozbat Ansar too believe in the right to return, but not for peaceful means.
“We have succeeded in establishing a military wing inside occupied Palestine,” said Abu Sharif, vowing to fight against any two state solutions that could arise from Annapolis.
“God had promised us that we will return to our homes. But we will never get Palestine without jihad.”