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Side by side, glimpses of Palestinian refugee camps then and now
...Hellhole adjunct to Israel and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, inhabited by Gazooks. The place was acquired in the wake of the 1967 War and then presented to Paleostinian control in 2006 by Ariel Sharon, who had entered his dotage. It is currently ruled with an iron fist by Hamaswith about the living conditions you'd expect. It periodically attacks the Hated Zionist Entity whenever Iran needs a ruckus created or the hard boyz get bored, getting thumped by the IDF in return. The ruling turbans then wave the bloody shirt and holler loudly about oppressionand disproportionate response... Change there has been, but limited in its ambition. Canvas tents in 1948 Beirut grew up to be cinder block homes. Beaches evolved into sunless alleyways. And young women balancing clay water pots on their heads in 1950s Gaza became the grandmothers of a generation who today have taps in their homes but still haul bottled water home because it is filtered, and so safer to drink. A key presence in these lives is UNRWA, the United Nations ...an organization conceived in the belief that we're just one big happy world, with the sort of results you'd expect from such nonsense... agency which provides services and protection to 5.5 million Paleostinian refugees. Around a third ‐ more than 1.5 million - live in 58 registered camps. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Paleostine Refugees in the Near East ‐ its full name - was created by the U.N. General Assembly 70 years ago to deal with the hundreds of thousands of Paleostinian refugees who had been driven from their homes or fled the conflict surrounding the birth of the modern state of Israel in 1948. One of the descendants of that exodus - Najah Abu Reyala - has lived all her life in Beach Camp, the third largest of eight refugee camps in coastal Gaza. Now 61, she remembers the rudimentary conditions during her youth in the camp, where the population has grown from 23,000 to more than 85,000. "Streets were not paved, they were sandy and dusty," she recalls. But although the passing of the years brought more services, it also brought more tension, divisions and despair. Well...yeah. Because you're Paleos. It's your natural state "Maybe they put electricity and water inside the houses, but things are far worse than they used to be," she said. "Back then, we were more closely knit, we were more united." Abu Reyala and other refugees want the right to return to their families’ former lands in pre-1948 Paleostine, lands which now lie inside Israel. Israel has rejected any such right of return as a demographic threat to its Jewish majority. And many Israelis regard UNRWA - by far the largest humanitarian organization handling Paleostinian refugees - with suspicion. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that UNRWA’s longevity had served to perpetuate, not solve, the refugee problem. "It is time (for) UNRWA (to) be dismantled," he said in 2017, urging the U.N. to "re-examine" its existence. Just such a re-examination is due in the coming days, with the U.N. General Assembly to vote on renewing UNRWA's mandate. Posted by: trailing wife 2019-12-15 |
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