One of the best parts of living abroad has been meeting so many fascinating people. Teaching English abroad attracts a special breed of person, usually adventurous, intelligent and caring. No one that I’ve met since leaving the states has embodied that more than our friends Jonathon and Emma. The couple helped Taylor and I find an apartment when we first moved to Istanbul and showed us the ropes of ESL teaching in the classroom at our first school.
Not only that, they showed us how far ESL teaching can take you with a fearless attitude. Before coming to Istanbul, they taught in Guatemala City, one of the most violent and dangerous cities on Earth. After finishing their teaching contract here, they spent 3 months teaching in Palestine. Recently, Jonathon was kind enough to show me some of his writing on Palestine. Being a better man –and a better writer — than I am, he gave me permission to share it with you as well. Living in America, we tend to get a pro-Israeli bias to stories concerning the conflict from our media. To me, it was fascinating to read about it from the perspective of an American inside the fence. He has sent me four pieces, each on a separate aspect of daily life in Palestine: Camps, Checkpoints, Settlements and Villages. Thanks to Jonathan for letting me share them with you. And congratulations to him and Emma on their recent marriage!
Here is Jonathon on Palestinian Camps:
Camps
Perhaps the most contentious, or stalwart, issue between modern-day Israel and the Palestinian territories is “the right of return”. The dispute has been going on since 1948, and either side has yet to budge. The Palestinians who were displaced in the Arab-Israeli War in 1948 (around three-quarters of a million), others who were uprooted due Israeli annexation in the Six-Day War of 1967 (about a quarter million), and another 400,000 who have lost homes due to Israeli policies ongoing since 1967—they all want to go back, and they now constitutes over five million refugees, including the generations born while waiting for their “right to return”.
A Palestinian refugee, via the UNRWA (U.N. Relief and Works Agency), is classified as persons whose normal residency was in Palestine between June of 1946 and May of 1948 and who lost their livelihood as a result of the war. While most modern day “refugees” weren’t even alive at this time, the waiting continues and has continued for the last sixty-some-odd years. Many refugees still retain keys to the homes of their parents and grandparents as a symbolic gesture of what they feel is rightful theirs. Meanwhile, life goes on.
Currently, there are fifty-nine refugee camps spread amongst Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, and they house 1.3 of the over 4.5 million registered refugees. Much of the remaining group lives around the camps. Jordan boasts the largest population, just under two million, and has been kind enough to give their refugees full citizenship. On the other hand, the nearly half-a-million refugees in Lebanon are given no social or civil rights and lack access to government and health systems. Then, there are the twenty-six camps in the Palestinian territories.
Essentially, camps in Palestine exist on the outskirts of the bigger cities. They were originally set up as small areas for temporary housing (i.e. tents) but have remained so long that they now have dense masses of cinderblock buildings (noticeably shorter than the city they cling to), schools, and various help centers. Some even have hotels as means of furthering international awareness and bringing self-provided funds into the community. However, to put it brusquely, the camps and surrounding areas are now ghettos.
While the camps have developed into somewhat self-sufficient entities (shops and clinics), they by no means were intended to do so. Thus, entering a camp, one notices that the streets are not suitable for cars and are often rather dingy alleyways between buildings too oversized for their plot of land. Even so, these big buildings often find extended families of ten or twenty people shoved into one or two rooms. The streets are littered because garbage services (supposedly provided by the U.N.) has become irregular over the last half-century. There are no parks or playgrounds, not much in the way of green, save for the occasional weed sticking up through cracks in the concrete. The camps grow more stable and rooted each year, but all the while, people are simply awaiting the opportunity to be elsewhere.
International law is on their side as well. No less than four current global mandates (the humanitarian law, human rights law, law of nationality as applied to state succession, and refugee law) regard Palestinian refugees as having every right to return. Though the UNGA Resolution, The Fourth Geneva Convention, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights grant this right, Israel, nonetheless, has refused to accept these policies and has, in fact, formally stated their refusal to acknowledge the right of return for Palestinian refugees, as well as discounted any Israeli responsibility for the situation.
The stubbornness stretched into the Oslo Accords in the early 1990s, during which Palestine’s Yassar Arafat refused to give up the refugee’s right to return, and in turn, the negotiations resulted in the next great failure on behalf of these people. But, these are all grandiose and governmental issues, and thus, they, too, fail to capture the grass roots struggle that refugees in the West Bank undertake every day, namely being stuck in places that can offer little to no work and steadfastly holding out for promises that grow further and further out-of-reach as the years flap past.
The camps have become an odd combination of striving to overcome poverty and poor conditions (they are all riddled with community centers of every sorts) and maintaining the perception that the refugees are not at home. Consequently, some believe that residents resist the urge to clean up the neighborhood in an attempt to ensure that their struggle and aspirations are not forgotten. In other words, if the camps become up-to-snuff habitats, then there is all the more reason not to allow their revered returns. Furthermore, the financial prowess of refugees is bottom rung to say the least, so even if the desire were there, the expense of development (something the all-powerful U.N. hasn’t even been able to provide) is then very improbable.
Should the refugees ever be permitted their return, the resultant would of course be a lot of saved keys with no doors to unlock. In truth, the 1948 war destroyed more than 500 villages itself, not to mention the escalated numbers of destroyed houses and farms resulting from the annexation of Palestinian territories and the upstart of Jewish colonies (within Israel proper, not like the settlements in the West Bank) that now inhabit what once was “home”. While the Israel government is to fault for this, the people who have established their lives can’t be expected to surrender all of their work because this debacle wasn’t solved years ago, as it should’ve been.
Hence, we are left with an immense and growing population of people with only the ever-expanding rumble of un-kept promises too long gone now to be upheld. In the end, the toil has shifted to being a concerted effort to simply gain access to repopulating the lands of their past, fields and homes and farms most have never even seen with their own eyes.
You say, The streets are littered because garbage services (supposedly provided by the U.N.) has become irregular over the last half-century”"
… so where DOES all this UN money go? Not where it was intended and it sure ain’t Israel that’s putting it in their pockets. It’s time the Palestinian people rose up against those in power who KEEP them in these situations to make political mileage and get international sympathy!
As you said elsewhere, the average citizen whether Israeli or Palestinian just wants to get on with life and don’t really care who they live next to.
It’s all political b***it that is using innocent and good people as pawns.
No one will ‘win’.