Teaching Empathy and Compassion: Nahr el-Bared and the Plight of Palestinians in Lebanon

Nahr el-Bared, 2013.

The story of the destruction of Nahr el-Bared refugee camp in 2007, at the hands of the Lebanese Armed Forces, is one among so many atrocities, that it is no wonder that we have moved on from it with haste. But I firmly believe that in history, rather than the current event, lies a greater capacity to understand the world.  Today, I want to impress upon my colleagues who teach courses about the inhumanity of warfare or military oppression across history, the importance of using filmic documentary, oral histories and testimonies of victims, in their classrooms. The war front of the Palestinian struggle for survival has never been a green line or the shifting and changing imperial alliances. Now more than ever, it is a public relations contest. 

There is tremendous power in simply showing who the victims of aggressive government policies are. I have taught students who are so far removed from the reality of war that it had never occurred to them that a simple affirmation of support of military action translates into someone’s nervous breakdown or a woman’s own familial holocaust, or a child’s lost limb, or an adult’s lifetime of displacement and post-traumatic stress disorder. Of the millions of children who perished in the Nazi holocaust, we keenly feel the loss of Anne Frank more so than the others. Why? Because human beings do not have a capacity to sympathize with faceless, anonymous masses. We need to be shown individuals, we need to have the horror of war translated into a singular, personal experience. And this is exactly why I taught the Diary of Anne Frank alongside Mahmoud Darwish’s diary, Memory for Forgetfulness, and why I taught Art Spieglman’s graphic masterpiece, Maus, alongside Joe Sacco’s graphic novel, Palestine. In doing so, there was no escaping the collective humanity of the victims and the individual horror of people caught in machinations of extraordinarily unnecessary loss and destruction. 

Some of you may remember that the university where I taught made the decision to excise the Palestinian content. I walked away from that battle because, put simply, the insidious psychological warfare had by that point ravished and decimated my soul, and had taken such a toll on me that I, in the absence of collegial, personal and institutional support,  was not able to stand up and fight. I admire the likes of Steven Salaita who did, and won. I did not win, but I have survived and I can still write and I still have the privilege of a voice that is heard and words that are read.

Much talk of Israeli apartheid exists but we have yet to name the Lebanese apartheid, we have yet to just as loudly acknowledge the depth and breadth of Lebanese oppression of Palestinians. Nahr al-Bared Talks Back is an important documentary film that collects oral histories from survivors and gives a palatable context to the depth and breadth of the oppression that students will be able to relate to and find palatable. The film has all but disappeared. Its official website http://www.nahrelbaredfilm.org/ is no longer in use and the Norwegian institution (CMI) which funded the project offers no viewing or institutional purchasing options. For this reason, I choose to discuss some of the film’s content here.

The film tells us that Nahr el-Bared refugee camp was founded in 1949 and is located near the Lebanese Syrian border, in the far north, some fifteen kilometers beyond the city of Tripoli. The camp was and is home to Palestinian refugees displaced in 1948, most of whom had fled Galilee at that time. The film does not tell us that Nahr el-Bared is actually two camp sites, the original one and another that began to be settled in nearby rural plains as the refugee population increased. Like other camps in Lebanon, Nahr el-Bared, prior to its destruction, was organized into suburbs that reflected the names of the locations from which various people come. For example, those who were displaced in 1948 from Sa3sa3, now lived in a neighborhood called Sa3sa3, and those who had once lived in Safad now lived in the Safad neighborhood of the camp.

Palestinians have an extraordinary way of preserving the Palestine they were forced to flee in 1948 in a relentless and tenacious collective memory. I recall one woman from Burj al-Barajneh refugee camp in Beirut telling me how she had visualized the Palestinian village she came from, because her grandmother had given her such vivid accounts of the place. One day, she said, a news report was showing images from the village and she was able to recognize it even before the reporter named the location. She said the experience felt surreal -- to have known a place she had never been was spiritually elevating.  After the Lebanese Armed Forces destroyed the old camp and with the new reconstruction underway, these old neighborhoods have been erased; the social and cultural fabric of a people numerously displaced, faces further potential erosion. It is a little known fact that the Lebanese Armed Forces targeted the original campsite in their relentless 4-month destruction, when the alleged reason for their bombing, to destroy an Islamist group known as Fateh al-Islam, should have targeted the newer campsite where the two hundred or so fighters had taken fort.¹

One resident of the camp with whom I found myself in conversation, had lived there all his life and was now working in Beirut. He reminisced that after the end of the Lebanese civil war, Nahr el Bared experienced a time of commercial prosperity.  He recalled that in those days the best road from Tripoli and across to the Syrian border actually ran through the camp, leading to an influx of traffic, and by consequence, commerce. What’s more, the resident added, merchandise was competitively priced, making camp merchants the more desirable resource for shoppers from outside. This was due to the camp’s proximity to the docking ports near Tripoli, he added. The Lebanese Armed Forces completely razed the camp to the ground. Gone was that commercial stretch of highway and even as late as 2013, when I visited six years after the battle, the roads had still not been repaved. Much of the destruction was not even yet removed. An UNRWA School had been built, a modest facility, which stands in sharp contrast to its surrounds. A new school is to be found but no reasonable roadway leading to it or any of the infrastructure one would normally associate with a brand new school building. Looking out of the window from one of the classrooms, another one of my companions pointed to the skeletal remains of ghost buildings in the distance. “I had an apartment in that building over there. Every time I look at it, I get angry,” she said. 

Nahr el-Bared, 2013

Nahr el-Bared residents did not take up arms to defend the camp, because no one felt that this battle was theirs. No one had any desire to defend Fateh al-Islam who were a foreign militant entity, seeking to establish an Islamic emirate,² spilling out of the conflict in Syria and into Lebanon’s north. For this reason too, the then Lebanese Prime Minister, Fouad Signiora, declared that the Palestinian people were not the target of the military’s assault and had regrettably been caught in the cross fire. While this was symbolically all nice and fluffy, the actuality on the ground couldn’t be far from the truth. The behavior of the Lebanese soldiers was remorseless in many instances, as the film Nahr el-Bared Talks Back recounts through survivor testimony. A young man tells us how he and a group of other young men were detained and stripped naked, while some were beaten, and all were interrogated for no legitimate reason other than that they had remained in the camp when most others had fled. In his soft, evidently traumatized voice, he tells us:

When [the soldier] asked me why I was still in the camp, I told him, “why, where do I live? I live in the camp.” He asked me “why didn’t you leave with the people who left?” I told him “ I didn’t know things were going to get this bad. I was sitting in my house. In the end I’m not Fateh Islam.” He asked me what I did. He was asking every single guy what he did for a living. So for example, one of the young men told him “I’m a mechanic.” The officer told him “you worked as a mechanic, or did you fix machines and tools for Fateh al-Islam? Another guy told him “I’m a baker,” and so he said to him “so you used to bake and make food for Fateh al-Islam?” When he came to me he asked me what do I do for a living. I told him “I’m a musician, I play at parties and weddings.”  He went quiet. What could he say, when I tell him “music,” of course he couldn’t say to me “you used to play music for Fateh al-Islam.”

Another survivor, recounting his detention also wonders how, given the military restriction under which the Palestinian camp exists, was it possible for Fateh al-Islam to nest in the camp and to bring in so much arsenal with which they were able to fight the Lebanese army. When every Palestinian has to enter at a military checkpoint, showing a residential ID and when every outsider or foreigner must have a permit to enter the camp, how did Fateh al-Islam manage what they did? Sociologists Ismael Shaykh Hassan and Sari Hanafi contend that the origins of the group can be traced back to the allegedly secular Fatah al-Intifada, a militarized faction that was armed by the Syrian regime in Lebanon’s far north in the 1980s in opposition to the remaining PLO fighters who had withdrawn from elsewhere in Lebanon.³

An off-screen man curates the graffiti left by Lebanese soldiers on the ruins, among them are: “Thank you Shaker al-Abbsi [one of the three leaders of Fateh al-Islam, responsible for a contingent of fifty Palestinian fighters, predominantly hailing from Syria⁴] because you allowed us to enter Ali Baba’s Grotto.” The reference to Ali Babba’s Grotto must be in relation to the looting and ransacking that took place, given that the mythical grotto was full of untold riches.  Other graffiti reads “In revenge for al-Abbas.” And “In revenge for al-Damour.”  While al-Damour references a Lebanese coastal town that saw fierce fighting between al-Kata’eb and the PLO during the Lebanese civil war some two decades earlier, al-Abbas may be in reference to Mohamad Zeidan, the Palestinian political leader who founded the Palestinian Liberation Front in Lebanon. Off screen, the graffiti’s curator passionately tells us that this graffiti demonstrates that “this was a war programmed not against Fateh al-Islam but against the Palestinian people.” Given the final statistics, one can see the off-screen curator’s reason for believing this. In eliminating less than 250 Fateh al-Islam fighters, the Lebanese Armed Forces managed to kill approximately 40 Palestinian civilians as collateral damage and to displace and further impoverish 30, 000 camp residents. Many of them, to this day still live in the neighboring camp of al-Badawi, still awaiting reconstruction of their homes, eight years later. The Armed Forces’ brutal decimation of Nahr el-Bared was not met with condemnation. In fact, the heavy handed assault was hailed as a victory against global terrorism. Nahr el-Bared Talks Back tells a more important story, it tells the story of those whose voices are actively muzzled, preventing us from hearing their dignified and very human call for justice. As one man, speaking to a foreign camera, in the midst of the siege, says:

We are a people who have been unjustly treated (mathloomeen). If they want to exterminate us and kill us, let them kill us, but before they kill us they shouldn’t also be unjust toward us. Please convey to the international general public that we are trapped here with our children, and we can’t find water, and we can’t find bread, and we can’t find medicine. 

Notes

¹This point is illuminated by Ismael Shaykh Hassan and Sari Hanafi in their critical and in-depth study “(In)Security and Reconstruction in Post-Conflict Nahr Al-Barid Refugee Camp,” published in the Journal of Palestine Studies XL(1), 2010: 34.

² ibid, 33

³ Briefly after the end of the Israeli invasion in 2006, Hassan and Hanafi contend, that a “large group of Salafist militants arrived in Nahr al-Barid camp during that period as part of the well-established and ostensibly secular Fatah al-Intifada faction through the intervention of its Damascus-based general secretary, Abu Khaled Amleh. The newcomers initially remained within the faction’s military bases, supposedly as members, but it appears that an internal coup had taken place in which the Salafists had essentially taken over Fatah al-Intifada’s bases for themselves. On 26 November 2006, the man subsequently revealed to be the group’s leader, Shakir al-Abssi, announced the creation of Fatah al-Islam” (ibid, 32).

⁴ Fatah al-Islam’s “decidedly nonlocal character was confirmed by the Lebanese Judiciary Council, which listed its composition as follows: 69 Lebanese nationals, approximately 50 Palestinians (the vast majority from Syria), 43 Saudis, 12 Syrians, 1 Tunisian, 1 Algerian, 1 Yemeni, and 1 Iraqi” (ibid, 33).