Between right and realisation

By Graham Usher
Hussam Khader points to an old black and white photograph on the wall of his office. It shows rows of tents on an empty field with a narrow road winding before them. "That's Balata camp in 1950," he says with a smile. "And that" -- his finger picks out one canvas amid dozens -- "was my father's tent."
Hussam's father and family fled Jaffa in the 1948 war and had their home destroyed in its aftermath by the new, victorious Israel. He has lived in Balata all his life, save for seven years when Israel deported him at the start of the first Intifada. "But I belong to Jaffa," he says, "and so does my three-year old son. Ask him where he comes from and he will say, Jaffa, but I live in Balata camp near Nablus." He pauses for a moment. "It is impossible to cancel that sense of belonging."
It surely is, and every shelter and alley-way in Balata attests to it. Nor is this sense of belonging to another, better place, another, better land the only constant in the camp.
At the time of the photograph on Hussam's wall, Balata housed around 3,000 Palestinian refugees from 69 destroyed villages in the Ramle and Lod regions of Palestine on a land area of less than half a square kilometre. Today the camp hosts 22,000 refugees on a land area of less than half a square kilometre. A walk though Balata's dense warren of streets reveals how this demographic trick has been accomplished.
On one side of an open sewer measuring no more than two metres in width squats an old cinder-block shelter consisting of two rooms. "That's an example of the first houses that were built in the camp in 1954, after the tents," says Bassam Hadadi, another Balata resident. On the other side sits a similar structure but topped with two extra floors that climb precariously to the sky.
"It's an environmental disaster," admits Bassam, who works for the Palestinian Authority's Ministry of Local Government. "The construction is unsafe and it blocks out the sun 24 hours a day. But what can we do? We're not allowed to build outwards. So we build upwards."
The same instinct for adaptation marks the fierce national consciousness that has given Balata the sobriquet of the West Bank's "camp of revolution" and is epitomised in the political biography of activists like Hussam.
As a grassroots leader of Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement and head of the Committee for the Defence of Palestinian Refugee Rights, Hussam is fully aware of what President Bill Clinton's package of proposals for a final status agreement means for the refugees. They essentially define the right of return as repatriation to a state in the West Bank and Gaza rather than to the refugees' homes and lands in what was Mandate Palestine but is now Israel. In other words, "it is a project for the resettlement of the Palestinian refugees and it is utterly unacceptable to every one of them," he says.
But as an elected member of the Palestinian Legislative Council and someone committed to a peaceful resolution of the conflict Hussam is also aware that Israel is not going to accept the right of return anytime soon. He argues instead for a solution that separates the right from its actual implementation.
"It is possible for us to accept now a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank with Jerusalem as its capital and delay implementation of the right of return for 20 or even 50 years," he says. "But Israel must take responsibility for the creation of the refugee problem and recognise UN Resolution 194. We could even omit 194 from Clinton's proposals as long as omission is not mistaken for renunciation. But if Clinton wants us to trade 194 for implementation of UN resolution 242, then he and his proposals can go to hell."
And so can any Palestinian leadership that would be tempted by such a deal, he adds, including Yasser Arafat. "I accept Arafat as my national leader, even though I've had many fights with him over domestic issues. But were he to relinquish the right of return I would lead the revolt against him. And there are hundreds of thousands like me -- in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon."
It is a sentiment with which Bassam agrees. "I think most of the refugees -- at least in Balata -- would settle for a state in the West Bank and Gaza as long as their right to return is acknowledged," he says.
For then their dreams can be preserved. It is an important distinction dramatised poignantly in the shelter of Jamila Abdel-Rahman, where we take tea and cakes in celebration of Ramadan. Jamila does not know how old she is. But she remembers vividly that she was a girl of 19 when the Al-Nakba (1948 disaster) happened. She relates the events as though they were yesterday.
She remembers how the British Army left her village of Sid Nali north of Jaffa one day and Jewish militias of the Stern group arrived the next, killing five of the village's men and warning the others they would suffer a similar fate if they did not evacuate. She recalls how she lived in Jenin for 12 years in vain, hoping that UN resolution 194 -- "which we heard about" -- would be implemented and she could return to her home. And she tells how, finally, she came to Nablus in 1966 "in search of work" and has lived in Balata ever since.
Today Sid Nali is the site of Herzilya, a prosperous Jewish suburb on the coast where many of the Israeli elite live amid a landscape of high-tech industries, Internet cafés and lush restaurants. If she had the choice, would Jamila return to Herzilya? "Yes," she says without hesitation. "But Sid Nali was destroyed in 1948. So we would have to rebuild the village again."
And that is the distinction. For the vast majority of Palestinian refugees the right to return must be preserved for those who still belong to the land where their history was made and their ancestors are buried and to which -- in the future -- their children and grandchildren may live if they so choose. But the realisation of that right in the rebuilding of the village and society that was destroyed in 1948 is a dream. For Sid Nali and that society is gone, and can never be again.
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