involvement was as much forced upon us as it was a genuine and spontaneous inward preoccupation of our soul. This became evident soon after we all began to go to school again.
The first school I went to in Beirut was not far from the camp. It was run as a business by a Lebanese from the neighborhood. The classrooms were crowded. And always cold and damp. The teachers, were semi-literate. But for me even this school was an exciting place to go to every day. For Ibrahim, with his craving for education, it was heaven on earth.
Every school day, for me, was an exotic experience. After years in the streets I was truly enchanted by the idea of a formal education, by school activities, by sports, by the concept of boy scouts. I joined the boy scouts. And I was totally consumed by the idea of a camping trip to Cyprus that the group was organizing. For three months I made preparations. I saved money. I peddled chewing gum again in the evenings. The anticipation of the trip gripped my senses. I told the people at the camp. I told the whole world. I was a fourteen-year-old boy, a boy scout, going on a camping trip to Cyprus. I was, at last, no different from the other children. The tension of this transformed me, ruled my life for three months.
Three days before we were to go on this trip, the Palestinian kids in the boy scout group were called into the principal’s office. Because we were Palestinians, he said, we were stateless. And because we were stateless, we had no travel documents. And because we had no travel documents, the principal adds with the gestures of a man who had just discovered the solution to a major problem in his life, we could not go to Cyprus. We should have informed him of our status before, he continued reprovingly, talking to us, as the rest of the world did, as if it were our fault that we were stateless.
The other kids went on their trip. And we returned to Palestine. I am from Haifa. Haifa, O beloved city, we left thee with the fish that our fisherman had caught still thrashing about on the sands. Haifa now means more to me than it did to my father. It is more graphic in my mind than in his. Its image more enriching, more engulfing as I grow up.
Still, there was nothing wrong with being a Palestinian. Or living at the camps. We went to school. We fought the boys outside the Bourj el Barajneh. We fought each other. Samira sat next to me in class and my arm brushed hers. During the Eid following the holy month of Ramadan, the UNRWA distributed clothes and shoes and baseball hats to the refugees. I am a refugee. I get an old pair of moccasins from America. That’s right, from America. I have painted slogans on the walls: Down with America.
For Palestinians, passion for politics and political activism began at a very early age. By the time we were halfway through high school, we were already veterans of a number of demonstrations, strikes, protest marches, and ideologies, as well as arrests, beatings, and worse.
For Ibrahim, politics was now more than a passion. It ruled his life. Every waking moment. Long before he graduated, he virtually controlled political activity at school. He became the one to decide when to go on strike, what demonstration to join, what petition to sign. He was becoming incredibly self-assured, haughty, aggressive, and extremist. It was he who organized Awlad Falasteen to uproot the UNRWA trees. The United Nations organization had been doing a lot of building, renovating, and construction around our camp. The trees, planted along the dirt tracks, were presumably put there to beautify the area. But around the sidestreet cafés, people were wondering about them, about the better shacks they were building.
A woman shouted to a gathering of Palestinians around the water pump, “O sisters, I swear to you by the blood of our fallen patriots that I will not hammer one nail in a wall while we are outside Palestine. We shall build only when we return to our land. There we shall build!”
The woman was Um Ali, who became famous in the movement in the 1970s because she lost all her six sons, her two daughters, and her husband in battles the Palestinians waged after 1967.
Are they going to deny us our right to return to our land, everybody was complaining, by making our stay here comfortable, acceptable, and hence permanent? “They” were the UNRWA officials, the American government, the Zionists, the British, the Arab states, and everybody else who lived outside the camps with their backs to us.
The trees looked so incongruous in the midst of our misery and destitution. So Awlad Falasteen attacked the trees, uprooted them, and burned them. We danced around the fire, singing lines of doggerel then common among Palestinians: Who am I/Who are ye?/I am the returnee/I am the returnee.
And always the police came to the camps. And always Captain Constantine was in a jeep, accompanied by three or four of his gendarmes. Nobody was afraid of us in those days.
He climbed up on a box, in the manner of a man about to pontificate, and waited for the people of the camp to come and listen to his abuse. If they did not, he sent his men to drag them out of their homes. He talked as if we were children.
“I don’t want to see any more Palestinians peddling in the streets without a permit,” he hollered with a hint of contempt in his voice. “I don’t want to see any more Palestinian sons of whores going across the border to Syria without a travel permit, or working ‘whether paid or unpaid’ without a permit.” If someone asked him a question he raised his voice contemptuously as he replied. He even slapped men across the face in front of their sons. “Uppity Palestinians,” he screamed, and went on to do the same thing at other camps.
At the café, a man complained, “The son of a whore doesn’t even wear a moustache.”
One day someone killed Constantine, with a dagger, as he was coming out of his house in the Mazra’a district. Immediately everybody began to speculate whether it was the Nasserites, or the Arab Nationalists, or the Communists, or the Baathists who did it. Shopkeepers gave out free candy to the children.
Then Squad 10, police who were the terror of both Palestinians and poor Lebanese, came to the camps. They arrested an eighteen-year-old boy called Hatem Arabi. He was never seen again.
Three middle-aged, very American-looking evangelical ladies come to our school to distribute toys. They are patting kids on the head and speaking deliberate, enunciated English to them when a boy of eleven or twelve walks up to one of the ladies, and ever so gently, pats her behind. “Your buttocks are so beautiful,” he says innocently.
The three evangelists want to know why the older pupils outside the school gate are making such a din. We are going to join yet another demonstration organized by the Arab Nationalist Movement in support of the Algerian struggle against French colonialism. Everybody is already shouting slogans. The girls are in the front, standing three abreast, holding Palestinian, Lebanese, and Algerian flags. The boys are arguing among themselves about which route to take to reach the Makassed school, where we will join its detachment of demonstrators.
“Tahya el thawra el Jazairia,” someone shouts. And we all shout back, Victory to the Algerian Revolution. “Fi el thawra tahreer Falasteen,” another shouts. And the slogan is repeated en masse. In struggle shall Palestine be liberated.
As we move on, dirty versions of political doggerel, old ones from previous demonstrations or new ones coined for the occasion, echo across the streets. The slogans condemn American imperialism, the British government, the French colonists in Algeria, Arab reactionaries, the “lackeys” of the West and Zionism in the Arab world, and virtually all established Arab leaders, with the Hashemites in Jordan and Iraq heading the list. When we get to the Makassed school, Ibrahim runs back and forth to confer with the leaders of its detachment of demonstrators. He is sweating profusely, with his shirt clinging to his small body.
“The sons of whores say we can’t go for a while,” he says loudly, contemptuously, “because the stupid Baathists are at it again with their rigid instructions to their followers. For God’s sake, these
