When repeated tragedy befalls a man, Arab teleological idiom has it, it is because “God is angry at him.” If that is the case, then the deity has been mighty unhappy with diaspora Palestinians in recent years.
Last Sunday, Paula Constable, foreign correspondent for the Washington Post, filed a gut-wrenching story from Baghdad about a new, makeshift refugee camp of canvas tents, “baking like ovens in the searing midday heat,” to which 1,500 of the estimated 70,000 Palestinians living in Iraq were dispatched after being evicted from their government-subsidized homes by irate Iraqi landlords. These are Palestinians who were born, grew up or had lived in Iraq since the refugee exodus from Palestine in 1948.
To be sure, even before the ouster of Saddam Hussein, a man noted for his flowery rhetoric about the “noble cause” of Palestine, the Iraqi leader mandated that the Palestinian community remain isolated, its members denied citizenship, including those married to Iraqis, and, till last year, the right to own property, such as houses and cars. And they were barred from a variety of military and public-sector jobs, a policy clearly intended to marginalize them from the economy, most of which was state-owned.
Is God really angry at the Palestinians, using their fellow Arabs as His instrument of retribution?
Consider this. In 1982, Lebanese forces, under the command of Ariel Sharon’s invading army, stormed the two Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla and massacred well over 2,000 men, women and children, leaving their fly-covered bodies to rot in the sun. In 1991, virtually the entire 400,000-strong Palestinian community in Kuwait — again with most of its members having been born, grown up or lived there for decades — was expelled or made to flee. In 1994, Libyan leaders, unhappy with the signing of the Oslo agreement, took out their frustration on thousands of Palestinian families that had lived in the country since the 1950s, by unceremoniously dumping them on the Libya-Egypt border.
And so it goes, with Palestinians being blamed, then made to pay, for everything that had gone wrong in their host countries, from severe inflation to cold spells.
Why do their fellow Arabs constantly hound Palestinians at every turn?
It is the Palestinian people’s cri de coeur, originating at once from exile and the home ground, that is the source of the undercurrent of deep loathing that has built up in the Arab social subconscious against Palestinians, a resentment against those who hold a goal, an deal, a promise, constantly reminding us of how we have failed. We hate those who ask us, even by their mute presence in our midst, to break down the blackened walls of our historical condition, to leap out of the shadow of our petty status in the global dialogue of cultures.
We turn against Palestinians because we fully acknowledge, albeit unconsciously, the supreme value of their dream. In their exasperating way, Palestinians have become the bad conscience of the Arab world, a mocking, though subliminal, reminder of its intellectual torpor and social malaise. They carry a precise accusatory charge of failure, a sign on their backs, as it were, saying, “J’accuse.”
How is one to address one’s self, without feelings of fatuity, even of indecency, to such a theme? But it is there: We kill the dreamer to kill the dream, because his presence is macabre proof of our failings. We banish him. We excoriate him.
For their part, the Palestinians, crushed to a pulp, have never intended their cri de coeur to be a call to arms — just a call for a viable, independent and prosperous state in which they can live, or to which they can return after being placed close to the door for easy eviction in other peoples’ lands. Alas, they became unwitting performers in a gig designed to show Arabs the imbalance at the pivot of their culture, the breakdown in the current and currency of their modern history.
Meanwhile, more than 1,500 Palestinians languish in a dreadful refugee camp on a dusty field inside an urban club in suburban Baghdad called — irony of ironies — the Haifa Sports Club, named after a town in Palestine whence many of these refugees hail.
- Arab News Opinion 7 August 2003
