Locked out: Palestinians in Jordan still waiting to return to stolen homes

Amman, Jordan - David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, believed that the memory of the Nakba , or "catastrophe", would eventually fade for the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians violently expelled from their homeland by Zionist militias in 1948.

In 1949, a year after the State of Israel was created, he is reported to have said: "The old will die and the young will forget."

It's a prediction that amuses Omer Ihsan Yaseen, an erudite 20-year-old optician and third-generation Palestinian refugee living in Jordan's capital, Amman.

"We will return, I am sure of that," he says firmly as he points at a thick iron key that once opened the heavy-set doors to his grandparents' stone house in Salamah, five kilometres east of Jaffa, now part of Tel Aviv in Israel.

The key takes pride of place in a homemade shrine-like display dedicated to Palestinian identity that hangs on the wall of his family-run optician, next to a display of designer sunglasses and spectacles.

It contains a collection of memorabilia, including lumps of sand and soil smuggled in from the Gaza Strip and Jaffa by family friends over the years.

Omer's father, Ihsan Mohamad Yaseen, picks up some Jaffa soil with a gentle reverence, allowing it to run through his fingers into a small bowl.

The family's home was burned down during the first Arab-Israeli war (May 1948 - January 1949), the 58-year-old explains, but the key remains an heirloom and stands as a symbol of resistance and the right of return.

Ihsan has lived all his life in al-Wehdat, a chaotic, bustling Palestinian refugee camp located in the Hay al-Awdah suburb of southeast Amman.

The camp was one of four set up in Jordan after the Nakba to house tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees but has long outgrown itself and now melts seamlessly into the surrounding areas of southeast Amman.

Like many Palestinians who have lived their whole lives in these camps, Ihsan still sees it as a temporary solution before his family can return to their homeland.

He takes long breaths as he recalls the memories passed down by his parents. Behind him, pictures of Palestinian intellectuals line the walls, including the poet and authors Mahmoud Darwish and Ghassan Kanafani.

Ihsan's vivid descriptions paint a picture of a family living in a close-knit community that would while away the evenings in their home's traditional inner courtyard, singing and dancing and surrounded by fruits, including the world-renowned Jaffa oranges, that flourished in the temperate Mediterranean climate.

The happy memories fade into ones of violence after the Haganah , a Zionist paramilitary force, tore through the village.

He pulls out a walking stick that belonged to his mother, engraved with the words of a song titled Oummi (My Mother).

Aseel Yaseen, Ihsan's amiable 28-year-old daughter, joins her father and brother as they clasp the cane and belt out an impromptu sing-a-long.

Ihsan continues, but his words falter, and his eyes reveal a deep generational trauma.

Clenching the key firmly in his fist, he says that the local authorities had told his parents that they could return in a week, once the violence had ended, so they grabbed their key, packed some bags and left for the Gaza Strip.

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A week turned into 19 years before the family were uprooted once again when Israel seized the remaining Palestinian territory in the 1967 War, an event also referred to as the "Naksa", meaning setback or defeat.

Ihsan's mother, who was six months pregnant, was forced to walk from Gaza with him to Amman, an exhausting monthlong trek that took her through the sweltering heat of the Negev desert.

Omer looks out at Al-Wehdat, which houses about 62,000 Palestinian refugees, all of whom he says are waiting to return to their homeland.

The camp is a far cry from the scenic village Ihsan described, but its community spirit and strong Palestinian identity ensure that they will always prove Ben-Gurion wrong, he says. "We stick together, we stay strong together."

With limited space, the camp has had to expand lengthways, resulting in an eclectic mix of housing units and a sprawling network of pockmarked roads.

Jordan now hosts about two million Palestinian refugees, around 370,000 of whom still live in camps, 10 of them official and three of them unofficial.

Ihsan and his children, like the majority of Palestinians in the camp, have never set foot in Palestinian territory.

After the Nakba, the Egyptian army took control of the Gaza Strip, and Jordan's army entered the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

When those territories were seized by Israel during the Naksa, Palestinians from the West Bank who fled to Jordan were issued citizenship. Those who came from Gaza were not because Egypt had controlled the enclave and they were considered foreign residents.

This meant they were excluded from the rights and services offered to Jordanian citizens, marginalising the community.

More than 600,000 Palestinians in Jordan still do not have citizenship, the majority of them having been registered arriving from the Gaza Strip after the Naksa.

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Despite being originally from Jaffa, the Yaseen family were therefore registered as being from the Gaza Strip due to their displacement there in 1949.

They have temporary Jordanian passports which must be renewed frequently and cost more than regular Jordanian passports.

Their passports also state that they are Palestinians from Gaza, something that Omer says means he would not be allowed to cross the Israeli-controlled checkpoints into the Palestinian territory.

However, for Omer, it is simply a label. The worn key is evidence that his family is from around Jaffa, where they will, one day, return.

Ali al-Mashayekh, a 54-year-old restaurateur, pulls down an array of thick, worn keys from a display in one of his establishments that serves traditional Palestinian food in Al-Balad, Amman's busy commercial centre.

He dangles one from his index finger, feeling its heavy weight.

This key once belonged to what he describes as a modest home made of clay brick near the occupied West Bank city of Hebron, known as al-Khalil in Arabic.

He puffs on his cigarette and flicks through old, grainy photographs on his phone of his parents' property that they were forced to flee during the Naksa.

Sitting on the wooden balcony of his restaurant, he ushers one of his staff to bring some hibiscus juice.

The men in his family had worked in construction, he says, pulling up a photo of his parents' home, a small, unremarkable house sitting atop a small grass field.

Now, al-Mashayekh says, the area houses an antenna farm for an Israeli company.

That modest life in Hebron seems a world away from his successful restaurant business in Jordan. Yet, despite everything he has built up since he was a young boy living in a refugee camp outside Amman, he says he would trade it in a heartbeat if his family could return to Hebron.

Al-Mashayekh describes his life in Amman with indifference. "It's ok, we don't really have a choice," he says with a shrug of his shoulders; like Ihsan and Omer, he sees it as a tolerable limbo before he can return to Palestine.

He has never visited the land that he yearns for, instead it lives through photos that he has printed out and plastered across the walls of his restaurants.

His precocious 12-year-old daughter, Sara, is equally enthusiastic about the place she "knows well", having scoured Instagram for images and videos.

Al-Mashayekh, like roughly three-quarters of Palestinians in Jordan, holds full Jordanian citizenship, which means that, technically, he could enter the occupied West Bank.

The King Hussein Bridge, also known as the Allenby Bridge, is the only crossing between Jordan and the occupied West Bank. Although it is only 50km from Amman, the journey would involve many hours of travel, waiting and passing checkpoints.

However, the majority of Palestinians in Jordan have never entered the Palestinian territory or Israel.

Many say it is because of the issues they would face from Israeli authorities who control the three border crossings, which also include the Sheikh Hussein crossing in the country's north and Wadi Araba Crossing by the Red Sea city of Aqaba.

Al-Mashayekh says his reason for not having visited is the fact that he would have to visit the Israeli embassy, located in an affluent area of Amman and the site of regular mass pro-Palestinian protests.

There, he would have to request permission for an entry visa and, if approved, receive an Israeli stamp on his identity documents.

"If I did that, I would legitimise their occupation, and I can't do that," he says firmly.

Ahmad Ibrahim Akras, 47, riffles through sheets of paper in a small ramshackle store in central Amman that sells vintage bric-a-brac and copious amounts of Palestinian trinkets and posters.

He pulls out ownership papers stamped by the Palestinian authorities in 2000, which recognise that his family owns land near Hebron in the occupied West Bank.

They evoke bittersweet emotions, he says; on the one hand, they are a recognition of his family's right to return but he also feels anger that the area is currently part of Kiryat Arba, an illegal Israeli settlement, meaning he cannot return.

Their family's home has been reduced to a "bunch of stones" he says.

His mother, 80-year-old Amenah Mohamad Bostanjy, still regularly wears her Palestinian thobe, which she wove in the early 1980s herself with rich green and blue embroidery on the chest and sleeves.

Ahmad hands her the key to the house near Hebron, which she clutches to her chest, but her hand drops under its weight.

She appears frail with age and unable to easily recount her life in Hebron, which she left in 1972 to marry Ahmad's father, Ibrahim, who died in 2020.

Instead, Ahmad plays an hours-long cassette recording he made with his mother many years ago.

Her younger voice fills the room, recounting the harrowing tale of her husband's displacement during the Nakba when he was only two years old.

It was a treacherous journey, with his family sheltering in a cave for two months before reaching Jabal Amman, in Jordan's capital Amman, where Jordanian soldiers looked after them.

Ahmad lets out a series of dry hoarse coughs, his health has been failing him recently, something he attributes to the stress of following the news coming out of Gaza.

Tears fill his eyes; he wants his family to be able to return home, but he is proud, he says, of the Palestinian diaspora.

Many other people would have given up he says, but not the Palestinians. " We are still waiting to go back," he says defiantly.

Hamza al-Afghani, 45, a lawyer and store owner who lives in Amman, opens an old passport issued in 1947 that belonged to grandfather, Ahmad Abdulhamid al-Afghani. It was issued by what had then been British Mandate Palestine and reveals a picture of a well-groomed hirsute man with a pencil moustache.

Next to it lies the keys to his home and souvenir store in Jaffa, a business started by Hamza's great-grandfather, Abdulhamid al-Afgahi, an Afghan trader who had moved to Palestine in 1870 after a visit had left a deep impression on him.

The port city of Jaffa had been a thriving commercial thoroughfare, Hamza explains, and a prime location for an ambitious entrepreneur.

Palestinians, not knowing how to pronounce his Afghan surname gave Hamza's great-grandfather the nickname al-Afghani, a name he adopted and gave to his first business, a souvenir store.

That store soon became a thriving business under the British Mandate of Palestine, before the family was driven out by Zionist militias during the Nakba.

The family has since recreated his legacy in Amman with several souvenir stores including one in Jabal al-Weibdeh, an international, trendy area filled with cosy cafes and restaurants.

The staff, many of whose families come from Gaza, help customers choose from an array of Palestinian memorabilia.

Tourists visit the store to buy keffiyehs or high-end products that display Palestinian symbols, including the Palestinian key.

Fifty-year-old Anas al-Abdullah, Hamza's cousin, holds up two iron keys - one that used to open the door to the family home in Jaffa and one to an old souvenir store.

He has located the latter on Google Earth; the once handsome stone store facade in the corner of a Jaffa street now stands derelict.

Hamza, the head of a successful business and a lawyer, is a well-known character in the area. He is constantly interrupted by passersby who want to steal a moment of his time.

Despite his success and comfortable surroundings in Amman, he says life in Jordan for Palestinians can feel like a "deep sleep".

"We all carry this pain; I even carry it," he says, adding, "but I teach my children one day we will go back to our land."