Marie
Vaton, L'Obs, 5/1/2024
Translated by Fausto Giudice, Tlaxcala
Marie Vaton is a French journalist and author, working for the weekly L'Obs since 2008. FB
From the series STORIES OF EXILE (3/4). In 1948, just after the creation of the State of Israel, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians set off into exile. Among them was Jamil, with his parents and four siblings. His life would soon be summed up in the Neirab refugee camp in Syria. His granddaughter Rima Hassan, founder of the Action Palestine France movement and candidate for La France Insoumise in the European elections on June 9, tells us all about it.
In the camp, she was known as “The Aleppine”, and this was no compliment. Aleppo, however, was not far from Neirab. Barely thirteen kilometers separated the camp from the big Syrian city. But Malak didn't look like the others. With her long suit, light-colored coat and white silk veil that she tied into a turban over her head, the young woman stood out among the refugees. And with good reason: Malak was neither a refugee nor a Palestinian. Yet it was here, in these 15 overcrowded hectares and makeshift barracks, that she, the heiress of the Hananos, one of Syria's wealthiest families, had lived all her life. Banished, disinherited because she fell madly in love with Jamil, a handsome, charismatic 24-year-old Palestinian who worked on her father's farm.
The story is romantic. It recounts the strange and mad destiny of a family after the Nakba (“catastrophe” in Arabic), following the creation of Israel in 1948. It tells what exile produces in the way of thwarted trajectories and shaken destinies. It speaks of a Palestinian identity that has been battered by history. “My paternal great-grandparents, the Mobaraks, lived in Salfit, a large village in the mountains near Nablus, until the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948,” Jamil and Malak's 31-year-old granddaughter, Rima Hassan, tells L'Obs. The founder of the Observatoire des Camps de Réfugiés [The Observatory of refugee camps] and the Action Palestine France movement grew up in the Neirab camp in Syria until she was 10, like her parents before her. And like thousands of Palestinians “forced into exile” by Israeli soldiers during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
On April 9, 1948, the massacre at Deir Yassin, an Arab village west of Jerusalem, stormed by Israeli paramilitary militias of the Irgun and the Lehi, marked the beginning of panic - and exodus - for the vast majority of Palestinians. Hundreds of thousands left their villages and headed into exile: Jamil was visiting the north of the country with his parents and four siblings. They were caught up in the turmoil. Like everyone else, they travelled on foot. Occasionally, a tractor pulled up and carried the family to the next village. At the Lebanese border, the refugees were transported to the major cities of Lebanon and Syria, Homs, Hama and finally Aleppo. The end of the journey for the Mobarak family.
In the Neirab refugee camp
On the way, they stop for a few months at a hostel in Kfar Takharim, run by a wealthy family of Arab intellectuals, the Hananos. The patriarch, Ibrahim, is no ordinary man. He is a national hero of Syrian independence, celebrated throughout the country since his death thirteen years ago. In his youth, the MP had played an active part in the Arab nationalist movement against the Ottomans, then against the French army occupying Syria.
One day, Jamil stops in front of the family's beautiful home. Suddenly, a young girl emerges and rushes into a cart parked out front. It's Malak. Their eyes meet. Jamil immediately decides that she will be his wife. The young heiress is won over too. She doesn't dream of a princess' destiny. Having already spurned several suitors, she has alienated part of her family. So who cares if marrying Jamil is a mismatch? For six months, she battles in court to have her union with the young refugee accepted. And it doesn't matter if her marriage costs her all her property and inheritance.
To enable her young husband to set up his own business, she sold her jewelry and gave him a caterpillar tractor. The young couple settled in the village of Al Neirab, near Aleppo. They had 11 children and experienced a number of tragedies. Salwa, their eldest, was just 2 years old when she was found dead, smothered in silt on the riverbank, after having escaped her mother's vigilance for a few moments. A fourth baby lived only a few hours after birth. Nabiha, Rima Hassan's mother, arrived two years later, in 1958.
As the children grew up, the family moved to the Neirab refugee camp, a few kilometers from their village. It was here that a school was opened by UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East). In her Memoirs, Nabiha records her earliest memories as a little girl. She remembers the “big barracks” designed for soldiers during the French Mandate, in which “up to eight families” crammed together, separated by sheets stretched as partitions. Toilets? A hole dug in the ground. Her mother, Malak, is ashamed of her origins and hides them. Her suits, her pumps, her brand-name perfumes, her handbag and the good manners she tries to instill in her children don't go down well with the other refugees. The Aleppine is a middle-class woman lost in a lawless zone. Her husband, Jamil, clings to his dreams of emancipation. Every evening, he hammers home to his children: “For us to be able to return to Palestine, we need neither war nor arms, but education.”
In the camp, the question of return becomes a burning issue. The Palestinian identity is forged there, in the tents and misery, in the humiliation of the lost territories, and the inanity of United Nations Resolution 194 of December 11, 1948, which instituted a right of return for Palestinians - and which was never applied. It stipulates that “those who decide not to return must receive compensation for the loss of their property”. But the Palestinians received nothing. The Arab-Israeli war changed the situation, and Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion was not in favor of the return of the exiles: “It would not be an act of justice to repatriate the Arabs to Jaffa, but madness. Those who declared war on us must bear the consequences after suffering defeat.”
In 1949, Lebanon closed its border with Israel. The following year, the “Absentees’ Property” law authorized the Israeli government to confiscate unoccupied Palestinian land, thus hindering any possibility of return. The Six-Day War in 1967 ended in a crushing Israeli victory, burying any dream of imminent return home.
Emigration to Saudi Arabia
Neirab is Syria's densest camp. As the years went by, the wooden barracks solidified, first in clay, then in cement. Neirab became permanent. The temporary became permanent, reflecting the hybrid status of refugees in the country. The Palestinian identity becomes one of exile. Accepted, tolerated, but above all a camp identity. Palestinians in Syria have the right to own a company or a business, but they have no access to citizenship. A child born in Syria to a Palestinian father, even if born in Syria, is considered a Palestinian, not a Syrian, national. In the 1970s, the oil boom in the Gulf countries gave Jamil a chance, and he emigrated to Saudi Arabia. His daughter Nabiha landed a job in the same country, teaching natural sciences and mathematics at a girls' school.
The young woman, viscerally free and secular, arrives at Riyadh airport in skin-tight jeans, her hair loose and five volumes of Lenin's works in her backpack, unaware that veiling is compulsory in the kingdom and that the Communist author is banned. One day, a convoy of Cadillacs and Rolls-Royces circles the city and parks in front of the Mobarak home. A delegation of men, led by the mukhtar (the town mayor), knocked on the door. Jamil opens the door: it's a marriage proposal. They offer him 1 million ryals (around €240,000, USD 260,000) for his daughter's hand in marriage. Nabiha then hears loud voices and her father's firm “no”. “And why not?” asks the mukhtar. “I don't want to see my daughter dressed all her life in black, like a crow,” replies Jamil.
Every summer, Nabiha returns to the Neirab camp in Syria. One day, she met Ahmad, a friend of her brothers: “He was tall and elegant, with his beige pants, his impeccable white shirt and his black belt,” she wrote in her memoirs, written at the end of her life. He asked her to marry him. The young woman was 23 and let herself be tempted. “Are you sure, Nabiha? I've got a bad feeling about this” says her father. You're beautiful, you're free, you can find someone else.” This was Jamil's last piece of advice to his daughter. He died a few months later in a work accident in Riyadh.
In August 1982, Nabiha married Ahmad, in an atmosphere weighed down by the absence of her brothers, who had left to fight in Lebanon, where civil war had been raging for several months. Their marriage quickly fell apart. Ahmad was born and raised in the camp, like Nabiha. But he was not protected by the aristocratic ancestry of a Syrian mother. “My father grew up in poverty and violence,” says Rima Hassan. “At the age of 5, he was shining shoes in Aleppo with his cobbler father.” Nabiha's return to the camp sealed the end of her freedom. At Ahmad's request, she stopped working at the UNRWA school where she was a teacher. She became pregnant, once, twice - twins -, three times, four times. And finally, in 1992, Rima was born. The sixth and last of a family that was beginning to crack.
Nabiha then wakes up: she knows all too well the fate of the little Palestinians who are born, live and die in the camp, endlessly reproducing the cycle of misery and resentment. She knows the cost of clinging to lost illusions. At home, she suffocates. Her husband prevents her from going out and forces her to wear the veil. Nabiha realizes she has to leave everything behind. She filed for divorce and applied for several visas: first to Canada, where one of her brothers had emigrated, then to France, where her sister lived.
Finally, in 1995, she obtained a visa for France. In Niort, where she arrived, she worked tirelessly. By day, she gave Arabic lessons and worked as a hospital caregiver; by night, she worked in a restaurant as a cook. She spends her rare spare hours at the library learning French, a sine qua non for obtaining a permanent job. And above all, to bring her children, who had stayed in the camp with their father and Malak, their grandmother. It will take her six years to achieve this. And eight more to obtain French nationality: “My mother thought she would have to sing the Marseillaise at the ceremony. So, for days on end, she listened to it over and over, making us rehearse with her,” recalls Rima.
Rima's return to Syria
In 2005, Malak died of a stroke in the camp. Nabiha was heartbroken. In 2011, the Syrian civil war prevented her from returning to Neirab to visit her mother's grave. And her health was declining. Cancer had been eating away at her for years. “But even when she was ill, she never stopped working,” says Rima. Between her chemotherapy sessions, she obtained her baccalaureate, began studying history at university, and set up a Syrian-Lebanese restaurant. She remarried, divorced again. Then she wrote her Memoirs in a few days, on her hospital bed, in perfect French. Her diary ends thus: “I am satisfied with everything I have done in my life. I am so happy to have my children with me so often, to feel surrounded. I still have one wish: to regain enough energy to be able to return to Syria and see the rest of my family again. “
Her daughter, Rima, took charge. In May 2023, three years after her mother's death, she returned to Neirab. She found her father, whom she hadn't seen for twenty years. She recognized the old house where they used to live, “so little changed”. And then she went to visit the grave of her grandmother, her beloved Malak and her silk scarves. As fate would have it, “she was buried in one of the camp's five cemeteries, right next to my paternal grandfather's grave”. On her plaque, someone had engraved her title of nobility. Malak, the Aleppine, the bourgeois, the foreigner. Faithful to the destiny of the Palestinians, even in death.
