Democratic Palestine : 2 (ص 34)
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- Democratic Palestine : 2 (ص 34)
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Descent Into the Water
Palestinian Notes in Arab Exile
Descent into the Water: Palestinian Notes from
Arab Exile by Muin Bseiso, is autobiographical in
style. Yet Bseiso’s purpose was not to tell about
himself. Rather through his own experience, he
recounts the reality of Palestinian refugee exist-
ence, especially in the Gaza Strip, and how Pales-
tinian communists worked among the people,
starting in the fifties. The book represents a liter-
ary history, packed with expressive metaphors of
the Palestinian experience, as well as with much
concrete information about the conditions and
forms of struggle at that time. In the preface, Bsei-
so explains that he wrote the book for a specific
purpose: to combat the anti-communist sentiment
that was on the rise in the Arab world in the late
seventies. The book was published in English in
1980, by Medina Press, Wilmette Illinois, USA, as
No. 13 in the Arab American University Gradu-
ates Monograph Series. We have chosen the fol-
lowing selection because it deals with the first
struggles against attempts to resettle the Palestini-
ans, a struggle that has current relevance with the
revival of the Israeli efforts in this direction.
I reached Gaza in the summer of 1953 and began to teach
English at the Burayj Secondary School which was adminis-
tered by UNRWA. S.B. and M.N. were like two stalks of
wheat in a field of locusts. Together, we formed a cell and
began to grow as Communists. We were joined by a worker
who mixed powdered milk in water and distributed it among
the schoolchildren in the Burayj camp. Later we were joined
by another who eventually was fired by UNRWA for refusing
to make bricks from soil and grass. He said, “The fabricated
stone is more dangerous than the fabricated bank note.”
Thus I began teaching English to the children of the Palesti-
nian refugees at the Burayj camp. But I was teaching them a
different language.
In the camp the Palestinians who had been expelled from
the southern villages hung up their rags and waited to return
home to their trees. They began to deceive themselves,
though, and planted trees in the camp. They planted vines. But
the cluster of grapes in Barbara village is different from that in
the Maghazi camp. And the wooden and steel keys which they
carried with them from their old homes turned, with the long
wait, into nails in their bones.
And they began to talk. The voice of the rags and the
wooden key and the cluster of grapes began to rise: A people
has been expelled from its land! And the cities and villages
have turned into camps! But the refugees banded together.
UNRWA tried to eradicate them with water, but in the rain
they knew how to turn their bodies into small ships.
They always knew that their enemies were against the Pales-
tinian fingers, fingers that press on the trigger as well as on the
chalk stick.
A vegetable box became a blackboard, and with a piece of
lime the teachers wrote on the boards they had painted them-
34
selves. They began teaching the children, and hope began to
spread. When the Palestinian child in the camp - at Burayj,
Nusayrat, Maghazi, Arrimal, Jabalya, Rafah, Khan Unis, Deir
al-Balah, and Beit Hanoun held a pencil in his hand and made
his voice appear on paper, his father felt that the child would
someday carry a weapon. The son pressed on the pencil, and
the father began to dream of pressing on the trigger.
At the end of the month the teacher received his reward: a
bundle of onions and some dried fish.
Egyptian papers began writing about the camps, about the
tuberculosis hospital in Burayj and about these Palestinian
birds whose necks were like strings. Israeli raids on the camps
began. At the same time explorers from UNRWA discovered
an island in the midst of the Sinai sand which they saw fit as a
place to settle the Gaza refugees.
Thus the first Israeli raid on the Burayj camp took place.
When our bus stopped that morning in front of the Burayj
Secondary School, the raid was already over: twenty-six dead,
dozens wounded, and many homes destroyed.
From the door of the school we marched to the Nusayrat
camp, where we stripped the secret police of their weapons.
When the peasant women saw us with rifles in our hands, they
let out cries of joy.
Together with my students, I entered prison.
“Their blood was heated, so they demonstrated.” That was
what some moderates said.
“Our fight is not for the camps, but for the Qur’an,” others
said.
“Let them go free, but keep them away from the schools.”
And so I was dismissed from my job. But the Party had
begun walking in the camps.
Sheikh ‘Izz al-Din, a Muslim Brother who had been excited
by the demonstration, gathered the elementary school child-
ren and led them in a march from Nusayrat beach to Gaza
beach. He was arrested, but the children were left free. They
had not yet learned to arrest Palestinian children seven and
eight years old. But the Palestinian children, whom the Party
had taught to cross from Nusayrat beach to Gaza beach, later
began to cross the Jordan River with rifles in hand...
We decided to hold the first conference of Palestinian
Communists. The National Liberation Group had become the
Jordan Communist party, and those Communists remaining
under Israeli occupation had joined Rakah. Palestinian Com-
munists as such only remained in Gaza.
We prepared the Party’s program. At the top of it was the
derailment of the Sinai project, which Mahmound Fawzi, the
foreign minister of Egypt, had agreed to in exchange for a
fistful of dollars...
Efforts to carry out the Sinai project intensified. The
Agency was supported by some of the mukhtars who wanted
to present the eyes of the Palestinian children as boiled eggs to
the Egyptian secret police.
The Party and its patriotic friends were given an office
across from police headquarters, and there Abdallah Abu Sitta
sat under the constant watch of the police. Thus we had to go
to the camps.
The Gaza peasant cuts the barbed wire and returns to his
fields to sow the wheat. He cuts the barbed wire again at
harvest time. He returns with a bundle of wheat stalks and is
shot dead on the wire. The next day it is proclaimed that an
infiltrator has been killed. - هو جزء من
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