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Whose agency? UNRWA and Palestinian refugees in history
About the book ‘UNRWA at 70: Palestinian Refugees in Context’, Pietro Stefanini (ed.): The exile of Palestinian refugees remains at the heart of the Palestinian struggle for justice and liberation. UNRWA at 70 engages the themes surrounding this UN Agency and Palestinians beyond the logics of humanitarianism. The book brings together scholars from Palestine and Israel, Lebanon, Qatar, the UK, Canada and elsewhere, who specialise in the fields of politics, history, sociology and law, and are renowned for producing critical research on the Arab region and in particular on the forced displacement of Palestinians.
Theoretical and methodological challenges of studying refugee children in the Middle East and North Africa: young Palestinian, Afghan and Sahrawi refugees
This article aims to address a number of conceptual and methodological challenges facing the study of young refugees. Much of the research on refugees has, until recently, been focused on adults, and to a lesser degree, on young children. Those studies that do include children are largely carried out in the domain of psychology and psychiatry and tend to pathologize and individualize. This article is based on observations derived from a six-year, multi-disciplinary anthropological and participatory research programme that examined the impact of forced migration on young people in the Middle East and North Africa: Palestinian refugee youth in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza, Sahrawi youth in Algeria, and Afghan youth in Iran. It argues that despite the challenges, an anthropological and participatory approach contributes to a greater, more holistic understanding of refugee youth.
Exiled within: Between citizenship and the struggle for return for internal Palestinian refugees in Israel
The internal Palestinian refugees represent an intriguing paradox of a people who have suffered displacement and dispossession but are today citizens of the colonial state that was built on their ruins. While there are well-established studies of the (external) Palestinian refugees’ impasse, the internal Palestinian refugees, defined as present absentees, have historically been omitted from these debates. In this paper, I challenge the preconceived assumption that citizenship is the most durable solution to cease the displacement and rectify the dispossession of refugees, demonstrating that, for internal Palestinian refugees, these processes continue to be a part of their ‘lived experience’ despite the legal status afforded to them in Israel. By applying theories and practices of citizenship and re-reading the history of Palestine and Israel since 1948, I argue that the provision of citizenship has served to maintain this population in a state of absentia. To illustrate this, I analyse two policies that continue to target the Palestinian community in general and the internal Palestinian refugees specifically: the present absentee land ownership law and the compulsory state education system. While the former ensured their displacement and dispossession from their lands, the latter has systematically targeted their history and identity. Finally, I study how the internal Palestinian refugees have also resisted these policies at the grassroots level by organising commemoration activities and marches to their destroyed villages, mounting a (symbolic) movement for the right of return to re-create spaces of legitimacy and subjectivity. I demonstrate that, ultimately, these acts of citizenship contestation are also employed to actively re-connect and communicate their struggle with the wider Palestinian diaspora – countering their absence by asserting their presence.
Educating Palestinian refugees: The origins of UNRWA’s unique schooling system
This article examines the origins of the unique schooling system for Palestinian refugees run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). Examining developments c. 1950–57, it illuminates the programme’s beginning and explores the objectives of those behind it. Using archival evidence from numerous international welfare organizations and testimonies from refugees themselves, this article argues that the parties providing education and the refugees receiving it often had conflicting objectives that were highly politicized on both sides. Despite the comparatively greater power and resources of the United Nations, the Palestinian refugees were able to make use of their limited leverage in order to shape the education system as they preferred. The UNRWA education programme thus serves as a revealing case study for explaining developmental aid to refugee populations and its inevitable intersection with politics.
Palestinian refugees and the Global Compact on Refugees
Palestinian refugees in the Middle East have been displaced for more than 70 years and they are living in an increasingly precarious situation with limited prospect of a political solution to their plight. The system set up to support them by the international community is failing to address their growing needs and has become unsustainable, nor does it provide them with much needed durable solutions. As a blueprint for providing a fairer and more effective response for all refugees the Global Compact on Refugees (GCR) adopted in December 2018 provides an important framework in which to rethink the refugee response for Palestinian refugees. This working paper argues that the GCR is equally relevant to Palestinian refugees and its application could help address the many gaps in protection and assistance provided to them. It provides an analysis of the most relevant provisions of the GCR that could help address the many challenges faced by Palestinian refugees and calls on relevant stakeholders to engage in developing a Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework for them under the GCR.
UNRWA and the Palestinian refugees: Protecting refugee rights while structurally addressing the agency’s financially unsustainable modus operandi
The 73-year-long failure to resolve the Palestinian refugee question, and the discourse around it, especially since Madrid and Oslo, combined with the unsustainability of UNRWA’s current modus operandi – essentially a means to manage the humanitarian dimension of the of the unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict – prompt a critical re-examination of the way the Palestinian refugee question has been approached and how UNRWA has interpreted and implemented its mandate over the past decades. This paper calls for a fundamental paradigm shift in the approach to protection of and solutions for the Palestinian refugees, comprised of three elements: (1) the search for solutions for Palestinian refugees must move from the essentially bilateral approach of the last decades, namely the Madrid/Oslo framework, back to the multilateral arena of the UN; (2) the discourse on solutions must move beyond the current constraints of perceptions or politics, and refocus on the rights of the Palestinian refugees that remain unfulfilled, including both historical rights (self-determination, return, restitution compensation) and the panoply of human rights that for many refugees, especially in UNRWA area of operation, remains suspended; (3) it is necessary to abandon the “politics of suffering”, namely the resisting belief that the refugees must continue to live in substandard conditions with limited advancement of rights and a clear residential status in host countries in order to assert and maintain their right to return. In fact, allowing refugees to have a dignified life may enable them to be political actors determining their present and future. The 2016 New York Declaration provides a unique opportunity to realize the above paradigm shift. Applicable to Palestinian refugees, it provides an UN-sanctioned mandate – with the broadest possible endorsement of the international community – for the elaboration of a comprehensive response framework (CRF) for Palestinian refugees, dealing with the various unresolved aspects of the Palestinian refugee situation, and developed through a multi-stakeholder approach. The authors propose a radical yet gradual evolution of UNRWA’s strategic direction, from providing humanitarian assistance and support for human development to a comprehensive response to all aspects of the Palestinian refugee question, including a more expanded focus on protection and durable solutions. By doing so, the agency would build on its existing mandate in protecting the rights of the Palestinian refugees and address the void left by the demise of the UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine (UNCCP), which critically complements the UN mandate toward them. Palestinian refugees need and deserve, like all other refugees, an international entity engaged not only in supporting their humanitarian needs but equally in upholding their human rights, including to return, restitution and compensation, as well as facilitating such other durable solutions as the refugees may want to pursue. These latter rights flow from the illegality of the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Palestine and have only become stronger with the passing of time and the further advancement of international law. The development of a CRF for Palestinian refugees (CRF-PR) has the potential to reenergize the discourse in support of unmet Palestinian refugee rights, and reactivate a common front among host countries, refugees, and Palestinian leadership. By generating discussion and awareness, it would shift political attention towards the refugees and create important momentum to ‘federate’ and advocate jointly for a just and durable solution of the refugee question. Giving proper weight to a rights-based approach, centred on the refugees, and advancing the development of a CRF-PR through a multi-stakeholder platform under the aegis of the UN, has the potential to break the current impasse. Implementing the above shift – including by turning UNRWA’s registration system into a central repository of documentary evidence of the refugees’ historic claims – could gradually pave the way for a broader reconsideration of the agency’s modus operandi, moving away from parallel delivery of some services in some of its “fields” of operations. As a first step, UNRWA may wish to develop a note on its mandate as UNHCR did in 2013. The reforms and initiatives in this paper should also help inform the imminent development by UNRWA of its next Medium-Term Strategy (MTS).
Rethinking solutions for Palestinian refugees: A much-needed paradigm shift and an opportunity towards its realization
The authors believe that the current state of affairs with respect to the Palestinian refugee question requires a fundamental rupture with the political approaches so far pursued amounting to a fundamental paradigm shift. This would hinge on a necessary liberation of the debate from the political stalemate, a more purposeful involvement of the UN, supported by a multi-stakeholder process (hinging first and foremost on the refugees themselves), a greater emphasis on international law and related obligations towards the rights of the refugees, and, finally, a move away from the ‘politics of suffering’ that has held many refugees hostage over the decades. The authors suggest that the 2016 New York Declaration on Refugees and Migrants provides a new opportunity to reengage the UN with respect to solutions for Palestinian refugees, for firmly placing this within an international law framework, and for pursuing solutions for Palestinian refugees more holistically. Guided by the Declaration, they propose the elements of a Comprehensive Response Framework for Palestinian Refugees as well as the route towards its development.
Palestinian refugees affected by the 2011 Libyan uprising: a brief overview
This article provides a brief overview of Palestinians’ presence in Libya from the 1970s to the present, and of the multiple processes of displacement and expulsion faced by Palestinians during this period, culminating in the most recent 2011 conflict.
Refugees in the Middle East: identity politics among Sahrawi, Palestinian and Aghan youth
Book description: This volume brings together ethnographers conducting research on children living in crisis situations in both developing and developed regions, taking a cross-cultural approach that spans different cities in the global North and South to provide insight and analyses into the lifeworlds of their young, at-risk inhabitants. Looking at the lived experiences of poverty, drastic inequality, displacement, ecological degradation and war in countries including Haiti, Argentina and Palestine, the book shows how children both respond to and are shaped by their circumstances. Going beyond conventional images of children subjected to starvation, hunger, and disease to build an integrated analysis of what it means to be a child in crisis in the 21st century, the book makes a significant contribution to the nascent field of study concerned with development and childhood. With children now at the forefront of debates on human rights and poverty reduction, there is no better time for scholars, policymakers and the general public to understand the complex social, economic and political dynamics that characterize their present predicaments and future life chances.
Petitioning for Palestine: refugee appeals to international authorities
In the second half of the twentieth century, stateless Palestinian refugees regularly submitted petitions to international authorities, particularly the UN. In these petitions, the refugees demanded their rights and invoked the UN’s liberal internationalist discourse to assert the justice of their cause. This article explores what these petitions reveal about contentious politics among the Palestinian grassroots in the refugee camps. In so doing, it recasts Palestinian refugee camp communities as actors consciously engaged with international politics, and key drivers in internationalising the ‘Question of Palestine’. By unpacking the petitions’ internationalist aspects, the article also situates Palestinian refugee history within the broader context of post-war global governance. Finally, the analysis presented here challenges the state-centrism of existing historiography on petitioning, which examines the practice largely in relation to the growth of the state. By contrast, the case study of Palestinian petitioning shows that the practice can also be important in a setting of statelessness. This article therefore makes a series of contributions to understanding not only Palestinian political history, but also the practice of petitioning and the dynamics of post-war internationalism.
An Unusual Revolution: The Palestinian thawra in Lebanon, c. 1969-82
In 1969, Palestinians across Lebanon declared that they were carrying out a revolution in their refugee camps. Nationalist militants known as fidaiyyin* ousted state security authorities from the camps and took charge themselves, asserting control over access and services. The new status quo was codified in the Cairo Agreement, signed the same year between the Lebanese government and Yasser Arafat’s Fatah organisation. Around the same time, the fidaiyyin took control of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), previously overseen by the Arab League, and established the infrastructure of a pseudo-state in exile. Until the Israeli invasion and siege of Beirut in 1982, the PLO not only trained thousands of fighters but also provided healthcare services, ran social clubs, and organised cultural facilities in refugee camps across the country. Numerous Palestinian refugees and nationalist leaders, along with a range of historians and sociologists, have termed this period al thawra al filastiniya (‘the Palestinian revolution’), or simply the ‘days of the thawra’ – revolution.
Refugees, exiles, and other forced migrants in the late Ottoman Empire
Refugee studies rarely address historical matters; yet understanding ideas about sanctuary, refuge, and asylum have long roots in both Western and Eastern history and philosophy. Occasionally the Nansen era of the 1920s is examined or the opening years of, say, the Palestinian refugee crisis is addressed. But by and large the circumstances, experiences, and influences of refugees and exiles in modern history are ignored. This article attempts to contribute to an exploration of the past and to examine the responses of one State – the late Ottoman Empire – to the forced migration of millions of largely Muslim refugees and exiles from its contested borderland shared with Tzarist Russia into its southern provinces. The article focuses on one particular meta-ethnic group, the Circassians, and explores the humanitarian response to their movement both nationally and locally as well as their concerted drive for assisted self-settlement. The Circassians are one of many groups that were on the move at the end of the 19th century and their reception and eventual integration without assimilation in the region provide important lessons for contemporary humanitarianism.
Palestinian refugee youth: agency and aspiration
Palestinian refugee youth living both within and outside of United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) camps in the Middle East are the focus of this article. For more than half a century, these youth have been captive for stereotyping, and they have been objectified as passive victims, much as their parents and grandparents before them lived without the benefit of international protection. Yet Palestinian youth, throughout the five UNRWA field sites, consistently express a willingness to act to improve their situation as well as a cautious and measured optimism for their future. Given the appalling poverty of many refugee youths’ lives, the prolonged low- and high-intensity armed conflict, and the structure of violence in the home, in schools and in daily encounters with occupation forces as well as Palestinian security, it is remarkable that Palestinian youth continue to maintain a sense of agency against all odds and hold on to aspirations for a better personal and community future.
Dispossession and Displacement: Forced Migration in the Middle East and North Africa
This volume explores the extent to which forced migration has become a defining feature of life in the Middle East and North Africa. The papers present research on refugees, internally displaced peoples, as well as 'those who remain', from Afghanistan in the East to Morocco in the West. Dealing with the dispossession and displacement of waves of peoples forced into the region at the end of World War I, and the Palestinian dispossession after World War II, the volume also examines the plight of the nearly 4 million Iraqis who have fled their country or been internally displaced since 1990. Papers are grouped around four related themes--displacement, repatriation, identity in exile, and refugee policy – providing a significant contribution to this developing, highly pertinent area of contemporary research.
Introduction/Epilogue
This volume explores the extent to which forced migration has become a defining feature of life in the Middle East and North Africa. The papers present research on refugees, internally displaced peoples, as well as 'those who remain', from Afghanistan in the East to Morocco in the West. Dealing with the dispossession and displacement of waves of peoples forced into the region at the end of World War I, and the Palestinian dispossession after World War II, the volume also examines the plight of the nearly 4 million Iraqis who have fled their country or been internally displaced since 1990. Papers are grouped around four related themes--displacement, repatriation, identity in exile, and refugee policy – providing a significant contribution to this developing, highly pertinent area of contemporary research.
Invisible refugees and/or overlapping refugeedom? Protecting Sahrawis and Palestinians displaced by the 2011 Libyan uprising
This article examines the experiences of two North African and Middle Eastern refugee populations (Sahrawis and Palestinians) affected by the 2011 conflict in Libya who have remained largely invisible to the international community. The challenges that they have faced since the outbreak of violence in February 2011, and the nature of international responses to these challenges, highlight a range of interconnected issues on both conceptual and practical dimensions. After outlining the scale and nature of the internal and international displacement arising from the 2011 conflict, and the history of these refugees’ presence in Libya, the article explores whether Sahrawis and Palestinians can be categorised and conceptualised as ‘refugees’ in Libya, given their ‘voluntary’ migration to the country for educational and/or employment purposes. Drawing on a number of historical examples of protection activities by UNHCR for Sahrawi and Palestinian ‘refugee-migrants’, the article explores the potential applicability of a framework that highlights ‘overlapping refugeedoms’ without negating refugees’ agency. Given that neither population has a ‘country of origin’ or effective diplomatic protection, the article then explores which state and non-state actors could be considered to be responsible for their protection in this conflict situation. Finally, analysing the ‘solutions’ promoted for Sahrawi and Palestinian refugees in this context leads to an assessment of whether such responses can be considered to offer effective protection to these populations. Ultimately, the article examines a range of protection gaps that emerge from these groups’ experiences during the 2011 North African uprisings, arguing in favour of a critical assessment of the protection mechanisms in place to support refugees who ‘voluntarily’ migrate for economic and educational purposes. Such an evaluation is particularly important given policy-makers’ increasing interest in presenting mobility as a ‘fourth durable solution’.
Conflicting missions? The politics of evangelical humanitarianism in the Sahrawi and Palestinian protracted refugee situations
This paper analyses the contradictory motivations, actions and implications of a network of American Evangelical organizations which is actively involved in humanitarian and political projects directly affecting two groups of protracted refugees in the Middle East and North Africa: Sahrawis and Palestinians. Following a brief introduction to typologies and key characteristics of ‘faith-based’ and ‘Evangelical’ humanitarian organisations, this paper examines how, why and to what effect American Evangelical groups provide relief aid to Sahrawi refugees in their Algerian-based refugee camps, and vocally advocate in favour of the Sahrawi quest for self-determination over the Western Sahara before the US Congress and the United Nations. While this first mode of Evangelical humanitarian and political intervention explicitly invokes a human rights discourse and international legal frameworks, the second case-study underscores the ways in which these same actors effectively render Palestinian refugees invisible, implicitly negating international law and UN resolutions enshrining their right to return and the right to meaningful Palestinian self-determination. Ultimately, the paper addresses the implications of these contradictory Evangelical interventions through reference to international humanitarian principles, interrogating the proposed ‘humanitarian,’ ‘political’ and ‘religious’ dynamics in such initiatives.
When the self becomes other: representations of gender, Islam and the politics of survival in the Sahrawi refugee camps
This volume explores the extent to which forced migration has become a defining feature of life in the Middle East and North Africa. The papers present research on refugees, internally displaced peoples, as well as 'those who remain', from Afghanistan in the East to Morocco in the West. Dealing with the dispossession and displacement of waves of peoples forced into the region at the end of World War I, and the Palestinian dispossession after World War II, the volume also examines the plight of the nearly 4 million Iraqis who have fled their country or been internally displaced since 1990. Papers are grouped around four related themes - displacement, repatriation, identity in exile, and refugee policy - providing a significant contribution to this developing, highly pertinent area of contemporary research.
No refuge: Palestinians in Lebanon
Suleiman’s paper sets out the restricted legal, political, economic and social conditions within which Palestinian refugees in Lebanon are forced to live. More than any of the other four populations under the UNRWA mandate, Palestinian refugees in Lebanon are deprived of basic civil and human rights. In the aftermath of the Nahr el-Bared debates regarding its rebuilding and the possible association with tawteen, Suleiman maintains that Palestinians in Lebanon do not wish to be naturalised or integrated; they do not wish to give up their claims to Palestine but simply seek to “mitigate their destitution and alleviate their day-to-day suffering.” The paper by Mansour and Yassin places the rebuilding of the Nahr el-Bared camp within the current concerns on the ‘global war on terror’ and the securitisation debates which link refugees to threats to national security. The paper asks whether post-conflict reconstruction is designed to restore refugee protection - as the state claims - or to implement greater control, confinement and exclusion. Using Foucault’s framework of governmentality, it analyses the Lebanese state’s protection and reconstruction policy and practice over Nahr el-Bared camp. It concludes that, while the reconstruction plan for the camp in strictly technical terms is a model of innovation, it has serious implications for the rights and protection of refugees.
Unprotected among brothers: Palestinians in the Arab world
This paper aims to trace the political and legal ripple effects of the Nakbah – the mass displacement of Palestinians from historic Palestine beginning in 1948 – for those refugees who found refuge in Arab states outside the bounds of international attempts at their assistance and protection. It will present a legal and political analysis of ‘protection gaps’ – in short, the lack of international and national protection that should, in principle, be guaranteed to all refugees. In doing so, this paper explores the relation between the foreign policy agendas of autocratic Arab states and their domestic policies, which are aimed at controlling and, often, marginalizing Palestinian refugees. It argues for a layered and intertwined political and legal analysis, with particular emphasis on the impact of autocratic governance on human rights and the role of foreign policy in host state treatment of Palestinians.