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Palestinian Refugees in Syria & Lebanon
Still Hopeful after 50 Years

by Virginia Baron

hen Ali Mustafa, director of the Syrian government’s office for Palestinian refugees, and half-Palestinian himself, said he thought Israel was trying to convince people to become Jews so there would be more Jewish immigrants to Israel—and less hope for the return of Palestinians—I didn’t take it too seriously. That was last March.

In July, the magazine section of Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper featured an article about the religious conversion of 90 Indians from remote villages in the Peruvian Andes by an official Israeli rabbinical delegation. After a 12-day crash course, the new converts were flown directly to two settlements on the West Bank. There, according to Hirsh Goodman, in a Jerusalem Report article called “Zap—You’re Jewish,” the new Jews will “study in yeshivah and pray, at the state’s expense, for the messiah to arrive.” Goodman surmises that the Peruvians’ motivation may not have been so much religious as an eager response to the promise of a new mobile home and a guaranteed living.

A memorial to the victims of the 1982 massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon. Photo: Mideast Citizen Diplomacy

These are cruel developments in the lives of all Palestinians, including the 10 percent of Syria’s population whose only possible view of their homeland is a glimpse of the Israeli-occupied fields of Golan. Some have waited for more than 50 years to return to villages in northern Israel from which they fled in 1948. Old people say they just want to go home to die. Their stories are familiar: of thinking they were leaving for a few days, taking no clothes or belongings, walking barefoot over mountains with babies and the barest necessities, abandoning livestock, carrying only a blanket to sleep in the woods. Their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren have been steeped in stories that have built up a tradition of determination and persistence.

I spoke with many last of the refugees March as one of a group of 14 people from every region of the United States and from many professions, members of the first delegation of Mid-East Citizen Diplomacy to travel on a “Compassionate Listening” trip to Syria and Lebanon. MECD is a nonprofit organization dedicated to people-to-people peacemaking with a 12-year track record of peace building between North Americans and peoples of the Middle East. Many delegations have traveled to Israel/Palestine, but this latest itinerary was a ground-breaking experiment.

Ali Mustafa, when asked for his story, said he left the village of Um El Fahm when he was four months old. His mother was Syrian, so his family came to live with his grandfather. The Palestinian branch of his family is still in Haifa. Asked if the Syrian people had manifested resentments toward the great influx of refugees, Mustafa assured us that there had always been so much intermixing of families from Palestine and Syria that Syrians welcomed the refugees, even after it became clear that their stay would not be temporary, as all had originally thought.

Now, 54 years later, the implementation of U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194 on the right of return or compensation seems less likely than it did when it was passed in 1948. To an outsider, it is surprising to discover that most Palestinians, whether they live in camps or independently in towns or villages throughout Syria, sincerely believe the day will come when they will be able, not only to see but to stay, in their birthplaces again. A Canadian study found that 98 percent of Palestinian refugees surveyed would, if given the choice, go back, even to a ruined village.

Permanent “Guests”
Living conditions for Palestinians are more favorable in Syria than in any other Arab country, in spite of the police state atmosphere that must at times be circumvented but mostly is taken for granted. Our group was at first skeptical but came to believe, after countless conversations, including one with U.S. Ambassador Ted Kattouf, that the rights given to Palestinians are relatively generous. In spite of their designation as “guests” with no possibility of citizenship, Palestinian refugees enjoy the right to an equal education, including much-sought-after places in universities. They can own businesses without the requirement of a partner who is a citizen, as is the case in Lebanon. They have the right to own land, as long as it is not agricultural. As this restriction was explained, ownership of arable farmland indicates that that place is where you belong, that it is part of your heritage. Most people from the United States, who value easy mobility, find it difficult to comprehend this deep relationship to land unless they come from farms themselves.

“Syria is the best kept secret,” Angela Williams, Director of U.N. Affairs in Syria, says. “You have heard little about the hospitality of the Syrian government to Palestinians. How could you? There are no valued international journalists who file stories from here.” The Syrian government has made it clear, according to Williams and others, that once a resolution is reached, the Palestinians will be welcome to remain in the country if they choose to do so, unlike Lebanon, where the hostility to the refugees is extreme.

On a trip to Quneitra, a border town (near the present Israeli/Syria border) that was virtually destroyed in the 1973 war, we met Aref, a Palestinian born in Safed in 1935. When Safed was attacked in 1948, his family made their way to Syria, along with most of the other Palestinians from the same area, who still live in the Damascus region. Twice displaced after Quneitra was occupied, his family moved again. After receiving only a fourth-grade education, Aref educated himself, studying as he walked up and down the road under streetlights because there was no room in his house where he could read. He realized that an education was essential if he was to be able to provide a decent life for his children. He went on to college and to a career with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. Now retired, he is writing a book on the philosophy of education. The question he asks the United States to consider is, what good is it to be a superpower if we only want to conquer the world and not help relieve its suffering?

At a women’s center in a village near Quneitra, we heard about landmines that pock the area, a fearful reminder of the ’73 Israeli occupation. “I was nine when my father was killed by an Israeli soldier because he refused to leave his land. His body was left on the ground for months,” one woman said. “Now my family lives in a place where we are afraid of landmines. No one can farm the land because of mines. Everybody has a relative who has died from them. You would hear the same story in every village here in the Golan. Mostly it is the children who are in danger. We built a school and found landmines in what was going to be the playground.”

Another young woman added, “We have no sense of security. We never know when we will be attacked or reoccupied. We have to talk to our relatives left on the Israeli side with microphones. Why don’t you ask your media to let Americans know the real story, to tell the truth?”

The first Palestinian refugees who came from the upper Galilee to Syria were housed in World War II barracks near Aleppo. It is still home to many of the original occupants and their descendants. Mohammud Azzam, Neirab Camp’s liaison officer, recalls: “I was eight years old when we left. Planes were dropping bombs so we hid in the fields. We thought we would go back to our house. We stayed in caves till soldiers came and told us to leave because the Israelis had occupied the village and we would be killed if they found us.

“We walked to Lebanon the first night, then we made it to Tyre two nights later. Then we took a train to Aleppo where a truck picked us up at the station and brought us here. I remember we were put in Barracks 21. The Syrian people were kind to us. They provided food and clothes. Now we have the highest density in Syria and we are working on a project to move at least 300 families to a new area because there is no place to extend. We have received money from the [United States] and Japan to put in sewers and to build a secondary school. People can’t stay in these deteriorated barracks from the ’40s. Of course, we all want to go back to our homeland.”

At refugee camps, in villages, and in Damascus, we heard so many stories of lost homes, all harking back to nostalgia for the fields and hills of what is now northern Israel, that I wrote a note to myself at the top of a page in my notebook: “I start really understanding about Al Awda (the Palestinian movement to return) and I know why Arafat couldn’t accept proposals without mention of the return of refugees.” After 25 years of travel in the region, the depth of the problem has finally sunk in to my psyche.

The 14th edition of a popular Israeli guidebook first published in 1955 describes events in this way: “At the outbreak of the War of Liberation, Tsefat [Safed] was inhabited by about 12,000 Arabs and 1,700 Jews, mostly elderly pious people bound to the holy places of the town’s bygone splendor … A few days after the British evacuated the town, leaving the redoubtable police station in Arab hands, the [120] Jews emerging from the low tortuous lanes stormed the Arab positions and conquered the city on the 11th of May 1948. The Arabs fled in a body. The conquest of Tsefat is one of the ‘miracles’ of the War of Liberation.”

Someone during our visit described the need for a “recognized joint narrative.” The more one hears the disparate versions of history, the more one doubts the possibility that such an agreement could be reached.

50 Years in the Mud
In Lebanon, it is clear that 17 years of war have left deep scars on a society that had considered itself advanced and progressive before its devastating war. Today, in a period of impressive reconstruction, an aftermath of bitterness remains against the 390,000 Palestinians still in the country. Palestinians are not welcome in Lebanon—nor is anything that might make their lives more comfortable. In but two examples, every refugee camp is vigilantly guarded by the Lebanese army to make sure not one nail or board that might improve any ramshackle shelter passes through the gates, and the spokesperson of a Palestinian NGO reported that medicines donated from an American NGO were not allowed into the country by the Lebanese government.

We stood and talked with a social worker at the site of the ’82 massacre in Shatila Camp, with which Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s name will always be linked. Between 700 and 3,500 civilians were slaughtered at Shatila and neighboring Sabra Camps on September 16-18, 1982; Sharon was Israel’s Defense Minister at the time and is widely held to be responsible for allowing the massacre, which was actually committed by Lebanese troops. Many buildings were destroyed and never rebuilt. Some that were two floors have risen to six to accommodate the increase in population. Much of the destruction is still visible after 20 years. There is no drinking water in Shatila Camp, and residents have many diseases. There are serious psychological problems among children and outbursts of aggression are common. None of this would surprise anyone. As one teacher said, “Children living in these conditions can’t have proper minds.”

In tightly controlled Syria, political questions are often met with silence, or with, “I’m not going to answer that question.” In Lebanon, also controlled by Syrian forces, the spirit of freedom nourished in an earlier time has not been quenched; questioners will receive answers without hesitation, sometimes with political jokes. Jokes may reflect the attitude toward Syrian domination of the country, but there are no jokes—from either Lebanese or Palestinians—about the need for a solution to the refugee problem.

One Palestinian asked, “How would you like to stay 50 years in the mud?” Another, more hopeful, said, “There is a solution to every problem. We are waiting for ours.”

Virginia Baron just finished a two-year term as president of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation. She has visited the Middle East many times and written about the area for this magazine and others.