Palestinians Succumbing to Despair in the Quest to Return to Homeland

The road north from Amman, the capital of Jordan, drops precipitously a few miles outside the affluent-looking city and spills down a mountain valley to reveal a modern Middle Eastern paradox.

On one side of the four-lane ribbon of highway, the giant twin dishes of Jordan’s telecommunications industry shimmer in the noontime heat, a monument to the region’s technical advancement.

On the other side sprawls the vast shantytown known as Baqaa Camp, which was hastily erected by the United Nations in 1967 as “emergency” shelter for Palestinians after the Six-Day War with Israel.

With a population of 65,700 at last count, the cinder-block and concrete houses of Baqaa camp make up the fourth-largest city in Jordan. It is also the largest Palestinian refugee camp in the world, a revealing place to gauge the mood of the Palestinian “diaspora”--the flight from what was once Palestine. It is estimated that more than 1.5 million have fled.

‘Rambo’ Tapes on Sale

On a recent visit, the dusty roads of Baqaa teemed with commerce--from the fat chickens in wooden cages at the roadside to the video store where teen-agers line up to rent tapes of “Rambo” and “Commando” at 500 fils, about $1.40 each.

Despite these and other appearances of normality, a visitor comes away with an unmistakable sense of despair in the wake of the collapse last month of efforts to get Mideast peace talks going again. After nearly 20 years, the refugees seem to be finally giving up hope of ever returning to their former homes in what is now Israel.

“I think it’s clear that we won’t see our homeland again,” said one resident of the camp, who works in a sports center for teen-agers. “I just hope my grandchildren will see Palestine.”

“We won’t be liberated without the military option,” said another, Ahmed Khaled Hussein, who welcomed a visitor to his yarn shop. “Our only hope is Arab unity and war.”

‘Not Getting Anywhere’

The mood seemed to be summed up in an almost offhand comment by another resident, also a businessman: “You hear a lot now that the next generation will have to liberate Palestine. There is an across-the-board feeling that we are not getting anywhere.”

Even the relatively affluent Palestinians of Amman--Palestinians constitute 60% of Jordan’s overall population--have not escaped the gloom that followed the decision by Jordan’s King Hussein to break off political cooperation with the Palestine Liberation Organization.

“The sense of hopelessness and defeat is very, very strong these days after the collapse of the negotiations,” said one Palestinian, a professional man. “There is a resignation to stalemate and, ironically, support for the PLO in the moment of its diplomatic failure.”

Indeed, the surge of support for Chairman Yasser Arafat and others in the PLO leadership has been so strong that King Hussein has been forced to backpedal in his criticism of the organization.

At one point, he was accusing the PLO leadership of having lost credibility and suggesting that they be replaced by new leaders chosen by Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, but more recently Hussein has taken pains to acknowledge that he still regards the PLO as the “sole and legitimate” representative of the Palestinian people.

King’s Effort Backfires

In the view of Western diplomats in Amman, Hussein’s efforts to drive a wedge between Palestinians on the West Bank of the Jordan River, a part of Jordanian-controlled territory that Israel occupied in the 1967 war, and the Palestinians of the diaspora has backfired.

A longer view of Palestinian history, according to the envoys, suggests that whenever the PLO is threatened from the outside, whether by Israeli or Arab leaders, as in the 1983 struggle between Palestinian mainstream factions and radicals and more recently in the so-called war of the camps in Lebanon, Palestinians always seem to join ranks behind Arafat for the duration of the perceived crisis.

“It’s difficult for the average Westerner to grasp this, because Arafat is unshaven and such a slob,” a Palestinian writer said. “To Palestinians, Arafat is the only person standing up to the United States, to Israel and the Arab countries. He is literally seen as our George Washington.”

Support for the PLO is strong even in Baqaa, where political activity is banned. King Hussein’s picture is displayed in many shops, but his popularity has declined noticeably in recent days.

Mao’s ‘Single Step’

One shopkeeper quoted an aphorism from Mao Tse-tung, arguing that “a journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step.”

“Well,” he went on, “our step was to get the PLO as our representative. We may not get Palestine back in this generation, but we have at least achieved that.”

Another Palestinian, an intellectual, said: “For many Palestinians, the PLO represents the interests of the Palestinians all over the world. It doesn’t matter what their politics. I think a majority support Arafat and feel that if he is replaced, it would be by someone who is more radical and hard-line.”

A Palestinian journalist said he fears that Palestinians will become “backward-looking,” by which he meant that they would look back to an awareness of being Palestinian in the same way that an Italian-American looks toward Italy. The “forward-looking” Palestinians, who yearned for a homeland, are rapidly becoming a minority, he said.

One sign is that Palestinians who had been reluctant to sink roots outside their former country have now begun to do so, buying tangible assets like homes and businesses.

New Collaboration Seen

Other Palestinians look on the setback as temporary, and engage in the old game of political prophecy. King Hussein and Arafat, they say, will find it expedient to resume their collaboration in the coming six months.

“We have not cut our relations with Jordan, although many people called for this,” said Khalil Wazir, the deputy PLO military commander, who lives in a fashionable house in central Amman.

“It’s a time of waiting and thinking,” he said. “We will wait and see. We struggle for the benefit of our people. . . . That is our credibility.”