On April 19th of this year, 43 families from Nahr al Bared, a refugee camp in north Lebanon, moved back to their newly constructed homes, after four years of displacement. 83 more families are expected to return in the coming weeks, as UNRWA (United Nations Relief & Works Agency) completes the final touches on the homes, and still 5,000 are hoping to return in the coming years as UNRWA seeks more funding to reconstruct the rest of the Palestinian refugee camp that was destroyed in 2007 by the Lebanese Armed Forces.
One woman will not return, however, Fatima, whose age I never knew but I guessed as I traced her life through the telling of her stories of exile from Palestine in ’48; to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon which lead to her 2nd displacement during the war of the camps in the 80’s; and finally to Nahr al Bared, her final resting place where she died, alone, waiting to return to Palestine. I never discovered her age, and it was never recorded in any of her UNRWA papers.
I first moved to Lebanon at the end of 2007, about 6 months after Nahr al Bared, Lebanon’s second largest Palestinian refugee camp, was destroyed. Over 3,000 buildings built over a period of 60 years were left in rubble, an entire city turned to a ghost town in less than a week. More than 5,000 Palestinian families, almost 35,000 persons were displaced, some for the 2nd and 3rd time, leaving behind their livelihoods, belongings, history and future. As in 1948, the people of Nahr al Bared were misled to believe that if they left their camp in order to allow the Lebanese Army to detain the Islamist group Fatah al Islam, they would return within days. But they discovered a little too late not only was their camp eliminated, but it was closed off for 4 months after it was destroyed, preventing the families from retaining their belongings, or what was left of their homes, pictures of dead mothers and fathers, books and stories from their history, and most importantly land and ownership papers to reclaim their lands lost in 1948. All was gone…disappeared…turned into dust.
I first met Fatima in one of the schools she was living in after she was displaced from Nahr al Bared.
She was one of 15,000 people who ended up in the neighboring camp of Bedawwi. She shared a classroom with three other families, and her only belongings were the long dress she had on, her scarf and a mattress that UNRWA had given her a few weeks back. The families took over four UNRWA schools because they had nowhere else to go, and like all the refugee camps in Lebanon, Bedawwi was crowded. The schools were the only free space these families had. So UNRWA gave them mattresses, blankets and some cooking utensils until a long-term solution was found. The families used some of the blankets to divide the space in the classrooms, and to give each other some privacy. I noticed Fatima sitting in the corner, a short, frail woman with silver hair and a broken leg. As soon as I saw her, I imagined this was what my grandparents’ exile and displacement was like, except the cement walls of the schools were modern day tents. I have the stories of their exile from Beir Sheba stored in my head. I’ve imagined it over and over again, and here I was witnessing yet another catastrophe, the Nakba of Nahr al Bared. Seeing Fatima, I saw my grandfather…and my grandmother and all of my people who were made refugees in 1948. I saw the despair and shattered hopes, the same look I saw in my grandparents’ faces. They arrived in Gaza, and were handed a tent and some cooking utensils. Fatima was placed in a school and handed a mattress and a blanket. History was repeating itself, and here we were, Fatima, a Palestine refugee in Lebanon displaced for the third time, and me, a 3rd generation refugee from Gaza who has never seen Palestine 48, and I was bearing witness to her refugnesses. I became her soul mate. I learned she had no living family members, her only daughter killed in a car accident several years ago, so she was on her own, had been for several years. And she injured her leg when she was rushing to get out of her house when the camp was being bombed. An ambulance picked her up and brought her to the school. She didn’t take any of her belongings with her because she thought leaving was temporary.
After about three months of meeting Fatima, I was able to secure her housing in one of UNRWA’s pre-fabricated temporary housing units. UNRWA moved about 300 families to the new units, a temporary solution until the camp was to be reconstructed. UNRWA also could not afford to keep the schools in Bedawwi closed, with over 300 families living in four schools. So 1 million dollars was used to transport and install these trailers in the area next to the destroyed camp, so at least some families could return to the area adjacent to the camp. I too moved to the camp. I visited Fatima in her housing unit every other week, made sure she had the food she needed and delivered her medicines. I convinced one of our UNRWA doctors to also make house visits because she couldn’t walk to the health clinic. Her leg never healed, in the two and half years I knew her.
She told me the same stories of 1948 my grandfather told me, except she ended up in Lebanon, not Gaza. She was born in the Palestinian village of Sa’sa’, near the town of Safad in what is now northern Israel. She must have been in her teens or 20’s when she was exiled because her mother died and she became responsible for her siblings. She said she married late, a Fatah freedom fighter in Sabra & Shatila. She spoke of her husband a lot, Hussein. She described him so vividly, tall, dark hair, big brown almond shaped eyes with fire inside them, she said. She was proud to have married a freedom fighter. I learned all the details of the Israeli invasion in 1982 and the “War of the Camps.” She was one of the women who cooked for the freedom fighters, fed them and washed their clothes before they went into another battle to protect the camps. But her story was sad; Hussein was driven out of Lebanon in the early 80’s, I imagine during the massacre of Sabra & Shatila, where Arafat and his resistance fighters were driven out. He was never heard of again. Fatima and her daughter were left without a home, so she migrated after the massacre and the destruction of Sabra & Shatila to the North, settling in Nahr al Bared.
I heard about the house she built in Nahr al Bared, taking her almost 20 years to finish. She opened up a little shop and received some money from Fatah, enough to support herself and gradually build her house. She furnished it, and even built an extra floor for her daughter when she marries. It was where she was going to die she said, her comfortable 3- bedroom house, with its kitchen, surrounded by her grandchildren in her bed with a picture of Hussein on her dresser.
In the three years I was in Lebanon, every year I took Fatima to the Nakba’s commemorations in Nahr al Bared, on May 15th. Community centers would hold events, mostly for children to learn about the Nakba of 48 and the Nakba of Nahr al Bared in 2007. The events were to remember our history, and to celebrate our resilience. Fatima was one of the oldest people in the camp, so she was always a guest of honor. She always said, we don’t want to return to Nahr al Bared, we want to return to Palestine. She made sure to say it to all the children, so they don’t lose sight of Palestine and our roots. Sadly this year she will not tell her stories of our Nakba, or remind the children of Nahr al Bared of our history.
The last time I saw her was before I left Lebanon in September 2010. She asked me with doubt about the reconstruction of Nahr al Bared and I told her it will in fact be rebuilt. I showed her pictures of the beginnings of the reconstruction, and in excitement she asked me to confirm that her house will be rebuilt in the same area that it was before. I learned of her death when I visited Lebanon in February of this year. I tried to get a permit to get into Nahr al Bared, which continues to be sealed off by the Lebanese Army, and entrance is only allowed with permission. I discovered from one of the UNRWA social workers that she had passed away a few weeks before, and her housing unit has since been unused…and locked.
Fatima didn’t know she would be displaced for a 3rd time, and she would die in a 3 by 6 meter room with a sink to be used as a kitchen, and a small bathroom, on a thin mattress, without Hussein beside her, without the keys to her house in Palestine or in Nahr a Bared. She would die of a broken heart, at the loss of everything, only to be left with a refugee ID and a failed promise of a durable solution to her refugneesss.
She never returned to her house in Nahr al Bared, and she never returned to Sa’sa, in Northern Israel. She died with a yearning to see her land, and the bitter taste of injustice in her mouth. So while Israeli’s celebrate the day of their so called independence, we will commemorate not only one, or two, but many days of catastrophes, for we never forgot, for being refugees is a constant reminder of the day of Nakba.
