Author: Claire Thaliana | Date: April 2015

Jabal al-Hussein refugee camp in Jordan.  Photo: C. Thaliana

This message came from Umm Ahmed, a Palestinian grandmother who’s lived her whole life in the Jabal al-Hussein refugee camp in Jordan. She was recently able to visit her daughter in Palestine for the first time after seventeen years of being denied by the Israeli embassies. She asked me to get bring the message home about the injustices Palestinian refugees face every day. This story is my attempt to do just that.

Economic Conditions

“It is a life of desperation.” Each of the ten people I interviewed said that at some point when I asked about the economic conditions in the camps. The youth in particular face unemployment, low wages and an impossibly high cost of living, and can’t raise the money they need to leave the camp even if they want to. These issues can ultimately be traced back to the disparities in legal status between Palestinian refugees and Jordanians in Jordan. Less than half of students make it through secondary or professional school, and those lacking Jordanian citizenship are given lower consideration for scholarships and jobs in their fields than Jordanian citizens with less education. Exploitation of low-wage workers is common, and labor laws in Jordan are rarely enforced.

Meanwhile, the cost of living has drastically increased in the last few decades, and even more since the Syrian crisis.

Let me tell you a truth about poverty everywhere, for poverty is in my lived experience too – it means making terrible choices when all the other options are gone. Saeed (pseudonym) a young married man with several children, painted a clear picture of day-to-day living in the camp. Young people just want to buy a coffee or cigarettes, but can’t afford even these simple pleasures in their circumstances. So they ask older people for money… but it’s humiliating.

After a long time of living every day in desperation, youth get to where they don’t feel anything. And then they say they wish it were a chaotic situation like Syria, so they could move about and steal what they needed. One even said that if he could join one of the terrorist organizations he would, because they would provide a living for him, but if he had any other way to feed his children and cover his expenses, he would be the first one to fight against such organizations.

We’d live under a tent in the rain as long as we could live in our homeland.

Access to Healthcare

The intermittent employment people face in the camp also affects their access to healthcare, since health insurance is only available to employed people. Refugees with Jordanian citizenship can access the same healthcare system as Jordanians but those without citizenship are in a vulnerable position. UNRWA clinics cannot help in emergency situations. One young man related how his wife had a miscarriage because he could not obtain the necessary 30 JD in time to have her admitted for a complication. The Jordanian government provides some medical aid to refugees with citizenship, but this ends up stratifying refugees by legal status.

Right of Return

Under international law, refugees displaced by military engagements have the right to return to their homeland, but this right is systematically denied by the Israeli government and has been ever since the Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe,” the term for the Israeli takeover of the 1948 territories) displaced at least 750,000 Palestinians in 1947-49. Though families have lived out their lives in the camps, people overwhelmingly told me they would exercise their right of return and live in Palestine given the chance. I also heard several older people exclaim with exasperation after years of being denied entry into Palestine that they just wanted to visit – their homes, their villages, their families who are still there.

The stories I heard from people who were unable to visit their family members in Palestine made me sick with rage, especially since I, with no family or cultural connections to Palestine, have the privilege to cross those borders any time I want. Umm Ahmad, the same woman who couldn’t visit her daughter for 17 years, said that her husband was unable to attend his brother’s funeral, nor can he visit is 90-year-old mother in ‘Aqa. Also in Jabal al-Hussein, a woman named Su’ad Abu Sharma told me that she’d been denied a visa consistently from 2000-2013; when she finally visited her family she stayed one extra day, and for that reason she’s being denied again now. Because of this, she was unable to attend her brother’s funeral. This would be painful for anyone; no one should have to live cut off from the ones they love.

Under international law, refugees displaced by military engagements have the right to return to their homeland.

Messages for the West

I asked each interviewee what messages they most wanted me to carry back to a Western audience. People had two main messages which I’ll go into in detail.

First, people wanted to correct the Western story about Islam and Palestinians. Islam as a religion teaches peace, social justice and harmony with others; terrorists represent only themselves and not the Palestinian people and certainly not Islam. Palestinians don’t hate Americans either, only our government as it gives unmitigated support to the Israeli state while it commits human rights abuses. People often joked that if they thought the American people were like our government I would not be allowed into the camps.

Finally, in the words of a lady I interviewed in Jabal al-Hussein Camp, “No more talk! It’s time for direct action.” We need to support people on the ground. Monetary assistance is great, and it should take such forms as funding businesses and providing scholarships to local universities, but the most important thing we can do is fight for the Palestinian right of return. For Westerners, that means the struggle is here in our home countries as well – it’s time to hold our elected officials accountable for being complicit in Israeli oppression, and keep fighting until all our governments recognize the Palestinian right of return.