Refugees Say Arafat Did His Best for Them

For lifelong refugees such as Ahmed Abdullah, the death of Yasser Arafat is a bittersweet moment.

No one fought harder for them than Arafat did, the 58-year-old said admiringly Friday as he watched the funeral on TV. And yet the refugees are flesh-and-blood reminders of one of the late leader’s greatest failures.

More than 4 million Palestinians are registered as refugees, nearly a quarter of them in the narrow, congested Gaza Strip. They or their parents or grandparents fled or were expelled from their homes when Israel became a state in 1948.

“Arafat tried, and when others wanted to sacrifice us, he tried more,” said Abdullah, the principal at a Jabaliya camp school. “True, we are still refugees. But because of Arafat, our issue is still alive.”

“He was fighting alone, and it was the best he could do,” said Abdullah’s daughter Faten, 30, an English teacher. “I feel very sorry for him.”

Arafat always insisted that any resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would have to respect Palestinians’ “right of return” to ancestral homes. But Israel always argued that the influx of refugees and their descendants would constitute the end of the Jewish state.

Negotiators at the 2000 Camp David summit worked on compromises for the refugees, including a plan in which a set number of refugees would be allowed to return to homes in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, but larger numbers would receive payment instead.

Arafat balked, saying later he could not tell refugees that they would not be going home, and the summit collapsed. Many observers see his refusal as a huge mistake, because Israel’s offer was its most generous ever and included limited Palestinian sovereignty over most of the West Bank and Gaza.

Abdullah said compensation for his land was unthinkable.

“You don’t know what being a refugee is like,” he said, seated on cushions on the floor of his living room, as wild scenes from the West Bank city of Ramallah, where Arafat was being buried, flashed on the television screen.

“I have a strong link to the land where my father and grandfather are buried,” he said, referring to his native village, which has been replaced by a town of Israeli Jews, many of them from other parts of the Middle East.

Arafat’s critics often accused him of using the refugees as pawns, of keeping them in camps to dramatize their plight rather than settling them in more suitable housing.

Palestinian refugees have been refugees for so long that even the word “camp” is a misnomer now. Most of the refugee camps have become sprawling slums. They are also fertile breeding grounds for radicalism that produce many of the militants fighting Israel.

Izzidin al-Qassam, an armed wing of the militant Islamic movement Hamas, holds sway in much of the Jabaliya camp. Israeli forces launched a massive invasion of Jabaliya over the summer after militants fired rockets into Israel. Two of Abdullah’s teenage pupils were among dozens killed.

The Palestinian leadership never took steps to prepare refugees for the possibility that they might never go home. Many refugees say they harbor dreams, however unrealistic, that the day of return will come. They live in cramped quarters, without parks or playgrounds for their children, longing for the large tracts of farmland their families once owned.

Like many refugees, Abdullah keeps a key to the house in his village and the British Mandate deeds to the property. His village was about eight miles from the ramshackle camp where he has lived since it was built by the United Nations in 1953.

He said he fled the village with his mother and seven siblings when Jewish troops attacked in 1948. His brothers and sisters were killed in the fighting, Abdullah said, and he bears the scars of wounds he received.

“I teach my children that we have land and the Jews took it, and that we should fight until the Jews leave,” daughter Faten said. “It’s still in my head, this idea of returning to the village. But I know it’s impossible, so I make my life here.”