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This was, in the various writings and famous quotes of Israel’s founders, simply to ‘transfer’ the Palestinians away from the cultivatable land, to make room for the masses of Jewish Immigrants from Europe, and eventually the Middle East, to settle. Many of the early Zionist leaders from Theodor Herzl to David Ben-Gurion spoke or wrote about deporting the native population of Palestine, the Palestinian Arabs. Despite attempts by the European Jewish immigrants in Palestine to purchase land, prior to the war’s outset the Jewish population of Palestine was only able to acquire approximately 6% of the land area of Palestine, even though the U.N.’s partition plan granted them 50% of Palestine as a Jewish state. One at this point would question how the farmers in Saskatchewan would react if the Canadian government or the U.N. were to grant 50% of their land to recent immigrants to Canada.
Needless to say, there was a small Jewish community in Palestine prior to Israel’s creation, which had lived in relative harmony with the Arab inhabitants, much in contrast to the Jewish experience in Europe. It was only when the massive influx of European Jews began to occur that tensions between Arabs and Jews began rising, as the European Jews made no secrets of their desires to setup up a Jewish National home in Palestine, with or without the consent of the majority Palestinian Arab population.
Afif, as it turned out, was one of the luckier Palestinians. Growing up in a crowded tent with his 11-member family in the notorious refugee camps of Lebanon, he would study almost every night using only a kerosene lamp for light. The hardship he endured most of his young and adolescent life as a refugee helped him develop the will and endurance to overcome what fate had given him. Taking advantage of UN funded schools, he was able to earn his high school diploma and began teaching at a high school in Lebanon and eventually Bahrain. Afif saved enough money to travel to the United States, and was able to successfully acquire his Bachelor and Masters Degree in Mechanical Engineering, and was thus in a position to support his family, who were not quite as fortunate.
Several hundred thousand Palestinians in refugee camps in the Middle East are still waiting for the day that a solution to the refugee issue will emerge. The United Nations has continuously upheld Resolution 194, affirming their rights to return to their homes to no avail, as generations of Palestinians have been born as stateless refugees, while Jewish immigrants from Europe and the Middle East migrate to the lands the Palestinians had once lived on. To this day Palestinians are seeing their lands continuously expropriated by the state of Israel, despite condemnations from International and Israeli human rights groups, and in contravention of International Law.
Afif will probably never be able to see his old village, or rather what’s left of it. His clearest childhood memories are those of the shanty towns, poverty and turmoil of the Lebanese refugee camps. While any person, from Ethiopia to New York, claiming to be Jewish, can immediately immigrate to Israel (which lies on the ruins of some 400 Palestinian villages), Afif will remain stateless, without a country to safeguard his rights and offer him permanent and unconditional shelter, for the rest of his life. Being one of the luckier Palestinians, however, his case is not quite as unfortunate as that of other Palestinians still condemned to a life of exile and statelessness, who remember their villages and cities, and their old Mediterranean lifestyles. Never losing hope, some Palestinians have been known to keep old title deeds and rusted keys to the properties they left behind, in the slim chance that one day they may be given the opportunity to return to their ancestral homes.
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Riyadh Bseiso
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