Canada Funding Palestinian Community's Return to Gaza Strip

By Dick Doughty

Many may find the image familiar, even emblematic: a Palestinian family stands behind barbed wire, shouting and waving; in the distance bob the heads of fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, cousins and friends. Israeli and Egyptian soldiers patrol the no-man's land between the groups.

Since 1982, this is how nearly 5,000 Palestinians of Canada Camp in Rafah, Egypt, have communicated with relatives in the Gaza Strip who gathered to listen and shout along the Israeli-occupied side of "the wires" or "the calling wall."

"No one leaves that place without weeping," said one young woman.

By August, however, members of 70 of the 363 Palestinian families living in Canada Camp were to have started their moves from Rafah, Egypt, to Rafah, Gaza Strip, in what remains the only instance of an exiled Palestinian community re-entering Israeli-controlled territory since the beginning of the 1967 Israeli occupation. The current movement began on June 30, when the first 10 heads of households crossed from Egypt to begin building houses in Gaza's Tel el Sultan district. They are building on small, assigned plots, alongside 133 Canada Camp families repatriated between 1989 and 1992. Each Thursday in July, 15 additional heads of households were eligible to cross. Near the end of the year, when their houses are certified complete by the new housing authority, the rest of the family will follow.

"We are very, very happy, of course, to see our neighbors and friends come," said Mustafa El Hawi, who arrived in the Gaza Strip from Canada Camp in 1990 and is now environmental projects coordinator for Save the Children in Gaza City. "But it makes the families who remain [in Canada Camp] even more anxious. It will get lonely for them, and the situation inside Canada Camp is unbearable."

Israel built Canada Camp in 1971, during the Israeli occupation of the Sinai Peninsula, as a relocation camp for Rafah families left homeless by the widening of roads throughout the Gaza Strip, as a part of Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon's "Iron Fist" counter-insurgency campaign. The camp lay across the old Egyptian border, but for families ordered to vacate their former homes, that was the least of their worries. In 1982, however, when the final phase of the return of Sinai to Egypt was completed, the Palestinians in Canada Camp were stranded on the wrong side of the new border.

"We were told we would be here a few weeks, not more, and that the Israeli government would give us land in Tel el Sultan," recalled Mohammed el Najjar, camp director for UNRWA. "They said we would receive permits to continue work on the other side, too."

Although Israel indeed allocated the land, it took until 1986 for Egypt and Israel to agree upon a complex procedure that stretched repatriation out over more than a decade. Only a few dozen received work permits, and only eight families were repatriated between 1986 and 1990. Then, 35 families crossed for each of three years through 1992. Nearly 4,500 people still live in Canada Camp, and in over 12 years it has become a humanitarian disaster.

Residents must renew their Egyptian tourist visas every six months. Because residents are not officially permitted to work within Egypt, unemployment hovers at a staggering 70 percent. The single camp school runs three shifts. Almost three-fourths of the residents depend upon bimonthly emergency food rations from the United Nations. UNRWA statistics rank Canada Camp as the most impoverished of the 61 Palestinian refugee camps in the Middle East.

"This is a cemetery for the living," said one youth sitting in the shop of a friend, facing another day after school with no library, no youth club, no organized activities available at all—and only one soccer field for the entire camp.

Sources close to the camp (who insisted on anonymity for the safety of their families) also tell of at least 60 male residents of Canada Camp deported mostly to Libya, but also to Sudan, Algeria and Yemen by Egyptian authorities since the intifada began in 1987. Most were charged under Egypt's emergency laws with political activism, although a few were charged with trying to smuggle arms to militants in Gaza. None were tried.

"The Silent Exiles"

"These are the silent exiles," wrote one Palestinian lawyer, who told, with others, of pre-dawn arrests in Canada Camp followed by days of beatings and interrogation by Egyptian State Security investigators. Some who were arrested were returned to the camp later, but others were held in Egyptian prisons in El Arish or Cairo for weeks or months, and then driven to the Cairo airport for deportation "all without the families knowing when or why for sure."

Ron Wilkinson, public information officer for UNRWA in Gaza, said "a few" of these deportees have been permitted by Israel to return as members of the Palestinian police, and others are likely to be permitted to rejoin families that repatriate.

In the 1988 repatriation agreement, which Egypt and Israel negotiated on the basis of the Camp David accords and outside of Israeli "family reunification" programs, Israel set several requirements. First was a ceiling of 35 repatriated families a year. This left many in the camp bitter.

"They can fly ten thousand falasha [Ethiopian Jews] in a few days, but then they say for us 35 families is all they can admit," said one repatriate. Israel also requires families to arrive with at least $12,000 in construction funds donated from abroad, which for the first 133 families was provided by the PLO through Egypt. With the Gulf war, these funds dried up, and in August 1992 the repatriation process came to a standstill.

Although Canada Camp's name is a coincidence—residents insist it started as a joke, a satirical parry in 1971 to the newly named Brazil Camp nearby—the government of Canada stepped in to revive the repatriation process late last year. To make up for 1993, when no families crossed, Israel has consented to allow 70 families to repatriate in 1994. Canada put up US $840,000, which funded each family at the $12,000 requirement. In practice, earlier repatriates pointed out, these funds cover about one-fourth of the cost of an average house. For most families, the remainder comes from loans extended by friends and relatives.

An official of the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade said Canada had been willing to provide four million Canadian dollars to fund the repatriation of more than 200 families in 1994, "but that implied a rate of return the Israelis weren't prepared to accept." However, Canada has also funded a community center in the repatriated neighborhood of Tel el Sultan that is set to begin construction soon. It will provide the youth and women's centers that were never available on the Egyptian side, as well as an orientation center for newly arriving repatriate families.

For the 293 families who will remain in Canada Camp after this year, however, life will go on as it has since 1982. According to the Canadian official, although it is too early for talk of further repatriations, "we hope what we've done will get the ball rolling, and that [other governments] will buy into it later." It is, he explained, an attractive program for a donor because the money goes directly to families, and the diplomatic mechanisms are firmly in place.

"They are a close, well-disciplined community despite what they've been through," said Wilkinson, who coordinated UNRWA's distribution of the Canadian checks to the 70 repatriating families. Some families, he added, have permitted others to go ahead of them due to pressing personal needs. "When I was there handing out the checks it was very emotional. I was almost in tears myself."

Now, many Canada Camp residents are hoping the future will bring more than mere continuation of the 1988 process, said El Hawi. "We are hoping that with the new Palestinian authority in the Gaza Strip the process can be speeded up. Nobody is really talking about it. There are too many other concerns. But we will be raising this issue."

Photojournalist and writer Dick Doughty is a member of the Impact Visuals Cooperative of New York. His book Gaza: Coming Home to Occupation; A Photographer's Journal of Palestinian Community, is forthcoming from Kumarian Press in early 1995.