I pointed out to Jamal that he and I had the same Palestine map necklace—not too shocking, given that we were sitting opposite each other in the Nahr Al Bared camp (a place name which also translates into “Cold River”) near Tripoli—and that we smoked the same flavour of Gauloises cigarettes. Still a little in my London mode, I was a bit shocked when this prompted him to come out with “have one”, and we sat and smoked.
Jamal had been fortunate enough, through luck and determination, to leave the aid-dependent camps and find a home Beirut—albeit in another camp, this time Mar Elias—where he was studying mathematics at university.
“Ah! A man even more after my own heart! I did physics!”
Like the others gathered at the Nahr Al Bared youth centre that day, Jamal had come to participate in one of their frequent and irregular (“sometimes every month, sometimes for special occasions like Ramadan, whenever we feel like it really”) table tennis tournaments. The trip from Beirut to the North was an easy 2 to 3 hours, so was it really worth it for a few games of ping-pong?
“I'm good you know, and I think I might get one of the cups this time around.”
Although far from the most painful, this was the one sentence I heard in the camps I would want to broadcast to the world in Tripoli and beyond: The Palestinians, long-time, inter-generational dwellers—dwellers only and not citizens—of Nahr Al Bared went for the same silly pastimes as everybody else. We play table tennis and study mathematics and sneak away for fag breaks while our friends are practising bouncing balls. Since Jamal's friend Zaki had trounced me like a bad joke earlier in the afternoon, I wasn't in a position to offer Jamal a pre-tournament warm-up, but I thought to ask him about chess.
“Oh, I've given up on chess, stopped playing since I was 13; you see, people stick to really silly plans, and it becomes hard to beat them if you want to be creative like me.”
Yes, of course. I'd heard that before. So it hit me, Jamal and I were not just two similar people staring at each other in the face: We were twin brothers who'd ended up on differing sides of a rather small political coin. I knew how to evade saying “I'm afraid I'll lose” in more ways than one myself.
I might have been born in Kuwait, and Jamal in this camp here, but putting a brave face on what could be a personal tragedy was a national habit shared by both of us. In Elias Khoury's Gate of the Sun, an absent-minded Palestinian nurse trained deep behind the Eastern bounds of the Iron Curtain was transformed into a Daktor in the blighted life of the camps; and just today, Zaki of table tennis fame had referred to a Daktora Vivian, in fact an MA-holding American researcher well-known and liked in these parts. Although maybe a way to make it easier for a woman collecting data on the health of the camp-dwellers, it was also a way of signifying their own significance: The world has not totally abandoned the Palestinians so long as the medics will continue to visit. It is better to live in a world where doctors care about your health than in a camp where even your existence is of questionable legality; it is better to be a freedom fighter than a hopeless refugee, and better to be tired of unimaginative tactical manoeuvres than a bad chess player.
If the escapism seemed a bit desperate, there was enough cause for as much. When I arrived, Zaki took me around to see what had become of Nahr Al Bared since the Lebanese military had carried out its “operations” there to wipe out the Fateh al Islam group—which even the Lebanese state acknowledged was not made up primarily of Palestinians—bulldozing everything which stood between the new, post-Syrian departure Lebanon and a Muslim fundamentalist. Here, the delusions of grandeur indulged in by Palestinian refugees seemed to have their place. Where the Lebanese Army spoke of “operations”, they spoke of a “war”. A war which, in the words of Zaki,
“Was against the trees and the stones of the houses as much and the people in the camp. This used to be a little orchard I planted: Were my orange trees terrorists?”
Where Zaki's trees had once stood, there was no only a pile of rubble and iron bars. To make matters worse, Zaki could have owned the land, just on the fringes of the camp hiumself. Instead, it was held in trust for him by a distant cousin, who had managed to make a living, and gain citizenship, for himself in the US, where there were no refugee camps save for the Indian reservations. A little in the distance, Zaki showed me the “resort” where the Nahr Al Bared dwellers would go to smoke hookah and look out at the Mediterranean.
Being on the shoreline brought this conflict, found throughout all the camps where the Palestinians lived, screeching to the front. In Nahr Al Bared, you may have to worry about tanks uprooting your trees or the fact that you are not legally entitled to be a citizen anywhere; but you still want to smoke argeela with the boys and have a good time. After all, even Palestinians want to play ping-pong.
appropriated by the state, are never addressed), Israel retaliated against a shooting attack by bombing civilians in Gaza--although there is absolutely no evidence that anybody in Gaza shot anybody in Eilat. 
