October 13, 2005

A Refusal to Disappear

Exiled toddler, refugee camp survivor, retired teacher - Rezeq Faraj won't let Montrealers forget about ethnic cleansing.

by Dave Himmelstein

I.    ROOTS
For Rezeq Faraj, ethnic cleansing is not a historical abstraction.

It's a three-year-old waking to real-life nightmare. Swept up in the arms of his older sister, Nejma. Unfolding chaos. The family is preparing to flee the village of Deir Rafat. So are all the other villagers. Zionist militias are on the way, and residents know what to expect. Deir Rafat will become one of hundreds of Palestinian villages bulldozed, ploughed over, and erased from maps issued by the newly created state of Israel.

The refugees move at night. During the day, they hide in caves. Everybody is crying. Father has disappeared. After three days, the family nears Bethlehem. They find a cave, and it becomes home for a year. Damp chill creeps into young bones. Nejma will be wracked by arthritis later in life, Rezeq also marked.

In 1949, the United Nations sets up tents in Daheisha, and a refugee camp is born. A year later, barracks are constructed. The eight members of the Faraj family live in a single room. They cover each other for warmth. Rains are heavy in winter.  A primal memory: "that piece of yellow cheese"-food rationing is stringent. He will live in the camp till he's fourteen.  Some family members are still there. Today he can say, matter-of-factly, "It was hell."

At age seven, Rezeq becomes a second family breadwinner. (His mother is already doing housework for relatively well-off Palestinians). He starts selling newspapers before school. Adds ice cream later on.  Also gains a rep as a marbles sharpie. Picks up spare change for movies by shooting marbles with wealthier kids in the vicinity.

In school, Grade 6 brings a bonanza:  access to the Bethlehem library. He averages a book a day. Hugo. Dumas. Tolstoy. A new world is ballooning around him-but the bubble bursts in the middle of the year. He has to leave school to help his mother put bread on the table.

Then, a year later, a life-opening break. Against heavy odds and better-schooled competition, he is accepted at the UN vocational school in Kalandria. There he is trained in the intricacies of electrical wiring. Earns three pounds a month, two of which go to Mother. Graduates with highest honors in the school's history.

Now a frenetic career trajectory begins, zigzagging across the Gulf and the Mediterranean.  Over the next few years, electrical contracting work takes him to Jordan, Kuwait, Iran, England, Saudi Arabia and Germany. Conditions range from rugged to hellish..but he's already survived Daheisha. Through exceptional exertion, he starts to catch up with normal life. In Germany, while working, he is able to complete two years of university studies inengineering. He is also developing a far-flung network of contacts-which is how he starts hearing about opportunities in Canada.

II.     BRANCHES
In 1966 Rezeq arrived in Waterloo, Ontario with eleven dollars in his pocket. His first night on Canadian soil was spent slumbering at the local police station. Canadian Immigration helped him find an assembly-line job at a factory, where he worked 16 hours a day. But a few months later, his networking grid lit up, and opportunity beckoned from the US. He was invited to reside in Hartford, Connecticut by one of his previous engineering contacts in Europe.

The New England idyll lasted three months. It ended in the parking lot of a shopping center where Rezeq had just finished helping an elderly African-American woman load groceries into her car. He was immediately and severely reprimanded by his host, who told him that mixing with blacks was an unequivocal no-no. The next day found Rezeq on the proverbial midnight train to Montreal. His Hartford host eventually apologized, but southern temptation had been overcome: "Compared to the United States, Canada seemed like Paradise."

He got to know the country first hand while crisscrossing it as part of a railway crew. It was on the run to British Columbia that he met Claudette Fortier, a university student in Quebec City-which is where they were married twelve months later. Today they are the proud and devoted parents of three grown daughters.

Relocating to the Montreal area, Rezeq reluctantly abandoned efforts to obtain academic recognition of the university credits in engineering that he'd earned in Germany. He completed a degree in education and went on to teach high school. All his engineering knowledge and electrician skills went into the home he built for his family on the South Shore.  His commitment to Palestinian continuity has been ongoing and multi-pronged.

Doting suburban father. Immigrant success story. If he were content with blending in, Rezeq Faraj could be a poster boy for the Canadian dream. But, of course, blending in is precisely what he's not about. He stands out because he speaks out - bearing witness to unwelcome facts, like his ploughed-over birthplace and the ethnic cleansing which triggered his life's
involuntary odyssey. "I refuse to vanish or disappear. I want to see justice done, not only for my fellow villagers and I who survived, but for all the Palestinian people who suffered from injustice and are still suffering under occupation and in refugee camps. Having had no real childhood, having had to struggle every day to achieve a decent existence for me and my family, having seen all the injustices around me everywhere I've been -  all of this has made me a militant, an activist for justice, peace and human rights anywhere and everywhere."

On more than once occasion, Rezeq's community-building activities have taken him to Palestine. In Ramalla, he facilitated meetings between leaders of Quebec civil society and the Palestinian Authority, and took part in a conference on education and globalization. Globalization was also the focus of another notable gathering he participated in, the 2003 World Development Forum in Porto Alegre Brazil

Rezeq retired from teaching two years ago to devote himself to activism on a full-time basis. Locally, the major organizational focus of his efforts is PAJU - Palestinian and Jewish Unity/Palestinens et Juifs unis - which he co-founded with teaching colleague Bruce Katz in 2000. Every Friday at noon, since February 9, 2001, reminders about Palestinians' throttled rights have been delivered to passers-by at a busy downtown intersection in Montreal. Sponsored by PAJU and the Jewish Alliance Against the Occupation, the weekly hour-long vigil condemning Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza takes place in front of the Israeli Consulate on the northwest corner of Peel and Rene-Lévesque. It is the longest-running such activity in Canadian history.

In this part of the world, pressing the claims of ethnically cleansed Palestinians in the court of public opinion is an uphill battle, as Rezeq readily admits. "I think most North Americans really don't know about the Palestinian plight. They are busy trying to survive in this world of consumers, trying to make their lives comfortable."  When pressed on whether North Americansdeliberately hide from uncomfortable facts, he demurs: "Most people really don't know, and they don't go out of their way to become informed. If they know anything about the situation, it consists of falsehoods that have been served up by their governments and the media conglomerates."

Aware that many North Americans equate the Palestinian struggle with suicide bombings, Rezeq is unequivocal about the issue that is immediately thrown in the face of anyone presenting the case for Palestinian human rights. "Having suffered from violence, I became a non-violent person. I know what it is and do not wish it for anyone, even my worst enemy. I refuse and will never accept violence. But I also refuse to accept injustice being done to anyone."

In Rezeq's view, the variety of viewpoints and strategic approaches among supporters of Palestinian human rights is a plus. "As long as the various aims and objectives support the just cause of the Palestinian people, diversity contributes to thestrength of the movement. The difference in approaches and planning of political actions in North America can seem to complicate things, but diversity is essential because it ultimately contributes to strengthen the solidarity movement. All roads lead to Rome, as the saying goes."

His own formula for a solution involves "one democratic secular state with both Israelis and Palestinians having equal rights and duties. The most essential element of the solution is the recognition of Palestinian refugees' individual and collective right of return and right to compensation."

Rezeq's long-term expectations are positive:  "The media won't be able to keep the truth hidden forever. Average people who know the facts are already speaking out, but it will take time before they become a majority." Although the flame of optimism has flickered on occasion ("It's true I once thought that humanity was dead because of the things the West closes its eyes to"), he remains confident about vindication over time.  "The Palestinian people's refusal to vanish or die will eventually overcome the odds and win, like all other people in the past who have struggled for peace with justice and against foreign domination. This might not come to pass during my lifetime, but it will eventually come to life someday. That day I will rest in peace - whether alive or dead - and not before."

Until then, Montrealers will not be allowed to forget the screams of a three-year-old waking up to the terror of ethnic cleansing.

David Himmelstein is a teacher and writer in Montreal. He can be reached at:
lexiprime@videotron.ca

This article originally appeared in the September edition of the Montreal Planet Magazine.
Available at newsstands across Canada.