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With the key to the past

- We are trying to raise our voices, says Ziad Abbas Shamrouch. – Not in a political way, but by helping the new generation to form a leadership that can lead the fight further.




(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

The IBDAA Center has not yet been around for ten years. It was started in 1995 as a project for children and young people in the refugee camps in the West Bank. In the stairwell of the three-storey building there are murals, poems and drawings. Some have painted columns with names on the narrow side of the windows: Ajjyr, Al Faluja, Zikrin, Ishwa, Al Burayj… 45 names together. This is equivalent to the 45 villages the Palestinians in Dheisheh had to flee from in 1948.

It is a center that can be used by anyone. But first and foremost, it is aimed at Palestinians in the refugee camps. Ultimately; behind the many offerings on music, dance, sports and computer courses, there are only two tasks that are important: to give the refugee children a picture of their own past, and give the refugees a voice outwards. The first is important to keep the story going. The second is important because the Palestinians in the refugee camps are about to be forgotten in the political process.

For the refugees in Dheisheh, where the IBDAA center is physically located, it is not a given that the Palestinians should have a separate state. In practice, this will legitimize Israel's ownership of the villages that are currently in ruins inside the Jewish state. A two-state solution means renouncing the right to return. In various political back channels between Israelis and Palestinians, there is open talk of giving up the demand for return. It is a heretical thought for the refugees who still, three generations later, live in a kind of temporary parenthesis where life before 1948 forms a bridge to life after one or another year in the near or distant future.

"The refugees have been ignored," said Ziad Abbas Shamrouch. – No one has cared about the social and political development inside the camps. Nobody cared about us. We are part of the Palestinian liberation struggle, but we have nothing and we have not achieved anything. At the same time, it is clear that Israel is in no way ready to acknowledge the historical injustice they committed against us. In such a situation, with the right of return swept by the political agenda, we must find other ways to maintain the dream. We must create hope in the new generation so that the dream does not burst.

For Ziad, this fight is not about throwing stones or detonating bombs. It is about self-respect and knowledge. – My generation of Palestinians learned to throw stones before they could write and read. The new generation should create leaders who are trained to respect human rights, and to be respected as people with rights.

Words such as knowledge and self-respect are the focus of the conversation. It is the intellect that will win the match, coupled with an obvious demand for justice. It is an answer to the Israeli tactics, which are aimed at destroying civil society on the Palestinian side. Without a functioning civil society, the Palestinians that people will succumb to. Therefore, the IBDAA Center, with its focus on education, knowledge, awareness raising and networking.

A closed world

Ziad tells of things he himself has experienced, but which Palestinian children and young people do not experience. It's about something as simple as freedom. A relative freedom, of course, since the West Bank was occupied when Ziad was only three years old. But he could at least go about exactly where he wanted to.

During the first intifada, he threw stones, but was still able to move freely. It became Europe. During the second intifada, he no longer threw stones, but could travel wherever he wanted. It became the United States. But he was thrown out after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. Since last fall, he has been outside Bethlehem only once. – I can not stand the harassment, he says.

Traveling out of Bethlehem involves passing a roadblock with armed guards and metal detectors. Children and adolescents who grow up in Dheisheh can travel freely in Bethlehem. But outside there is a closed world. And inside are the nightly raids where Israeli soldiers search for Palestinians with bombs. It gets worse and worse, Ziad says. There are curfews, raids and people being driven away in the murk and darkness of the night. It is war, and of course the children are marked by it.

- It is a psychological thing, says Ziad. – We live behind mental barriers even when the gates are open and the roadblocks are emptied of soldiers. It's easy to kill, and we have to be careful all the time. We stay close to our houses. This is why I believe that the physical wall is not just a negative thing. It shows the world that we live behind a lattice; that we are locked inside physical boundary fences. But the mental barriers are the worst. The wall is just a concretization of the occupation, he says.

In other words, his point is that the wall makes the occupation visible. It enables the international community to see what is going on. Not that he expects any help from either Europe or the United States. But it certainly shows the intentions of the occupying power. It clarifies the prison.

But does he still have hope? – Without hope we will not survive, he says. – The hope is that life, at some point, will return to a kind of normality. It is a hope we cling to.

But he realizes that this hope is breaking for many. The young people want only one thing: they want out. They want to leave Palestine and live free lives elsewhere in the world. It's about space too. 11.000 people at half a square mile. 54 percent of them are under the age of 18. The er a new generation is coming, and they are many. In Dheisheh, one lives on top of each other, more than before.

Disaster at issue

The walls. A symbol of an actual occupation. A demonstration of power that even the international community – in all its awkward paralysis or unwillingness to act – finds grotesque. But it is of course not the case that Ziad Abbas Shamrouch has a different view of the wall than Palestinians in general. For him, the wall is a disaster in the making, because it destroys both the dream of one state for all, and the dream of a sustainable two-state solution.

Which is probably the point.

- The wall is a political disaster in several ways. First, it takes even more Palestinian land. Secondly, they are building it between us and Jerusalem, which means that Jerusalem will never be the capital of an independent Palestine. Thirdly, it kills the dream of a common state for all in this area. Fourth, it is built so that the right of return will never be realized. Fifth, it will not be possible to build any state on the other side of the wall.

- The wall is simply the final solution. It is a final solution to the Palestinian problem, because it works to open up a common state – as I personally prefer – or a two-state solution.

And what's left then? What has really been there all along. An occupation of the Palestinian territories and a racist Israel to rule it all. An apartheid regime in which Palestinians still have to ask for a one-day visa to visit relatives in the neighboring town. A regime in which Palestinians will continue to be trampled on and shot at, where houses will be leveled with the earth and people monitored and harassed. Why not, really? Justice, then, has never been any given size in world history?

Ziad is a pessimist. But like most Palestinians we meet, he manages to combine this with also being an optimist. It must end once, he thinks. But in what way?

- The first thing that must happen is that Israel recognizes our rights. The second thing that must happen is that Europe – preferably the United States as well, of course – must step in. Then Israel must abide by the UN resolutions that have been adopted since 1967. The International Court of Justice in The Hague is not a stupid ally, either.

Is about solidarity

But on the whole, it is not in the globalized world that hope lies, Ziad believes. It is instead the painstaking work that takes place in the West Bank. It is in the children who right there and then put up a theater piece in the large hall of the IBDAA house. It is located in the dance group, which goes abroad, and the many trophies that the house's sports enthusiasts have gathered.

19 people work at the center, of which 13 are women. The computer room is full of young chatters, and well, there is not an American girl sitting there either – come in solidarity with the Palestinians.

It is solidarity that is all about, says Ziad. Not assistance and gentle gifts. It is about keeping the history of the refugees alive, like anything else than the rest of the Palestinian joint experience.

They cover 170.000 refugees. And it is among these refugees; in all these camps in Gaza and in the West Bank, the resentful anger of the Israelis is most evident. It is in the refugee camps that people are driven like animals through the streets, and where things happen at night that the rest of the world does not know.

There is so terribly small space here. A society in miniature, where God has forgotten to shrink humans to fit the physical environment.

The IBDAA center is not located in the refugee camp itself, but outside. Inside you meet a kind of quiet contemplation where everyone is intensely concerned with theirs. On the outside, life cries out its violent crescendo.

There is nobody tristesse here. Rather, it is a huge release of energy. It is this energy that Ziad will channel into something constructive. The people here must have a goal. Otherwise, they go under.

11.000 people, of whom six thousand are children under 18 years. Demographics are similar to developments in other Arab countries. Soon the infrastructure will collapse. Resources cannot sustain society.

It was never intended for so many people to stay here. In 1950, the tent camp was established by the UN. Ten years later came the first small rooms, where families of an average of 6.3 members three times shared three meters and 25 families had a shared toilet. By the end of the 60s, the first houses were built.

54 years ago, the UN signed a contract with the original owners to lease the area for 99 years. There are still a few decades left.

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