" ... Once the uprising broke out in March 2011, al-Shihabi was forced to give up his two jobs. After working as a civil engineer and a tour guide for more than two decades, he said “there was no work anymore.” Though some Palestinians have joined Syrian opposition forces and others have thrown their weight behind the regime, most are simply trying to find a way to survive during the crisis. “I don’t care who wins the fight in Syria — the opposition or the regime — because I’m Palestinian. All I care about is returning to Palestine,” said al-Shihabi. Al-Shihabi’s family is originally from Lubya in the Tiberias region of Palestine. When the village was occupied and destroyed by Zionist militias during the 1948 Nakba, the forced expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland, his parents and siblings fled. They slept in a forest in Lebanon for weeks before they moved on to Damascus, where they eventually settled in Yarmouk. “My mother says that being driven from Yarmouk is harder than the Nakba,” al-Shihabi said. “She is an 86-year-old woman now, you know, and it’s hard on her to have to leave her home again ... ”
Posted on: Fri, 05 Jul 2013 21:40:02 +0000
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