Lebanon’s Palestinians live in limbo

Over the years, the tents have come down and concrete apartment blocks have gone up on this hillside overlooking the Mediterranean.

In the course of six decades, institutions have taken root: kindergartens, schools, medical facilities. Residents bury their dead in graves bearing tiny white headstones framed by pink roses and purple bougainvillea at the small cemetery.

The streets of Bedawi, teeming with honking cars, children on bicycles and scooter-riding teenagers, resemble those in villages anywhere in Lebanon.

But unlike other towns dotted around the mountains here, Bedawi is in limbo.

It is one of a dozen camps housing 400,000 Palestinians in this country, home to about 4 million Lebanese who comprise Sunni and Shiite Muslims as well as Christians and minority Druze.

Lebanese families in the area surrounding Bedawi have had little contact with the Palestinians. Although there is local commerce, the refugees are not allowed to hold anything but menial jobs outside the camp, all but guaranteeing a life of poverty for their children. The Palestinians have no passports and are not allowed to own land.

For several days last week, Lebanese soldiers battled Islamic militants hiding inside a neighboring refugee camp, unleashing a barrage of firepower. Fleeing the shelling, more than 15,000 Palestinians came to the Bedawi camp, joining its 11,000 occupants.

On these crowded streets, aid workers took down names as minibuses ferried tall stacks of thin foam mattresses to the new arrivals. In front of a barbershop, a Japanese news crew was doing a stand-up.

“Everyone’s here,” said Mona Said, a 31-year-old resident of Bedawi, as she weaved her way through the jam-packed alleyways.

“It’s great,” she added, giving a thumbs up.

The battle and subsequent flight once again brought attention to the thorny issue of the Palestinian refugees here, further straining their tense relationship with the Lebanese.

Many Lebanese have rallied behind the army, with volunteers from nearby villages offering to go into the camp and fight. This week, several refugees told of Lebanese Sunnis from the surrounding areas shooting at them as they fled.

On the facebook.comwebsite in recent days, young Lebanese have created a multitude of discussion groups, with several posts containing racist remarks against the refugees. Many Lebanese hold Palestinians responsible for the 15-year civil war that ended in 1990. They accuse Palestinian militants of making the country a battleground in their fight against Israel.

Palestinians are Sunnis, but posters of Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Shiite militant group Hezbollah, have gone up around Bedawi since Hezbollah’s war with Israel last summer.

Here in the camp, residents forced the radical group Fatah al Islam out when its fighters tried to establish a foothold there late last year. The militants then went to the Nahr el Bared camp a few miles away, establishing a paramilitary base there.

Although residents resented the militants’ arrival, which forced a children’s soccer club from its playing field, they were unable to fight them off.

Nahr el Bared residents said they were trapped between a small, militant group of foreigners espousing an alien, Al Qaeda-style ideology and the Lebanese army, which shelled the camp, bringing down homes, schools and mosques.

“We’re born in debt, and we spend our lives paying,” said Firas Abdallah, a 22-year-old who sought refuge in Bedawi after shelling destroyed his home last week.

Palestinians who fled present-day Israel in 1948 and their descendants have lived inside about a dozen ghettos scattered in the Shiite south, the Sunni north and in the heart of Beirut.

“I feel that we as Palestinians, whatever we do, we’ll always be regarded as foreigners, outsiders,” said Siham Zagmout, 54.

Zagmout was born in another camp farther south in 1953. By the time she was 12, her family had moved to the Bedawi camp. Here, she roamed the streets, selling caramel apples on a stick.

“It’s true we were poor, but our family bonds were very strong,” Zagmout said. Her parents told her stories of the land they had farmed for wheat, grapes and figs but now couldn’t return to -- a small village where boys and girls met at the well to flirt.

“From hearing all these stories, sometimes in my dreams I would see the fields and orchards, and a big shining sun,” she said.

At 20, she married a young man at the camp. She named her first daughter Mona, meaning hope. The couple also had Raoul, now 29, and 17-year-old Dima, whose name means summer clouds.

“We had nothing to offer our children, only an education,” she said.

Although they were stuck in the camp, Zagmout wanted to teach her children that they were free. Her husband, who was unemployed and who had been brought up by an authoritarian brother, was scared of freedom, she said.

“He would tell me, ‘You are raising them in a bad way, you are teaching them to be free and this is not good.’ ”

His criticism drove a wedge between them and they eventually parted.

“One day I told him, ‘If you’re going to talk like this, get out.’ ”

She recalled her past as she sat in a courtyard filled with potted flowers outside the kindergarten she co-founded in 1975. Her daughter Mona had grown up at this kindergarten and eventually become a teacher there too.

“We do everything to give the children some of the rights of children in other places,” said Zagmout, who wore a traditional dress and head scarf.

Her daughter, now 31, wore new Nike trainers, jeans and a T-shirt advertising a group called Right to Play that organizes after-school activities for children.

Her daughter’s eyebrows were carefully plucked and she was carrying a black notebook with the group’s motto on a sticker: “Look after yourself. Look after one another.” She listened patiently to the adults and children who came up to her, tugging her sleeve and demanding her ear.

A few years ago, Mona had taken a job as a nanny and teacher for the royal family in Saudi Arabia. She had a big salary and a chauffeur and traveled extensively with the royals.

She divided her salary between her family in Bedawi and a camp orphanage.

The toys of the youngest prince could have provided for hundreds of children in Bedawi, she said.

Living with such excess knowing her family lived in poverty proved too distressing. “I hated myself,” said Mona, who returned Lebanon two years later. “Sometimes when I sat down to eat with them for dinner, I remembered our life here.”

It was getting close to 10 p.m., and the two women had been helping the recently arrived refugees find accommodation in schools and with other families. Like her daughter, Zagmout had enjoyed the influx.

They too were playing host to a family of 15 people in their modest home.

“You forget about yourself in a situation like this,” she said.

roug@latimes.com

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Special correspondent Raed Rafei contributed to this report.