refugee camps

in the past few days i have made some trips to a few of the refugee camps around bethlehem. I visited di heisha, which got its name when the british asked the egyptian soldiers what they had just stumbled upon, and they responded in their dialect 'this is a jungle'. I also went to Aida camp. These refugee camps were somewhat confusing to me when i got there. I guess i had always imagined the kind you see on tv where there are people all lined up in tents with UN trucks handng out food. This was not at all what i found. These camps have been built, there are buildings. It is really much more like a project or a ghetto than the image of tents that many people have. Because these refugees have been living there for 60 years, they started making homes, and so now it is more of an issue of poverty there, and the inability to go anywhere else. there are tiny one or two room homes built all on top of each other with families of 10 or more sometimes living in one room without running water or electricity. This is what a refugee camp looks like in palestine, this is what displaced people look like after 60 years. There are people who were born and have lived all their lives there.



I have found also that the mentality of the people in these camps is differant than the ones that i live with in beit sahour. In bethlehem and beit sahour, the people are frusterated with the oppression, and they really want to just be left alone. They want the same rights that citizens are entitled to, and they want a government that represents and protects them, they want to be able to build their homes, they want to have control of their water and electricity, and they want a future for their children that does not include so. They want to be able to visit their families in neighboring cities without the trouble of checkoints, and they want to see their holy sites.



In the camps, the people remember their homes, most of them still have the keys to their houses in what is now israel, and have held on to the idea that if they could go back, they could rebuild their lives, and things could go back to an idea of normal that many of them have never truly known. The problem with this is that these homes they dream of returning to, no longer exist except in their memories, they now have israeli families in them, in fact theyve probably been remodeled if not rebuilt. all the street names have changed. still, this is the only hope these people have. they dont have good education, most of them dont know how to use computers and going home might be the closest idea to going somewhere with their lives, they just cant accept that they should be in a refugee camp forever, and i cant blame them.



these refugee camps used to be completley enclosed, noone could go in or out, they are surrounded by a fence that was guarded by israeli soldiers. Now many of those soldiers are gone, but still the people are trapped because land is so expensive, permission to build is almost impossible to get, and their old homes are seperated by a concrete wall that is twice the size of the berlin wall. In many ways this is the same struggle that is happening in palestine now. The people used to be oppressed with military and tanks, and the enemy was clear. Now it seems that the israelis have found even more effective opprestion tactics that leave them invisible. They are attacking the economy, choking the infrastructure, and when they want people dead they come in dressed like palestinians, often in the night. The effects are the same, but it is harder for people to unify against an invisible enemy.