Beirut, Lebanon

The blue and red of the Annapolis stage, on which sit the American President George W. Bush, the Israeli Premier Ehud Olmert, and the Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas (Abu Mazen), breaks forcefully into the home of Abu Rami, in the refugee camp of Mar Elias on the outskirts of Beirut, Lebanon. The TV is on, but the only one listening distractedly to the sing-song Arabic coming out of the speaker, which simultaneously translates the speeches of Bush, Abbas and Olmert, is little Fadi, the youngest of Abu Rami’s eight children, busy playing in the lounge. Outside the house, close to the entrance hall, Abu Rami, 63 years of age, native of Akka (or Akko) on the north coast of Haifa, agrees to speak about the Annapolis conference: “It’s one more farce to take up some time and make us believe that peace will come sooner or later, and with it our return home,” he says in a tone of certainty. “They’ve been talking about it here in the camp for weeks,” he confesses, “because behind all the usual, standard phrases Abu Mazen is preparing another bitter pill for us refugees to swallow. They want to abolish our sacred right to return to Palestine.”

It has just turned seven in the evening, and from an alleyway out pops Jihad, 29 years of age, the second child of Abu Rami. Jihad opened an internet-point two years ago in the Mar Elias camp, “but it’s mainly kids who come who want to play each other on computer games” he says. Once in the house, Jihad takes the remote control and changes the channel: “I don’t want to listen to this useless chatter”. Abu Rami hears him from outside the door, comes into the house and rebukes him: “It might be useless chatter, but now it’s more your problem than mine!” Jihad is already in the kitchen, pottering around amongst the pans while he waits for dinner. “It doesn’t matter to me whether or not we go back to Palestine,” says Abu Rami, hoping to surprise his son. “Well, a part of me dreams about returning to Akka day and night, but another part of me is terrified of feeling such a deep sadness in my heart that I couldn’t live any more.”

Diaspora

Abu Rami and Jihad belong to two different generations of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon who have never seen their motherland. Like them, at least 400,000 other Palestinian refugees have been living in Lebanon for decades, spread out between the twelve camps which exist in the Country of Cedar Trees. Many more of their ‘brothers’ can be found in Jordan, in Syria, in Europe, in North America, and elsewhere. In total, according to data from UNWRA (the agency created by the UN in 1949), there are today around 4 million and 300,000 Palestinian refugees , ‘children’ of those 800,000 who were forced to abandon their homes and lands in 1948-49, whilst the State of Israel was born, victorious over the unprepared ‘enemy armies’ of the first Arab-Israeli war. Jordan is currently the country which hosts the greatest number of refugees – one million and 800,000, which is almost a third of the total population of the Hashemite region (around 6 million), spread across ten refugee camps.

Syria hosts the next largest number, with 432,000 registered refugees, resident in thirteen different groups, and whose living conditions are on average better than those of their compatriots ‘hosted’ in Lebanon. The 400,000 Palestinians of the Country of Cedar Trees do not, in fact, enjoy basic civil rights, and until 2005 did not have the right to practise a number of careers, enumerated in a list of about seventy professions (in 2005, following the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon and the consequent intensifying of the ‘anti-Syrian’ sentiment in the country, the Beirut authorities conceded to the Palestinians the right to be employed as builders and labourers as substitutes for the Syrian labour force which had fled back to Syria). But it is possible to be a refugee even in your own land, and in the open-air prison that the Gaza has now become there are today almost a million (986,000) refugees packed into the eight camps in the Strip. Around 700,000, on the other hand, remain crowded in the West Bank, hostages of a divided territory that Bush, Olmert and Abbas want to see transformed into the future ‘Independent State of Palestine’.

The myth of the return

Abu Rami doesn’t want to admit it, but under his breath he confesses: “Not even I believe in the return any more. I know it is an illusion, but we were born with this certainty. My parents brought me up with photos of Akka, with its popular songs and rhymes, and we, like everyone, we keep the keys to our house, which is waiting for us. Or, rather, which was waiting for us.” Abu Rami understands too, deep down, that his son Jihad “like many other youths on the camp” has never really believed in the return. “But maybe these kids are right,” says Abu Rami, “because they look to the future, and don’t want to rot in this narrow alleyway, with no hopes.” After dinner Jihad is already back from his internet-point and doesn’t want to talk about ‘returning’, nor about ‘Annapolis’. Closing the door behind him he simply comments laconically: “I want to live maybe in Canada, or in Europe, but anyway somewhere far away from here.”

It is a logic that the leadership of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), currently presided over by Mahmud Abbas, has long accepted. Its party, Fath, today attempts to govern in the West Bank, while the Strip has, in recent months, been transformed by Hamas into the Islamic Emirate of Gaza. The Islamic movement, like the other Palestinian fundamentalist groups, refuses to accept any compromise with either Israel or the United States. For them, all of the 4 million refugees have the right to return to their homes in ‘Historical Palestine’, that which existed pre-1948. The idea of the PNA, more pragmatic, more not necessarily easier to realise, is that of obtaining a ‘symbolic return’: Israel would have to accept that at least 100,000 refugees could re-settle on the West Bank. There was no talk of this, however, at Annapolis, not least because before tackling the question of refugees there are those of territory, of borders, and of energy resources to be resolved, and that of the control of security within this ‘Independent State of Palestine’, which from the now dark alleyway of the Mar Elias camp, seems more and more like the ‘umpteenth farce’ – the words used by Abu Rami to describe the Annapolis ‘peace conference’.

Lorenzo Trombetta, an expert on Middle Eastern political, is author of the book “Siria. Nel Nuovo Mediooriente” (Riuniti, Rome, 2005). He is finishing his doctoral thesis on Syrian history jointly at ‘La Sapienza’ University of Rome and at the ‘Novelle Sorbonne’ University in Paris. A professional journalist, he lives and works in Beirut where he collaborates with the news agency ANSA, with the magazine Limes, with La Stampa, and with numerous other Italian newspapers.

Translation by Liz Longden