WaPo: two good pieces on (refugee) Palestinians

Every so often, the WaPo does some real good. They are doing so this weekend, with the publication of two articles that throw some much-needed light on the intense harm that the 60-year record of no-peace in the Middle East continues to inflict on the Palestinians.
The first of these is Scott Wilson’s piece of news reporting in today’s paper on some aspects of how the 1.4 million Palestinian residents of Gaza have been suffering under the brutally tight economic siege that Israel has maintained on them since– well, at some level, since 1967, though the screws tightened noticeably in 2000, then again in 2002, and even more so right after the Palestinian legislative elections of January 2006 gave a robust plurality to an organization not to Israel’s liking, namely Hamas.
Wilson focuses his reporting on the effects the siege has had on the deaf Palestinian children who receive teaching and some bare social services through the amazing organization Atfaluna (“Our children”). Long-time JWN readers may recall that for some years now, I have been involved with a group here in Virginia that helps to sell the beautiful craft products that Atfaluna’s people create. This fall, againk they were miraculously able to fulfill the order we had placed. But Wilson says they are fast running out of the necessary raw materials– as well as out of the batteries the kids need for their hearing-aids and many other basic services.
He also writes about dialysis patients at a nearby clinic having their sessions cut from three times a week to twice a week, about cancer patients dying because they are refused entry to Israeli hospitals, and about the anger of the Palestinians at the collective punishment to which they continue to be subjected– despite all the fine words voiced at the recent Annapolis conference.
(And yes, he gives quite appropriate coverage to the arguments made by Israeli officials as to why they have been maintaining this siege on Gaza. Does the WaPo always feel similarly obliged to cover the arguments that Palestinians make when they undertake actions that harm Israelis? I think not. But I’m glad Wilson does this here. It underlines the conundrum people and governments face when they take actions to deal with their own insecurities that– by increasing the insecurity of others– end up simply increasing and entrenching the security “threat” that they themselves face. Strategic analysts give this piece of elementary human-affairs logic the fancy name of “security dilemma.”)
Wilson quotes Gerry Shawa, the formidably effective and visionary American-Palestinian woman who runs Atfaluna as saying of the Israelis: “I hold each of them responsible, just as they obviously seem to hold all of us responsible…If the Israeli government really has the power and the desire to change, well, this is pushing me in exactly the opposite way — over the edge.”
… The second good WaPo piece is this heavily reported piece of “commentary” from Nir Rosen about the situation of the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. It will be in Sunday’s paper, but is already available on the web.
Nir describes some of the scenes he witnessed over the summer in and around the refugee camp at Nahr al-Bared, near the north Lebanese city of Tripoli, at the time when the Lebanese army was bombarding the whole camp in its brutal campaign against the extremists of a splinter group called “Fateh al-Islam.”
He wrote:

The media were not permitted in [to Nahr el-Bared], and most Lebanese outlets ignored or denied the outrages. When I managed to slip inside, I was shocked by the scope of the damage. The buildings were crumpled, windows broken, electrical wiring yanked out, water pumps destroyed, generators stolen or shot up. All the gold jewelry had been stolen, as had been the cash that so many Palestinians had stored in their bedrooms. Insulting graffiti were scrawled on the charred walls, as were threats, signed by various Lebanese army units. Every car in the camp that I saw had been burned, shot or crushed by tanks or bulldozers. The ruination had been strikingly personal; I saw photo albums that had been torn to shreds. Palestinians told me that they had seen their belongings on sale in the main outdoor market in Tripoli.
… I saw videos filmed by Lebanese soldiers on the Internet, showing army medical staff abusing corpses and beating prisoners. Hundreds of Palestinians had been abused or tortured in Lebanese detention, according to human rights groups, and refugees told me that some had died from medical neglect of treatable wounds.
The refugees still faced harassment and the occasional beating by Lebanese soldiers. Nobody is helping them, but rather than giving up, hundreds of Palestinians were at work emptying their homes of debris and trying to get on with their lives.

Nir also writes about the broad political background to this story:

The rights of the Palestinian refugees have been ignored for six decades by a world that has wished them away. But the Middle East will never know peace or stability until they are granted justice…
A series of subsequent peace processes has ignored the refugees, offered no compensation for their suffering and lost property, or refused to recognize their right to return to their homes in their homeland. It’s not just the Israelis who have brutalized them; Palestinian refugees have been massacred in Jordan and Lebanon. Small numbers have become so radicalized that they have gone on to fight the U.S. occupation of Iraq. In Lebanon… the refugee problem has never really left center stage.

This is a great piece of political reporting by someone who most certainly understands everything that is writing about. Kudos to Nir, and to the editor of the WaPo’s weekly “Outlook” section of (mainly) political commentary for publishing it.
For my part, I would add simply that these two articles both underscore the great importance of making sure that the issue of the Palestinian refugees gets adequately dealt with during the whole of the post-Annapolis peace negotiations, and that it is not simply left to the end, which was one of the major reasons for the failure of all previous peace efforts. A strong numerical majority of the Palestinian people have been forced by the Israelis or others to live either as exiles completely outside their ancestral homeland, or as refugees from their ancestral homes though still technically within the boundaries of Mandate Palestine, or both. (Somewhere around 80% of the population of Gaza is made up of refugees, so it is likely that a high proportion of the kids in Atfaluna’s programs there come from refugee families.)
There is no way, politically, that any final peace agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians can “stick” and provide a sustainable base for longterm peace if the claims of the refugee Palestinians are not addressed in a way that the vast majority of these chronically mistreated people judge to be satisfactory. This is not an impossible task– though it gets harder by the day, and will continue to do so as long as Israel continues to seize and hold onto control of additional portions of the West Bank area that, along with seriously over-crowded Gaza, is the only area left in which to base the independent state that was promised to the Palestinian Arabs back in 1947.
I wrote recently on JWN about one effort, made by something called the “Aix Group”, to craft a mutually acceptable resolution to the Palestinian refugee issue. Go check that out– and some of the other points I made in that blog post.