– by Mustafa Alaraj –
30/10/2022

Mustafa Alaraj is a resident and community advocate from the Aida Refugee Camp north of Bethlehem in occupied Palestine. He is one of the directors of the Aida Youth Center and a tour guide. The following dispatch is a transcript of an interview conducted with him by Erez Bleicher, discussing conditions in the camp, recent events, and the meaning of refugee status.

Tell us about yourself. Who are you? Where are you from and where is your family from? What projects and activities are you involved with?

My name is Mustafa Alaraj. I’m a Palestinian tour guide. I was born and raised in one of the refugee camps in the West Bank, called Aida Refugee Camp in the north of Bethlehem. My family is originally from a village in Jerusalem called al-Walaja. All my family was displaced in 1948 and ended up in Bethlehem in the refugee camp.

As a Palestinian growing up in the refugee camp, I was involved in and grew up at the Aida Youth Center. It is an organization that tries to find a better future for the new generation born in the camp. A long time ago, before twenty years, I was one of the kids in the youth center joining for summer camps and the different activities. After I grew older I felt responsible for the development of the youth center and felt responsible for securing a more comfortable life for the young generation, while at the same time educating them about their history and their rights.

Now I am one of the coordinators at the Aida Youth Center and I consider myself a political activist and human rights activist. I help direct the Political Information Center at the Aida Camp, and at the same time, because I used to be a social worker before I was a tour guide, I am responsible for the music program at the Aida Youth Center.

For those who don’t know, tell us about the history of Aida Refugee Camp. What is the Aida Refugee Camp? When was it established and how has it changed and developed over the years?

Aida Camp is located north of Bethlehem. It is one of three refugee camps in Bethlehem established by the United Nations after the war of 1948. In 1948, when the Zionist groups attacked our villages, more than 500 villages were forcibly displaced from their homes. 750,000 Palestinians became refugees.Those people kept running and running until they mainly ended up in five locations, the West Bank and Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. The United Nations arrived at these five locations and started to rent pieces of land and provide some services, like tents, food, and shelter, and that’s how the camp was established. 

People were looking for a place to run and hide. They started to come together in the tents because of the services and because they felt safe coming together in the shelters. And also, people were looking for relatives and parts of the family that they lost along the way since 1948.

Usually when we talk about a refugee camp, people think we are talking about tents, shelter, and temporary living. It used to be like this, but after seventy years it doesn’t look the same. Today the camp looks like any other neighborhood. But it’s more crowded and the houses are on top of eachother. 

The camp was established to host 700 people and now we are 5,000 in the same amount of land. It used to be tents in 1948, but in 1960’s the United Nations started building the first concrete houses. In the beginning the people refused the concrete, because they thought permanent concrete shelters would negate their status as refugees and cement their inability to return to their homes. But later on, people started to think differently. The refugees started to think that we don’t need to be in a tent to claim our rights as refugees. We could move to houses and have that basic comfort, and it could allow us to be louder and stronger. We could go to school and study, but it doesn’t mean that we lose our refugee status or our rights.

What does it mean for you to be from the Aida Refugee Camp? What does it mean for you as an identity and as a community? 

Living in the camp reminds me every day where I come from. It reminds me every day to not forget where my grandfather comes from. We are the third generation witnessing the continuous Nakba. The Nakba never ended. The same that my grandfather suffered, my father carried, and I carried after. Today living in the camp we are still recognized as the responsibility of the United Nations. We the refugees and the UN are the only witness and archive of this history from 1948 until the present. Living in the camp now, we are witnessing the action, the story that’s been continuing since 1948, the story that’s passed from grandparents to their children.

What is the situation in the Aida Refugee Camp today? What is important for people around the world to understand about the occupation and how it affects the lives of residents? 

Aida Refugee Camp looks like any other refugee camp wherever Palestinians were displaced in the world, in Bethlehem, in Lebanon, or in Syria. But our location makes daily life here harder than other refugee camps, because we are surrounded by the Israeli military base, the settlement, and the wall surrounding the camp from three sides. This makes the violence from the Israeli army against our community part of our daily life. Aida Refugee Camp, according to the United Nations, is the most tear gassed location in the world. I’m listening to the sound of the stun grenades and the tear gas just outside my window and door at this very moment as I speak. 

What’s been happening the last few weeks and days? It’s so difficult for people around the world to understand the daily brutality of the occupation and follow events. Have there been developments these last weeks people should know about?

In general when we talk about the West Bank, the refugee camp is more politically active than other places in Palestine. For refugees the sense of ongoing displacement in the Nakba is continuous, and so people are very active. 

This is especially true of the Aida Refugee Camp. This is because Aida is in the north of Bethlehem very close to the military base near Rachel’s Tomb, or what they call Rachel’s Tomb. Whenever anything is going on in the West Bank, people in Bethlehem are always gathering very close to the refugee camp and protesting and clashing with Israeli soldiers. So all the tear gas and shooting ends up in Aida Refugee Camp. 

What’s happening these days and what’s happening in the last two months in Nablus and Jenin, when there is a martyr or a strike in other places in the West Bank, the people in Aida and Bethlehem gather here and clashes start. There is not a single house in the camp without someone who has been in prison or injured. There is no family without stories like these.

The last two weeks especially, including yesterday, there were clashes. And when we talk about clashes I’m talking about teenagers gathering and throwing stones at the soldiers, and the soldiers then harshly and brutally attacking the camp, and even attacking the camp at night, and chasing people, and arresting people from their home. This causes more clashes the next day. So it always reflects on the Israeli attacks and violence.

What gives you motivation and helps you remain steadfast and active in the community and in efforts to end the occupation? What parts of your culture, community, family, or religion sustain you in your work?

It gives us motivation when we see people from all over the world seeing what happens in Palestine. It gives us motivation to see people from all over the world visiting Aida Refugee Camp and being an eyewitness to what’s going on. We feel that as long as you only read and see news about Palestine, you will never understand what’s going on unless you see with your own eyes. Visitors to Aida Refugee Camp act as an eye witness. They deliver what they’ve seen by word of mouth to their family and friends. When they are personal witnesses it is a stronger message from us to people all over the world and builds solidarity with the Palestinians. When these messages arrive to Europe, to the United States, and places all over the world, it helps us to build solidarity.

There are many amazing initiatives in the Aida Refugee Camp that show the resilience and beauty of the community. What people or organizations in the Aida Refugee Camp do you think people around the world should know about and support? What incredible projects deserve to be better known in the international community?

With everything that’s going on in our daily life and growing up in this community, what we’re trying to do in  the Aida Youth Center, in our activities and projects, is to make the children and the new generation more aware of what’s going on. But at the same time we try to keep them away from violence. We try to use creative methods to spread the news about Palestine. We try to inform the children about where they come from and to focus on education, on cultural activities, to spread the news about Palestine, to prove to the world that we teach life and we teach love.

We’re telling the real message from Aida to the world, that we are not people who just want to send our kids to die. No, our kids today at our youth center and in our NGOs are learning languages, we have many projects like the football team, and the music project where we have more than 50 kids playing different instruments. Those children are a large orchestra that travels all over the world and performs our music. They just came back last month from Paris where they were performing.

Another project of ours is Volunteer Palestine, where we try to hire international volunteers to work with us in our community. This helps us to bring more skills into the local community. Local volunteers working with international volunteers builds more solidarity and develops skills in the community. 

The main idea is developing Palestine and finding a safe place. It is hard to find a safe palace in the camp for the children and the new generation. The most important thing is  to educate the children about where they come from and to not forget their identity. We are trying to tell everybody that there is another side of Palestine, not only the image that the media shows in the Western world. We try to show the reality, the daily life, and what’s really going on in Palestine.