Burj el-Shamali
Burj el-Shamali is a municipality located some 86 km south of Beirut and 3 km east of the Tyre/Sour peninsula, merging into its urban area. It is located in the Tyre District of the South Governorate of Lebanon.
It is particularly known for hosting the second-largest of the twelve Palestinian refugee camps in the country as a de facto autonomous exclave effectively out of the reach of Lebanese officials: The camp is ruled by Popular Committees of Palestinian parties under the leadership of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation which is de facto recognised by the municipality through some degree of coordination and cooperation. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East has the mandate to provide basic services, assisted by local and international NGOs. The Lebanese Armed Forces control entry and exit through the camp's main gate.
Etymology
Burj el-Shamali – also transliterated into the spellings of "Borj" or "Bourj" combined with a version of "Shimali", "Shamali", "Shemâly", "Chemali", "Chamali", or "Chmali" with or without the article "el", "al", "ech", "esh", or "ash" – is commonly translated as "Northern Tower", as done by E. H. Palmer in the 1881 Survey of Western Palestine.The settlement is named after a medieval tower on its main hill that overlooks Tyre. The Arabic word "Burj" reportedly originated from the Ancient Greek "pyrgos".
Territory
Together with the built-up areas of three adjacent municipalities – Sour on the peninsula and the coastal areas to the West, Abbasiyet Sour to the North, and Ain Baal to the South-East – the urban part of Burj el-Shamali has integrated into one greater metropolitan Tyre. There are also unpopulated agricultural lands, especially in its Northern and Southern parts. Altogether there are 24 distinct neighbourhoods in Burj el-Shamali. The Palestinian camp is only one of them:
Though Burj el-Shamali is often used as a synonym for the camp, it is important to see that it has just a size of about 135,000 square meters and thus covers but a tiny fraction - little less than 1% - of the municipality's overall territory. While it is less dense than other refugee camps in Lebanon, it is still one of the world's most densely populated areas. A 2017 census counted 1,243 buildings inside the camp and in adjacent gatherings with 2,807 households.
There are five unofficial entrances: former village streets barricaded with cement blocks that allow pedestrians to pass, but not cars. The camp is irregularly shaped, following the property lines of land rented by the Lebanese government for 99 years. When you cross that border, you are in a zone of urban informality. The unplanned streets and haphazard buildings announce that this is a place of legal exception, outside regulation, where a state of emergency is the norm. The camp is divided informally into neighborhoods named after agricultural villages in the Safad and Tiberias regions of Palestine.
The only exception is one neighborhood which is known as Morocco, referring to the North African origin of the residents, whose ancestors moved to historic Palestine during the Ottoman Empire.
History
Ancient times
According to Ali Badawi, the long-time chief-archaeologist for Southern Lebanon at the Directorate-General of Antiquities, it can be generally assumed that all villages around Tyre were established already during prehistoric times like the Neolithic age.Phoenician stelas and other artefacts found in Burj el-Shemali give evidence that the place was used in the 5th to 4th century BCE for funerary purposes. If there were settlements during that time, they were probably demolished by the army of Alexander the Great, who had all the coastal villages destroyed and the building materials used to connect the island of Tyre with a mole during the siege of 332 BCE. There are indications though of settlements at Burj el-Shemali dating back at least to the first century BCE.
During Roman times, parts of Burj el-Shemali continued to be used as a necropolis. A number of its hypogea - underground tombs - with Roman-era frescos are on display at the National Museum in Beirut. The remains of a Roman-Byzantine road are preserved underneath the modern main road.
Medieval times
It is not clear whether Burj el-Shemali continued to be settled and/or used as a funerary place after the Arab armies defeated the Byzantine empire in the region and took over Tyre in 635 CE for half a millennium of Islamic rule.When the Tyre was taken over by a Frankish army in the aftermath of the First Crusade, the new rulers constructed a fortified tower on the hill of Burj el-Shemali overlooking the peninsula of Tyre. The village then adapted its name from that tower. There are also remains of another Crusader tower known as Al-Burj Al-Qobli in the Southern part of town. Like in ancient times, the lands of Burj el-Shemali were used as cemeteries in medieval periods.
Ottoman times
Although the Ottoman Empire conquered the Levant in 1516, Jabal Amel remained mostly untouched for almost another century. When the Ottoman leadership at the Sublime Porte appointed the Druze leader Fakhreddine II of the Maan family to administer the area at the beginning of the 17th century, the Emir encouraged many Metwali – the discriminated Shia Muslims of what is now Lebanon – to settle to the East of Tyre to secure the road to Damascus. He thus also laid the foundation of the Lebanese part of modern Burj el-Shemali demographics as a predominantly Shiite place.In 1875, Victor Guérin found the village to be inhabited by 150 Métualis. The old fort was divided into several private dwellings.
In 1881, the London-based Palestine Exploration Fund's Survey of Western Palestine described it as
A large village built of stone, containing about 300 Metawileh, placed on a low ridge, with figs, olives, and arable land around. There are two good springs near.
and further noted that it was
a village with a similar tower of drafted masonry. The hill is crowned by a stronghold, the vaults of which, slightly ogival, do not appear older than the Crusaders, but it was constructed of older blocks, some in drafted masonry and others completely smoothed. About a mile to the south-west of this hill is a subterranean series of tombs, each containing several ranges of loculi, which was explored by Renan.
Modern times
French Mandate colonial rule (1920–1943)
Little has been recorded about developments in Burj el-Shemali after the French rulers proclaimed the new State of Greater Lebanon on the first of September 1920:In 1937, a richly decorated Roman tomb with frescoes from the 2nd century CE was accidentally discovered there in an ancient necropolis area. Two years later, the archaeologist Maurice Dunand had the frescoes dismantled and restored in the basement of the National Museum of Beirut.
Post-independence (since 1943)
Following Lebanese independence from France on 22 November 1943, Southern Lebanon enjoyed less than five years of peace. The border with British-ruled Mandatory Palestine was still open during those times, and many Palestinian Jews used to spend holidays in Tyre, while vice versa many Southern Lebanese would travel freely to Haifa and Tel Aviv.1948 Palestine Nakba
However, when the state of Israel was declared in May 1948, an estimated 127,000 Palestinians fled to Lebanon alone until the end of that year. Confronted with this exodus – also known as the Nakba – a camp of tents was set up in Burj El Shimali by the League of Red Cross Societies. The refugees were mainly from Hawla, Lubieh, Saffuri, Tiberias, and Safed, where they mostly led agricultural existences. An oral history project recorded the following:Refugees from 1948 often begin their narratives by telling of what used to be cultivated in the past. One refugee family in Burj el-Shemali, for example, began their description of life before the exodus by telling how they used to grow yellow and white corn, wheat, cereals, sesame, big beans, white beans, lentils. There were plenty of vegetables and fruits, apricots, peach trees, plums, grapes, cherries, really big and sweet watermelons and honeydew melons."
The refugees at first suffered from particularly poor conditions as the camp was initially only meant to be temporary and became a transit point:
"was disbanded in June 1949 and its 6,010 refugees distributed among four camps in the Saida and Beqa'a Districts. This operation was carried out in the record time of four days by the League staff in collaboration with the Lebanese Government."Many of them seem to have moved back to Burj el-Shemali though once the current "footprint" was established in 1955. At that time UNRWA started providing humanitarian assistance – infrastructure services, school education and health care – to the residents of the camp.
Meanwhile, more Palestinian refugees settled in the area of Maachouk – 1 km to the West of Burj El Shemali – on agricultural lands owned by the Lebanese State as a neighbourhood rather than a camp. Its eastern side, which is an industrial zone, as well as the main road's southern side with many commercial activities fall within the jurisdiction of Burj el-Shemali municipality which demonstrates the arbitrariness of many boundaries.
The Tyrian public expressed solidarity with the Palestinian cause in that early post-independence era, especially thanks to the politics of Tyre's long-time Imam and social-reformer Abdulhussein Sharafeddin, who had given shelter to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Amin al-Husseini shortly after the beginning of the 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine. After Sharafeddin's death in 1957 the balance of power in Southern Lebanon and the whole country gradually started to shift though with the arrival of a newcomer to the political scene:
In 1959, the Iran-born Shiite cleric Sayed Musa Sadr moved to Tyre to succeed the late Sharafeddin. As "one of his first significant acts" he established a vocational training center in Burj el-Shemali that became "an important symbol of his leadership". Reportedly, one of the first directors of the institute was a Maronite, while its Iraq-born Shiite principal started military trainings for Shia youth with support from Palestinian fighters at the camp.
By 1968, there were 7,159 registered Palestinian refugees in the camp of Burj el-Seimali. At the same time, during the course of the decade, Greater Tyre metropolitan area, including Burj el-Shemali, increasingly became subject to a rural-to-urban movement that has been ongoing ever since and resulted in growing settlements around the camp.
The solidarity of the Lebanese Tyrians with the Palestinians was especially demonstrated in January 1969 through a general strike to demand the repulsion of Israeli attacks on Palestinian targets in Beirut. However, this sentiment changed during the first half of the 1970s when the local population got increasingly caught up in the crossfire between the Palestinian insurgency in South Lebanon and reprisals from Israel's counter-insurgency.
In 1974, the Israeli military attacked: on 20 June, the Israeli Air Force bombed the camp and, according to the Lebanese army, killed 8 people, while 30 were injured.
In the same year, Sadr founded Harakat al-Mahroumin and one year later – shortly before the beginning of the Lebanese Civil War – its de facto military wing: Afwaj al-Muqawama al-Lubnaniyya. The Iranian director of Sadr's technical school, Mostafa Chamran, who was married to Amal activist Ghada Ja'bar, became a major instructor of guerilla warfare. The US-trained physicist went on to become the first defense minister of post-revolutionary Iran. Military training and weaponry for Amal fighters was still mainly provided by Palestinian militants, but Sadr increasingly distanced himself from them as the situation escalated into a civil war: