In the summer of 1968, I went to visit my family for the first time since my departure from Jericho three years earlier. The flight landed at Amman airport in the afternoon. I had told no one about my visit. Outside the arrivals terminal, a little boy fol lowed me. “Hey, touristo!” he cried, a skinny arm extending towards me. His eyes looked at me hungrily. He was dressed in rags. I looked at my suitcase with its London labels and bent down to speak to him quietly in Arabic. Before I could give him a little coin, he scurried away confused. I had never liked Amman. Now, it was worse. The streets were filled with people, mostly refugees in a pitiful condition. No news bulletin, no television camera, could have conveyed the oppressive atmosphere of Amman in that summer following the ignominious defeat of June 1967.
I had been unprepared for the change I saw in my parents; they looked tired and frail. In their letters, they had been under playing the harshness of their condition. The war turned them old before their time, making them disconsolate and nostalgic. My father’s hair had gone completely white, and my mother's face had become drawn and haggard since I last saw them. It was a very emotional reunion in that dingy room where they now lived on the outskirts of Amman, where other refugees from Beit Nattif had lived since the first exodus. The war had reunited them, as if something had turned full circle, the catastrophe completed.
We talked as if I had left the day before, as though we had never been parted. With a fixed, sad look on her face, it was an effort for Mother to blink or to open her mouth. Sensing that my disapproval of them leaving Jericho was still burning inside me, Father described their panicky departure. Then, his face twisting with anger, he told me how they had been bombarded even as they ran. Some people had been hideously burnt; children screamed with terror as they tried to claw the deadly, highly inflammable, sticky napalm from their bodies.
The following day I asked a relative working as a taxi driver to drive me to the Baqa’a refugee camp on the outskirts of Amman. From a distance the camp looked like some rampant fungus, spreading patchily over the lower reaches of hills, as bare and wrinkled as elephant hide. The driver gestured to the camp ahead as the car bumped along the track. He gripped the steering wheel hard. The land around us was barren, a stony waste. I felt the chaos pressing in on me from all sides, families huddling together, quarrelling voices shouting angrily at each other and music piping mournfully from a doorway. Against the wall, sad-eyed men and women crouched hopelessly, like a huge refuse pit for unwanted humanity. They were second-time refugees. After 1948 in the Aqbat Jabr and Ain el-Sultan camps outside Jericho, now in this one outside Amman. With the outbreak of the 1967 war fear had spread through the Jericho camps like wild fire. A father told me of his little daughter who had fainted while they crossed the Allenby Bridge. She still had not recovered. She would not eat, had shaking fits and would scream in her sleep. I saw her huddled in her mother's arms, speaking with a whimper, her eyes huge and frightened. The mother turned away weeping as my eyes met hers. She was broken.
Our taxi was quickly surrounded by a crowd of desperate people. I spoke to some relief workers. They did their best, but it was like trying to empty water out of a sinking ship with a leaky bucket. The problem was massive, the physical discomforts vast. There was a repugnant stench, sanitation being virtually non-existent. Water was in very short supply. It would arrive daily by truck, there being no water distribution network in the camp. The degradation was sickening. The camp was the worst of slums: its residents lived in ramshackle housing or tents, and children played in rubbish-strewn alleyways polluted with raw sewage. If someone had attempted to devise an environment that would induce a slow cancer of the spirit in a pit of physical degeneration, they could not have laid a better plan. This was surely psychological torture. How could anyone living in these conditions ever hope to recover?
Meanwhile, back in Palestine were our cities, villages, houses, churches and mosques. I knew we were no more suited to live in these threadbare tents and wretched shacks than any other people on earth. I was done with waffly arguments made by politicians seeing us as pawns in a chess game or as atonement for hideous crimes committed far away from our world by European fascists. The impassioned, reasoned appeals of friendly states or conscientious human-rights advocates so often heard at the UN were in concrete terms as impotent in achieving change as so many goldfish mouthing mechanically behind glass. And here was the living proof of that impotence.
That visit to the refugee camp in Jordan helped to crystallise not so much my perception of the injustice meted out to Palestinians, but rather the sheer irrationality and cruelty of the position in which they now found themselves and the double standards it reflected. This has stayed with me ever since. It is something I cannot shake off.
A glaring illustration of these contradictions and incon sistencies can be discerned in terms of the implementation of UN resolutions on Palestine. It was the UN General Assembly (GA), where all member states cast a vote, that made a non binding recommendation in 1947 to partition Palestine based on a simple majority vote. This recommendation, which did not even consider the legality of partition itself and was adopted without the consent of the inhabitants of Palestine, gave the basis for the creation of the State of Israel. But an independent Palestinian state never emerged. Instead, militarily superior Zionist forces swiftly took control not only of the territories that the GA had “granted” to Israel under the Partition Plan but also of a significant part of the territories intended for the Palestinian state. The fate of the Palestinians was then left to the Security Council, whose five permanent members represent the superpowers and have the right to veto any resolution. There the United States, for its own geopolitical reasons, has routinely vetoed any resolution even remotely calling for Israel to uphold international law vis-a-vis the Palestinian people.
To overcome this blockage, and given the GA’s historic responsibility for the creation of the Palestine problem, a vote was called at the GA in November 2012, at which 138 out of the 193 member states (71.5 per cent) of the GA voted in favour of the recognition of Palestine as a state. Nine members voted against: the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Panama, Palau, Canada, the Czech Republic and, of course, Israel and the United States. That vote for recognition was not implemented on the ground, however, as it did not lead to a withdrawal by Israel from the occupied Palestinian territories. By contrast, when thirty-three out of fifty-six member states (58.93 per cent) voted in favour of partitioning Palestine in 1947, their recommendation was promptly implemented to create the State of Israel, thanks to US influence and pressure.
Excerpted with permission from My Palestine: An Impossible Exile, Mohammad Tarbush, Speaking Tiger Books.
