Dabke and Disappointment in Ain El Hilwe

Palestinian refugees camps in Lebanon are like a parallel universe full of surprises (and dangers.) Some Palestinians, perhaps as many as 20,000 of the 200,000 living in Lebanon, have no identification documents of any kind, and can't leave the camps. Most don't have passports -- because Palestine is not a sovereign state and because Lebanon won't give them citizenship -- and can't leave the country without special paperwork and permission. Yet this group of children in Ain El Hilwe (the largest camp in Lebanon) are part of a dance troupe that competes internationally in the Middle East and Europe.

Dabke is a traditional Levantine dance involving a lot of stomping, which is meant to emphasize the attachment of the community to the land. Normally it's done in lines or circles -- sometimes all male, sometimes all female, and sometimes mixed -- moving clockwise like a folk Arab precursor to the electric slide. But these girls were doing some very advanced moves involving twirling baskets and clay amphoras and the acrobatic boys seemed to spend more time in the air than connected to the earth.

I was there in Ain El-Hilwe on Friday with my Dutch colleague, Thomas Erdbrink, in order to speak with members of Asbat al Ansar, a militant salafi group that has made its home in the camp and which had allegedly been sending volunteers to fight in Iraq. At the last moment, one of the group's leaders cancelled our scheduled interview, and I didn't glimpse a single fighter. But Thomas did. "Did you see the two guys with big beards and machine guns?" he asked me suddenly as our car rolled through camp. "No?" he said. "Well, they saw you!"

--Andrew Lee Butters/Ain El Hilwe