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The Palestinians the World Forgot

For decades, thousands of Palestinians were trapped in a camp in Egypt, within shouting distance of their homeland in Gaza. This is what happened to them.

A Palestinian man at the “shouting fence” between Gaza and Egypt, 1984.

Cairo—“Don’t forget us! Don’t forget Canada Camp!”

It was July 1994. The wails lifted from thousands of displaced Palestinians marooned in Egypt’s Sinai. They were pressed into a plot of land ringed by a barbed-wire barricade dividing Egypt from Gaza’s southern city of Rafah, still remembered among residents as the “shouting fence.”

Just behind the spindly partition erected after Israel relinquished its occupation of the Sinai Peninsula in 1982 was the newly established international border between Gaza and Egypt. Over 4,000 Palestinians who had been “accidentally” deserted on the Egyptian side of the border were craning to catch a Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Chairman Yasser Arafat, who was making his triumphant return to Gaza after 27 years of exile in Tunis.

The 64-year-old Egyptian-born leader was being hailed by a pageant of rapture across Gaza City. But things took on a far darker cast on the Egyptian side. Mothers wept for children on the other side of the border, some of whom they had not seen in over a decade.

The “Canada Camp” the families referred to was the original name for a housing complex constructed by Israel in the early 1970s to warehouse Palestinian refugees whose homes in Rafah were demolished under the innocuous-sounding pretext of a “road widening” and “security clearance” campaign. (The clearance operations were led by Ariel Sharon, then-commander of the Israeli army’s southern force.) The camp name came from a former Canadian military housing barrack that was set up following the 1956 Suez Crisis in then-Israeli-occupied Sinai. The site, located just southwest of Rafah on the Egyptian side of the border, was repurposed into a UNRWA resettlement project. Lex Takkenberg, UNRWA’s former chief of field relief and social services, called it a “forgotten no-man’s land.”

By 1982, that land was in Egyptian hands, handed back by Israel as part of the Camp David Accords. Egypt and Israel devised a plan to begin relocating the families back to Gaza within six months. But it would be 18 years before everyone was allowed to return. Writing in The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Dick Doughty observed that the move constituted “the only instance of an exiled Palestinian community—[in their many thousands], re-entering Israeli-controlled territory since the beginning of the 1967 occupation.”

During that time, contact between Palestinians in Gaza and their displaced relatives was measured in 50 kilometers of sand, patrolled by Egyptian and Israeli soldiers. Those stranded on the wrong side were left in administrative purgatory, orphaned between two jurisdictions—never absorbed as Egyptian citizens, nor permitted to cross back into Israeli-occupied Gaza.

Today, this dreadful repatriation process, from Sinai back to Gaza, feels eerily contemporary, a prototype for the postwar United States–led “Board of Peace” that has already fast begun recruiting its new technocratic “Palestinian” government, and made plans to deploy an international occupation force and ghettoize Rafah. Only now, instead of 4,000 people, over 200,000 Palestinians are languishing in Egypt, driven out of Gaza by Israel’s genocide. Who is willing to stake political capital on their return?

Just as it was some 30 years ago with Camp David, the stubborn “catch-22” in yet another deal mortgaging Gaza’s future is never Israel’s illegal military occupation and apartheid regime, but rather how to warehouse all of its “inconvenient” leftovers. Time and again, Egyptians are being asked to “manage” Palestinian life spatially rather than reckon with Palestinians’ inalienable right of return.

At 18, Rafah-born Nisreen Najjar left Gaza to attend Birzeit University in the West Bank. She was there the moment the Washington-brokered Sinai-return bargain lurched from parchment to practice, effectively separating her from her parents, who were quarantined on the wrong side of the newly drawn border.

Before the 1982 boundary was established, Rafah had historically been a contiguous urban center, teeming with shared Egypt-Gaza markets and heavily integrated municipal life, according to Najjar. The town straddled what had been the old Ottoman administrative boundary between Egypt and Palestine, but for both sides, it had yet to acquire the force of a true border.

The lightly enforced frontier, though marked on maps since the 1949 armistice, had not yet been transformed into the elaborate border apparatus that would soon cleave the jointly administered city. It remained porous enough to sustain the social amalgam of kinship, commerce, and Bedouin life that bound Rafah’s Egyptian and southern Gazan communities, allowing families, merchants, and traders to cross with little sense that they were ever entering a different country.

By Najjar’s account, Gaza felt less like a periphery than an extension of the Egyptian nation itself. “Egypt felt like a walk across town, not another world. Crossing was an unremarkable feature of daily life for many,” she says. She adds that during former Egyptian President Abdel Gamal Nasser’s era, “and only his,” Palestinians were granted scholarships to........

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