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In Jordanian Camps, A Sense of Nihilism
"Our problem here is what? It's how to eat, how to drink, and how to forget about our problems. We can't do anything else," he said, coffee in one hand, a cigarette in the other. "That cultivates hatred. It's the hatred of not being able to do anything."
Moussa's parents were born in the village of Faluja, now in Israel, where Gamal Abdel Nasser, then a burly Egyptian major (later Egypt's president), held out for four months against Israeli troops in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. In ensuing years, Faluja would become to Nasser what the Sierra Maestra was to Fidel Castro in Cuba.
  Jordan granted citizenship to almost all of the Palestinians who fled there after the 1948 war, but many residents of the refugee camps, disenchanted with politics, talk openly of a conflict that, in their view, can no longer be resolved. (Salah Malkawi - Getty Images) |
Moussa was born in Karameh, a Jordanian village where, on March 21, 1968, an Israeli force of 15,000 attacked. The raid was retaliatory -- guerrillas had staged attacks from the village, just across the Jordan River. But in a rare success, Palestinian guerrillas forced an embarrassing Israeli withdrawal with the help of Jordanian artillery and armor. In time, Karameh assumed mythic proportions in an Arab world accustomed to humiliating defeat, helping lay the groundwork for the PLO's emergence. Comic books were published in Lebanon about the battle.
"Those memories have died," said Ibrahim Salem, a 32-year-old barber in Karameh, where the sole graffiti declares, "Islam is the solution," along a street of shops with names like Haifa and Jerusalem. "The Arabs no longer have Palestine in their heart."
In camps like Baqaa, 10 miles north of Amman, their streets washed of color, residents watch the smoldering conflict between the Islamic movement of Hamas and loyalists of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas with bitterness and bewilderment. Often, anger at America and Israel is conflated with resentment at Palestinian politicians who the residents say work solely in their own interests.
"Everyone wants to protect his seat of power," said Khitam Ramadan, a 30-year-old pharmacist, in her threadbare store.
Down the street, Suheil Ajouri, a 30-year-old father of two, shared her condemnation. His words poured out like a dam breaking. "I don't trust any of them. They have no principles," he said. Money motivates them, he declared, "no more, no less."
Like many, he spoke of justice, a word heard far more often in the camps than freedom. He catalogued his expenses -- clothes, food and rent for his family, school for his children -- then contrasted it with his income of $360 a month as a shopkeeper, not nearly enough. He declared that the conflict was divinely ordained to end in their favor. But as his anger grew, he blurted out an alternative.
"They're never going to solve it in my lifetime," he said. "There's no solution, absolutely."
