O.P.

I’ve been in Dheisheh for about a week now. Of course, like with most important things it seems like I’ve been here for both more and less time. My luggage mysteriously appeared at a small unidentified airport in Europe, I’m serious, they don’t know which airport, just that is will arrive in Tel Aviv tomorrow.
So I’m already falling a little bit in love with Dheisheh. I think you have to fall in love with anything that breaks your heart. Israeli soldiers have come into the camp the last three nights to make arrests and exert control. They are not supposed to be here. Dheisheh is supposedly under the control of the Palestinian authority but they saying is from morning to midnight the PA is in control of the camp and after midnight the Israeli army takes over. The UN seems pretty much to have removed itself from the situation. They offer extremely limited services within the camp, like a clinic with one doctor open from 7am until 1pm. But they have an impressive array of new, white UN vehicles, pictured bellow, which go on no end of errands outside of the camp…


Clearly here, like anywhere aid is big business. However, what I’ve heard articulated by Dheisheh residents is that they really have very little need for traditional “aid” services. They have enough food, children can go to school, there are medical services and people have homes. Obviously they would like a high standard for many of these “basic needs”, but what they want, what they struggle for, where they look for internationally solidarity is in their struggle for their human rights; the right to return to their lands, citizenship, freedom of movement. You know, all that social justice stuff. Unfortunately, in a global aid system, that regardless of whether it is public or private, that is most often an extension of western foreign policy, self-determination most always takes a back seat to a plethora of understaffed clinics and new white cars.