Jamal KanjJamal Kanj
Children of Catastrophe: Journey from a Palestinian Refugee Camp to America Paperback – 15 October 2010
by Jamal K. Kanj (Author)
4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 12 ratings
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This book tells the remarkable story of a Palestinian refugee, following his journey from childhood in the Nahr El Bared Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, becoming a member of the PLO, through to eventual emigration, a new life as an engineer in the United States, and a 'return' trip to historic Palestine. A great deal has been written over the years addressing the Palestine - Israel conflict, and the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem. However, few works on the subject really present the personal aspect: What is it like to be a refugee? What propels a decent human being to take up arms, to become a freedom fighter or a 'terrorist?' Running parallel to Kanj's personal narrative, the book also documents the story of Nahr El Bared itself: the story of a refugee camp that grew from an initial clump of muddy UN tents to become a vibrant trading centre in north Lebanon, before its eventual destruction at the hands of the Lebanese army as they battled with militants from the Fatah Al Islam group in the summer of 2007. Throughout it all, the spirit of the remarkable people of the camp shines through, and the book provides a moving testament to how refugees in Lebanon have managed to persist in their struggle for their 'right to return', as well as survive socially, economically and politically despite more than sixty years of dispossession, war and repression.
192 pages
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Jamal Kanj's biography provides an invaluable prism through which to comprehend the simple truth that Israelis and Palestinians both love the same land. Transcending facile black-white thinking, he humbly weaves his life story as a refugee in Lebanon into often misunderstood facets of Middle East politics. By honestly portraying heart-rending stories of his family's pain, he lifts the veil that continues to obscure Palestinians' humanity and dignity. For anyone wishing to grasp the contradictions and complexity of the Middle East, this book is required reading. --Dr George Katsiaficas, author of 'The Imagination of the New Left' and & 'The Subversion of Politics'
Jamal Kanj's 'Children of Catastrophe: Journey from a Palestinian Refugee Camp to America' is a moving and powerful narrative. Its gripping details are weaved through personal and collective accounts, which relay the story of Palestinian Diaspora through the life of the author and his family. Kanj's personal story of the refugee camp of Nahr El Bared paints an unmatched picture of the realities that shaped the impoverished refugee camp, from its early formations to its violent presence. Such narratives are of immense import, for such accounts humanize a place, and a people who have been seen for too long as mere subjects of statistical data and academic discussion. There are people, faces, personal tragedies and triumphs, dreams that were crushed and others waiting to be fulfilled in Nahr El Bared - as well as in the rest of the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, and elsewhere. Kanj tells the stories of these resolute people, steadfast even in their weakest moments, through his own. --Ramzy Baroud, author of 'The Second Palestinian Intifada' and 'Searching Jenin'
About the Author
JAMAL KANJ was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in northern Lebanon ten years after the creation of the state of Israel. He moved to the United States in late 1977, and has been active in various local and national political organizations. He is a cofounder of the Middle East Cultural and Information Center in San Diego and served as the Secretary General for the US chapter of the General Union of Palestine Students. Today, Kanj is a professional engineer who works on water infrastructure management.
Product details
Publisher : Garnet Publishing; First Edition (15 October 2010)
Language : English
Paperback : 192 pages
4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 12 ratings
Jamal Kanj
I was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in northern Lebanon ten years after the creation of the state of Israel. Moved to the United States in late 1977, and has been active in various local and national political organizations. Cofounder of the Middle East Cultural and Information Center in San Diego and served as the Secretary General of the US chapter of a national Palestinian student union. I have a BS degree in Civil Engineering and MBA in Global Management. I am a California registered professional engineer and work on water infrastructure management.
I lived through the tumultuous period when the PLO took over the refugee camps in 1969 and during the most intense part of the Lebanese Civil war. I ran away from home to join the PLO when I was only 11 years old; I survived many Israeli raids on the camp and cheated death in one air raid in 1972; survived serious head injuries in Jerusalem in 1996 and worked with the UN in Gaza for part of 1997.
About the book
A great deal has been written over the years addressing the Palestine–Israel conflict, and the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem. However, few works on the subject really present the personal aspect: What is it like to be a refugee? What propels a decent human being to take up arms, to become a freedom fighter or a “terrorist?”
This book tells the remarkable story of one such refugee, following a journey from childhood in the Nahr El Bared Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, becoming a member of the PLO, through to eventual emigration, a new life as a managing engineer in the United States, and a ‘return’ trip to historic Palestine. Running parallel to the personal narrative, the book also documents the story of Nahr El Bared itself: the story of a refugee camp that grew from an initial clump of muddy UN tents to become a vibrant trading centre in north Lebanon, before its eventual destruction at the hands of the Lebanese army as they battled with militants from the Fatah Al Islam group in the summer of 2007.
Throughout it all, the spirit of the remarkable people of the camp shines through, and the book provides a moving testament to how refugees in Lebanon have managed to persist in their struggle for their “right to return”, as well as survive socially, economically and politically despite more than sixty years of dispossession, war and repression.
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Antoine Elias Raffoul
5.0 out of 5 stars A Living Account of a Palestinian RefugeeReviewed in Italy on 13 July 2023
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Jamal Kanj has done a magnificent job in narrating what to many may seem to be an old (1948) Nakba Story. Except that this story is ongoing today.
Reading through this vivid, sad but sometimes funny account of a tragedy will require courage and objectivity. As a Palestinian refugee myself (born in Nazareth 1941) but had never lived in a camp after 1948 (I lived in the City of Tripoli which figures highly in this book), Kanj managed to draw me into his narrative with stories of daily life, his attempt to join the revolution, to flirtatious moments in Nahr El-Bared, to his first re-visit to his beloved Palestine and finally to his move to the United States. The thread that ties all of these eventful life stories is the love Kanj has, no the worship that he shows, for his father and mother and his family in general. You could not have survived your years without such a Palestinian gift.
You do not need to be a Palestinian, let alone a Palestinian refugee, to feel the roller-coaster emotions imbedded in every line Kanj eloquently wrote. There are many episodes which I share with Kanj but which I have no space here to reflect upon. Yet, suffice it to say that, after reading Children of Catastrophe, the question remains: How just or humane is it for one European people to have invaded another people's land, expelled its indigenous population, bomb them out of their refugee camps where they settled, albeit temporarily, and then question their universal right to return to their original towns and villages?
This question pops up in the reader's mind every time he turns a page of Kanj's fascinating book.
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michelle
5.0 out of 5 stars A Must Read book for allReviewed in the United States on 3 August 2013
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Children of Catastrophe by Jamal Kanj should be required reading for all. Jamal was a descendant of Palestinian refugees who were expelled from their homes in 1948. In 1958, Jamal came into the world in the refugee camp Nahr el Bared in Northern Lebanon. He was his parents' first born in a room and not a tent. The story tells of the crude structures that gradually replaced the tents. I hope one day his book will become a movie so that people can see what it was like to be a Palestinian refugee in Lebanon.
As I read his book, I was just amazed at how people can be so cruel. And how instead of celebrating differences and working together to advance humanity, we focus on differences and destroy it. At the end of the day, we all belong to the human race. We all want the same things for our children: a safe environment, a place to call home with a roof over our heads, education, freedom, love, happiness, a future, a world in which our children's worth isn't judged on their religion, race, color of skin or any other dividing factor and their basic needs are met.
As a Jewish American, I was taught that after the Holocaust, the Jews found a "land without a people for a people without a land" and made the desert bloom. When I first went to Israel, an Israeli told me that there were 21 Arab countries and the Palestinians needed to choose one as they didn't want them in Israel. I had no idea who he was talking about. I thought Palestinian was a synonym for Israeli and referred to the Jews who were in Israel before 1948. I thought it was like Persian and Iranian. How would I know otherwise when I was indoctrinated that we Jews found a land without a people? All we learned was how Israel was the safe-haven for Jews. We never understood what Zionism meant to the Palestinians. Our entitlement to the land was inculcated into our heads because of the Holocaust even though Palestinians weren't responsible for the Holocaust. We need to see what Zionism meant to Jamal and his people, the Palestinians. How one people's dream can be another people's nightmare. So often we only think of our own desires and not how what we want affects others. How would we feel if a non-Jewish religious group decides to claim a US state for themselves, banishing Jews from that state and telling us to choose from any of the other 50 US States for our new home?
Despite the overwhelming hardships, what I found so incredible was how his family could persevere as a unit under such conditions. Here in the US with the divorce rate is said to be around 50%, in a culture of instant satisfaction, people jump ship when things get difficult. I doubt many couples would remain together when faced with the hardships that Jamal's parents faced and yet, through thick and thin, his family lived for each other. They faced everything as a solid unit that could not be broken.
It also amazes me how resourceful children must become to survive. Although Jamal came into the world with the material bare minimum, a refugee in a country that did not want his kind, in anything but a stable political environment, throughout his life he had the love and encouragement of a unshakeable family that would do anything for each other. Where drinking and drugs are prevalent in our American society among our youth, Jamal and his friends were fighting to survive. I also noticed no sense of entitlement or laziness that we experience in the US among many of our youth. Instead I could see the deep desire to improve not only one's own life, but the lives of one's family members as well.
I stand in awe of the distance Jamal had to transverse as a refugee to make a new life in America becoming a registered professional engineer in California with graduate and post graduate degrees in civil engineering, management and executive leadership.
I also think it's important to read this story, not just as a Palestinian, but as a Muslim. With the prevalent Islamaphobia in America, I think it's important not to only focus on the extreme cases as we find those in every religion and culture. It is more important to see how other Muslims face injustice and overcome adversity. In the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr el Bared, the brutal environment motivated parents to stress the power of education to excel and succeed in life.
We need to hear these stories because awareness leads to understanding and understanding leads to change. By reading his story, we become aware of ourselves as human beings and the horrors we create for others. We cannot afford to be ignorant to the truth, holding onto fallacies. In the words of Stephen Hawkins, "The greatest enemy of knowledge isn't ignorance, but the illusion of knowledge." Through awareness we can put an end to these great injustices committed against the Palestinians. No one lives in peace when we condemn others to misery.
Michelle Cohen Corasanti, author of The Almond Tree
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Michael Fox
5.0 out of 5 stars Kanj writes with a sense for justice & his heart pointing to the homeland he lost before he was bornReviewed in the United States on 11 September 2011
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The parents of Jamal Kanj, the author, were alongside 800,000 other Palestinians, evacuated from their villages and towns by Israeli terrorist groups, an ethnic cleansing that was supported by the founding Israeli Government and overseen by the former British occupiers of Palestine. One of these terrorist groups, the Haganah, served as the foundation of the now official army of Israel, the Israeli Defence Force (IDF).
Jamal wasn't yet born when his family was pursued through the upper Galillee and into Southern Lebanon. He was born a refugee in the Nahr al Bared refugee camp in Lebanon where his family was placed with several thousand other Palestinians. The rights afforded to other Lebanese nationals: the rights for travel and education and self-determinacy were stripped from him and his family. Through no fault of their own, the Palestinians were now exiled from their homeland.
This book describes the life of Jamal. He lives his whole childhood in the square mile refugee camp. What starts off in 1949 as a shelter for Palestinian refugees set up with basic tent facilities, transforms over time to a vibrant town supporting its own community through trade and development. It is also a story of a victim that keeps getting punished. The camp is continuously targeted by Israeli forces in retaliation attacks for crimes committed elsewhere or through acts of aggression aimed at instilling fear in the population, trying to extinguishing any flailing hopes left of them one day returning to their homeland. Jamal leaves the camp at 16 or 17 to study in Baghdad and soon after is accepted to an american university.
Much of the book is interspersed with political events of the time and of historical background. This is the history that wasn't taught to students at school and wasn't taught to me at Jewish school, nor is it taught to Israeli teenagers before they are put into fighter jets and their thumbs hover over the trigger. It is an uncomfortable history. The praised leaders of Israel are quoted here expressing imperialistic sentiment, expressing indiscriminate hate and disregard for the natives of Palestine.
The Lebanese government, especially the Christian-Right ruling party, is also attacked for harassing and limiting the Palestinian refugees. The camp suffered almost total destruction in 2007, a sad situation for the Palestinians who for 2nd or even 3rd time have been forced to leave their home. Out of the ashes comes new hope though. Stated in the last chapter of the book is the slogan for the committees responsible for rebuilding the camp, "We will rebuild Nahr el Bared and we shall return to Palestine". Let us hope for the sake of humanity that they succeed.
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Ashley
5.0 out of 5 stars Essential ReadReviewed in the United States on 22 May 2021
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I got this book off Amazon. This is a great book and many people should read the truth of what's been going on between Palestine and Israel and how the People of Palestine are treated and still today they are treated this way. If you want to make sense of what’s going on now in Palestine/Israel, this book is an essential read! It's alway great to support a Palestinian. The whole world see's as if the Palestinian is in the wrong, but you should read this book and open your eyes and heart for these people. They have suffered for so long and still are today. I recommend this book, my best friend's father wrote this book. This a true story and things mentioned in the book are still happening today.
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John Jacobson
5.0 out of 5 stars SuperbReviewed in the United States on 12 September 2010
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I highly recommend this book. Most Americans know nothing about what happened to the Palestinians in 1948, thanks to a highly successful censorship and disinformation process here in the United States. This book shows one small piece of a massive human tragedy that has been completely ignored by Hollywood.
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