A People on the Brink: Life and Death in Dheisheh Camp – PT. 1
As the genocide in Gaza rages on, Palestinians in the occupied West Bank struggle to survive. 19 refugee camps in the West Bank are home to over 900,000 displaced Palestinian people expelled from their homelands. Dheisheh refugee camp is one of these camps, where Unicorn Riot contributor Brendan Dunn spent over two weeks in August 2023, and another two weeks in May-June 2024 gathering testimonials from activists resisting Israeli occupation. These are their stories.
The Morning
The sun has just begun to rise over Dheisheh refugee camp in the ancient city of Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank. Long shadows stretch and contort across the camp, which is home to over 19,000 Palestinian refugees packed tightly into a one square kilometer labyrinth of streets and buildings that scramble up a steep hill in the southern part of the city. Normally, the dust-hewn streets are humming with early morning traffic while some residents prepare to open their shops. Today, it’s eerily quiet.
A general unease is felt by many across the camp in anticipation of a possible Israeli army attack. Life is precarious here. The unknowns feel particularly suffocating before the sun rises, as it’s common for Israeli soldiers to raid Dheisheh in the predawn hours. The morning calm is suddenly punctured by the terrifying sound of three explosions in rapid succession, likely Israeli percussion grenades, drowning out the chirping of birds. Dozens of Israeli soldiers, loaded guns out and ready, march down the sidewalks at a quick pace toward the main entrance to the camp, while a long convoy of army vehicles comes barreling down the road.
Residents peek out their windows to catch a glimpse of what unfolds before them on the streets below. A shadow is seen darting across the roof of a building. Is it an Israeli sniper getting ready to shoot? Or a Palestinian running for cover? There’s no sense in risking one’s life by gazing too long to find out.
In a horrifying display of force, soldiers storm one home after the other, and drag out seven young men and boys. One by one, they are thrown into the back of an army truck. One young man arrested, Yazan Manaa, had only been home for four days after spending 18 months in prison without charge.
The Israeli army exits Dheisheh, their new captives in tow. The soldiers leave behind a camp in turmoil. Grief-stricken parents don’t know what will happen to their sons. Will they be beaten, sent to prison, tortured, killed? The painful, slow passing of one minute to the next only deepens the anxiety and anguish, the raw feeling of terror that has gripped the camp. The day has only just begun.
This is life under Israeli occupation in Dheisheh camp.
The Martyr
Naji Owda arrives early in the morning to unlock the bright green doors of Laylac – the Palestinian Youth Action Center for Community Development – a grassroots community youth organization at the base of Dheisheh camp. Smoking a cigarette and balancing a strong cup of Arabic coffee between his fingers, he exchanges greetings with Muhammad, a soft-spoken, kind-eyed, black-bearded farmer from Jenin who works in the vegetable market on the ground floor.
Naji Owda makes his way up a stairwell, passing paintings on the wall of Che Guevara, Lelia Khaled, and other revolutionaries. The lights flicker on as he takes a seat at his desk. He checks his emails and corresponds with other Palestinian activists on WhatsApp about the latest massacres and killings in Gaza. His eyes look sunken, dark, burdened by the heaviness of the never-ending tragedy of the genocide. Young Laylac volunteers slowly trickle into the building and sit down with him to talk, sparking a glimmer of warmth and optimism in his eyes. The work must continue, even as the Israelis continue their genocide.
A busy day lies ahead: a group of students will arrive from Al-Quds Bard College to learn about Laylac and the camp, a furniture-building workshop will be given by an International Solidarity Movement activist visiting from Minnesota, and an online meeting will be held late in the day with a group of Palestinian solidarity activists in the Canary Islands.
Nearly 20 university students arrive later in the morning and congregate in one of Laylac’s meeting rooms. Naji Owda leads a captivating discussion about the history, philosophy and practice of Laylac. When the discussion wraps up, he and the other volunteers lead their guests on a whirlwind tour of the camp.
Dheisheh camp’s scars and open wounds from decades of occupation are always present. Bullet holes from Israeli soldiers are clearly visible on one building, while another building in the camp, an abandoned decaying structure that was the target of Israeli bombs, is definitely still standing. Painted across a long stretch of wall are the names of 46 Palestinian villages near Jerusalem that were ethnically cleansed by Jewish militias in 1948 that are the original homes of many in the camp.
Owda talks about the Nakba (“catastrophe”) – the forced displacement of over 700,000 Palestinians in 1948, the massacres at countless villages, and the near evisceration of an entire society at the hands of Jewish ethno-nationalists. Some of the survivors of this campaign of ethnic cleansing, including Owda’s parents, became the original inhabitants of Dheisheh.
As Owda takes turns with some of the young Laylac volunteers in speaking during the tour, Al-Quds Bard students slowly walk through the streets. For most, it’s their first time in a refugee camp. The facades of houses and buildings everywhere are painted with communist and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) graffiti, murals, and portraits honoring those killed by the Israelis.
It was at one such house covered with the mural of a young martyr named Omar Manaa where the tour was led inside by one of the Laylac volunteers, Muhammad, Manaa’s younger brother. His mother, Nariman Manaa, welcomed the students into the living room. “I get happy whenever anyone asks me about my son. Nobody forgets martyrs. Especially my son,” she says of Omar.
One young man pours coffee into little cups and makes his way around the tightly packed circle of visitors who are sitting on furniture and leaning against the walls. In the corner of the room stands an enclosed glass display case filled with pictures of Omar Manaa, certificates and awards he received, boxing gloves, his glasses, a red keffiyeh, and a PFLP armband.
Nariman speaks fondly of her son’s selflessness and the impact he had on the community. “Before he died, he was a friend of everyone, young and old. Children would come to the house because he loved them and treated them good. When children left the school hungry he’d give them bread and money,” she says of her son who worked as a baker and sold traditional bread on the street. “At the funeral two young children were screaming his name – he had a major impact. Children still visit,” she says.
Manaa’s activities stretched far beyond individual acts of charity. He was a very engaged volunteer at Laylac. “He was the coordinator of the children’s department and was responsible for all the activities of kids in Laylac – trainings, parties, cooking together and everything else,” […] He was training them on children’s rights, and some knowledge in how they can deal with issues when dealing with the Palestinian Authority or Israelis or even in the community.” says Owda.
He was also very supportive of the PFLP and believed in the organization’s long term aspirations to liberate Palestine. He had earned the respect of Palestinians fighting the occupation to the north in Nablus and Jenin, two cities where the Israeli military has escalated its attacks over the last several months.
On December 5, 2022 the Israeli army launched a raid on Dheisheh that targeted alleged members of the PFLP, including Omar Manaa’s brother Yazan, who was 24 years old at the time. Clashes broke out between occupation forces and camp residents who threw stones and molotov cocktails at the soldiers. “The Israelis came one night and were very aggressive and were beating his brother in front of the family,” says Owda. “His father tried to make the children more calm, but Omar fled his home and was killed in the street when he followed the soldiers.”
Manaa was shot multiple times in his chest, hand, and back.
By day’s end, 22-year-old Omar Manaa lay dead, while his brother Yazan was taken to prison where he would spend the next year and a half locked up, one of thousands of Palestinian prisoners. He was kept incarcerated under the nebulous and commonly enforced ‘administrative detention,’ a catch-all Israeli authorities use for Palestinian detainees who can be kept in prison for months or years at a time without charge.
“Omar gave himself for the people of the country. He defended his home, his family, his people, his dignity,” says his mother. A quietness gripped the room as the weight of her words sunk in.
She motions up to a framed picture of her son Yazan on the wall, who was still incarcerated at the time. She cracked a smile. “We are counting the days with our hands for the release of our son.”
There are constant reminders of Omar across Dheisheh: murals, paintings, posters, graffiti. At Laylac, all the volunteers speak of their fallen friend with a mix of pride and sorrow. As a microcosm of Dheisheh, Laylac also pays homage to Omar in paintings and pictures, but also in the memories his friends and volunteers cherish.
A 26-year-old electrician and Laylac volunteer named Saed was one of Omar’s closest friends. Like many young political activists in the camp, Saed, who is withholding his full name for fear of retaliation, is firmly rooted in the revolutionary left. His father was active in Fatah, and participated in the Second Intifada where his hand was blown off by the Israeli army. Saed frequently goes to the Martyrs’ Cemetery located over the crest of the highest hill in the camp. Most of the refugees buried here were killed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
Martyrdom holds a sacred place in Palestinian culture. Western politicians and media outlets often paint martyrdom as something uniquely Islamic and violent. But for Palestinians, martyrdom is not unique to any religious or political group. A martyr is anyone who was killed by Israeli authorities. Sometimes those killed were fighters, but the vast majority of martyrs are civilians. The deaths of martyrs are not viewed as purposeless or in vain.
Saed stands over the grave of Omar. Buried nearby are three more of his friends. “This might be shocking to you but for us, this is normal, this is life.” He looks off into the distance as a gust of wind sweeps through the cemetery’s cypress trees. “My best friends were all killed. In an hour I might be dead,” he says. He’s afraid to get too close to people, to make another best friend, or even find a girlfriend. He fears the occupation might kill them too. He says that he’s on borrowed time. Death is always within arm’s reach in occupied Palestine.
Like so many in Dheisheh, Saed yearns to start a new life in another country — for him it’s Spain. But he’s torn as he still wants to stay in the camp, committed to his home and his community, to the struggle to free Palestine from occupation. Laylac gives Saed an outlet for that deeply Palestinian love of community and desire to serve others. It helps him find purpose in a life saddled with exploitation and violence.
For Omar Manaa and the others who were killed, their dreams of freedom were tragically and violently cut short.
The Organization
There’s a magnetic draw to Laylac for young people in Dheisheh. Late one afternoon, Naji Owda leans back in a chair at Laylac while sipping from a small cup of coffee. At 64 years-old, Owda bares a striking resemblance to Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata. He was even given the nickname ‘Zapatista’ while serving time in an Israeli prison years ago, more so for his prominent handlebar mustache, but his revolutionary candor could easily match his Mexican namesake.
He lights a cigarette and takes a long drag before speaking. Volunteering at Laylac, he says, is a transformational process for so many young people that enter the doors of the organization. Because of the radical grassroots organizing model, “later on, those people, they can never see themselves in any other kind of organization. They can’t be part of them.”
At Laylac, people feel “totally free,” proclaims Owda. They try to join NGOs but the hierarchical organizations are anathema to what they experienced and practiced at Laylac.
“We train the people, at least, to discover themselves and their energy as independent persons, as an independent collective group,” says Owda. Community organizing is viewed as the practice of solidarity, of mutual aid, and struggling alongside people as equals rather than helping the less fortunate in charitable acts – a thinking that dominates NGOs in the West Bank.
This pedagogy is deeply rooted in a kind of popular education that is based on the experience of the youth and seeks to fundamentally transform the conditions of oppression they live under. “We as Palestinians, we believe in that. Now we try to give a proper education, to belong to the community, to belong to the poor people, to have revolutionary thoughts about the future. This is the way,” says Owda with a wink. Some of the ideas Laylac engages with come from revolutionary thinkers like Paulo Freire and Frantz Fanon, but the deepest roots are Palestinian. “I will wear that ideology and the strategy to work in Palestine with a keffiyeh, a Palestinian way. I will not copy and paste anything,” says Owda.
Laylac’s program development and implementation works from the bottom-up. Young volunteers run a vast array of programs out of the center. Owda mentions some of the programs: art exhibits, mural painting, cleaning the cemetery, documenting army raids on houses, assisting injured survivors from army attacks, visiting the children’s hospital to offer activities to patients. The list goes on.
Raed Salhi created a free book program in the camp while he volunteered with Laylac. Across a bookshelf teeming with books underneath Laylac’s covered rooftop Raed wrote, “Your best friend is a book.” His fate, like so many other young people in the camp, was sealed in 2017 by a barrage of Israeli bullets when the army raided his home. His program, however, lives on.
The funding for Salhi’s book program, and for all of Laylac’s programs, comes from a variety of grassroots sources, but Owda says that Laylac takes a principled stance on how and where they get the funds. Over two years ago, the Italian government offered 1.5 million Euros to Laylac, but only on condition that the organization sign a statement denouncing armed resistance to the occupation.
“We were very clear to say no,” says Owda. “Not only were we refusing that because of the signature they asked for… we told them, ‘We don’t want to see you again in Dheisheh. You are not even allowed to propose that with the other organizations.’”
Attempts to control or de-radicalize Palestinian organizations come from every direction. Just up the street from Dheisheh lies the impressively large Russian Cultural Center. Youth from Laylac organized an art exhibit there. Owda recounts that the center “refused to present their work there because it had too much politics.” Looking in the direction of the center, he exclaimed, “They refused to present the political issues. Now you are in an intensive political country.” The youth took their paintings back to Dheisheh camp, and in a meeting decided to launch a protest of and boycott against the Russian Cultural Center which is still ongoing.
It was a small act but completely youth-led. They felt a sense of power in a society where powerlessness weighs heavily on people.
Naji Owda expresses a general deep suspicion of NGOs, the Palestinian Authority (PA), and Palestinian political parties. It’s a sentiment that reverberates across the camp. These feelings built over decades in response to what many residents in the camp say is a mix of endemic corruption, cooptation, abandonment, and betrayal.
The creation of many Palestinian grassroots organizations and movements emerged as a reaction to this. Laylac’s inception has deep roots in many years of collective action against the Israelis as well as the Palestinian Authority (PA).
In 1997 Owda and other residents saw the need for a collective community space. Rather than wait for the slow wheels of PA bureaucracy to meet that need, residents took direct action and occupied a former Israeli military installation in the camp that was abandoned as a condition of the Oslo Peace Accords, signed in 1993 and 1995. The Phoenix Center was born, a sort of commons for residents who were in desperate need of a large community space.
The Israeli army destroyed part of the center in an attack on the camp in 2000. Not easily beaten down, camp residents then rebuilt the center, according to Owda
Always wary of independent, popular grassroots organizations, the PA under Yasser Arafat attempted to co-opt and control the center, explains Owda. Ultimately the PA was successful, but they had to deal with sustained resistance and protest from camp residents. The pressure for Owda was overwhelming. He even dealt with death threats from PA personnel. He was forced to step back, shaken but not defeated.
The experience was disheartening for Owda and other activists, but it left a lasting impression that reverberated through the camp. The desire for a similar organization in Dheisheh persisted, and people were willing to fight for it. It was from this that Laylac emerged in 2010.
Founders agreed that Laylac would be fiercely independent, deeply grassroots, and would not operate under the thumb of the PA. About 45 volunteers from the Phoenix Center “came immediately to Laylac,” says Owda. He was ready to give up before Laylac was formed, but the community encouraged him to not give up. Fourteen years later, he has no regrets with his decision to continue organizing.
The Red Camp
It is no surprise that an organization like Laylac with such revolutionary praxis would emerge from a place like Dheisheh. Nearly three quarters of a century of living under a brutal occupation have pushed people to resist not just the occupation, but what they see as a system of capitalist exploitation.
Naji Owda’s story of radicalization is a common one. “I was 13-years-old, and I didn’t get any information from my parents about what was happening. I always asked them questions: why are we poor, for example. Why am I here? Why am I going to school without shoes?” Questions about the poverty he experienced as an individual turned into bigger questions about systematic oppression and injustice that impacted all of Palestinian society. He found some answers to his questions when he started volunteering in a UN-run community center.
It was there where he met older activists from the PFLP. The group, established in 1967, offered a revolutionary left alternative to Yasser Arafat’s nationalist Fatah, and was rapidly growing in Dheisheh and across Palestine at the time. Owda says that the older activists “shifted from the Arab nationalist groups to the Marxists inside the jail, because PFLP was created in that movement.” In 1997 the United States listed the PFLP as a ‘Foreign Terrorist Organization.’ Members and supporters of the organization see the PFLP as a liberatory organization for the Palestinian people. The group maintains a large following in Palestine and in the diaspora to this day.
Drawn to their politics, the young Owda and his friends would rush to the center after school to listen-in on political discussions the older activists held. He tasted his first organizing when he helped plan festivals for International Workers’ Day and International Women’s Day. He became an avid reader and amassed a personal library in his home. He and his young friends got their hands on a book by Palestinian author and PFLP revolutionary Ghassan Kanafani. This had a profound impact on his thinking.
Owda was hooked. “I joined the Communists by myself without being official. I was 13 years old. I was just a child,” he says. His activism with the PFLP landed him in jail “several times… sometimes for 18 days, sometimes 40 days, sometimes months, sometimes one year.” He’s been arrested over 20 times – he lost count at some point – spending a total of over ten years behind bars.
“There are a lot of people that say, even now there is no choice but to die, it’s much better than to be in jail because life in jail, it’s not so easy, and we don’t like it. But finally, now there were two choices for you: to hide your head down, to accept whatever, and don’t give attention to anything. Or, to get freedom, we have to fight. We have to struggle,” he says. Owda decided to immerse himself in the activism and struggle in the prisons alongside the PFLP.
“If you believe it or not, we were busy 24 hours a day inside,” says Owda of his time in prison. “The prisoners, especially the PFLP, when we get in, we have our own program. I can say this is the best education I got in my life.”
His education was immersed in Marxist and revolutionary theory, history, and political struggles in Palestine, Vietnam, Russia and Mexico. But the conditions Owda describes in Israel’s notorious prisons were brutal. Early on in his incarceration, Owda joined the other inmates to demand an end to the oppressive conditions.
“We decided to fight, and we started fighting the police physically inside the jail. Now they beat us, gassed us, isolated us for 40 days. It was insane. But we didn’t mind if we died or not because you were fighting for your dignity,” he says. “And somehow, we succeeded to have knowledge even inside the little cell while we were punished in isolation.”
Owda says that both inside and outside of prison, the PFLP gave real meaning and purpose to Owda and countless other Palestinians. He made life-long friends in the PFLP who are now scattered across Palestine, and even met his wife through the organization.
In the early years of the PFLP, it took some time to organize in the camp, especially with more religious and traditional residents. But the Communists’ reputation as committed, principled activists attracted people. The ranks of the organization swelled, and many more camp residents became active supporters. There was such widespread appeal for Communism in Dheisheh that it was known popularly as the ‘Red Camp’ across the West Bank.
Owda states that there is a shared sense of collectivism in Palestinian society between Communist activists and even the most traditional people. The concept of owna, the Palestinian practice of collective mutual aid, is woven deeply into the fabric of Palestinian village life. “Now if you build a house, you say I need owna. I need help now. Everybody will come and try and support you. Not only physically – they bring their materials and tools to work with you. That’s it. Now they help you because you are very poor,” says Owda.
Owna may explain why there is no visible homelessness in Dheisheh or elsewhere in Palestine. The strong desire to help those in need, with no expectation that they reciprocate, is pervasive in Palestine. Owna may also explain why residents in Dheisheh don’t have a police force to keep order. Instead, if a conflict arises in camp, elders are immediately called in to defuse the tension. In many ways, the cultural and political practices in the camp are lived realities of what many communists, anarchists, and abolitionists theorize elsewhere in the world.
In 1991, when the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), of which the PFLP is a member organization, signed onto the Oslo Peace Accords, many Palestinians saw this as a great betrayal. The Palestinian leadership that signed at Oslo was desperate for political change and peace, but the Israelis ground them down in the negotiations brokered by the U.S. While Oslo ushered in a veneer of Palestinian self-rule, it also further intensified the Israeli occupation over the West Bank, paved the road to an eventual blockade of Gaza, and jockeyed into a very limited form of power the Palestinian Authority which in the eyes of many Palestinians has become woefully ineffective and corrupt. People left the PFLP and other PLO groups in droves, yet many remained committed to their revolutionary beliefs.
“Oslo had a very direct impact on Dheisheh. Owna continued during the First Intifada and the Second Intifada and started decreasing after the Oslo Agreement because of the creation of many NGOs,” says Owda.
The PFLP was very active during the First Intifada in 1987-1993 and the Second Intifada from 2000-2005, the mass popular uprisings of Palestinians against the occupation. Members and supporters showed up in force at demonstrations in Dheisheh which were frequent. Clashes with the Israeli army become more common, and more intense.
Dheisheh camp in many ways is a different place from what it was years ago as the political landscape has changed. Illegal Israeli settlements mushroomed on the hills surrounding Bethlehem, land grabs from settlers have intensified, and what many Palestinians refer to as “the apartheid wall” was constructed in and around Bethlehem in the 2000s. Palestinians in Dheisheh and Bethlehem have resisted all of this, but since the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, demonstrations have been smaller and more subdued. People are afraid to speak up politically. Many Palestinian activists are patiently waiting for more opportune moments to organize and protest more publicly.
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