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.
Malak and her granddaughter
Rima, in the Neirab camp. PERSONAL ARCHIVE
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.
Malak Hanano, Rima Hassan's
grandmother, and Jamil Hassan, her grandfather. PERSONAL ARCHIVE
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.”
Neirab camp, Syria, 1950.
PERSONAL ARCHIVE
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.
Nabiha as a student. PERSONAL
ARCHIVE
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.
Nabiha (right), with her
daughter Rima in her arms and her sister on the left. PERSONAL ARCHIVE
Nabiha and Rima as a child.
PERSONAL ARCHIVE
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.
Rima Hassan in May 2023, in
the former house of the Neirab camp where she lived until she was 10. PERSONAL ARCHIVE
