This year marks the 40th anniversary of the creation of the State of Israel. It has not been celebrated even in Israel with much pomp and pageantry, for there is a corollary 40-year anniversary to be marked: the creation of Palestinian refugee camps. Palestinians hold the dubious honor of having stayed the longest in post-World War II refugee camps, but other refugee groups are not far behind.
In Uganda, 120,000 Rwandans have languished in camps since 1959. In Sudan, half a million Eritrean Ethiopians have been piling up in camps since 1962. The camps for half a million refugees in Somalia opened in 1978, the same year refugees began trickling out of Afghanistan, soon to become a torrent of 5 million. Most of the camps housing Central American refugees were built in 1980 and 1981. For the most recent outpouring of people from Mozambique, the United Nations is preparing camps to hold them for five years. But receiving countries such as Malawi, which soon will have 750,000 Mozambicans to care for, are girding for at least a 10-year problem.
The UN High Commission for Refugees, the agency charged with caring for most of the world`s refugees, designates anybody who has been out of his country for more than three years as a ”long-staying” refugee. Perhaps 75 percent of today`s refugees have been in camps for five or more years.
After 40 years, the expelled Palestinians and their 2.2 million descendants remain trapped in fetid camps across the Middle East. They have been there so long that two generations of Palestinians have been born and reared in camps, and much of the rest of the world tries not to think of them as refugees any longer.
The world has paid a high price for trying to ignore the Palestinians. Already it has meant the virtual destruction of one country, Lebanon. It has spawned an insidious new form of warfare, worldwide terrorism.
The Palestinians, of course, will not let the
rest of the world forget their plight. They were largely abandoned to their fate in the camps by the rest of the Arab world after the original Arab-Israeli War in 1948, when the new Jewish state forced 700,000 Palestinians out of their homes. The rest of the Arabs did not want the Palestinians to leave the camps because that would have meant permanent resettlement elsewhere in the Arab world.
So the Palestinians have been left to their own seething discontent for 40 years. It is a discontent that is particularly galling to the 800,000 Palestinians who, since the Six-Day War of 1967, have lived in the Israeli occupied territories of Gaza, Golan Heights and the West Bank, where their status is less than second-class citizenship.
The Israelis, themselves descendants of Jewish refugees who managed to survive Hitler`s Holocaust and had nowhere else to go at the end of World War II, persuasively justify their treatment of the Palestinians. They point to 100 million Arabs surrounding them, to the Arab leaders who for 40 years have proclaimed their intentions of driving the Jewish state into the sea. The Israelis say they are fighting for their very right to exist as a nation, and they are right.
The Palestinians also persuasively justify their struggle against Israel. They are a nation of people without a land to call their own, a people denied the right to determine their own destiny. The Palestinians say they are fighting for their very existence as a nation, and they, too, are right.
With each passing year, the self-righteousness and intransigent attitudes of the Israelis, the Palestinians and the Arab world seem to harden. With each passing year, the violence and potential for violence ratchet upward.
Refugee officials around the world increasingly worry about the potential for more Palestinian-style refugee problems. They fear that other long-term camps also are becoming seedbeds, fertilized by years of wrecked aspirations and wasted lives, for violent outbursts.
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I met Sophy Juda in September, 1987, in Gaza, one of Israel`s occupied territories. More than half a million Palestinians, including 360,000 refugees, live in Gaza, an arid strip of land 28 miles long and 5 miles wide at Israel`s southern flank.
I had gone to Rafah Camp, the southernmost of Gaza`s eight refugee camps, to watch the daily spectacle at Gaza`s border with Egypt. There, two fences separate Gaza from Egypt, and running between them is a road that is used by Israeli security forces to patrol the border.
The fences went up in 1967 after Israel took over administration of Gaza Strip after its lightning victory over Egypt and other Arab nations in what is now known as the Six-Day War.
For many refugees, the erection of the fences split not only Gaza from Egypt but their families as well. Rafah Camp before 1967 straddled the Egyptian and Gaza sides of the border, and even though members of the same family might have lived in Gaza or Egypt, they had freedom to go back and forth. Since 1967, residents do not have that freedom.
Now members of separated families come to the fence every day. They stand on anything that is handy, to give them a little elevation to see better into the Egyptian side of the camp. They cup their hands and shout to get the attention of people on the other side. The idea is to stop somebody who knows the relatives you are seeking and get that person to bring them to the fence. There are telephone connections between Gaza and Egypt, but few refugee households can afford them, nor could they afford the $1-a-minute cost that such a phone call would incur. If you have family business to discuss or gossip to pass on, you go to the fence.
Most of the people who came to the fence the morning I watched were elderly. After 20 years of separation, the older refugees have the strongest links with people on the other side.
That is why I was intrigued when a tall, neatly dressed young man ambled up to the fence and began shouting to people on the other side. He turned out to be Sophy Juda, a 27-year-old Palestinian trying to get in touch with his wife, Hayam, 23.
Sophy had been born and reared in a Gaza refugee camp. He had attended UN schools in the camps, obtained a scholarship to the American University in Cairo and received a degree in computer science and programming in 1984. But the Egyptian government refused him a work permit, so he was forced to return to Gaza.
That is an ordinary enough occurrence for Gazan refugees: allowed to leave for university training abroad but forced to return to Gaza, where job opportunities are nil. What made matters worse for Sophy was that he had met a Palestinian woman with Egyptian citizenship in Cairo, and they fell in love. He left Hayam behind when he went home to Gaza but decided he couldn`t spend his life without her, so he went back to Egypt on a temporary travel pass and married her in 1985.
Israeli authorities will not allow Hayam to live in Gaza. Egypt will not grant Sophy Egyptian residency. So their marriage is now limited to twice-a-year visits of about a month at a time, with Sophy going to Egypt or Hayam going to Gaza. Other than that, about once a month Hayam travels from her parents` home near Cairo and goes to stay with Sophy`s uncle on the Egyptian side of the border opposite Gaza. That way she and Sophy can meet for a couple of days at the fence.
With two barbed-wire fences, a road and about 50 yards of no-man`s-land separating them, the meetings obviously are not very intimate. ”You don`t really have a man-to-woman talk,” said Sophy, as he waited at the fence for his wife. ”Not with so many other people standing around listening. It`s just, `How are you, what do you need?` and that sort of thing.”
Sophy said he would like to get a job in one of the oil-rich Persian Gulf nations. That way he could use his computer skills and also bring his wife with him. Unfortunately, the downturn in world oil prices has ended the industry`s employment boom.
”There is no chance for a job in Gaza for somebody with my specialty,”
he said. ”I`d like to go to the gulf, but right now they are asking only for people with at least five years` job experience, and I have none. I went to Israel a year ago, to Tel Aviv, to speak to accountants about work, but when they heard I was from Gaza, they said I was a high security risk and wouldn`t hire me.”
So Sophy works as an unskilled laborer inside Israel, as does 45 percent of Gaza`s working-age population. He said he makes $12 a day working in a bagel bakery.
Every day, long before the sun rises, about 4 a.m., the refugee camps and towns stir noisily to life in Gaza. More than 40,000 Palestinians gather at bus and taxi terminals to travel from Gaza to their jobs inside Israel. The commute can take as long as two hours or more each way each day, especially if the jobs are in Tel Aviv, Israel`s industrial center.
Israel uses Palestinians in Gaza and the other occupied territories as a pool of cheap labor. The usual Israeli response to criticism of its policies is that the Palestinians in Gaza have enjoyed immense gains in their standard of living under Israeli rule. But a 1986 study of economic and social conditions in Gaza by Sara Roy, a Harvard University social scientist, paints a different picture.
According to the Roy study, Palestinians receive only 40 percent of the pay received by Israeli employees doing identical work. As much as 30 percent of Palestinian wages in Israel are deducted for Israeli taxes, insurance plans and social-security payments, which Palestinians seldom receive. Histadrut, the Israeli trade union, deducts 1 percent of each Palestinian`s paycheck but refuses to admit them as members.
Israeli taxation of the Gazan Palestinians, Roy said, far exceeds the $17.5 million that Israel contributes to Gaza`s budget: ”It becomes apparent that the occupation is not only self-supporting but, in fact, may be profitmaking.” In 1985 alone, Roy estimated that Gazan workers contributed $30 million to $40 million to Israel.
Farming, especially citrus farming, once was an important source of employment within Gaza itself, but Israel has taken over direct control of one-third of Gaza`s land. The Israeli military government has effectively stopped Gazan farmers from planting new trees while imposing heavy taxes on farm income, land and exports. Since 1967, it has banned Gazan citrus exports to Europe, once its major market, to cut down competition with heavily subsidized Israeli citrus growers.
Water is controlled by Mekorot, the Israeli water company, which prohibits Gazans from digging wells and severely limits how much water Gazan farmers can use. Yet Israeli settlers inside Gaza have built their farms next to the most valuable water reservoirs and suffer no limitations. As a result, in 1984, Israeli settlers in Gaza each consumed 14,200 to 28,400 cubic meters of water compared with 200 cubic meters for each Palestinian.