Two Palestinian families in France: forever uprooted, forever exiled
In this report from Paris and the south-west French city of Toulouse, two families of Palestinian refugees, who arrived in France following the escalation of the civil war in Syria, recount their long paths of exile during which they were regularly uprooted, just like their ancestors who were forced to flee their homes in 1948, when the state of Israel was proclaimed. They tell of the sadness that hangs over lives permanently eyeing a homeland of the past, even for the generations who have never known it. “We never knew Palestine, we were born in a different country, we live in another, and in every situation we’re treated as foreigners,” said Omar, 20, born and raised in a Damascus refugee camp. “But if we have children, we’ll have a lot to tell them.” Sophie Boutboul hears their stories, alongside photographer Ameer Alhalbi.
MeetingMeeting with Mediapart in his family apartment in Toulouse, south-west France, 56-year-old Khalil Abu Salma, who was born in Syria, recalled how his mother would remind him that “we’re in exile, it’s not our land”. She would describe to him the lake near Safed, a town in Israel’s Upper Galilee region, previously north-east Palestine, where, in the 1940s, she used to go swimming, and where anglers went fishing. When she spoke of such memories, it was, said Salma, a former teacher of Arab literature who now runs a restaurant in Toulouse, “as if she was still there”.
