Ain el Heloue, a Palestinian camp in the south of Lebanon, just a few kilometres from Galilee, north of Israel. 70 000 Palestinian refugees live on just one square kilometre – one fifth of the Palestinian refugees in the Lebanon. Most of them never leave the camp. They barely have the right to work and 72 professions are forbidden to them in the Lebanon. They have no identity papers, only a refugee card from the UN, and they cannot travel.
Palestinian refugees, not just in the Lebanon, but also in Syria and Jordan, have been waiting for the past 50 years. The creation of the state of Israel in 1948 marked the beginning of an exile that was to be temporary – until a solution could be found that allowed them to return home – but it became permanent, no solution has been found. They are at the centre of the negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian leaders. Israel does not want to discuss their return, a return home that Palestinian leaders have been promising for four generations.
While the creation of Israel might have been the solution for the Jews who escaped the Shoah, it was seen as a great injustice to the Palestinian refugees. They have nothing to do with age-old Western anti Semitism and don’t understand why they should suffer the consequences.
There seems little hope for the future and violent armed clashes between the men from the Hamas and those from Arafat’s Fatah became a daily occurrence in the camp. The Palestinian society had been traditionally the most secular in the Middle East, but our investigation shows that the Islamic fundamentalists of the Hamas and the Islamic Jihad gain ground each day. Hamas is getting a grip on this society through propaganda, education or by forcing women to accept to live by archaic traditions.
They are nostalgic of the past, but with little hope for the future. Today, they might well be a collective human time bomb…