Occupied Lives

Maintaining Integrity in a Palestinian Refugee Camp in the West Bank

Nina Gren

• Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781617976728
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

Intense media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict does not necessarily enhance one's knowledge or understanding of the Palestinians; on the contrary they are more often than not reduced to either victims or perpetrators. Similarly, while many academic studies devote considerable effort to analyzing the political situation in the occupied territories, there have been few sophisticated case studies of Palestinian refugees living under Israeli rule. An ethnographic study of Palestinian refugees in Dheisheh refugee camp, just south of Bethlehem, Occupied Lives looks closely at the attempts of the camp inhabitants to survive and bounce back from the profound effects of political violence and Israeli military occupation on their daily lives.Based on the author's extensive fieldwork conducted inside the camp, including a year during 2003-2004 when she lived in Dheisheh, this study examines the daily efforts of camp inhabitants to secure survival and meaning during the period of the al-Aqsa Intifada. It argues that the political developments and experiences of extensive violence at the time, which left most refugees outside of direct activism, caused many camp inhabitants to disengage from traditional forms of politics. Instead, they became involved in alternative practices aimed at maintaining their sense of social worth and integrity, by focusing on processes to establish a 'normal' order, social continuity, and morality. Nina Gren explores these processes and the ambiguities and dilemmas that necessarily arose from them and the ways in which the political and the existential are often intertwined in Dheisheh.Combining theoretical readings with field-based case study, this book will be invaluable to scholars and students of social anthropology, sociology, international relations, refugee studies, religious studies, and Middle East studies, as well as to anyone with an interest in the Israeli-Palestinian issue.

1

Dheisheh as a Social and Political Space

In this chapter, I discuss Dheisheh within the specific context of the Bethlehem area and provide the reader with some basic facts about the camp. In particular, I explain how and why Dheishehans have been political active. I also outline the political developments and experiences of large-scale violence during the al-Aqsa Intifada that made many of my interlocutors turn away from traditional political activism and instead focus on alternative practices to sustain their sense of social worth.

Dheishehans and other refugees in the occupied territories insist that they are ‘refugees in their own land’ (cf. Hamzeh 2001). They say this because this part of the Palestinian pattern of dispersal follows what would nowadays be considered ‘internal displacement.’³ Many of those displaced remained inside the land they fled, in this case inside the British Mandate of Palestine. Some refugees in the occupied territories live very close to their former homes.

A peculiarity of Palestinian refugees is that they have their own United Nations agency, the United Nations Relief and Work Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). Dheisheh is one of fifty-nine Palestinian refugee camps administered by UNRWA that still exist in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria (Rosenfeld 2004: 2f). Today, more than an estimated third of Palestinians in the West Bank are registered with UNRWA. One-fifth of those are camp refugees, while others are self-settled (PLO 2000: 7).⁴

By registering with UNRWA, people obtained ration cards, which proved that they were Palestinian refugees (cf. Peteet 2005; Schiff 1995). Relief distribution thus literally led to an establishment of refugeeness. From the start, the lost village was used as a unit for organizing and distributing relief and village headmen served as intermediaries with aid organizations (Peteet 2005: 71). UNRWA inherited refugee lists compiled by agencies already in the field and then carried out investigations to determine who was in need of relief (Schiff 1995: 22). In a gendered fashion, each male family head was issued a registration card for himself and his dependents. Even today, a refugee woman married to a non-refugee will hence have children who are not registered as Palestinian refugees. This refugee classification has persisted since the predicament of the refugees remains unresolved and since Palestinian refugees continue to rely on assistance at times of emergency. UNRWA has also been despised among Dheishehans for being part of the United Nations that initially voted for a partition of the homeland,⁵ as well as its inability to implement political rights for the refugees. Fraught with contradictions, the agency came to stand for survival and social continuity as well as for new identities.

Dheishehans, like other Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, remain stateless. While Jordan was in control of the West Bank (1948–67), most camp inhabitants obtained Jordanian passports (Jarrar 2003: 76). Since the beginning of Israeli occupation, they have held Israeli identity cards, which are still vital for passing through Israeli checkpoints and roadblocks as well as obtaining permits for work and travel. Today, Dheishehans also have Palestinian passports, which have been issued by the Palestinian Authority (PA) since 1995. The PA has never had the authority of a state, but only over self-ruling areas. Since Israel controls all border crossings, Palestinian passports are useless without an Israeli travel permit. A few Dheishehans acquired foreign passports after living abroad. Others had Jerusalem identity cards distributed by the Israeli authorities because they at some point lived or were registered in that city (Boqai and Rempel 2004: 120). In addition to refugee cards, Dheishehans thus hold multiple administrative tags, as former semi-Jordanians, as occupied subjects of Israel, and as semi-citizens of the PA.

The Order of Things in Dheisheh

Walking down the stairs that led from the apartment of a young married couple, Ahmed and Hanan, I passed by the door of Ahmed’s parents’ apartment, which was on the ground floor of the same building. The oldest part of the house was built in concrete in the early 1950s shortly after the establishment of the camp. Over the years the house had been extended with several rooms and a new floor to accommodate the growing family and later on Ahmed’s household. After graduating from high school Hanan took a secretarial course. Now, she was twenty-eight years old and a full-time housewife and mother of three. When I left her apartment, she was about to put her youngest daughter to sleep. As I carefully closed the gate to the family’s small garden so as not to disturb them, I could spot the village of Doha on the hillside on the other side of the road that leads from Jerusalem to Hebron. Many former camp residents live in Doha, including several of Ahmed’s older brothers, since the lack of space for housing in the camp has become intolerable. Ahmed, who was some years older than his wife, had not studied after graduation but had started his own business in town with one of his brothers. Their business went reasonably well and Ahmed was therefore able to afford a rather stylish apartment.

Further away the lights from the houses and streets in Bayt Jala, a predominantly Christian town, were glimmering in the dark. Beyond that town, there is an Israeli settlement, Gilo, which, although erected on occupied territory, is increasingly considered part of greater Jerusalem by Israelis. I took the alley that passed by the house of Hanan’s sister and her husband. The light was on in the kitchen but I could not see anyone. A feral cat sneaked away as I approached some plastic bags that had been put out to be picked up early the next morning by young men paid a meager salary by UNRWA to collect garbage. I could hear drumming, clapping, and singing from far away; there was a wedding going on somewhere.

By now, I had arrived at one of the roads that led down to the main entrance to the camp. On the wall of one of the houses was a painted picture of a young boy and it was surrounded by flowers. Underneath the picture, some words had been written in both English and Arabic: “Martyr of Childhood and Suffering.” The camp is filled with graffiti and posters like this that serve as reminders and memorials for violent deaths, but they are also political statements and markers of resistance. I avoided the road and took another alley. Some young children were playing soccer between the houses. From behind the wall of a hidden garden, a huge tree reached out over the path and the birds in its branches were filling the air with their song. Further down in the camp, the alleys between the houses became narrower and the gardens were smaller with the overcrowding. Despite the lack of space, there was always some family extending its house or putting in a new window and the sound of construction was constant.

At the end of the passage, one of the camp’s three mosques came into sight. It would soon be time for evening prayers. As I turned into the small street where I had been living for almost a year, I greeted Abu Ibrahim, who was sitting on the doorstep to his tiny grocery shop as usual. Some minutes later I entered the home of my hosts. ‘Amti (my ‘aunt,’ my hostess) and her elderly mother were in front of the television watching the news. “There’s a military operation in Gaza again,” said ‘amti. “How many?” I asked. “Fourteen martyrs, fourteen so far.” My host sister came out of the kitchen carrying a tray with small cups and a coffee pot. “Here you are!” she said, handing us each a cup. As I sat down on the sofa, ‘amti shook her head, and whispered, “No, no, no.” The same bloodstained pictures were shown again and again while the reporter’s voice described the order of things in Palestine.

*

Urban Palestinian refugee camps like Dheisheh look like city slums in the so-called Third World. This is not unique to the Palestinian case, but housing in refugee camps or resettlement areas for displaced populations often has distinct physical characteristics that distinguishes it from homes in surrounding places (Zetter 1991: 52ff). The physical character of Dheisheh had been even more visible when the refugees lived in tents during the first years of camp life. The older camp inhabitants recalled that the school had been in one tent, the medical center in another, and the United Nations distribution center in a third. Abu Amir, a man who worked with the local authorities in Bethlehem, explained: “My family lived more than eight years in a tent. I was born in a tent in 1953. And because of that I have problems in my chest, it’s like asthma in my chest. And I have difficulty breathing.” Only later did UNRWA provide a basic housing unit for each family. With time, new buildings have eaten up the formerly spacious gardens that can be seen in older photographs of Dheisheh (Rosenfeld 2004), diminishing the possibility of families sustaining themselves through some subsistence farming. Today, the infrastructure of the camp is inadequate for the swelling population of Dheisheh. There are problems with the sewage system and refuse collection, as well as with frequent power cuts in winter and water shortages in summer. The United Nations-run school is overcrowded, and the lack of space for extending houses and communal buildings in the camp is alarming.

Dheisheh is virtually a society of its own. The camp contains butcher shops, a bakery, gift shops, hairdressers, many small groceries, and several Internet cafés. One can buy clothes, shoes, cell phones, and television sets in the camp that are cheaper than in downtown Bethlehem. Down by the main road there are larger supermarkets and a driving school. Furniture is sold on the opposite side of the main road next to a pool café and a restaurant. There are two gas stations and a garden center nearby. Outside the camp, a market selling meat and vegetables is situated on the way to Bethlehem. UNRWA provides basic services free of charge to the camp inhabitants, for instance in the form of primary and preparatory schooling, a kindergarten, a women’s center, and a medical center. Several NGOs also run kindergartens, sport clubs, and activities for older children. The best-known, Ibdaa, had a huge building containing a guesthouse and a restaurant as well as space for cultural activities at the time of my fieldwork. In addition, a new private medical center had been set up with foreign aid. A recreation center, al-Feneiq, had been opened on the camp’s hilltop and it had a small entrance fee. Al-Feneiq had an assembly hall for gatherings and film screenings as well as an outdoor park with playgrounds and a cafeteria. This place quickly became popular in the hot summer months.

Although the families in Dheisheh have farming backgrounds, nowadays people work in all sorts of professions. There are teachers, construction workers, nurses, doctors, social workers, clerks, mechanics, shop owners, seamstresses, carpenters, taxi drivers, academics, hotel employees, and so on. Many of the employees in local UNRWA institutions are refugees from the camp. Considering that the older generations of camp inhabitants, particularly women, are illiterate or have only a few years of schooling, today’s camp residents have had remarkable educational success, largely thanks to UNRWA schools as well as universities in the Middle East and the West Bank. Rosenfeld (2004) explains that the division of labor within Dheishehan families has helped some family members to study thanks to their parents’ and older siblings’ wage labor. Many Dheishehans have high school diplomas or higher education. This means that although the majority of the camp residents, with the exception of some in-marrying women, have a rural refugee background, the camp has considerable diversity in terms of social class and economic means. An increasing trend since the 1990s has been that people with economic means move out of the camp after buying land and building houses in neighboring villages and towns (Gren 2009). This implies that the socioeconomic diversity in the camp could have been even more pronounced had fewer economically secure refugees moved away.

As has been widely noted (for example, World Bank 2003; PCBS 2006b; UNRWA 2006), the al-Aqsa Intifada hit the Palestinian economy hard and poverty increased in the occupied territories. At the time of my fieldwork, male manual workers seemed to be the most at risk of unemployment because they had been so dependent on the Israeli labor market as day wage laborers (see Rosenfeld 2004; Bornstein 2002a). In 2001–2002, men’s unemployment rates in Gaza and the West Bank rose to unprecedented levels as tens of thousands lost their jobs in Israel. On average, refugees, both men and women, endured unemployment rates 3 to 4 percent higher than those of non-refugees in 2000–2005 (UNRWA 2006: 14f). The increased unemployment and loss of income among Palestinian men put pressure on other family members, both children and women, to find employment (Amnesty International 2005: 13). At the checkpoints around Bethlehem and downtown, children, many of them from refugee camps, sell candies or home-made snacks to provide their families with some income. Although only 16.6 percent of Palestinian women were reportedly engaged in paid employment outside their homes in 2007 (PCBS 2007b: Table 7), women from Dheisheh (not considered much of a threat by the Israel Border Police) could enter Israel more easily than men from the camp and find work, for instance in Israeli factories. Many women also had an income-generating activity that they combined with being housewives. For people with some formal education, there were more work options in the West Bank, even if they were poorly remunerated. Even more vulnerable to the economic recession were households in which the main breadwinner was sick, dead, or imprisoned. Like elsewhere in the occupied territories, female-headed households in particular found themselves in a precarious economic situation (Hasiba 2004; PCBS 2007a: 16).

The Bethlehem Area

Refugee camps such as Dheisheh are today largely integrated into their local districts, although research on the occupied territories has conventionally divided the population into city, village, and camp dwellers, assuming some homogeneity within each location (Taraki 2006: xxvi). Taraki notes that because of the marginalization of agriculture in the occupied territories sharp differences between rural and urban areas are being blurred, while social instead of political divisions between camps on the one hand and towns or villages on the other are becoming increasingly untenable. “Many of the urban refugee camps are part and parcel of the social fabric of the towns, even though they bear the markings of exclusion and separation as do so many other poor urban communities and neighborhoods the world over,” writes Taraki (2006: xxvi). In addition, there are increasing differences between the major Palestinian cities and their surroundings due to the diverse political and economic conditions that are outcomes of the restricted mobility enforced by Israel, but also due to different ethos characterizing each city (Taraki 2006).

Dheisheh is located in the Bethlehem governorate, which has some 176,000 inhabitants consisting of the town of Bethlehem and two traditionally Christian towns, Bayt Sahour and Bayt Jala, some larger villages like al-Khader, Artas, and al-Doha, and a number of smaller ones. Besides Dheisheh, there are two other refugee camps, Aida and al-Azza, in the Bethlehem area (PCBS 2008: Table 26). One description of the area notes, “Once a bustling cultural and spiritual centre hosting tourists and pilgrims from around the world, Bethlehem has become an isolated town, with boarded up shops and abandoned development projects. The age-old link between Jerusalem and Bethlehem is nearly severed as a result of Israeli policies” (OCHA and UNSCO 2004: 20).

Prior to the al-Aqsa Intifada, the inhabitants of the area, especially Christians in urban Bethlehem but also Dheishehans, had for centuries benefited from incomes generated by tourism and had therefore been less dependent on the Israeli labor market than inhabitants of other parts of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. With the decrease in tourism due to the unrest during the al-Aqsa Intifada, the economy quickly deteriorated. The highest rate of unemployment in all the West Bank was found in the Bethlehem governorate in 2007 (PCBS 2008: 38). It is possible, however, that poverty was reduced thanks to the many international and local NGOs based in Bethlehem. The value of remittances is also far higher than in other areas since many migrant relatives of the Christian population live in Europe, the United States, and Latin America. These migrants have a higher standard of living than migrant relatives in countries like Jordan, where many Dheishehans have family.

Class and religion remain markers of differentiation between social groups within Palestinian society. The economic differences between camp refugees and other Palestinians persist. UNRWA (2006: 37) reports that the burden of poverty, however it is measured, has been borne disproportionately by refugees in the post-2000 period. When it comes to lack of physical security, refugees also seem to carry a heavy burden. According to the Palestinian refugee organization BADIL (Boqai and Rempel 2004: xv), it has been estimated that more than half of the Palestinian fatalities related to the Israeli occupation in 2003 were refugees. Bethlehem is indeed a governorate where people of different socioeconomic and to some degree religious backgrounds seldom interact. Muslims from landowning families in Bethlehem or with a family history as urbanites would not dream of marrying a camp refugee. However, refugees who have moved out of the camps and non-refugees from the lower classes in neighboring villages and towns do (cf. Jarrar 2003: 112ff). The few marriages that occur between Palestinians of Muslim and Christian faith normally create large and violent local conflicts (Bowman 2001).⁶

The al-Aqsa Intifada brought great demographic change to the Bethlehem district, reducing local Palestinian religious diversity. Before the outbreak of the uprising, Muslims and Christians each constituted about 50 percent of the population in urban Bethlehem, while Muslims counted for the overwhelming majority in the district as a whole, as they do in other parts of the occupied territories (OCHA and UNSCO 2004: 2, building on PCBS 1997). With the economic and political instability that resulted from the uprising, many Christians left for other countries. It has been estimated that one-tenth of the Christians in Bethlehem migrated by the end of 2004 (OCHA and UNSCO 2004: 18). When identity politics become increasingly Islamized, as they have partly been in the Palestinian territories, a Christian minority may have problems maintaining a sense of belonging to the nation. In addition to a long tradition of Christian migration and well-established contacts with kin in other countries, the growth of Islamist parties combined with some holding Western citizenships and the deteriorating situation may serve as an explanation for the rise in migration among Christians. Latent religious tensions exist and occasional conflicts between Palestinian Muslims and Christians sometimes erupt (Bowman 2001). This exodus of Christians was a frequent topic of discussion in Dheisheh because in Palestinian nationalist discourse leaving has been portrayed as a form of betrayal. However, as I will argue in the next chapter, the desperate situation caused by the al-Aqsa Intifada also meant that Dheishehans wanted to leave, either temporarily or for good.

The Dynamics of Lingering Villages

As for many displaced groups, the past and lost places have taken on particular importance for Palestinian refugees. The disintegration of agricultural life and the imposition of a camp refugee tag have prompted responses such as the reassertion of preexisting village identities. Turton reminds us of “the power places have to call forth an emotional response in us, a power which is especially potent when skilfully and artfully linked to the ideology of nationalism” (2005: 258). Lost Palestinian villages are infused with such power.

The past—it was beautiful. We used to cook khubb...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Maps
• Chronology of Events
• Introduction
• 1. Dheisheh as a Social and Political Space
• 2. Living with Violence and Insecurity
• 3. The Making of New Homes
• 4. Reconstituting a Moral Order
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References