Voices From Jerusalem: An Interview with Khader Dibs

By Ilana Sichel
Like many short trips in this region, the 15-minute car ride from the busy center of downtown West Jerusalem to the Shuafat Refugee Camp is a quick jaunt from the first world to the third. Coming from the "new Israeli neighborhood" of Pisgat Ze'ev just across the valley and on the Palestinian side of the Green Line, the passage to Shuafat RC is evident not only by the checkpoint and the unmistakable concrete wall dividing the two neighborhoods, but by the total aesthetic shift. The white stone apartment buildings of Israeli Jerusalem give way to a vista of modular cement units in shades of gray, stacked one atop the other like a 3-dimensional game of Tetris. Just three kilometers north of the Old City, Shuafat RC is where the sidewalk ends. The trash-riddled main street of the camp can hardly fit two cars through, and even walking down the street demands a level of concentration hard to achieve while trucks pass just centimeters from your arm.

Shuafat RC wasn't always an urban landscape. The refugee camp was built by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in 1965-1966 to temporarily house 1,500 Palestinian refugees from throughout Israel who were being expelled from their places of refuge in the Old City by Jordanian forces. At the time, the camp was out in the boonies. Today, it bumps up against Jerusalem's 1967 municipal boundaries. Most of its 22,000 residents hold Jerusalem ID cards, which entitles them to reside in the city and receive government benefits, including health care. But only 11,000 residents are registered refugees.

Construction of the separation barrier around Shuafat RC is not yet complete, but the entrance to Jerusalem has been controlled by a border police checkpoint since 2001. The effect, like that in other areas of Jerusalem, is to separate Palestinian Jerusalem residents from Jerusalem and sever the neighborhood from the urban fabric around it. Throughout Jerusalem, this ostensibly intended consequence of the barrier affects over 55,000 Palestinian residents--amounting to nearly one-quarter of the Palestinian population of the city. This exclusion drastically reduces residents' quality of life, separates them from their own city, and reorients them, by default, to the West Bank. From Israel's perspective, it improves the demographic balance.

One afternoon in early June, I sat down with Khader Dibs, a public figure in Shuafat RC. Dibs is a middle-aged father who heads the camp's UNWRA-run sanitation services and leads the camp's Popular Committee Against the Wall, a group that filed--and lost--a legal case against the course of the wall. Dibs' office is a concrete cube that sits atop a sun-baked roof. From its front door, one could easily traverse the vista of densely packed rooftops across the 400 dunams of the camp without once touching ground.

The first thing Dibs showed me when we sat down was an impressive portfolio of architectural engineering plans that aim for a total overhaul of the camp, complete with skyscrapers and a downtown skyline. The project is a joint initiative of Al-Quds University and a group of European engineers, and aims to turn Shuafat RC into a residential and commercial center easily accessible to Ramallah, Bethlehem, and Jerusalem. It would require UNRWA approval and, it seems, immense foreign investment.

Ilana Sichel: This seems like an unprecedented plan for a refugee camp. What's your vision for Shuafat?

Khader Dibs: We want to make a change here. The camp is overcrowded, dirty, polluted. Sewage runs by my front door. People are building like crazy here, and it's very stressful.

IS: What does your work in sanitation look like?

KD: It's hard. Almost half of the people in this camp aren't even refugees, and UNRWA isn't supposed to provide for them all.

IS: Why are non-refugees here?

KD: They come for a couple reasons. First, we don't pay city taxes here, so people can live more cheaply. In addition to that, the rent is lower here than in other East Jerusalem neighborhoods. Thirdly, since the late 1990s, people who fear losing their Jerusalem ID cards have been coming to live here because if they have an address in the camp, they can hold onto their IDs and keep getting services. A fourth reason is that people who live in the West Bank but work in Jerusalem are losing access to the city because of the wall. Sometimes living here is the only way for them to survive and provide for their families.

IS: Was the Jordanians who built Shuafat Refugee Camp?

KD: They gave permission to UNRWA to build it in 1964, then came and kicked out the refugees from the Old City. I was two years old. My parents didn't want to leave. Nobody did. But the Jordanians broke into the house and handed us a key. 'Here's a key,' they said. 'Now give us your key.' Give a key, take a key. And that's how we went from a not-good situation to a very bad situation. And in 1967, there was a war. A joke war. Israel gained control of this area and Jordan wanted to get it off its hands; neither cared who was in the middle.

IS: What was it like growing up here?

KD: It was a hard life. We didn't have bathrooms! Until 1974, all we had were public facilities in these little stations. [Shows me on a copy of UNRWA's original map of the camp.] Men and women, one next to the other. Drinking water was also public. There were just these five water points. They'd open them for two hours a day, and most days we got just a dribble. The kids would run straight from school to the water fountain, and we'd fill up the jerry cans every morning and every afternoon and bring them back to our families. The amazing thing is that people waited in line. We actually maintained lines.

IS: And what did you feel was Israel's relationship to the camp?

KD: After the war, [former Defense Minister] Moshe Dayan came to the camp. You know what he said? He was shocked. But what did he expect? Tidy houses and clean streets? But he didn't do anything about it. So in 1974, the people of Shuafat RC established a neighborhood committee for themselves. With money from the PLO and from individuals, they put down pipes and brought water into the houses. They built bathrooms. In 1975, they hooked up electricity to the houses.

After the outbreak of the first intifada, the civic administration that provided water to refugee camps in the West Bank realized that Shuafat RC is within the boundaries of Jerusalem, so they cut off our water supply. We lived a month or two without water. We had to buy it in small tanks. UNRWA didn't really get involved. It's against their policy to file charges against states. They wanted us to organize and talk to the [Jerusalem] municipality]. We tried, but the residents were thirsty and tired of waiting. So we went to the pipe they closed, and we opened it. And then there was water.

IS: And you were part of it?

KD: Well. [Glances behind his back and out the window as if looking for spies.] Yes. But two months later, the municipality came, dug, cut the tanks, and filled them with concrete. For a month we were stuck again without water. Without water! It's hard to live that way. UNRWA again wanted us to talk to the municipality, so they mediated. So we sat at the UN, us in one room, the municipality in the other. We told them we refuse to pay. We lost our homes four decades before and have been stuck in a refugee camp for twenty years. Whoever wants to pay, fine. But not us.

The municipality didn't budge. So we did it again. Four or fives of us went out at night with equipment and lay down pipes. We hooked them up to the pipeline that passes through Anata--a huge one--8" in diameter. And that's how we have the water we have today. Basically, the municipality gave up, and the water flowed. But actually, seven years ago, when Olmert was mayor, the municipality lay new pipes and changed them from six inches to two and four. So now the water pressure is less than 50% and sometimes it gets shut off. But the bottom line is that there is water.

IS: What are the challenges facing children in Shuafat RC?

KD: I have seven children with no place to run around. There are no playgrounds and no parks. There aren't enough schools. We have a new girls' school here and there are already 2000 kids in it. We solicited 4 million NIS from the Saudi government and we built the infrastructure. Every day 7,000 kids leave the camp to go to schools run by the municipality, the Waqf, and the Palestinian Authority.

IS: Has it changed much here since your childhood?

KD: When I was a kid, there was no Pisgat Ze'ev [the large Jewish neighborhood across the valley]. The schoolyard wasn't our only place to play. We'd go out to the hills. We'd go out with robes and cables and climb all the hills around here. We'd walk by foot to Hizme, along the wadis, down the hills. Now there are thousands of children here with nowhere to play. Some go to the mall in Pisgat Ze'ev, like it's a playground. They started building Pisgat Ze'ev in the 1980s. Now 50,000 people live there. Some residents went to the police with a petition. You want to know their complaint? "There's a refugee camp next door."

IS: What do you tell your kids? How do you transmit a sense of hope?

KD: It's hard. I'm not sure I do. I see black. What, I should tell the kids the world is green?

Comments

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Please note: Not all Palestinians in this neighborhood are refugees. It was Jordan, not Israel, who evicted the Palestinians from the original neighborhood. The man interviewed has seven children and is wondering that there are so many children now! Most of us in the rest of the world control the nr of children we have, and we have no more than we can decently care for. There is a problem with ID cards. There recently was something in the press that Jordan will retract Jordanian ID's. Note also: trash and sewage in the streets. Concrete shacks are being built by Palestinians, no one else. In Gaza concrete is not being used to rebuild, but to make smuggling tunnels into Israel and into Egypt. They smuggle weapons and food which they sell on the black market against inflated prices. I recently spoke to two European friends, one Norwegian and one Swedish. They said that about one fifth of the population is now Arab and muslim, and....that they tend to stay together in large apartment buildings which soon become tenements. Year ago I read similar observations of the situation in France. This interview contains again a litany of complaints, but no solutions, or ideas of how to get out of the situation.There was, yesterday, mention of Hamas' refusal to accept teaching the Holocaust, same applies to PA. An Israeli website suggested the overseeing organizations are really charged with resettling refugees.