After 20 Years, They Still Want to Go Home : 2 Refugees in Jordan Won’t Let Hope Die

In the summer of 1967, two young Palestinians were among those who made their way from the West Bank of the Jordan River to Amman.

Their homes on the West Bank had been occupied by Israeli troops in the Arab-Israeli war that had lasted six days that June. Separately, the two, a teen-ager and a younger boy, were moving to the relative safety of the Jordanian capital to await the day that they could return home.

Twenty years later, that day still has not come. Neither has been able to go back, even for a brief visit. They are among the estimated 1.9 million Palestinian refugees living outside their former lands, a situation often described as a “festering wound.” More than 300,000 such refugees left the West Bank in 1967.

Two Hours of Travel

The younger of the two, Bassam Azzeh, is now 25 years old and lives in the teeming Bakaa refugee camp on the outskirts of Amman. Trained as a teacher, he works as a clerk in a pharmaceutical supply house and spends more than two hours a day traveling to and from his job.

The other, Sabri Toukan, now 37, tells an economic success story. With the help of relatives in Amman, Toukan established a branch of the family glass business, and it has prospered during Jordan’s building boom. With his wife and child, Toukan lives in Shmeisani, one of the most fashionable areas of Amman, and drives a Mercedes-Benz to work.

The views of men like Azzeh and Toukan are not likely to be pivotal in any future peace settlement, but if there is ever to be such a settlement, Arab and Israeli authorities will have to cope with the Palestinian refugees.

A Haunting Question

A question that has haunted Arabs and Israelis alike since the Palestinian problem began is what will happen to the refugees if the Arab-Israel conflict ever ends.

Will they all want to return to their former homes? If not, where will they live? What about the refugees who have known no life in Palestine and would return as strangers?

Also, would there be room for all of them? More than half of Jordan’s population of 2.5 million is Palestinian, and there are large groups of Palestinians in Syria and Lebanon, not to mention the Persian Gulf states. The West Bank and the Gaza Strip are already overcrowded, and what would happen if all 1.9 million refugees decided to return to their “homeland?”

Toukan has been far more successful than Azzeh in assimilating into Jordanian society, yet he is as insistent as Azzeh that he wants to return to what he calls Palestine.

Bearing No Fruit

“My main ambition in life is to go back to my parents,” Toukan said. “When you pull up a tree and plant it in another place, it doesn’t bear fruit anymore.”

Azzeh was only 5 when he arrived in Amman, and he has become a citizen of Jordan. But, he said: “I don’t have anything here, only my nationality. I look to return to my parents’ land because there is nothing else.”

Azzeh’s parents were refugees even before the war of 1967. They fled their home in Tel Safi, now in Israel, in the Arab-Israeli War of 1948 and moved to a United Nations refugee camp in Jericho on the West Bank.

Both Azzeh and Toukan say they are not particularly political, yet both have run afoul of the Israeli or Jordanian authorities because of their views on the Palestine Liberation Organization, which claims to be the sole true representative of the Palestinian people.

Suspected of PLO Ties

Toukan said that in 1967, Israelis expelled him from the West Bank on the grounds that he was a member of the PLO. He denies such membership.

Azzeh was also accused of being a PLO member, but by the Jordanian authorities. He was denied permission to teach. He, too, denies membership in the organization.

“The PLO,” Azzeh said in an interview, “is mine, but it is for all Palestinians. No Palestinian can find a representative other than the PLO.”

Azzeh does not accept the popular argument that refugee camps have been a fertile recruiting place for the PLO because the young men there are largely without jobs and hope for the future.

“People join the PLO not because they don’t have anything else to do,” he said. “A man who owns a factory doesn’t want his land back any less than I do.”

Right to Representation

Toukan, when asked about the PLO, said, “Every people has the right to establish an organization that will represent them.”

Neither man is enthusiastic about PLO violence against civilians, but they both point out that Israeli forces have carried out attacks against Palestinian civilians, including children.

“We want to have a state, a democratic state, and the peace process is the last stage,” Toukan said.

“My family owns a lot of land (in Israel),” Azzeh said. “So why should I buy land in Jordan? Israel will not allow me to have back my land. I would like to return to my land and have the PLO on it”--governing it.

‘90% Will Go Back’

Even though there are several thousand people in the Bakaa camp without work, Azzeh said, “90% will go back even if there are no jobs.”

Toukan believes that nearly every Palestinian would return home if given the opportunity, even if it involved large-scale economic disruption.

“We’ll build a second floor,” he jokes, when asked where all the refugees will settle.

In part, this reflects the continuing economic crunch in Jordan caused by the drop in the price of oil, which has affected the economic vitality of the entire Arab world.

“The memories of my own house, where I was born, are still fresh in my mind,” said Toukan, whose wife and mother are able to travel back and forth across the border. “Not all of us will go back but, left to ourselves, we will manage to live.”