Caught in Army Violence at a Palestinian Refugee Camp, Part I
Curiosity about lives lived behind barbed wire.
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This is Part I of a two-part essay by Gena Corea. Part II will be published later this week. For context, please visit (Resonant World#81: The Problem of What to Do With our Pain).
Resonant World#82
By Gena Corea
On the road to Bethlehem in April 1989, I saw a settlement surrounded by barbed wire. My cab driver told me it was a Palestinian refugee camp.
Soon, I would enter that camp. Soon I would run from army gunfire. But it had never been my intention to experience, as I soon would, the first Intifada, or even to learn anything about mid-eastern history, of which I was vastly ignorant.
I think of my days in that camp now, after Hamas in Gaza, striking out against their Israeli occupiers, brutally slaughtered 1,200 Israelis, and took hostages. The Israeli army retaliated, killing some 32,000 Palestinians in bombings that have appalled the world. The bombings have forced the majority of people in Gaza from their homes. Driven from pillar to post, survivors search for safety, drinking water and food in the rubble. Imminent famine is predicted. As the bombings continued, South Africa, stating that Israel had engineered a system of apartheid against Palestinians more extreme that it itself had suffered, brought a case before the United Nations International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide.
I try to make sense of the fields of pain that live side by side: the unfathomably massive suffering of Jews in the Nazi Holocaust; how some descendant Holocaust survivors inflict suffering on Palestinians, asserting a God-given right to take their land; and — what had brought me to Israel in the first place — the experimentation on women with reproductive technology causing suffering not even noticed or acknowledged in the world.
I had travelled to Israel in 1989 because I was investigating the deaths of women — 14 that I knew of — in in vitro fertilization (IVF) clinics. One of these deaths had occurred at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem.
When I needed a break from my work, I hailed a cab, asking the driver to take me to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, the site of Christ’s birth, a drive of some half hour. I would go sight-seeing.
It was on the road to Bethlehem that the glimpse of Palestinian refugees living behind barbed wire stunned me.
Arriving shortly at the church, I walked around it, fast, yeah, yeah, here is the Grotto where Christ was born…yeah, yeah, oldest site continuously used as a place of worship in Christianity…yeah yeah… get me outta here… Nothing in the church could touch me because I had been too appalled by the sight of the camp. I knew little of mid-east history yet still, you look at people living behind barbed wire and you know something is horribly wrong.
‘Okay, But Be Careful’
I quickly returned to the cab where the driver was waiting to take me back to Jerusalem.
As we approached the camp, I asked the driver to stop the taxi and drop me off at one of the entrances, telling him I would get myself back to Jerusalem later. I wanted to walk around the camp. He was shocked. What did I want to do that for?!
He pulled up at an entrance where Israeli soldiers were stationed. Alarmed, seeing where he was halting, I tried to get him to drive on to a different entrance, but he paid no attention to me. He jumped out of the cab and addressed the soldiers in Hebrew.
One soldier asked me why I wanted to go into the camp. To walk around, I said, not sure I added anything more articulate than that.
After some back and forth, the soldier hesitantly said: “Okay, but be careful.”
I backed into the camp, all the while reassuring the soldier. Once inside, I began walking. I wanted to meet and talk with people. It can be awkward to approach adults. But I thought it likely that I would encounter children at some point, and the children, curious and uninhibited, would talk with me and then, after a while, take me to meet their mother or uncle or neighbour. That is what had happened during other travels when I walked around neighbourhoods in Mexico and Brazil. I’d always ended up in rich encounters with people.
This time, when I’d been in the camp no more than 20 minutes, I noticed a group of children, maybe seven to ten years old, giggling, their hands held behind their backs. Then soldiers approached and the children threw at them the stones they had been hiding. The soldiers shot at them, whether to wound them or to warn them, I don’t know. The children ran, shouting something to me in Arabic which I assumed meant, “Run!”
So I ran on a dirt street in the opposite direction. After a time, I stopped and looked back to see where the soldiers were. A young Arab woman standing on a veranda told me in English to come into her house, saying it wasn’t safe on the street.
This was Ferdous. Her brother-in-law Burhan, a 25-year-old graduate student, met me at the door. I told him I was a journalist, but I wasn’t there to write about the Palestinian situation.
“Come in,” he said. “We’ll talk.”
First Intifada
For the next several hours, sitting on covered foam pallets on the floor, I listened to Ferdous, Burhan and his 29-year-old brother Akram, Ferdous’ husband.
Here’s a tiny bit of what I did not know as I sat in their living room for the first of many times: This was the Dheisheh camp established in 1949 to house more than 3,000 Palestinians expelled from their villages by Jewish militias in the Arab-Israeli war. At 247 acres, it is the largest refugee camp in the southern West Bank (Bethlehem and Hebron).
Dheisheh began as a tent encampment on land leased to the UN Relief and Works Agency by the Jordanian government. In the 1950s, the agency began building small rooms for each family, one bathroom shared between every 15 shelters. As the decades rolled on, families added rooms and the camp built up into multi-storey concrete houses all in a jumble.
The neighbourhoods in Dheisheh are still loosely arranged according to the villages where the refugees came from, villages which lie only a few kilometres away.
Israel began a military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the wake of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. As the military occupation approached the 20-year mark, the Palestinians launched a civic uprising called the First Intifada, December 1987-1991.
So I, in all ignorance, entered the camp during this First Intifada. The Intifada included stone-throwing by children, as I had witnessed.
Sitting in their living room in Dheisheh, Ferdous, Akram and Burhan told me the family has been resisting the Israeli occupation since 1967.
“We always have one ‘ambassador’ from the family in prison,” said Burhan, who had been arrested sixteen times since 1978.
Another brother, Jamal, 21, sat in prison right at that time. Akram was forbidden to leave the camp from 1985 to 1987, and since then he has spent six months in administrative detention — no charges against him, no trial.
The brothers spoke about Western stereotypes of Arabs, some of which they had learned about from the television series Dynasty.
“Before the Intifada, the world saw us as terrorists only,” Akram said. “Many Americans think that when you see an Arab, there must be a camel beside him.”
“They think,” chimed in Burhan, “that we live in prehistory, that we are primitive people, uncivilized.”
They invited me to return the next day and stay overnight, along with a friend of Burhan’s from Nazareth, Nadim1, who had never been to a refugee camp. I accepted. They found a neighbour to drive me back to East Jerusalem, a part of the city Arabs were allowed to enter.
Under Suspicion
The next day, Burhan met Nadim and me on the road to Bethlehem and escorted us into the camp. On our entry, we had to dodge bullets. This rattled Nadim but I’d already been exposed to gunfire. Once in the family home, we talked for hours. I brought out my miniature tape-corder and, with their permission, taped much of the discussion.
“Some Jewish people tell us they are victims of Nazism,” Burhan said. “But if they are victims, it is not necessary to make us the victims of the victims. If you know suffering and harassment, you should be especially sensitive and not make other people suffer.”
At one point as we spoke, Israeli soldiers launched a tear gas attack. When gas began seeping into the house through windows that had been smashed by soldiers during previous raids, all of us, including Nidal, the infant of Ferdous and Akram, crowded into a single windowless room.
In the morning, Burhan took me and Nadim on a walk over the dusty, rock-strewn paths of Dheisheh, passing cracked concrete walls covered with Arabic graffiti and posters of young men who had been killed during the Intifada. He showed us the one-room house where the nine members of his family had lived for ten years, sleeping side by side.
Then we walked to the main road so Nadim and I could hail a taxi back to Jerusalem.
As we waited, an army jeep pulled up. A soldier — the same one who had given me permission to enter the camp the day before — found it suspicious that I had spent so much time in the camp. He demanded to see papers, questioned me.
I managed to whisper to Burhan that I was nervous about the tapes I had in my bag. I couldn’t make out his response, spoken in a low raspy voice. His vocal cords had been injured as a result of his treatment by soldiers during a prison stay when he was 13, Akram had told me. The soldiers separated the three of us to prevent us from communicating so I had no further chance to speak with him.
Strangely, there was a chair there on the side of the road and the soldier directed me to sit in it. A gaggle of children from the camp approached my chair and surrounded it. The soldier shouted at them to get away from me. They’d leave for a few minutes and then silently ease back. This was repeated several times.
Days later I learned that Burhan had instructed the children to take the tapes from me. But I hadn’t understood that.
I watched as the soldier did go through my bag. But he came upon a box of Tampax and maybe it embarrassed him because he stopped searching my bag after that and never found the tapes.
Meanwhile, the soldiers were calling back to the army base asking what to do with us. Finally, the word came to bring us in. An army truck sped up, and the soldiers loaded the three of us into it at gunpoint. It took off, sirens screaming. I was plenty scared.
A Separate Door
At the Army base, soldiers separated Nadim and me from Burhan, leading him away. The two of us were kept in a hall for a long time. My last glance of Burhan was through a window where I saw him blindfolded and three soldiers roughly binding his arms behind his back. Like the sight of barbed wire, you know this is a horror.
After a couple of hours, the soldiers took Nadim away and I was left alone. Later I learned they had let him go through an exit I could not see. And soon, they told me I could leave as well and opened a separate door for me.
I was frantic, not knowing what they were doing to Burhan. Once I got back to my hotel in Jerusalem, I called one of the family’s neighbours who had a telephone and relayed messages to people in the camp.
Burhan, he later told me, was beaten badly by soldiers who repeatedly asked him whether I was a journalist, and whether he had slept with me. He was released at about midnight.
I wanted to return to the camp and speak with Burhan and the family, but I knew if I were recognized by soldiers again, it would not go well. I spoke with the hotel’s housekeeping director, who was Arab and with whom I’d had a number of conversations, and asked his advice.
I could take a taxi back, he suggested, but the driver must be Arab and must help me. I think he found the driver. Maybe it was also he who obtained clothing that would allow me to blend into the camp. The clothing included a headscarf and shawl which the driver fitted on me properly and for best disguise. He drove me — not to a gate where soldiers were stationed — but to a more obscure entry point, far from the gate I’d originally entered.
The housekeeper taught me to say in Arabic — I no longer remember the words — “Where is the home of Akram…?”
Once the driver left me at the obscure gate, I walked in, asked my question, and was quickly led to the family home.
The second and final part of this essay will be published in the next few days.
A labour of love, Resonant World is written in the gaps between work I get paid to do, notably editing investigations at nonprofit climate news service DeSmog. It’s a huge boost when people become paid subscribers, and support of any amount affirms that my mission to support the global community of practitioners engaged in supporting people to integrate individual, inter-generational and collective trauma has value. Thank you!
I am giving him the pseudonym “Nadim” as I don’t remember his actual name.
This is an important witness statement against the ugliness of Zionists - back then!