BACKGROUND

Clinging To Memory

INA FRIEDMAN

Special to The Jewish News

E

ntirely by coincidence,
in the same week that
the issue of the Pales-
tinian refugees returned to
the headlines during the
multi-lateral talks in
Moscow, a short, poignant,
and thought-provoking book
was published on the subject
in the United States.
Entitled The People Of
Nowhere: The Palestinian
Vision of Home (Times
Books, 145 pages, $18.00), it
was written not by one of the
hundreds of thousands of Pa-
lestinians who could explore
this issue from the inside but
by an outsider in the
strongest sense of the term:
an Israeli, Danny Rubins-
tein, who for the past 20
years has covered the oc-
cupied territories for Israel's
two leading morning dailies.
And in many ways, the book
is all the more interesting
for that fact.
Writing in a clean, spare
style, Mr. Rubinstein opens
his book with statistics that
force us to confront the
tragic scope of the problem
from the start. In 1948,
700,000 Palestinians (about
half the country's Arab
population) fled or were
displaced from their homes.
Some 200,000 of them went
to the West Bank or Trans-
jordan, where, together with
the West Bank's permanent
residents, they became Jor-
danian citizens.
Some 200,000 others
crowded into the Gaza Strip,
and another 300,000 found
themselves in camps in Leb-
anon and Syria — all
stateless persons to this day.
Since then, according to
UNRWA statistics, the Pa-
lestinian refugee population
has swelled to 2 million peo-
ple, 800,000 of whom con-
tinue to live in camps.
"The problem of the 1948

Ina Friedman, who reports
from Jerusalem, translated
The People Of Nowhere from
Hebrew into English.

refugees still festers decades
after the fact," Mr. Rubins-
tein writes, "and remains
the prime obstacle to a polit-
ical settlement in the Middle
East."
Much of the rest of his
book is devoted to an analy-
sis of why. For the past 44
years, Israel and the Arab
states have angrily laid the
refugee problem at each
other's door. Yet Mr.
Rubinstein shows, with ex-
traordinary empathy, how
the Palestinians too have
kept this painful wound
open.
"Usually a man lives in a
certain place in the world,"
literary critic Anton Shalhat
wrote in 1987, "but for the
Palestinian the place lives in
the man."
Even after two genera-
tions, many refugees do not
accept that the place they
regard as home exists only
in their their memories. In

Refugees in the
West Bank, Syria
and Lebanon even
rebelled against
the attempts to
resettle them.

the intervening years, their
villages and lands have been
transformed beyond recogni-
tion, so that under even the
best of political cir-
cumstances they can't go
home again.
How this clinging to the
past colors the present is
demonstrated in a vignette
about a woman from a West
Bank refugee camp who took
her son and grandchildren
(then residents of Kuwait) to
visit the site of her native
village, Sataf, inside Israel.
Little remained of the
village she knew, but the
Israelis restored Sataf's an-
cient water system and
turned the site into a muse-
um of mountain agriculture.
While guiding her family
through the area, the old
woman suddenly began ran-

ting in fury. The reason, it
turned out, was an er-
roneous detail in the resto-
ration: a stone wall should
not have extended as far as
it did.
"It's a lie!" the old woman
shouted. "How could they do
such a horrible thing?"
The Israelis (visiting the
site) didn't understand what
the commotion was about: it
was only a restored wall
deviating slightly from its
original course. But the old
woman's reaction bore a
message that the Israelis
had completely missed. For
the first generation of Pales-
tinian refugees, the meaning
of "homeland" was very
simple, concrete, direct: a
field, an olive tree, a veran-
da, a well. Hence their loss
was felt immediately, and
deeply, as a great tragedy."

Indeed, one reason for the
long misunderstanding bet-
ween Israelis and Palestin-
ians stems from this deep
attachment to a very specific
place bearing the stamp of a
single family or clan. The
Jews living in exile for 2,000
longed to return to their
land, not to a precisely
defined patch of it.
But for Palestinians a
sense of exile could result
from being displaced just a
few kilometers. One an-
thropological study found
that the acceptance of a Pa-
lestinian family moving
from one village to another
could take 50 to 100 years.
Asked if he hailed from
Nablus, one student who had
been born and raised in that
city said "No," explaining:
"My family came to the city
150 years ago."
Even after a century and
half, they were still con-
sidered parvenus. If the pro-
cess of absorbing a single
family was "long and hard,"
Mr. Rubinstein reflects, "the
hundreds of thousands of
refugees who were displaced
in 1948 had virtually no
chance of finding their place
in new surroundings and be-
ing accepted as locals."

Photo by RNS P HOTO/Reuters

A new book on the Palestinians, written by an
Israeli Jew, traces their changing concept of homeland.

A Palestinian woman and her child sit in the rubble of their home
destroyed by Israeli authorities.

Little wonder, then, that
the longing for their homes
led the refugees to glorify
their "lost paradise."
"They spoke and wrote in
compulsive detail of every
tree, every stone wall, every
grave, house, mosque, street,
and square they had left
behind," writes Mr. Rubens-
tein. They lived in the past
and the future, convinced
that something was bound to
`.!redress the injustice" and
they would return to find
things just as they had left
them.
Refugees in the West
Bank, Syria, and Lebanon
even rebelled against the at-
tempts to resettle them,
holding angry demonstra-
tions and uprooting saplings
planted to make their sur-
roundings more comfortable.
A change in this deter-
mination to redeem the past,
intact, began after the 1967
war, when refugees from
Gaza, the West Bank, and
Jordan were able to enter
Israel and see for themselves
that their dream was a delu-
sion.
The villages they re-
membered in such acute
detail had been wiped off the
map, replaced by highways,
development towns, kibbut-
zim and moshavim. Contact
with the Arab population of
Israel also spread the seeds
of a new philosophy —
summud , or tenacity — that
soon became the watchword
of the Palestinians in the
territories.
The more Israel ex-
propriated land for Jewish
settlement, the more the Pa-
lestinians realized that the
issue at hand was not when

they would be able to turn
Israel back into Palestine
but how to protect the re-
mainder of Palestine from
becoming "Greater Israel."
Their response, as Mr.
Rubinstein describes it, was
a shift from paralyzing
nostalgia to the work of
nation-building; from the
concrete return of every last
refugee to his own house,
well, and fig tree to a more
abstract, collective desire for
national independence.
The Palestinians still
speak of their "right to
return" and will undoubted-
ly raise this issue in the
Committee on Refugees cre-
ated during the Moscow
Conference.
Just how they intend to
manifest this "right" re-
mains unclear. The decision,
however, will probably be
made in Tunis, rather than
east Jerusalem, just as the
representatives to the com-
mittee are slated to be ap-
pointed from the Palestinian
diaspora.
One clue, noted by Hebrew
University PLO-watcher
Matti Steinberg, is Yassir
Arafat's implication that
any "return" would be to an
independent state created
alongside Israel, while the
issue of property could be
solved through reparations.
Yet Mr. Arafat and the
PLO's other senior officials
are ensconced in Tunis, far
from the bleak realities of
life in the camps. What do
the refugees themselves say?
Mr. Rubinstein's book gives
no conclusive answer, but it
hints that even today many
of them cling to their old
dreams and identities. 1=1

THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS

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