Rihab Charida, Saida
Ain El Helweh is the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon. In this tightly packed camp the only playgrounds available for children are the narrow alleys where dirty water flows. The only place for the elderly to gather is on plastic chairs in the widest part of the alleys (about 2 metres wide).
The only place for groups of young girls or boys to hang out is on the ground of the alleys just outside their homes. Walking past them means interrupting their stories or laughter, because they need to stand up in order for you to pass.
Ain El Helweh cannot be described as anything but a prison — a large prison surrounded by barbed wire and Lebanese military checkpoints. Palestinians here, just like their brothers and sisters in Palestine, live in abject poverty and have many restrictions imposed on them.
There are at least 70 jobs that Palestinians cannot undertake, regardless of their qualifications. In the overcrowded market in Ain El Helweh, the men selling fruits, vegetables, cigarettes, fish, etc., are mostly university graduates.
In almost every household here there is a sick person that cannot be treated in Lebanese hospitals (because they are Palestinian of course). Palestinians here cannot even walk around the camps without identity documents.
Foreigners are forbidden to enter the camp without permission from the Lebanese authorities. The 70,000 lives that are confined to these very narrow alleys are not to be filmed or even thought about by the outside world. They are to remain the "forgotten refugees", as they have been called.
Nearly all the difficulties that the Palestinians in Palestine face (except, of course, the military occupation, curfews and closures) exist here in Ain El Helweh. The poverty and deprivation that is the reality of the camp is the experience of every resident here.
At least in Palestine we can put the blame ultimately on the occupation. But here there is no military occupation.
While the employment and other restrictions imposed on the Palestinian refugees by the Lebanese government play a key role in shaping the desperate conditions of the Palestinians here, the blame can only be put on the dispossession of Palestinians in 1948. The reason they are here to begin with and the reason they cannot return can only be blamed on Israel.
The creation of the Israeli state, by its own definition as a "Jewish state with a Jewish majority", means that these Palestinians must continue to live here. Their return to their homes in Palestine would alter the demographics of Israel.
Maintaining Israel as a "Jewish state with a Jewish majority" means that one generation of Palestinians after the next must be confined to these alleys.
"The walls of these alleys are the only witness of our suffering", an old man here told me. Along these same walls the graffiti reads: "Palestine — we shall never forget you".
The only place of refuge left in this refugee camp is the dream of return to Palestine. Despite the permanency of the concrete buildings people live in, the feeling of return takes over and shapes the spirit of this camp.
From the eldest to the youngest, each resident of the camp will tell you that they will return to their village in Palestine. The old man told me, "If I don't return my son will. What's certain is that we shall return." His words are still ringing in my head just as they did through the alleys — the very narrow alleys of Ain El Helweh.
From Green Left Weekly, August 4, 2004.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.