AM’ARI REFUGEE CAMP, West Bank — For decades, the residents of this hardscrabble neighborhood on the outskirts of Ramallah have been nourished on “haq al-owdeh” — Arabic for “right of return” to their homes before the 1948 Arab-Israeli war turned them into refugees.
Though the dream of return has become a sacred principle in Arab politics and one of the most difficult issues to resolve in Israeli-Palestinian negotiators, many residents of the Am’ari refugee district admit that the prospects of ever going back sound absurd.
“I don’t think there will be any kind of return,” said 23-year old Ahmed Badran, whose grandfather lived in the city of Lod before Israel’s independence. “It is only words on paper.”
With the 60th anniversary of Israel’s Declaration of Independence, observed yesterday in the Jewish state, Palestinians focus on Al-Nakba, the catastrophe of displacement and defeat by the fledgling country.
In the West Bank refugee camp of Deheisha near Bethlehem yesterday, hundreds of Palestinians marched alongside a giant 2-ton key to mark the Nakba.
The key is a symbol of ownership to the dwellings left behind by hundreds of thousands of refugees from the 1948 war.
For Israelis, the right of return is a code word for the end of the Jewish state, because if the more than 4 million Palestinians refugees in the territories and around the Middle East were to flood back, it would tip the demographic scales decisively to the side of the Palestinians.
Ask anyone in the refugee districts throughout the Middle East to describe their long-abandoned homes, and most paint idyllic pictures of villages long since gone from the map.
“My village was a beautiful natural spot. We were rich with land and agriculture,” said 73-year old Said Abu Mohammed, remembering his native home of Salameh, a hamlet he said was located in what is today south Tel Aviv.
“Going back to Salameh is what I hope for, but we have not seen any signals of it happening.”
Abu Mohammad remembers his family leaving their village for the Arab-controlled town of Lod early in the war out of intimidation by shooting from Jewish forces.
After Lod fell to the fledgling Israeli army, the family ascended the Judean hills to the Am’ari camp, where they have stayed put.
Abu Muhammed said that even though he still yearns for his old village, the land has now become part of south Tel Aviv.
“There is a difference between hope and reality,” he said. “Have you ever seen the dead come back to life?”
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