Our Elsewheres: Beyond The Wall, Writing A Path Through Palestine

What is a camp? A camp is a temporary settlement. A camp is disorganized, hap-hazard, created from necessity as a last-minute measure when accommodation is hard to come by. Or . . . a camp is set up in difficult circumstances by helpful people who provide advice, shelter, medical treatment, food and water. A camp is created by travellers and friends to celebrate nature, freedom and camaraderie. A camp is a children’s summer adventure holiday in the countryside or a place for gifted individuals to concentrate on their talents. A camp is a means of corralling and exploiting people for their labour. A camp is a place of detention. A camp is a place of starvation, torture, mass murder. A camp is unsafe, dirty, lawless and cruel. Or it is fun, like a circus crew’s nightly set-down. A camp is for prisoners, guests, nomads, wandering friends, advancing soldiers, the condemned, the blessed and rich, the oppressed and poor. When the purpose of a camp has been fulfilled, it is dismantled. A camp comes and goes with seasons, fashions, families, age, journeys and regimes.

Balata Refugee Camp is permanent. It has been here for more than four decades. Children have been born and grown up in Balata Refugee Camp and adults have married, grown old and died there. It is made up of concrete family dwellings stacked on top of one another, less than a metre apart. There is a dirt-floored main street with shops. There are schools, a mosque, a church and a cultural centre within the camp. There is administration and infrastructure. Everything in the camp is the same colour: dust. The young people here have been born here or are housed here after witnessing the destruction or occupation of their homes. There are camps like this all over the West Bank.

Balata is just to the southeast of Nablus but each journey is so arduous that it feels as though we’ve crossed hundreds of miles. Were so many obstacles not placed between them to enforce a sense of isolation, Jerusalem, Ramallah and Bethlehem would be considered suburbs of one another anywhere else. The strangest experience is when we rock up to a seemingly deserted shed checkpoint. Everything’s been painted white and there are obviously no seats or guidelines or signs. There are booths, grilles, gates and turnstiles: all shut. We pace the abandoned building. We can’t get through unless someone lets us through and we can’t contemplate what’ll happen if we force a gate. After a long while a voice shouts over the tannoy, making us all jump out of our skins. ‘They’ were watching us on their security cameras. The voice has shouted ‘Stop!’—or maybe it shouted ‘Go!’—we have no idea. We shout, ‘What?’ No reply. We’ve been turned into real-life video-game blips trying to get round a puzzle for their amusement. Eventually, someone notices that the tiny green light above one of the turnstiles has lit up. We go through it. There’s no one on the other side. We walk down a few narrow white clapboard corridors. We see a sign saying ‘Exit’. The whole thing passes in watching, smirking silence.

Faisal takes us out on a tour of the camp once all our classes are over. In passing he says, ‘Palestine is small, from the top end to the bottom is five hours by car. So all the wars and confrontations that happened, happened in this small space.’

The camp is made up of identical dust-coloured blocks. There is no decoration of any kind anywhere. There is no light and no air. The ground is dust, the passages between blocks are barely walkable, narrow, unventilated and untended. It would be difficult to get into your door if you had even one bulging bag of food shopping with you.

‘So you can imagine,’ jokes Faisal, ‘when you buy a new sofa for your house, how do you get it in? It’s very difficult. And when somebody dies, the corpse, it goes stiff. How do you get it out?’

From the passageway we can hear the TV, the radio, the conversation, the furniture scraping and the cooking sounds of everyone on both sides. The sound is compressed, it has nowhere to escape. The rooms in the buildings are so small and we’re looking in so directly that we make accidental eye contact with a woman and her little boy who are at home that day. She accepts it sanguinely; it’s normal to be looked in on, even by strangers.

‘We live so close that we think of the neighbours as relatives, because you can see, hear, everything they’re doing, and there are so many kids everywhere,’ says Faisal. ‘We Palestinians are, as you see, very active at having children!’

The camp covers an area of one square kilometre, with each family given just one room to live in. The perimeter was fixed by the authorities so there’s nowhere to build but up, except that the foundations weren’t built to support so many storeys.

‘What’ll happen when you’ve built to the maximum height the foundations can hold?’ asks someone.

Faisal shrugs as if to say, we’ll have to find a way to manage. The foundations will only take one more floor before the blocks collapse. Faisal tells us that nearly three quarters of the camp’s population are under the age of 18, but that employment has been at 40 per cent since the closure of the border with Israel, where most people used to work. He says that one of the results of the limitation of space, the erosion of privacy and restrictions of employment and freedom of movement, is ‘mental problems’—depression, addictive behaviours, self-sabotage, violence, anger. This is what I am afraid will happen to the young people I met today.

‘They’ve closed the ends of the streets,’ he says, pointing to the flaking walls. Is this good or bad? Good, apparently. ‘There used to be military tanks there, for years. Imagine being a child, living every day with a tank at the end of your street.’

We pass a school with a dirt yard behind high walls where countless sweet-faced children are running about. They crowd together and stare at us, craning their necks as we pass. We turn a corner and another school is letting out its children for the day. They clock us, begin beaming and squealing and run full tilt towards us holding out their palms to be high-fived, their big rucksacks bouncing on their shoulders. The kids are jumping and looking, blinking with their bright button eyes, before tailing off to go home.

Excerpted with permission from the Seagull Books.