Shatila (Palestinian) Refugee Camp
1949.
The birth of -
Shatila Refugee Camp.
South Beirut.
A domain of dispute.
Hezbollah’s headquarters in -
Lebanon.
Residence to those historically on the run.
For those fleeing northern Palestine,
The ICRC[1] built a home,
Inadvertently
Designed to confine.
Less than half a mile wide
And one-and-a-half miles long,
Over time Shatila camp spread
To the poor Sabra district.
Impending conflict.
14th September.
1982.
Bashir Gemayel assassinated by a blast.
Israel watched
Aghast.
A Phalangist Maronite murdered
By a suspected Muslim or those akin –
A Palestinian.
It must have been
A supporter of the Syrian regime;
Responsible for this bloodstream
In Christian Beirut.
East of the Green Line,
Thereupon turned red -
With avenge for a leader
And 23 left dead[2].
The death of Gemayel
‘Symbolises the terrorist murderousness
Of the PLO’[3]
And those who share their deadly ideal.’
Said Ariel Sharon,
Israel’s Defence Minister,
Before the launch of a move
Far more sinister.
Israel,
An ally of the SLA,[4]
Supplied arms and finances -
To aid in the expulsion of
Yasser Arafat.
Menachem Begin,
A plutocrat,
Authorized the invasion.
A calamitous occasion.
Instructed to avoid civilian death,
The Phalangists congregated in legion
To detect PLO terrorists
In Shatila and Sabra
Refugee camps.
Civilian residents were not to be harmed,
Yet,
Were left dead or spiritually alarmed.
2,000 PLO fighters were allegedly left
In the refugee camps.
The Phalange entered to clear them out,
Thus,
A massacre was brought about.
Shatila,
Home to 5,000 Palestinians
Kept migrants from Syria and Iraq.
Israeli General
And Chief of Staff
Of the IDF,
Rafael Eitan,
Said the camps were
The gates were opened
To the Christian fighters,
Whose avenging grip was becoming tighter.
Arafat’s army already expelled,
Left camp dwellers
Bombarded and shelled -
At the mercy
Of
Revenge.
Rafael Eitan and the IDF,
Watched the militiamen stroll into the camp.
The following 40 hours
Endorsed the abuse of retributive powers.
Murder and rape
Soon redefined
This crestfallen landscape.
A collective punishment.
Beheadings and mutilation.
Castration.
Infiltration.
Horrors caused by vexation –
Is now the history of an abused nation;
A major country of emigration.
There wasn’t a sign of PLO guerrillas
During this fateful onslaught,
But photos were captured of civilians distraught.
The militia retreated and news spread fast,
To the Israeli community of whom 300,000
Marched.
On September 25th in Tel Aviv.
Israeli’s gathered to protest and grieve.
Yitzhak Kahan,
President of the Supreme Court of Israel,
Led the Commission of Inquiry
Into the Events at the Refugee Camps in Beirut –
For justice was Israel’s primary pursuit.
The Kahan Commission Report
Of 1983,
Condemned the Phalangists directly,
With Sharon and Eitan
As mere ancillaries.
Israel did not condone the army’s response,
And would not stand for international nonchalance.
Eitan resigned and Sharon forced out –
Leaving a legacy of killers devout
To "gun Zionism".[6]
The latter nicknamed "the Bulldozer",
The creator of the “retribution squad”;
Unit 101.[7]
Force over diplomacy.
Diplomacy –
An extension of war.
‘Politicide.’[8]
For many,
Jewish history has been erased.[9]
Whilst the history of Zionism
And the Jewish State –
North of the Tiran Straight,
Conquers.
Rapacious.
Expansionary.
A view of Jewish privilege
In Palestine.
Now,
Gaza morphs into the Mediterranean coastline.
The Zionist intention,
Malign.
Rejected by Jewish-Israelis
Who refuse to condone,
The replacement of camps by an overarching gravestone.
Names embossed in belligerent brutality
Stayed at home,
Whilst others fled without a key -
Surrendering the right to return.
Yet, they shall forever yearn
For happy times,
That do not amount to callous war crimes.
1986.
Shatila besieged once again,
By a Muslim militia.
Shi'ite versus Sunni.
The foreign grown
Palestinian lime tree,
Cut down in cold barbarity -
By Arab friends
And Islamic foes,
Now strives to grow in wounded shadows.
Shatila Camp.
600 slayed.
No murmur of protest strayed
From the Middle East.
Perhaps support had lamentably ceased.
The international community
Had failed to see -
This moment of catastrophe.
2002.
Elie Hobeika,
Assassinated by a car bomb,
Again in Beirut,
Avoided Sharon’s investigative lawsuit.
Yet,
Hobeika was tasked to lead
The Lebanese Christian militias
Into the camps
In place of the IDF –
Of whom to gunshots chose to be deaf.
In the same year,
2002,
The ICC[10] decided on Sharon
To legally pursue.
2015.
Shatila -
Originally built for 3,000,
Then housed up to 22,000 residers -
Imprisoned as insiders.
Israel’s expellants.
Lebanon’s outcasts.
Palestine’s wounded.
Insiders of Shatila camp,
Have no lamp
To illuminate their way home,
Where ancient ancestors roam –
Searching for their missing children.
2016.
I visit Kofinou Refugee Camp,
Cyprus.
Palestinians from Lebanon reside
In this liminal space,
An interface,
Between life and death -
Until life’s last breath
Is washed ashore,
Or taken away
To a happier day.
The families I met
Fled Shatila
After a commonplace raid -
Learning that the international community
Would never come to their aid,
Or fight for their homeland
And the ongoing blockade.
For in their minds,
The world saw Palestine
As fictional as
Frankenstein;
Created for suicide,
Murder and Politicide -
Equating to
Genocide.
2019 in a taxi.
I am taken through armed checkpoints
In South Beirut.
I flash my passport
And continue my pursuit
To meet Kassem,
Creator of Beit Aftal Assumoud;[11]
A man made of phenomenal magnitude.
We weave through awless alleys,
Into a street of dancing shadows -
Where souls decompose,
Dreaming of the beauty of a single
Damask Rose.
Kassem’s headquarters are not in sight,
And all I think of is my own impending plight –
As my taxi disappears into
The darkness of
Shatila Refugee Camp.
The driver ushers me out.
I refuse
As the dark hues
Of detention
Whirl dangerously within me.
I tell him to drive out
Of this charged world
With exposed wires
And fraught despair;
A living nightmare.
The driver determined that we had arrived,
Asked for my phone
In order to locate
Kassem.
My mobile was soon
Sent through the window
To crowds of residents
Intrigued at the taxis
Contents.
‘Charity’ was called,
And I felt appalled
That I was using their plight
For intrigue,
Research,
Work.
I called on Shatila
To aid writing an essay –
That will forever fail
To path an alleyway
Home.
A home in Palestine,
Across the boundary line –
Used to define
And confine.
My phone was returned
And the eyes of Shatila’s narrow streets watched
As foreign hope
Disappeared –
Leaving a trail of abandonment
And boundless torment.
Kassem’s office,
Invisible to the outside eye,
Lay hidden behind a market row –
Smelling of Durian;
Raw sewage and rotting meat –
Impregnating this Beirut backstreet.
A modest office,
Preserving funds for the Palestinian community
In Lebanon.
BAS,
Established in 1976,
A massacre caused by politics -
In Tel Al Za’atar.
Between 1,000 and 1,500 Palestinians killed.[12]
A UNRWA[13]- administered refugee camp.
Children orphaned overnight,
Watched their parents butchered in daylight
By Christian militias who feared
The PLO
And the terror that they might later bestow.
Kassem taught me all about the UNRWA,
And the ongoing crisis
In light of reductions in US support –
That will thwart
The right for Palestinians to return
To their homeland;
Their banned
Dreamland.
Israel and the US campaign against
The fact
That
Palestinian refugees
Are the only refugees
Able to pass their status
Of refugee
As a legacy
Through generations;[14]
A diaspora spanning many nations.
Targeting the right to return,
As a national right,
Rather than observed as
A fleeting parasite.
Eliminating the Palestinian cause –
Resolution 194.[15]
The UNWRA mandate,
Downsized and criticised.
A UN organisation
For Palestine.
Alleged bias.
International,
Systemic violence
Against Israel -
As such is the counter tale.
Millions of US dollars cut
Under the Trump administration,
Affecting education;
73% of UNWRA’s budget.
700 schools.
Half a million students.
22,000 teachers.[16]
Careers closed down,
Whilst individuals were left to drown.
186 million USD spent in Lebanon –
A callous cut for Refugees.
Disquieting for the Lebanese.
Nahr al-Bared’s repair
Became a story
Whispered elsewhere.
2,486 of 5,000 households
Unable to return,
To charred houses -
Bound in a political Bone China urn.
Palestinians live in abstracto
In Lebanon.
No accurate census
For this misplaced population.
Deliberate castration?
Mass cremation?
Purgation.
Palestinians,
Are unique to Syrians,
For both are refugees,
Ill at ease,
Because of politics.
Power over people.
People after monetary gain.
Slain –
In surrendering sadness;
With no redress
For perpetrators
Of genocide,
Whom created people
Petrified
Of
Zionism.
Shatila Camp 2019.
The fatal alleys grimace at the visiting sun,
Which brings the risk of exposing an undeclared gun.
Through lines of counterfeit clothes-
And the sour-sweet smell of rotting yield-
Lies a path,
Drowned and protectively concealed -
By sky stretching shanties –
Reaching for release
In the screaming sky.
A school established after the 1982 massacre,
Leaving little children to dance in macabre,
Is now adorned in cheerful dye,
Conjuring emotions that urged me to cry -
For they now exist in a mosaic of fatal wires,
And unstable ceasefires.
The threat of electrocution runs live –
Handcuffing the legs of children;
Condemning them to a sentence of death –
A charged last breath.
The school spreads vertically.
A playground glimpses towards the sun -
Resting on crippled structures -
Reflecting lives resolutely undone.
Yet someone’s son
Still smiles.
I am pushed into a playhouse -
A house un-shelled.
A bare home
Of make-believe dreams,
Unbuilt beams,
Not tearing at the seams
Of veins sewn together in collective
Loss.
A concept approached by a branch
Of the Red Cross.
Established by Fathi Arafat,
The brother of Yasser –
Chairman of the PLO.
The Palestine Red Crescent Society,
Supports the occupied detainee -
And the occupied escapee.
For where are Palestinians truly
Free?
Shadowing the social worker
In sombre pursuit,
I climb the lifeless chalk stairway
To a metal slate door
Sandbagged with sandals
Of sorrow –
Blocking tears
Streaming from the sky
Suspended above Shatila Camp.
A women with shattered eyes
Answered the door
With an unhealed smile –
Denied the chance to reconcile
Her lost love
For life.
She took my hand in hers.
Warmth saturated my sweating palm.
Covering the cold door
Dangled an Arabian rug -
Ensnaring scents of dried sumac,
Sweet Sahlab,
Rose water,
Burnt baklava,
Polluted guava.
Sweeping through
Like a fugitive wind
In a valley of despair,
We perched on her syrup stained sofa
And spoke
With voices of those removed
From tragic transience;
The voices of foreign philanthropy –
Removed from reality.
In meagreness comes munificence.
Rushing into a small space hosting
A kettle,
A toaster,
A stove.
Not a kitchen but an alcove -
Where food comes to fruition,
Where sustenance is sourced,
And Scarcity reinforced.
A Silver Ottoman tray
Is placed upon an ersatz table -
An effigy of olive wood;
Marbled and streaked,
Like a river roaming free
From the Mediterranean
To the Dead Sea.
Served in fincans,[17]
A nutty,
Malt-like aroma
Rose from the scorched ashes
Of cremated
Coffee beans –
Permeating my blood with caffeine
And calling the children home.
No space to roam.
No games,
Or laughs,
But gratitude,
For the paltry spread of food
That awaited them –
Settlements away from Bethlehem.
Portraits of lost souls,
Are mounted in defiance
Of movement,
Displacement.
Of the title
Refugee.
A title that denotes permanence –
Without the ability to return.
A concept
Undesirable to learn,
And harder to discern.
The eldest fled to Belgium.
The middle son died
In a camp raid
At the age of 26.
He had been engaged.
The fiancé left desolate.
The mother left enraged
In grief,
In hatred.
She wanted revenge;
Longing to avenge
His callous murder.
For she said goodbye to her son,
Who was unable to outrun
Politics.
Her youngest
Married,
Living in the shanty below –
Elevated in Limbo.
I met her.
Eyes blue tacked with elliptical lashes;
Holding tears that twinkle
In the midnight moon.
Rays of light are
Refracted down the shadowy abyss
Below –
Never reaching ground level.
The Aphotic zone.
Meanwhile a baby is perched
On her protruding hipbone.
He cries,
Contributing to the uprooted chorus
That sings to the listening Earth –
Falling on deaf ears.
The Music of the Spheres.[18]
The Cries are as inaudible as the cosmos.
Continually sounding;
Like the sound of silence.
Shatila’s despair has been lost
In its permanence.
Barbers,
Butchers,
Bakers,
And Blacksmiths
Soak the streets
Where sewers run open.
Live poultry
Stacked in crates
Scream in suffering –
Echoing the displaced.
The debased.
The ticking of Singer sewing machines,
Observes women
Empowered by BAS[19],
To earn subsistence
For their famished families.
A small space,
Large smiles,
Bespoke textiles -
All worn by antique exiles.
The Palestinian Embroidery Workshop,
Created in the year 1987,
Preserves the heritage
Of those silenced.
Of those
Unlicensed
In this
Obscure space
Of enduring history.
Shadows chase shadows
In Shatila Camp.
The bereaved grieve.
The displaced seek
To be placed.
The lost seek
To be found.
The depressed seek
Elation
And the cessation
Of captivity and
Occupation -
An end to
An incarcerated nation.
They dream of hope,
Of love,
Of liberty.
Perhaps one day,
The international community
Will free them from their
Misery.
Footnotes:
[1] International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)
[2] AFP, 2017. Lebanese president Gemayel’s killer convicted, 35 years later. [online] Timesofisrael.com. Available at: https://www.timesofisrael.com/lebanese-president-gemayels-killer-convicted-35-years-later/ [Accessed 20 June 2021].
[3] Carroll, I., 2019. Israel and Palestine. Staffordshire: Dark River, Bennion Kearny Limited, pp.144-150.
[4] South Lebanon Army
[5] Carroll (n 3)
[6] Shlaim, A., 2014. 'Man of peace'? Ariel Sharon was the champion of violent solutions | Avi Shlaim. [online] the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/13/ariel-sharon-no-man-of-peace-israel [Accessed 20 June 2021].
[7] ‘In Israel’s early years, Unit 101 carried out reprisals against Palestinian fighters across the armistice lines, in an attempt to deter future enemy raids into Israeli territory.’ Cook, J., 2014. Legacy of Sharon ‘the bulldozer’. [online] Aljazeera.com. Available at: https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2014/1/11/the-legacy-of-ariel-the-bulldozer-sharon [Accessed 21 June 2021].
[8] Cook (n 7)
[9] Grodzinsky, Y., 2004. In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Struggle Between Jews and Zionists in the Aftermath of World War II. Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press.
[10] The International Criminal Court (in Belgium).
[11] Also referred to as BAS and known as The National Institution of Social Care and Vocational Training (NISCVT).
[12] Civil Society Knowledge Centre. 2019. Fall of Tal el-Zaatar and Jisr el-Basha. [online] Available at: https://civilsociety-centre.org/sir/fall-tal-el-zaatar-and-jisr-el-basha [Accessed 24 June 2021].
[13] The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East
[14] Suleiman, J., 2018. THE ONGOING UNRWA CRISIS: CONTEXT, DIMENSIONS, PROSPECTS AND RESPONSES. 2nd ed. [ebook] Beirut: The Common Space Initiative. Available at: http://www.badil.org/phocadownloadpap/badil-new/resources/docs/individuals/unrwa-crisis-lebanon-en.pdf [Accessed 24 June 2021].
[15] ‘The United Nations General Assembly adopts resolution 194 (III), resolving that “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.”’ UNRWA. n.d. Resolution 194 | UNRWA. [online] Available at: https://www.unrwa.org/content/resolution-194 [Accessed 27 June 2021].
[16] Suleiman (n14).
[17] ‘Turkish coffee cups (called “fincan”) are a necessity for serving Turkish coffee. Their purpose is to let people enjoying a strong coffee in small quantity.’ Baker, M., n.d. Turkish coffee cups | Traditional coffee serving utensils. [online] Turkish Style Coffee. Available at: http://www.turkishstylegroundcoffee.com/turkish-coffee-utensils/turkish-coffee-cups/ [Accessed 1 July 2021].
[18] Samuel, D., n.d. The Music of the Spheres – Sensory Studies. [online] Sensorystudies.org. Available at: https://www.sensorystudies.org/picture-gallery/spheres_image/ [Accessed 6 July 2021].
[19] Beit Atfal Assumoud (BAS).
Comments
Post a Comment