Another story being added.

On Friday, 7 December, David, Joe, and Martha visited the Dheisheh Refugee Camp (pronounced “Deheisheh”). Shadi introduced them to the camp.

Starting in the community center, he gave a history of the camp. It began in 1947 as Palestinians fled their villages in the area designated for the new Jewish state of Israel. In 1948, the Dheisheh refugees came from 42 villages and ten cities, mostly between Jerusalem and Hebron, but also including Jaffa and Tiberias. Other refugees fled to other camps. Today there are about six million Palestinian refugees living in the “Palestinian Diaspora” – some in Lebanon, some in Syria, some in Jordan and Iraq, and some in refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. 5,300,000 of them are registered with the UN. 700,000 are unregistered. From 1948 to the present, refugee families have been split. Often even parents and children have been separated—one in the West Bank, the other in Jordan, for example.

At first, the refugees lived in tents. In 1957, when the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) was founded, the organization began to build the refugees more substantial, but tiny, housing. Palestinian families typically have six or seven members; each family was allotted only one room, three meters on a side. There was also only one bathroom for every 25 families.

Shot while repairing
his car during curfew.

By 1967, many Palestinians from the camp were working in Israel, earning a little money, and rebuilding their living quarters. But Israel still restricted the buildings to a single story. Only after 1994, when the area came under control of the Palestinian Authority, were residents allowed to add stories—we saw four and five story buildings completed or in process.

In 1972, the people of Dheisheh camp staged an uprising – or intifada – long before the Gaza-initiated intifada of 1987. The street in front of the camp was used by illegal Israeli settlers, so the residents threw stones at their cars. Israel found the camp uncontrollable until, in 1982, they built an eight-meter high fence around the camp. The former 24 entrances were reduced to one. That one entrance was open only from 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., and was controlled by Israeli soldiers.

In the 1987 intifada, there were 27 martyrs^[1] from Dheisheh. Israel frequently imposed curfews that required everyone to remain in the house. One could not get out even to use the bathroom. The longest curfew was 42 continuous days.

The mural reads, “Walls and armies do not bring security. Justice will bring security and peace.”

Many families had members in prison. If one was stopped on the street and seen to have a dirty hand, he was accused of having thrown stones, and was subject to arrest.

The Oslo Accords of 1994 ended the first intifada. People expected real peace, but there was no change. In fact, after Oslo, between 1994 and 2000, the greatest expansion of illegal Israeli settlements happened in all the forty years of military occupation. At the time of the first intifada, there were eight Jewish settlements in the Bethlehem area. Now there are 42—in the Bethlehem area alone!

The second intifada began in 2000. There were 32 martyrs from Dheisheh in this intifada, and 197 in jail. Shadi said that Israel even holds the corpses of those who have died in captivity until the end of their sentence, before releasing the body to the family. They have a special cemetery in the Negev for that purpose.

11,000 people live in Dheisheh camp. 6,000 of them are children. The camp covers an area of one-half a square kilometer. In the camp is one boys’ school and one girls’ school, and classes are taught in two shifts. For health, the U.N. provides one doctor and two nurses who treat 280 patients a day. Electricity and water in the camp are inadequate. Sometimes the camp goes two weeks or more without electricity, and a month without water. Unemployment is about 75%.
 

A few of the camp’s sports trophies.

The camp is organized by political parties. There is also a non-political camp committee that has built a new sewage system and private medical clinics. The camp committee members are not elected, as the party leaders are. Camp residents are not authorized to vote in municipal elections, but they can vote in the Palestinian Authority elections.

The Ibdaa Cultural Center, where we were meeting, was established “to provide a safe environment for the camp's children, youth, and women to develop a range of skills, creatively express themselves, and build leadership through cultural, educational, and social activities that are not readily available in either the camp or occupied Palestine” (http://ibdaa194.org/). It was started in 1994 when a dance troupe of Dheisheh children performed in France for cultural exchange with French students. After money for the initial project ran out, the women of the refugee camp sold their gold to continue. In 2,000, the U.N. gave the camp its present land. The center did fund-raising shows, with a yearly tour to the U.S.

It has not yet been possible for the dance troupe to perform in Jerusalem. Our tour guide Shadi said he has only seen Jerusalem once in his life. He was granted permission for a six-hour visit, but it took three hours to get through the checkpoint, so he only had three hours in Jerusalem.

The camp has an oral history project about the former villages. It has a sewing factory, an embroidery project, a nursery, classrooms, clinics, and a cement factory. Sometimes women can sell their crafts. Women can only work in the homes—that is why crafts like embroidery are so important.
 

The camp as seen from the restaurant.

The camp is developing a media center from which they will broadcast radio and TV. They have produced several films:   

1. Promises. Israeli and Palestinian children talk together, sharing their experiences, anger, and fears. http://www.humanrightsproject.org/vid_detail.php?film_id=9  

2. Frontiers of Tears and Dreams documents life in Dheisheh and in the Shatilla refugee camp in Lebanon through the eyes of children. http://www.jerusalemites.org/jerusalem/cultural_dimensions/34.htm

3. Palestine, Palestine. A puppet show. It took two weeks to get the show through the checkpoints from Ramalla to Hebron. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0314480/

4. The Children of Ibdaa tells the story of the camp children and the cultural center, including a visit of the children to the villages their parents had been driven from. http://www.arabfilm.com/item/274/

5. A new film, still in editing, is a video of a family in Dheisheh to be shared with the rest of their family in Gaza  from whom they have been separated for years. For nine months, the editor tried to take the tape from Dheisheh into Gaza to show the other half of the family. He was stopped and the tape was confiscated ten times at the checkpoint into Gaza. Finally he succeeded in sending it in by email.

YouTube is blocked in Gaza. The internet in Gaza comes through Israel, and Palestinian websites are blocked.

A visiting group.

Shadi proudly described Dheisheh as a “five-star” refugee camp. It emphasizes initiative by refugees for refugees. Their sports club, with 150 of the 370 athletes coming from outside the camp, has won many trophies, including the #2 champion swimmer in all Arab countries. Young people practice swimming in the local YMCA pool.

The camp creates its own funds. It was granted funding to build the community center, but by building carefully, they managed to have some money left over to build the restaurant. The camp provides jobs to camp residents—an alternative to working inside Israel. When money was cut off by donors when Hamas won the elections, the camp was able to continue from its own funds. The community center has a computer room, ten guest-rooms for foreign visitors, (each room named after one of the villages that was destroyed in 1948), activity rooms for music and theatre, and a restaurant on the top floor with tables named for the villages that the refugees came from. Windows on three sides give stunning views of the camp and the city beyond.

When asked, ‘What is the camp’s vision for the future?’ Shadi responded that all refugees have the right to return to the places from which they were dislocated, but they also should be able to choose whether or not to return. There should be one country for all – Israelis and Palestinians. The wall has made things worse because it has broken contact between the two sides. Israel is the only country that lists a person’s religion on their identity card: Jewish or Arab. (They don’t distinguish Muslim or Christian.) What Palestinians want most of all is to be respected as human beings on the same level as Israelis.
 

Michigan Peace Team members.

At this point, a young man joined us. Shadi explained that this young man had been released from prison two days before as part of the 429 prisoner release that Israel made after the Annapolis meeting. He had served six years of an eight-year sentence when he was released. Shadi then told stories that put the release into context. A mother and two sons were on their way to welcome their brother who was being released in Ramallah. At the checkpoint on their journey, one of the two brothers was arrested. So one was released, another taken. Another released prisoner was shot and killed on his way from Ramalla back to Jenin.

Palestinian parties run schools in Israeli prisons, especially George Habash’s PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine). The young man we met had completed his GED for a high school diploma in prison.
We walked around the camp while our lunch was being prepared. The buildings seemed solidly constructed. Several were having extra stories added. People used initiative on their own buildings—this was not boring boxes, Levittown style. We noted murals on a number of the walls. We visited a computer center, stores, Arabic sweets on the hood of a car, posters or murals of martyrs on the walls.
 

Delicious meal served.

On our way upstairs to the restaurant, Shadi explained some of the murals on the walls. They seem intended to celebrate resistance and to keep people’s memories alive for the villages they fled or were driven from in 1948.

There was a large group eating around a communal U of tables. We were seated in a booth at one end and served a delicious chicken dinner. Deheisha is probably the only five-star refugee camp among Palestinian refugees and that is thanks to the initiative of the refugees themselves.

[1] In Muslim terms, one killed during religious wars or while defending the Islamic community is a Shahid or martyr. Palestinians erect posters or other signs to commemorate their sacrifice.