The UN-official version: Intezaar
Written and directed by Rashid Masharawi
SBS, Sunday, July 7, 7.30pm (7 in SA)
Reviewed by Jennifer Thompson
Rashid Masharawi made this film by visiting the Palestinian refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, Al-Shati, in which he was born. He comments that it hasn't changed very much in his 40 years. Thus he gets to the point of the film: that the refugee camps were established 47 years ago, after the war that began after international powers partitioned Palestine to create the state of Israel. The camps were intended to be temporary ,and the Palestinians driven from their homes and land in Israel expected to return.
Masharawi makes the point that because the camps were intended to be temporary, they were not planned beyond very rudimentary facilities. As a result, Gaza, which has the highest population density in the world, doesn't have an economy, decent housing or social services able to support the 700,000 Palestinians crowded into the eight camps in the tiny strip.
Masharawi reserves his harshest criticism for the UN, responsible through its Works Relief Agency arm for providing the refugees with food rations (flour), education, accommodation (first tents and later tiny houses) and medical services. "The UN needed us as much as we needed them", he says, adding that the 47 years of aid were a way of containing the refugees rather than solving the problem.
This approach is hardly surprising given that the UN is dominated by the same powers — Britain, France and the US — that divided Palestine for their own purposes. The Palestinians have paid a terrible price, as Masharawi notes: "The UN cannot replace our country with flour".
The best part of the documentary is the glimpse of the refugees' lives in the camps through interviews with camp residents, including a young boy and the film maker's personal connection. One woman, expressing her disappointment that the Palestinian Authority hadn't been able to change the situation, feels that there is no light on the horizon, and remarks, "life is hard". Partly thanks to the UN. n