Video: Palestinian refugees' dreams of returning home fade

Wihdat Refugee Camp - Graffiti reading "we never forget" adorns the walls of homes in the Dheisheh refugee camp.

Fifty years ago, Sobhi Awwad left the ancient West Bank city of Jericho with his parents, running to dodge the crossfire from battling Jordanian and Israeli soldiers.
Today, living in a refugee camp in Amman, his seven children and 15 grandchildren know his Palestinian homeland only through his stories and those of others who fled.
"The past will never come back. I wish I had died in Jericho and not come here so I wouldn't have to carry what I carry in my memory today," he said. "Our life was simple, but very happy. There were good things in Jericho."
Awwad is among the some 300,000 refugees from the 1967 Six-Day War and its immediate aftermath.
Over the past five decades, the tent that the family pitched about 40 kilometres (25 miles) from Jericho has been replaced by a house, and the Al Wihdat camp in which it stands looks much like any other neighbourhood in the Jordanian capital.
One difference is the graffiti proclaiming that the refugee camps are just a way station, a "waiting room before the return" - a message seen on posters throughout the camps of Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the occupied Palestinian territories.
The Palestinians claim a "right of return" to homes their families fled or were driven from both in the 1948 war surrounding the creation of Israel and again in 1967.
It is one of the most contentious issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
For the Palestinian leadership, it is a right that must be negotiated painstakingly if stalled peace negotiations ever resume.
Israel says that in the same way that it took in Jews fleeing postwar Europe and Arab countries, the proper place to settle Palestinian refugees is in a future Palestinian state.
Graffiti reading "we never forget" adorns the walls of homes in the Dheisheh refugee camp, in the West bank city of Bethlehem.

The camps can be grey zones where neither the Palestinian Authority nor the Israeli army exert much influence.
A small, parallel world is evolving where political consciousness is sharper and despair greater than in the towns and cities.
Politics are conducted differently than elsewhere in the occupied territories, where internal rivalries are fierce.
"In the camps, solidarity among people is stronger. Even political parties take unified decisions," says Louai Al Haj, a local activist.
Palestinian security forces do not often venture in, he says, making the camps towns within towns, hidden from the eyes of the authorities.
Deep distrust prevails between the Palestinian Authority and the youngsters in the camps who appear in its alleys only after dark or, their faces masked, at the funerals of "martyrs" killed in clashes with Israeli forces.
For them, the PA is a body that negotiates with the occupier and which could one day, with the stroke of a pen, sign the death warrant of the right of return.
Unrest has also broken out. At the Balata camp in Nablus, there was an uptick of violence last year when Palestinian security forces launched raids to seize illegal weapons.
Still waiting in the Dheisheh camp to go back, Abdel Qader Al Lahham, 96, laments what has occurred over the past half-century.
Recently one of his grandchildren obtained an Israeli permit to visit ancestral land.
"I described to him the house and even the fig tree which I had planted," he told AFP.
But he says that love of working on the land has been lost and with it the desire to return to the villages.
The Israelis who now occupy the territory "employ the young people and sometimes pay them as much as 200 or 300 shekels ($56-$84) a day."
With such temptations, he says, "who is going to wear themselves out growing vegetables?"
After reflecting on the past, he points out his house in Dheisheh.
"It doesn't even belong to me," he sighs.
"All this is the agency's," he adds, referring to the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, which also provides schools and hospitals.
Mohammed Nassar and other youngsters are trying to preserve the memory of the exodus - and life before it - by restoring a pre-1948 bus.
Parked at the side of the road in Ramallah, the beige bus has been lovingly refurbished, with varnished wooden slats running along its windows and wooden panelling inside. The names of the cities it once visited run in Arabic script along its side.
In their day, Nassar said, such vehicles took travellers from Haifa to Beirut and from Jerusalem to distant Sanaa in Yemen.
After the glory days when they ferried Palestinians to the cinema in Amman or took Christian pilgrims from Damascus to Jerusalem, the last international journey of Palestinian buses was in 1967.
Then, passengers "with their suitcases left their country for another," Nassar said. "The Palestinians are waiting to get back on the road in the opposite direction."









How the 1967 Arab-Israeli war began



Jerusalem, May 31, 2017 (AFP) - The Arab-Israeli Six-Day War erupted early on Monday, June 5, 1967, a morning that saw heavy Israeli bombing of Egyptian air bases near Cairo and in the Suez desert.

Within a few hours almost all Egyptian aircraft had been grounded. Israel essentially won the war on the first day by ensuring it had control of the skies.

At 7:24 am local time, a news flash from Tel Aviv says that Egyptian planes and tanks have attacked Israel. A few minutes later, an official statement speaks of heavy fighting in the south between Israeli and Egyptian forces following an invasion by the Egyptians and an Israeli counter-attack. Air raid sirens sound in Tel Aviv and alerts are triggered in other Israeli cities.

Most historians now believe that in fact, the Israeli air force opened the hostilities in crushing the Egyptian air bases.

At 8:12 am, Egyptian radio interrupts its programme to declare that "Israeli forces launched an assault on us this morning. They staged air raids on Cairo and our aircraft went after the enemy planes."

Initially muffled explosions grow louder and sirens blare in the Egyptian capital.

Israeli army reservists are called up and trucks are commandeered, while armoured vehicles move south, breaking through Egyptian lines, deep into the Sinai Peninsula.

Civilian airports are shut down near Cairo and a nationwide state of emergency is then declared.

Civil defence units are mobilised in Syria as Radio Damascus interrupts its broadcast to announce that Israel has attacked Egypt.

Shortly after 10:00 am, Syria says its planes have begun to bomb Israeli positions.

Jordan declares martial law and places its armed forces under Egyptian command before declaring war on Israel a few hours later.

Iraq, Kuwait and Sudan follow suit, as do Algeria and Yemen, to be joined later by Saudi Arabia.

In Jerusalem, street battles break out between the Israeli and Jordanian sectors, and fighting quickly spreads to Israel's borders with Jordan and Syria.

Heavy fighting is reported early in the day on the Israeli-Jordanian front.

Syrian planes hit the coastal towns of Haifa, while the Israelis target the Damascus airport with waves of attacks.

Both Egypt and Israel are sure of victory and in many Arab countries the mood is upbeat. Official statements never mention defeat.

Elsewhere, global leaders are dismayed. Pope Paul VI asks that Jerusalem be declared an open city. The UN Security Council meets in emergency session and US president Lyndon B. Johnson asks all sides to help him reach a ceasefire.

Israeli troops capture the Gaza border town of Khan Yunis and all the Egyptian and Palestinian forces in the sector, an AFP special correspondent reports late in the day. That protects Israel's western flank and its forces engaged with a large part of Egypt's army to the south, the report says.

That night, Israeli prime minister Levi Eshkol tells the Knesset that all fighting is taking place in Egypt and on the Sinai Peninsula. He says serious damage has been done to the Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian air forces.

That is what determines the outcome of the Six-Day War. At midnight, Israel says it has decimated the Egyptian air force. Some 400 aircraft, including 300 Egyptian and 50 Syrian, were shot down from the first day.

• MENA