Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/163731
9 News PHOTOGRAPHY BY KARL SCHEMBRI maltatoday, SUNDAY, 1 SEPTEMBER 2013 A Syrian child waits outside a distribution centre in the Zaatari camp, where humanitarian organisations deliver aid. Besides their normal food parcels including rice, lentils, peas, cooking oil, corn, canned tuna and tea, refugees also receive dates during Ramadan Waleed Ayouub, from a local organisation based in the Shatila camp, distributes iftar meals to another Palestinian living inside the cam The Diab family lives in a two-roomed apartment in Shatila, Lebanon, paying $250 a month. In Syria they bought their own food. Now they have to wait for people to hand them down food. Refugees gather in one of the makeshift mosques in the Zaatari camp for Tarawih desensitised word when it becomes a way of life. Palestinians have been born into this reality, and a new generation doesn't know Palestinians living in other territories: you find people in the West Bank fearing Palestinians in Gaza, thinking they all have beards and are Islamists. So the division creeping into the unity once fostered under Yasser Arafat is a 'successful' outcome of the occupation, an occupation that is political, social and economic." But Schembri's experience among the Gazans is not the impression JULY 2013: An extended family unites to break their fast inside their tent on a farm in Taneeb. Unable to afford meat, the family is eating a meal made of aubergines, cucumbers, peas, beans and rice with tomatoes and potatoes. Back home in Hama, they would have shared a lamb with neighbours. fostered by Israel since the election and later deposition of the Hamas government, of a people intent on the destruction of the country. "The majority of Gazans are not warmongering but are peace loving and simply craving for a life. You see dozens being awarded a Fulbright scholarship, and then they are prevented from leaving Gaza because of the blockade. That's a life that has been stalled, and for what? I am amazed at the way Gazans retain a sense of sanity." The art of the occupation has left a divided Palestine, whose disunity was perhaps exemplified by the rejection of the democratically elected Hamas government in the 2006 elections, defeating the PLO-affiliated Fatah party. But the party was immediately placed under pressure by the sus- pension of Palestine's foreign assistance funds, with tensions between Fatah and Hamas deteriorating into open conflict in Gaza in 2007. When Hamas retained control of Gaza, Israel and Egypt imposed an economic blockade. "The politicians changed the rules of the game," Schembri notes, bracing the failure to recognise democracy, warts and all, to the current crisis in Egypt. Set up in 1949 for Palestinian refugees who fled to Lebanon, the densely populated Shatila camp in Beirut is also hosting a new generation of Palestinian refugees who have recently fled from Syria. The camp's population is estimated to reach over 17,000, with at least 4,000 of them seeking refuge from Syria. "As bleak as it sounds, no revolution takes place over just two years. Europe endured centuries of revolutions and conflict, and silent revolutions like the Industrial Revolution that left millions dead from poverty and starvation. There was never a guarantee that toppling Hosni Mubarak would have led to a democracy overnight. "But having the army overthrowing a democratically elected government in a coup is in itself undemocratic. The Arab world was a pressure cooker, and we all knew it would get messy when it explodes. "We often complain of our own governments being undemocratic – in the USA it's because of the power of lobbies, in Italy it's because of corruption, and in Malta it's because of patronage. But the safeguard to that is not overthrowing a government, but having strong constitutional safeguards. Which is what Mohammed Morsi did not do." The overthrow of the Morsi government now risks sending Islamists underground, holding out the army's coup as an example of the failure that democracy represents to Arabs. But this is the very lesson that has to be learnt from the Palestinian experience. "We have to let even Islamists try and prove what they can do in government when politics and religion are mixed together. We have to let them be put to the test. Otherwise, the resistance to another Mubarak- style government will just force anyone to become an Islamist." Schembri's experiences find a different kind of voice in his first solo poetry work, Passju Taħt Ix-Xita (Hopscotch under the rain), exemplified by his ode to Muhammed Bughazizi, the fruit merchant whose self-immolation was the "blaze so many more martyrs had to walk behind" when the Arab world woke up to dethrone the dictators who had held sway over their lives for too long. "In Palestine I focused on the facts, because my job was getting out the news. But even those facts aren't enough to move people. Somehow poetry and fiction is what I write when the facts themselves stop saying the truth," Schembri says, giving a wry smile as he exhales the smoke from his third Gauloise. "It's rare to be able to evoke the human rage when you're reporting it. For eight days under the Israeli attacks in Operation Pillar of Defence, all I focused was on getting the facts out. After that was over, it still hadn't sunk in. And poetry gave me a platform of liberty to adopt the voices that I encounter on the streets and evoke the raw emotions these experiences give me. Love, hate, envy, misery, despair, even total exultation." He extinguishes his cigarette in an empty plastic coffee cup. "It allows me to adopt a different personality. Without the need to see a psychiatrist." Passju Taħt Ix-Xita is published by Horizon Books. Karl Schembri (@ karl_schembri) is also the author of Il-Manifest Tal-Killer and Taħt ilKappa tax-Xemx