On May 15, Palestinians commemorate the flight and expulsion of 1948. In the Palestinian camps of Lebanon, the Nakba is not a thing of the past. Gaza brings the original Palestinian catastrophe back to the present.
Three generations have already passed through here: the grandparents who fled or were expelled back then. The parents who grew up in the tent cities. And the children who were born here and know nothing other than these camps with the garbage-filled alleys, the tangle of cables that hang like thick cobwebs over the labyrinth of barracks, the frayed flags that at least bring a little color into this Palestinian dreariness.
This isn’t home, say those who live here. Home is elsewhere: “I’m from Jaffa,” shouts an older woman, “I’m from Acre,” shouts another. And already a small crowd of people has gathered and everyone is shouting at one another – from Jaffa, from Haifa, from al Chalil.
War turns history into the present
It is as if the Nakba – the “catastrophe” – had just happened. And as if it was only a matter of time before they would return to their lost Palestine, which was of course a British mandate in the 1940s and inhabited by Arabs and also Jews.
But that’s history. Gaza with the daily horror, the 35,000 dead, the masses of people currently wandering between Khan Yunis and Rafah – this war, which has been raging for seven months, is present. He brings back the historical event of the Nakba as something omnipresent in the Palestinian refugee consciousness.
“They lied to all of us”
As a result of the founding of the state of Israel, over 700,000 Palestinians left their villages and cities and moved to Lebanon, Syria or Jordan. The refugee flows from back then have doubled or tripled demographically over the decades in the camps. There are now 250,000 stateless Palestinians living in Lebanon alone. As the number of refugees has grown, so has the hopelessness and the feeling of being betrayed again and again – by Europe, the USA, the Arab states.
“We were born in war, we went through wars, we die in them. What is happening now in Gaza is nothing new for us,” say the women in the camp. “Our parents had to flee during the Nakba, they took the keys to their houses with them. The Arabs had promised: You will return. They lied to all of us.”
Unwanted to this day
The tent cities of yesteryear are long gone; over the years they have mutated into miserable settlements, controlled by Palestinian Fatah militias or Hamas Islamists or armed gangs, which often amounts to the same thing. The Lebanese state, many say behind closed doors, “doesn’t give a damn about us.”
From the beginning, the Palestinians were unwanted and were always suspected of fomenting the already latent conflicts in Lebanon. When Yasser Arafat’s PLO moved into Lebanon in the 1970s, his fighters established a state within a state to attack Israel from the border area. They contributed to the outbreak of the civil war.
The Palestinians are still undesirable today. They are denied naturalization, are forbidden from owning land, and are denied many professions. The only thing they can hold on to is the dream of Palestine. They pass it on, from war to war, from generation to generation.
Martin Durm, SWR, tagesschau, May 14, 2024 9:33 p.m