Clinging to hopeThe 13,000 residents of Bethlehem's Deheishe camp, a warren of cinder block hovels clogged with traffic and electrical wires, are a focus of UNRWA's efforts.The agency leased the site months after some 2,000 original refugees quit towns and villages around Jerusalem in 1949.The fate of refugees clinging to the right of return has been one of the toughest issues facing negotiators in two decades of on-off talks aimed at creating an independent Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank.Israel says the demand for a right to return is a deal breaker in any peace accord, arguing that allowing the refugees into Israel would increase the proportion of Palestinian Arabs living within its borders and thus undermine its nature as a Jewish state.It also disputes the legal basis of the right of return set out in a UN resolution of December 1948 and says the world has not taken into account the plight of Jews forced from their homes across the Arab world in the last 65 years.Peace talks have been frozen since 2010, with the Palestinians saying they will not re-engage until there is a halt to Jewish settlement building in the occupied territories.The dejection found in Deheishe has not been reversed by the UNRWA plan to improve it or by the work of 20 non-governmental organizations in its one-km-square area.As walls turned from felt to cinder block over decades, houses squashed together, pushing community life out into the surreal narrow streets. With no parks for children to play in and few jobs to keep youths busy, people of all ages mingle in its crowded alleyways."Standards of living here are plunging," lamented part-time labourer Othman Abu Omar, puffing idly on a cigarette."We hope one day to be done with dependence. Everybody should depend on himself," he said.
UNRWA hopes 'to disappear, not be needed'Some residents complain that the decades of UN sponsorship have amounted to nothing more than charity, without addressing the underlying political cause of their plight."We've gotten health and basic services, but there is no end to the crisis," said Habis al-Aisa, a camp dweller whose family hails from Zakariyya, a town in what is now central Israel."We're refugees, and the UN should be totally responsible for our needs and our situation, because our status is an international political issue."The United Nations recognizes as refugees those who registered with UNRWA after fleeing their homes and their descendants. They are covered by the UN resolutions and eligible to receive the agency's services even if not resident in the camps, but not if they attain citizenship or asylum in another country.Historically weak and cash-strapped governments in Palestinian-governed Gaza and the West Bank have provided little in the way of infrastructure or subsidies to the camps or their inhabitants. Many remain in the camps for lack of better options.UNRWA is the only UN organization devoted to the refugee problem of a single people. Its spokesman, Chris Gunness, said it has no set policy on where the refugees are to go, or how the Middle East crisis might end."UNRWA would like nothing more than to disappear and not be needed anymore. It provides services pending a just and durable solution to the conflict," he said.The agency's current improvement scheme, subsidized by 19.5 million euros from the German government, stresses close coordination with local parties.A gleaming new clinic aims to provide services to sufferers of diabetes and hypertension, which afflicts around a sixth of refugees in the West Bank, who previously had few options for treatment.Living conditions will be improved by shoring up collapsing houses, mending roofs and improving sewage and trash collection.In a college-level education program, dubbed the "House of Wisdom" after a Baghdad library in the Islamic golden age, young camp dwellers choose their own curriculum and are visited by guest lecturers in small, Socratic learning circles."194, 242, 338," student Alaa al-Homuz rattles in staccato, naming UN Security Council resolutions dealing with Palestinian refugees which he is studying in a class on international law.These students disagreed that improving the conditions in the camps would interfere with the concept of the right of return or dull their determination to return to their ancestral homes."When you live better and have your essential needs met, it leads to a better way of thinking and to finding better strategies to get our rights," al-Homuz said.