| BALATA CAMP | From the print edition
IN
THE narrow bazaars of the West Bank’s old cities, peddlers ply rusty
keys supposedly from the homes of 800,000 Palestinians uprooted by the
war that created Israel in 1948. Long the symbol of the refugees’
clamour to return home, they are being bartered. “Last night I got $300
for the key to our Jaffa home,” says a precocious 18-year-old sporting a
football shirt. He comes from the refugee camp of Balata, on the edge
of Nablus, in the north of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, which
Palestinians see as the core of a future state.
“It’s
been too long,” says Mahmoud Subuh, a psychologist in Balata, where the
population of 28,000 is crammed into a square kilometre of squat
housing. “People don’t even dream any more” of returning to their old
homes, he says. After 65 years as the fount of anger sustaining the
struggle, the camps have degenerated into wretched inner-city ghettoes.
The
UN, which has run the camps for all those years, is tired of the job.
Balata’s alleys are caked in filth, a cash-for-work programme has all
but collapsed, almost half the working-age adults have no jobs, and the
UN’s once-prized classrooms are as overcrowded as the rooms where
families live. Children sometimes leave school unable to write their
names.
To the chagrin of many refugees, security chiefs under the aegis of the Palestinian Authority
(PA)
have joined Israel’s in seeing the camps as nests of gun-runners,
drug-traffickers and car thieves. The PA’s security men have teamed with
Israel’s to step up raids on the camps. Last month Israeli forces shot
dead three civilians and wounded 17 in a botched raid on Qalandiya
refugee camp, near Jerusalem, and killed another in Jenin, in the
northern part of the West Bank. Palestinian forces also killed a refugee
while making arrests in Askar, a camp close to10/13/13 Palestinian
refugee camps:
A newtypeof settlement | The Economist
www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21587846-some-palestinians-want-their-people-abandon-refugee-camps-without-demanding/print
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Balata. And on October 5th the Jenin camp was again raided by PA forces.
People in the camps are fighting back. In Shuafat, on the edge of Jerusalem, refugees hurl
breeze-blocks
at Israeli jeeps. Askar camp inmates recently torched a military
hospital and 16 security cars parked in its compound. Many Palestinian
police in the camp joined in, sighs a PA security man, showing that they
felt more loyal to the refugees than to the PA. The camps’ “popular
committees”, which in recent years have acted like municipal councils,
are rediscovering a taste for activism. The head of one, near Ramallah,
seat of the PA headquarters, says young members are reviving the tanzim
armed units that waged the second intifada (uprising) against Israel
from 2000 until 2005 or so, when scores of suicide-bombings were carried
out.
But whereas the camp’s angry young men used to attack Israeli targets, Palestinian officials
managing the West Bank’s cities fear that they may now be the first to be hit. Camp leaders,
who are often members of the (currently defunct) Palestinian legislative assembly as well as
officials of the ruling party, have formed a new committee that in effect skirts the authority of
the PA’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, who has got used to appointing the camp’s leaders.
Many of the challengers, says a loyalist of Mr Abbas, are financed by Muhammad Dahlan, a
Palestinian strongman whom Mr Abbas exiled to Abu Dhabi. Mr Dahlan’s supporters in the
camps have threatened to undermine the PA unless the 78-year-old Mr Abbas
nominates Mr Dahlan as his successor. Israel’s generals blame the
recent killing of two of their soldiers in the West Bank, the first
there for almost two years, on the PA’s weakening grip. Its leaders, say
the Israelis, should crack down on the camps’ lawless youths. But
Palestinian security officials fear they lack the ability and legitimacy
to intervene on Israel’s behalf. The PA’s forces, who have been trained
by Americans, “are persona non grata in the camps”, says a disconsolate
PA man. Privately Palestinian leaders in Mr Abbas’s orbit have toyed
with admitting that, even if there is a deal with Israel, the refugees
and their offspring will never return en masse to their old homes in
Israel. With only 60,000 alive (8% of those who fled in 1948), there may soon be almost none left for the Israelis to allow home.
But leaving them put will do nothing to lessen the trouble they cause. Almost 70% of West Bank refugees already live outside camps.
The refugee department of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, an
umbrella group, is hoping Western countries will pay for decent new
housing elsewhere. “We should settle the hills above Nablus with
[Palestinian] refugees, not [Jewish] settlers,” says Said Salameh, the
department’s head. A UN “beautification project”, installing swimming
pools in Roman ruins and demolishing houses to create town squares, has
raised10/13/13 Palestinian refugee camps: spirits in some of the West
Bank’s southern camps. So has a Qatari-funded housing project for
refugees in Bethlehem. After 65 years of squalor, almost any new homes
would be better.
www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21587846-some-palestinians-want-their-people-abandon-refugee-camps-without-demanding/print
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