Summary
The Palestinian refugee camp at Saida in South Lebanon which residents call “the capital of the camps” for its range of political tendencies, and whose contemporary factional turf, checkpoints and Security Committee open Parkinson’s history of Palestinian organizations in Lebanon (Beyond the Lines — Social Networks and Palestinian Militant Organizations in Wartime Lebanon, PDF p.53-55).
Details
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Lebanese Armed Forces members routinely warn foreign visitors that the camp is a war zone, and the newspaper al-Safir’s archive files its clippings under ishtibakat, clashes; a local UNRWA employee in 2010 compared it to Texas and its armed men to cowboys, as rendered in the book (Beyond the Lines — Social Networks and Palestinian Militant Organizations in Wartime Lebanon, PDF p.53).
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Each faction holds physical, economic and social turf; the camp’s dozen-plus mosques are each linked formally or informally to a party or Islamic organization, militias staff the main access points, and a Security Committee manages checkpoint allocation, inter-organizational disputes, relations with the Lebanese Armed Forces and the boundary with Ta’amir (Beyond the Lines — Social Networks and Palestinian Militant Organizations in Wartime Lebanon, PDF p.53-54).
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Against the security-centred image, the book records a bustling central market, schoolchildren in uniforms, unemployment estimated as high as 80 percent, and local NGOs — many headed by former militants — running youth, disability, elderly and gender-based-violence programmes (Beyond the Lines — Social Networks and Palestinian Militant Organizations in Wartime Lebanon, PDF p.55).
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In June 1982 the camp’s defenders — led by a combination of militiamen, Muslim religious authorities and scouts — battled Israeli troops from Thursday, June 10; after the IDF bombed the camp with conventional ordnance and incendiary weapons such as napalm, the camp held out for over a week, delaying the overall Israeli advance by two full days; the camp was, on the June 23, 1982 UNRWA estimate cited by the AFSC, totally destroyed (Beyond the Lines — Social Networks and Palestinian Militant Organizations in Wartime Lebanon, PDF p.79, p.82-83).
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The first organized post-evacuation smuggling activity began in South Lebanon around the camp, led by women with preexisting ties to militant organizations who had often become heads of household after the IDF round-ups; Khadija, a courier from Ain al-Hilweh, described delivering a salary to a family in need as an accomplishment in the transformed reality of 1982 (Beyond the Lines — Social Networks and Palestinian Militant Organizations in Wartime Lebanon, PDF p.98).
Related pages
Beyond the Lines — Social Networks and Palestinian Militant Organizations in Wartime Lebanon, Lebanon, Fateh