18 May 2011

BOURJ AL BARAJNEH/SHATILA, Lebanon: When Abu Awasif left his home in Deir al-Assad, he was 11 years old. It was 1948, and Abu Awasif fled with his parents from their village near Akka to stay with friends across the Lebanese border in Rmeish.

I traveled through the valleys thinking it would be two to three days before I would return to Palestine, he says. This I remember well.

Abu Awasif is 74. He lived in Tal al-Zataar until it was destroyed in a 1976 massacre, and now lives in the Bourj al-Barajneh refugee camp. He never returned home.

Sundays Return to Palestine March brought thousands of protesters to the Lebanese-Israeli border, commemorating the 63rd anniversary of Palestines Nakba. The Israeli Army shot and killed 11 protesters, and wounded over a hundred more.

If the protest itself was spurred on by the ongoing Arab Spring uprisings, the protesters demands that Palestinian refugees be allowed to return home is as old as the country of Israel. This demand has occasionally been sidelined in political bargaining the right to return was not named in the Oslo Accords, for example but it has not been forgotten.

In Lebanons 12 Palestinian refugee camps, the memory of Palestine and the desire to return has long been maintained through memories, photographs, and the occasional house key.

The oversized key Abu Awasif used to open the door to his Deir al-Assad house is now decorated with the red, green and black of the Palestinian flag. His father brought it along when the family left their home, planning to return. Abu Awasif holds it in his lap, and recalls the house it once opened.

It was cement, with a wooden roof. We had chickens, horses and a camel. We had olive trees, grapes and a well I wish at every moment of my life to return to this land, to kiss its soil, says Abu Awasif. He went to protest at Maroun al-Ras Sunday, and calls those who were killed martyrs.

Abu Saleh Abdel Hajj left Palestine in 1949, bringing with him only the contents of his pockets: 3,800 Palestinian pounds, and an identity card that proved he was a member of the British Mandates Palestine Police.

The 3,800 pounds are long gone. But one of Abdel Hajjs sons had the picture from his police identity card turned into a painting, and so it survives.

The young man in the framed painting is wearing a fur hat and a uniform, and although Abdel Hajj is now 85 and wearing a skullcap and a gibbe, the resemblance is clear.

Abdel Hajj remembers his days as a police officer fondly, and says even the Jews liked me, because I was polite to everyone. This politeness persists, as he insists on getting up from where he sits to bring juice to his visitors. His house in Palestine, he says, was near Akka. It had four rooms, and was surrounded by trees. One of his sons obtained permission to visit Israel in 1982, and reported that relatives still live in the house. He says even my sons want to return to Palestine.

Of the estimated 400,000 Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon, around half are under 25 years old. These young Palestinians, and even their parents, were not born in Palestine. Most of them have never been allowed to visit. However, like Abdel Hajjs sons, they speak of returning to Palestine, and are teaching their children to do the same.

Amin Rial, who is 39, was born in Bourj al-Barajneh, but says she is from Tarshiha, a village that was subsumed by the Israeli city Maalot-Tarshiha. A mother of five, she says I am teaching my kids not to forget about Palestine I try to draw a comprehensive picture for them.

She is reading from a book, published in 2001, called the Atlas of Palestine. She flips past pictures of Tarshiha, points to population statistics, and talks about the Canaanite ruins it was built on. I know that it has rivers, valleys and streams.

In Shatila, 75-year-old Umm Moussa laughs at the suggestion that she might still have a key to her familys house in Akka. Like Abu Awasif, she fled to Lebanon on foot in 1948, but she didnt have a key, just her younger brother.

She didnt even make it across the border with her clothes intact. Umm Moussa says that her dress was torn by trees and bushes along the way. She giggles and points to where her legs were exposed upon her arrival in Lebanon.

But possessions, be they keys or clothes, do not seem to matter much to Umm Moussa. She has heard about the deaths at Sundays march, and says let us all die. [What matters is] that we go back to Palestine.

She hits the floor of her apartment. I want to smell the soil of Palestine I want to go back I will leave everything that I have here to go back to Palestine.

Copyright The Daily Star 2011.