In Camps, Arabs Cling to the Dream of Before
By JAMES BENNET
ABALIYA REFUGEE CAMP, Gaza Strip, March 9 — Israel has for the first time stormed the fortresses of the Palestinian uprising, sending soldiers backed by tanks and helicopter gunships to raid camps like this one in a hunt, Israel says, for terrorists and their weapons.
Now Jabaliya is awaiting its turn to be hit.
Israeli soldiers have torn other camps apart, punching passages through interior walls to ransack house after house, and killing dozens of Palestinians in firefights.
Those raids have set off echoes of past violence among the three generations of refugees who are trapped by poverty, political calculation and their own longing for plots of the land in what is now Israel.
In attacking the camps, Israel is again joining the half-century struggle at the core of the conflict, as the grandsons of the Jews who won the 1948 war square off with the grandsons of the Arabs who lost it.
For the Israelis, it is a familiar fight for their lives and homes. For the refugees, it is one more attempt to chase them, and their ageless hopes, away.
With a dreamer's smile and one word, Muhammad Aziz summed up his vision of home: "Paradise," he said.
His paradise is a simple mud house with a wooden door with no keyhole and no need for one. In the village of Simsim, the house was set in a golden wheat field, shaded by fig trees and grape arbors, just a 90- minute walk from here to the east.
That home has been gone for more than half a century, more than twice as long as Mr. Aziz, 24, has been alive. He has never seen Simsim, but he has heard his father describe it so often he sees it in his dreams. He means to return home, God willing, one day.
There are millions of Palestinians like Mr. Aziz, yearning to go home, to places where they have never lived. More than a million of the refugees from the 1948 war live in 59 camps like this one scattered throughout the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.
The refugee camps have supplied the most fighters, Palestinians say, and the most fighters willing to kill themselves in the cause. It is their vision of earthly paradise lost — not of a heaven full of obliging virgins — that motivates them, said Dr. Nizar Rayan, a leader here of the Islamic group Hamas.
"We are not doing these military operations because of the women," he said, sitting in the study of his comfortable house here. "We are doing them because of my house in Ashkelon. My house is stolen. I want it to go back to my children."
One of Dr. Rayan's sons was shot dead last fall during a suicidal attack on a settlement in the northern Gaza Strip. "No, no, no, it was very easy," he said when asked if it was hard to lose a son. "If we want to get back our land, it seems we have to lose half this generation."
Most Palestinians have accepted a two-state solution under which they would build a state in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, the lands Israel occupied in the 1967 war. But Dr. Rayan, like many refugees, has no patience for that approach, floated most recently in a Saudi Arabian peace initiative. "My house is not within those borders," he said of the Saudi initiative.
At 42, Dr. Rayan is too young to have lived in Ashkelon. But, before Israel closed Gaza off, he would take his children to the remains of his family's old house, to picnic on its foundations.
"There is a lot of fiction surrounding this, of course," said Iyad Sarraj, a psychiatrist and refugee in Gaza City, referring to the ache for lost homes. "It becomes mythological. But I tell you, it is the most important element of the Palestinian psyche, if you want to understand it."
In his living room, Dr. Sarraj keeps a sewing machine. His father bought it to replace the one his mother lost when the family fled Beersheba. His mother cried whenever she thought of the original machine. "I was haunted for years by this sewing machine," he said.
"Refugee camp" evokes a transience at odds with the reality of this place. When Mr. Aziz's father, Rabah Ahmed Aziz, arrived here, there was only sand. Then there were tents, and with them lice and streams of raw sewage in the sandy lanes. Now there are the cinder-block and mud-brick homes — some, like his, with satellite dishes on their roofs.
With more than 100,000 people packed into little more than a half square mile, this is one of the most densely populated places on earth. Lacking a field, children play soccer among the dead in the cemetery.
The camps are administered by a United Nations agency created expressly for Palestinian refugees. Unlike the United Nations agency for refugees of other conflicts, this agency was specifically not directed to protect the refugees or to resettle them. It was empowered to house, feed, medicate and educate them, effectively maintaining them as a political running sore.
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