Book Review: Children of Catastrophe
by
Jim Miles
September
23, 2010
Children of Catastrophe – Journey from
a Palestinian Refugee Camp to America. Jamal Krayem Kanj. Garnet Publishing, Reading, UK. 2010.
Children
of Catastrophe is
a work of courage, love – of family, friends, and country – persistence, grief,
sorrow, joy, anger, bravery, fear, and frustration. In short, it encompasses
all the emotions that not only are part of life, but a large part of life for a
child born and raised in a refugee camp. Nahr el Bared refugee camp was
established in 1949 after the nakba in Palestine. Set near the northern border
of Lebanon with Syria, the camp existed, grew, and to a degree, thrived and
prospered until it was destroyed by the Lebanese army in 2007.
Nakba
and ethnic cleansing
The
first sections of Jamal Kanj’s story outline very quickly the events of the
nakba, with references to the even longer history of Zionism going back to 1896
and a declaration from Theodore Herzl concerning the endeavor “to expel the
poor population across the border unnoticed, procuring employment for it in
transit countries, but denying it any employment in our own country.”
Demographics
has always been a problem for the Jewish state and give the lie to the
democratic claim of the Jewish state. Jamal quotes Joseph Weitz, the head of
the Jewish National Fund in 1940, saying, “Not one village must be left, not
one tribe. The transfer must be directed at Iraq, Syria, and even Transjordan.”
Ben Gurion, from whom comments about peaceful coexistence can be found,
nevertheless felt and understood the problem created by a resident Arab
population, indicating that the UN partition plan “does not provide a stable
base for a Jewish state….There can be no stable and strong Jewish state so long
as it has a Jewish majority of only 60%.”
Jamal
ends his introduction with notes concerning the life of ‘survivors’: “the
refugees have indefatigably remained part of a nation, without the state.” This
becomes a heavily ironic comment in comparison with the declared and possibly
mythological exile of the Jewish people over two thousand years. This is
perhaps the underlying theme to the work: that the Palestinians “have remained
part of an enduring nation in exile. The dispossession and the challenge to
survive have become their very identity and a key component of what it means to
be a Palestinian.”
Camp
life
Life
in the camp was “deprivation by circumstance” yet that deprivation was tempered
by the idea that “it is not possible to lack what you have never experienced.”
Protected as best as possible from life’s hardships by his parents, the family
lived “a relatively normal life.” For Jamal, this was all too true, as his
early life centered on life in the camp, and “life was normalized by what we
had and not by what was lacking.” Higher education and a skilled trade became
goals for the children of the camp.
Daily
life consisted of fetching water for washing and cooking on a daily basis from
a communal water tap. Firewood was important, gathered from local farmers’
fields and hedges from around the camp, or from the beaches of the
Mediterranean where the camp was located. Bread making was another daily
requirement. These activities, done mainly by Jamal’s mother, were also one of
the main sources of news and gossip in the camp.
Jamal
describes his personal economy, digging up sand and aggregate from the beaches
for construction, selling scrap metals and rendered animal bones for fertilizer
products. Farm labor on nearby Lebanese farms provided another source of funds.
Fishing with rod and line, later supplanted by dynamite, provided food and
funds.
Never
accepted as citizens, the refugees were extremely limited with any economic or
personal contact with Lebanese society, although as time passed, not only did
the refugee camp become somewhat self-supporting and innovative in both a
technical and business sense, it also interacted more and more with the
countryside and villages around it.
Education
and activism
As
Jamal approached the teen years, political awareness and revolutionary ideas
developed. As political and resistance activities increased in the camp, so did
Israeli incursions, from land and sea. The general rule was followed in that
“It was…very common for Israelis to shell civilian neighborhoods indiscriminately
and disproportionally under the specious pretext of self-defense.”
Part
of this was the delayed fused munitions that exploded well after the raids
ended, when people had gathered at the scene of the attack to give assistance;
another part was the cluster bombs that left hundreds of unexploded ordinances
lying around that Jamal and his friends helped round up (now there’s an
everyday ‘normalized’ activity that most of us have never experienced!)
In
spite of the obstacles thrown up by being in a country that did not give
citizenship to the refugees, Jamal persevered with his education. For the most
part of his high school years, civil war disrupted camp life physically and
economically. It also disrupted the activities of the educational institutes he
needed to attend in Lebanon.
Outside
The
combination of determination, perseverance, and good timing led Jamal to
Baghdad in order to obtain his high school diploma. His reaction to Baghdad was
very positive, as “One cannot live in Baghdad and not acquire fond memories of
the place….At the time, the Iraqi government was also looking toward the
future, as the zealously promoted education, self-reliance, industrialization
and manufacturing. Learning was becoming an important pillar in Iraqi society.”
From
there, he left for the United States where he earned an engineering degree
(1983) and later an MBA in Global Management (2001). His story does not cover
this period, but returns to a later visit to Gaza and the West Bank under UN
auspices. After describing a near fatal accident while visiting Jerusalem and
Bethlehem, his passage aided by his UN credentials, Jamal ends his story with
an account of the destruction of the Nahr el Bared refugee camp.
Return
to Nahr el Bared
Several
plausible reasons are provided for the destruction of the camp. First, the
“disappearance of another Palestinian camp is one less political hurdle in the
complicated peace process,” in which the Arab governments tend to call for a
“Just solution” rather than a right of return. Israel is suspected of playing a
part in the camps destruction – no surprise with that – through their spy networks
and military provisions. Another aspect mentioned is the demographic balance as
“Lebanon’s democracy is held together by a thin thread balancing arrangements
across the sectarian divide.”
The
camp’s successful economy also played a part in its demise, as its proximity to
Syria and the Mediterranean “helped create a relatively strong and vibrant
economy,” part of which involved smuggling contraband goods, even though that
money generally went to large Lebanese traders. The camp competed successfully
with Tripoli and surrounding communities as costs were lower, labor costs were
lower, and as the government did not recognize the camp residents as citizens,
there were no taxes collected.
The
final summation is directly stated: “Arab governments and the international
community, and even the Palestinian Authority, provided a cover for the
destruction of thousands of homes under the pretext of fighting “Muslim
fundamentalists.”
The
destruction of the camp deepened Jamal’s understanding of what the earlier
generations had suffered, what all of Palestine had suffered during the nakba.
He was “able to fathom the secret of the older generation’s eternal connection
to Palestine, a nation that continued to exist only in their historical
memories.”
Palestinian
identity
Jamal
Kanj’s story evokes all the emotions experienced through life’s trials,
enhanced and exaggerated by it being experienced within a refugee camp that
remained under continual stress from external forces. The book is well written
and does not dwell on the deprivations, but instead emphasizes the successes of
life within the camp, successes against many seemingly overwhelming odds. From
that success, the success of survival and more, the Palestinian identity will
remain strong within its own community. Children of Catastrophe explains
that identity and brings it to life in a straight forward manner, for those
beyond the borders of the community, to the larger community of global
humanitarian awareness.
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