Palestinian refugees in Syria have a message for Gazans: Don’t leave your land

DAMASCUS, Syria — Khadija al-Ali was just 3 years old when her family fled their home in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and came to this Palestinian refugee camp in Syria.

“The Arab armies were all saying, ‘We are coming to fight for you. Leave for eight days, and we will liberate the land,'” she said. “People left carrying their house keys and locking their doors. So people left thinking they would return in eight days.”

Those eight days have turned into 77 years in the congested Jaramana Refugee Camp on the edge of Damascus.

The original tented encampment has long since turned into a permanent neighborhood of cinderblock houses, with children running through the narrow, muddy streets beneath a tangle of electrical wires overhead.

Most residents have spent their entire lives in the camp.

Al-Ali, 80, is one of the few who wasn’t born here. Yet, there’s still no prospect of returning to her old home — or a Palestinian state.

Al-Ali says this painful experience is a cautionary tale for Palestinians in Gaza.

“My advice to the people of Gaza is to hold on. Do not leave, even if it means they all become martyrs,” she said.

Trump says the U.S. should control Gaza

President Trump has called for a U.S. takeover of Gaza, and the relocation of the more than 2 million Palestinians who’ve just endured a devastating war with Israel that’s left the territory in ruins.

Trump’s vague proposal overturned decades of U.S. policy on Gaza, which has long seen the territory as part of a future Palestinian state that would also include the West Bank and a capital in East Jerusalem.

Many regional experts say the president’s plan is completely unrealistic.

“That’s pie in the sky. It’s not going to happen. And there are many reasons why it’s not going to happen. But suffice it to say, it’s not going to happen,” said Hussein Ibish with the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington.

Trump has offered no details on basic questions like who would remove the rubble, who would rebuild the territory and who would provide security. Meanwhile, the Palestinians in Gaza say they won’t leave. And Arab countries are adamant they won’t take Palestinians forced from their homes.

The war that created the original crisis

That 1948 Mideast War erupted at Israel’s founding and pitted Israel against several Arab states. The war scattered some 750,000 Palestinian refugees throughout the Middle East.

In December 1948, while the war was still ongoing, the United Nations passed Resolution 194 which says refugees should be able to return to their homes at, quote, “the earliest practicable date.”

But that’s never happened, and now nearly 6 million Palestinians — the original refugees and their descendants — are registered with UNRWA, the U.N. agency devoted to Palestinian refugees. Many live in camps like this one in Syria, as well as others in Lebanon, Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza. Many feel a deep sense of betrayal.

“I have the right to return. This is both an individual and collective right. Me, my children, my grandfather and my grandmother — all of us have the right to return,” said Fadi Deeb, a 52-year-old resident of the Jaramana Camp.

Israel opposes return of refugees

Israel has always rejected a mass return of Palestinian refugees, saying the Jewish state would be swamped demographically. Israel has been at odds with UNRWA for decades, saying it perpetuates a cycle of dependency as refugee status is passed on from one generation to the next.

A new Israeli law that recently took effect bars UNRWA from operating in Israel. The agency says that will create a host of challenges, but UNRWA is still functioning in Gaza, the West Bank and in Arab countries.

There’s no realistic prospect that Palestinians in the camps will be able to return to old family homes now inside Israel’s internationally recognized borders.

Perhaps their best-case scenario would be to leave the camps and move to a future Palestinian state. Yet today, a Palestinian state seems a distant dream.

Still, Deeb and other refugees hold out hope.

“We are steadfast. We are like olive trees,” he said.

Then he quotes the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, who wrote, “My homeland is not a suitcase, and I am not a traveler. I am the lover, and the land is the beloved.”

In making his proposal, Trump said the vast destruction in the Gaza war made the territory unlivable, and Palestinians would have a better life elsewhere.

But Khadija al-Ali says Trump isn’t acting in the interest of Palestinian refugees.

“If you want to approach this from a humanitarian perspective, return them to their original villages,” she said. “Go and rebuild and return them if you truly care about humanity. But don’t deceive people with false claims.”