scholarly journals Palestinian Refugee Identity: Marginalization And Resistance In Refugee Camps In Lebanon

Author(s):  
Tamara Sabarini

Through a review of theoretical literature on the topics of space, power, and identity as well as literature on the Palestinian refugee situation in Lebanon, this research paper uses a critical approach to space in order to examine how Palestinian identity is formed within the specific context of refugee camps in Lebanon. The refugee camp has been used by the Lebanese state as a disciplinary tool to contain identities, but it has also served as a site for the displaced Palestinians to construct meaningful lives and create new places and identities. This paper will specifically examine the way in which a marginalized collective identity as well as an identity of resistance has been formed and renegotiated using culture, memory, and militancy by displaced Palestinian refugees living within the boundaries of camps in Lebanon.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamara Sabarini

Through a review of theoretical literature on the topics of space, power, and identity as well as literature on the Palestinian refugee situation in Lebanon, this research paper uses a critical approach to space in order to examine how Palestinian identity is formed within the specific context of refugee camps in Lebanon. The refugee camp has been used by the Lebanese state as a disciplinary tool to contain identities, but it has also served as a site for the displaced Palestinians to construct meaningful lives and create new places and identities. This paper will specifically examine the way in which a marginalized collective identity as well as an identity of resistance has been formed and renegotiated using culture, memory, and militancy by displaced Palestinian refugees living within the boundaries of camps in Lebanon.


2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (5) ◽  
pp. 914-923 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hala Ghattas ◽  
Jowel Choufani ◽  
Zeina Jamaluddine ◽  
Amelia Reese Masterson ◽  
Nadine R Sahyoun

AbstractObjective:Decades of marginalization have led Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon to experience multigenerational poverty and food insecurity. The Healthy Kitchens, Healthy Children programme implemented and examined the impact of a two-pronged intervention that employed women through community kitchens to deliver a subsidized healthy daily school snack to elementary-school children in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. We describe the rationale, study design, theorized impact pathways, and discuss lessons learned.Design:The programme was quasi-experimental. We conducted formative and process evaluation of both components of the intervention to elucidate the pathways to programme impact.Setting:Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon.Participants:Thirty-three women participated in the kitchens and provided subsidized snacks to 714 children.Results:Snacks were healthy, traditional Palestinian recipes designed by women and a nutritionist. Participation fluctuated but eventually increased after modifying the meals to ensure acceptability by children. The main challenges to sustainability related to the need for subsidization of the meals and the lack of school policies around the regulation of sales of school food, which together led to fluctuations in programme participation.Conclusions:The study provides lessons learned on the potential of this model to improve the human capital of two generations of protracted refugees. The availability of schools as a constant market for these social enterprises offers an opportunity for sustainable livelihood generation and food security gains. Challenges to sustainability remain and could be addressed through social (subsidies to support the programme) and structural (policies to restrict unhealthy food sales) measures.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-136
Author(s):  
Erin Cory

Palestinians share a history of exile oriented towards the loss and reclamation of a homeland, often expressed through a shared visual lexicon and mythos. In the context of refugee camps, however, local visual culture and everyday practices demonstrate how Palestinian lives are also grounded in local stories and experiences. How do Palestinian refugees deploy everyday practices to create their home spaces? What can these practices reveal about refugees’ myriad belongings? And, in thinking about these practices, what can be said about how a feeling of home can be articulated in exile, which is at its heart the forced removal/dislocation from home? This article uses a comparative ethnographic analysis of two Palestinian camps in Lebanon to challenge overarching narratives of ‘Palestinianness’ by calling attention to the rich multiplicity of Palestinian refugee identities. In focusing the analysis on everyday practices – specifically street art and walking – by which residents make and experience home in the camps, the article grapples with the seeming contradictions between ‘home’ and ‘exile’ that colour the experiences of not only Palestinians, but also refugees and asylum seekers in other circumstances of protracted uncertainty, as they attempt to migrate and make home in new countries.


Author(s):  
Nadya Hajj

Property rights are not supposed to exist in Palestinian refugee camps. At least the existing scholarly record does not predict their presence. After all, why would a marginalized community living in uncertain political economic conditions go to all the trouble and effort of crafting institutions that lay claim to assets in a refugee camp? Yet a routine interview with a Palestinian refugee led to the discovery of formal legal titles inside refugee camps strewn across Lebanon and Jordan. The discovery triggered a new understanding of the potential for institutional innovation and evolution in transitional political landscapes, places that lack a stable sovereign state with the legal jurisdiction to define and enforce institutions....


2020 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 26-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Irfan

This article examines the relationship of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) during the 1970s, the period when the PLO reached the zenith of its power in Palestinian refugee camps throughout the Levant. Based on archival United Nations (UN) and UNRWA documents, as well as the PLO's own communications and publications, the article argues that the organization approached its relationship with UNRWA as part of a broader strategy to gain international legitimacy at the UN. That approach resulted in a complex set of tensions, specifically over which of the two institutions truly served and represented Palestinian refugees. In exploring these tensions, this article also demonstrates how the “question of Palestine” was in many ways an international issue.


2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 234-251
Author(s):  
Stefano Fogliata

AbstractPalestinian camps in Lebanon have turned once more into “transitional zones of emplacement” for thousands of people recently fleeing the Syrian conflict. In this context, the plural subjectivities emerging within the camps highlight a further connection between spatial marginalization and precarious legal statuses. My research hinges on the interconnectivities evolving around the Palestinian Bourj el Barajneh camp and Hezbollah-controlled Beirut southern suburbs moving from an ethnographic insight of the Palestinian football society. Inside the “Refugee Football Leagues,” Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese players find a space in leagues whose matches are mostly disputed within the numerous refugee camps scattered throughout the national territory. Moving from newcomers’ strategies for protection, the essay investigates how refugees living in camps experience different scales of mobility and develop a wide range of practices that extend beyond the camp's boundaries, exploring how imperceptible and hyper-mobile tactics of existence re-elaborate Palestinian refugee camps into meaningful places of elusive contestation.


Author(s):  
Lyndsey Stonebridge

In 1950, the American Council for the Relief of Palestinians produced the first international documentary on the Palestinian refugee camps, Sands of Sorrow. Directed primarily at Christian churches and charities, the film’s tone was lightly didactic, its images striking and ethnographically attentive. An early example of the then relatively new genre of humanitarian advocacy, Sands of Sorrow invited its audience to focus on the human consequences of the mass displacement of the Palestinian Arabs, caused by the war and the creation of the State of Israel. That moral injunction came with some authority. The film was introduced by the American journalist, Dorothy Thompson, famous in the war years for her internationalism, anti-Nazi campaigns, and tireless support of Jewish refugees. This chapter discusses the politics of humanitarian compassion through Thompson’s writing and advocacy. One of the first to advocate for the rights of Jewish refugees in the late 1930s, Thompson scandalized U.S. opinion when she campaigned for Palestinian refugees. Refugees, she argued, were not simply one more humanitarian crisis, but the consequence of the failure of the post-war human rights regime to deal with the violence of state formation and the persistence of nationalism.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yafa El Masri

The “permanently temporary” Palestinian refugee community, present in Lebanon since 1948 with no solution in sight, has the highest rate of abject poverty within all five areas of operation of United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinians in the Near East (UNRWA), and it still occupies the same limited geographic space it did 72 years ago. This harsh reality stems from the refugees' statelessness but is also worsened by the local conditions imposed by the Lebanese legislation and (non)settlement policy aimed at preventing refugees from becoming permanent. Within this situation, we look at practices of agency enacted by camp dwellers to provide lacking life necessities and improve living conditions in the camps. This paper will identify and analyze coping mechanisms and homemaking practices undertaken by Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, operating within the framework set by Brun and Fábos (2015), which conceptualized home and homemaking for people in protracted displacement through identifying a refugee's “home, Home and HOME.” Building on Donna Haraway's concept of situated knowledge, this paper uses data collected from participant observations, interviews, ethnographic and autoethnographic recordings analyzed through the lens of my own positioned rationality as a Palestinian refugee from Lebanon. Further, the paper will explore how Palestinian refugees establish camp spaces as a “home-Home-HOME,” despite their uncertain futures, through vertical expansion of buildings, stories and family bonding, in addition to trading and micro-markets. The paper will also deduce how refugees' informal coping mechanisms offer a way of strengthening community bonds, making home in those, otherwise, uncomfortable “waiting zones,” and finally, envisioning new ideas for restructuring the camp beyond the rule of formal institutions.


1993 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-50
Author(s):  
Hassan Elnajjar

This article examines the UN policies encouraging emigration from the Palestinian refugee camps through educating Palestinians and sending them for work abroad. Data show that emigration is more related to certain types of employment, especially skilled labor and white-collar jobs, than to employment per se. The data were collected, through personal interviews, from Dair El Balah refugee camp in Gaza Strip in 1986. There are 291 observations representing individuals who are 19 years old or over. A major conclusion of this study is that the educational policies initiated and operated by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) contributed to the dispersion of about one third of the refugees in the 1960s and the 1970s.


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