"The Independent speaks with two Palestinian freshmen.
2/21/08
Palestinians Lestat Ali ’11 and Sami Majadla ’11 grew up in the midst of war zones. Ali’s home is just 20 miles from the Lebanese-Israeli border, and Majadla’s town was split in two by the wall running through the West Bank. The two have witnessed firsthand the invasion of southern Lebanon and the on-going Palestinian Civil War.
Lestat Ali: Life in a Refugee Camp
Ali, who calls himself “a citizen of nowhere, a resident of Lebanon,” is described by his immigration paperwork as “stateless.” He is a refugee charge of the United Nations living in Lebanon. Ali’s home is a refugee camp called Tyre, which lies north of Israel in Lebanon.
Telling the story of how his family ended up in Lebanon, Ali said, “My grandfather lived in Palestine and was married to a woman who was Lebanese. So when they had to leave in ’48, they went to her home town and finally settled where they live right now. Everyone was forced out.”
Ali's father works for the UN as a schoolteacher in the camp, one of the few forms of legal work available to refugees in Lebanon aside from menial labor such as house painting. Ali believes the lack of employment has led to much of the domestic violence and social pressures that exist in the refugee camps.
Lately, he said, conditions have been worsening. The political situation is increasingly tense in Lebanon between the pro-American central government in Beirut and the anti-American Hezbollah. “When I came back in Christmas, it was taking a turn toward the intolerable,” Ali said.
Pressures have only rarely, he claimed, led refugees to religious extremism. However, Ali spoke of one incident in another refugee camp north of Tyre, in which a splinter group, Fatah al-Islam (no relation to Fatah in Palestine), attacked and killed several Lebanese soldiers. This offspring of al-Qaida was subsequently suppressed by a Lebanese invasion of the camp, but the pressures remain high.
Ali cannot visit Palestine or Israel at this point without risking the loss of his refugee status.
Although Ali said he would not return to Palestine permanently even if it were possible, he believes that many would: “I don’t feel any patriotism, [but] I’m the exception to the general case.”
Refugee schools, he pointed out, are taught by refugees themselves, and therefore inculcate young people with the cultural memory of a homeland. “Jews were out of Israel for 3,000 years and made it back. Now Palestinians are doing the same thing of belonging to a place.”
Israel’s Lebanon Campaign
Of the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which began after two Israeli soldiers were captured by Hezbollah, Ali stated, “There was no Israeli invasion.” Instead, he said, the Israelis dropped bombs in an attempt to destroy Hezbollah’s ability to launch missiles into Haifa and other northern Israeli territories. “My town was bombed four times,” he said.
“It was war. We could not wait for [the actual invasion] to happen because that would be relief from the bombing. Not something to look forward to, but better than bombs.”
He went on to describe how Israel at one point had dropped leaflet bombs that warned that all moving vehicles within the 20-mile invasion zone (in which Tyre was contained) would be destroyed — trapping Ali and his family, who had stayed in the town. His family had believed the conflict would be a mere border skirmish such as had happened in the past.
Ali characterized the general sentiment of the southern Lebanese concerning Hezbollah’s role in precipitating the conflict as “pride”: “They were defending us. In Lebanon, they symbolize resistance against Israel.”
“If you live one day with what happened there [in 2006], it doesn’t matter what the bigger political issues are,” Ali added.
However, Ali also described the dangers of the Hezbollah missiles, many of which failed to reach Israel. The question asked each day, he said, was simply, “Are they going to hit us?”
In respect to Israel, he described “anti-Semitism” as the norm, in the sense that southern Lebanese hate the Israelis, but not necessarily all Jews.
Of the civil war between the rival Palestinian factions Fatah and Hamas, Ali stated, “We’re just angry that it’s going on. Palestinians should not be warring amongst each other. They don’t have a country to war about. Notice the irony?”
UN troops now stationed at the border are “neutral,” according to Ali. The 15,000 UN troops and 15,000 Lebanese forces are, he feels, more important economically than anything. “I wouldn’t conceive of a way the UN could prevent Hezbollah from rearming because Israel could not do it,” Ali said.
Ultimately, Ali feels that the conflict will not resolve itself quickly. “We need to look into the history. I don’t think there’s any neutral account of why this happened. If the Israel people can legitimately claim the land as their own, then we’re taking their place and this is wrong. But if it is the other way around, we ought to get our land back,” he said.
Sami Majadla: Israeli and Palestinian
“Twenty percent of Israel’s population is Palestinian, and I’m one of the 20 percent,” Majadla said. “My town is actually cut in half by the wall. I live about a one-and-a-half minute walk from the wall.”
Majadla lives along the controversial wall dividing the West Bank territory from Israel in the town of Baka el-Gharbia (Bouquet of the West).
The wall was built by Israel to limit suicide bomb attacks. Majadla believes it has crushed his town’s economy, as well as the livelihoods of most Palestinians inside the wall’s confines.
“There used to be a lot of trade in my town. It used to be a center of the region’s comings and goings to the West Bank,” he said. “But, when they built the wall, the people who used to go through our town to West Bank stopped going.”
The crossing that still exists in his town is for military and diplomatic use only. He told a story of a family friend whose home literally uses the wall as one of its sides. The man’s sister lives on the wall’s opposite side.
“[The friend and his sister] can talk over the wall,” but “he has to drive three hours north, wait at a checkpoint, and drive three hours south” to actually see his sister. Majadla compared the quality of life in his town to that of the now-destroyed Israeli settlements. “They found in settlements there are running water,” he claimed, despite the fact that most Palestinian towns are forced to use well water.
Moreover, he said, Israel drains the aquifers used by Palestine. He claimed that “90 percent of Palestinian aquifers are taken by Israelis.”
Majadla stated that Palestinians were not anti-American. “Everybody, more or less, is against Bush, [but] nobody really considers Bush and America to be the same,” he said.
Palestinian Civil War
Majadla left Palestine before the most recent simmering point in the civil war between Hamas and the late Yasser Arafat’s party, Fatah. After Hamas won the democratic election in Palestine, Fatah and Hamas began fighting over control of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Moreover, Western powers and Arab countries alike opposed Hamas’ arrival into power, as they consider Hamas a terrorist organization. As such, they cut off aid to the territories.
“In Palestinian eyes, Hamas is the only group that did anything against Israel the whole time they were there,” Majadla said. “In the view of the Palestinians, the IDF [Israeli Defense Force] sends rockets, helicopters, tanks, and advanced technology, and this is the one group that does what it can do: strap on bombs and send them off.”
“I think it’s a bad idea, but, you know, [we’re talking about people] who might not have seen what I have — [that] the average Israeli is a human being just like the average Palestinian.”
Every month or so, Majadla stated, Israel would attack Hamas’s leadership, killing others in the process. “How many leaders can one organization have?” he asked.
But Majadla does not think that Israel could carry all of the blame, especially with the current civil war between Fatah and Hamas.
“It’s like a feudal system, where everybody is trying to be the feudal lord and nobody is willing to be the peasant,” he said of the current conflict. “They resort to Arab primitive — ‘I want to be the leader and not you.’”
Majadla added that the two groups seemed to think that “if you don’t succeed, and you fail by a democratic vote, you don’t wait four years and try again, you try to kill your opponent.”
About the future of the conflict, Majadla said, “[Hamas and Fatah] don’t seem to see the bigger picture; they see that they’re not in power.” He went on to say that he did not feel that this would change anytime soon, and also that a lasting peace between Israel and Palestine cannot be reached if the Palestinians cannot first take care of their own house.
Of peace and cooperation between all parties, he stated, “I don’t think it’ll happen for a while.”
I am absolutely stunned and amazed at how intelligent the Palestinians are.
I read this whole piece, and I am near tears!!
How come Palestinians understand the world so much better than 'murkns, readers?
The Zionist-controlled AmeriKan MSM MUST have something to do with it!!!!
