The Palestinian refugee camps: the promise of ‘ruin’ and ‘loss’

Abstract

This article aims to reconceptualize the aggregate ‘Palestinian refugee camps’ in light of the political reality from which the refugees emerged, and take into consideration the new space that took shape, characterized by processes of destruction and dispossession of civil status. The article will focus specifically on the period 1948–1967, and examine these processes by using tools from architectural theory and history. The article contends that the architecture of the refugee camps acts as a type of unwritten rigid law, outlining the boundary between ‘public’ and ‘private’ realms – the sphere of the polis and that of the household and family (Arendt [1958] 1998, The Human Condition, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 28) – through continuous processes of construction and deconstruction.

Keywords::

• refugees
• camps
• architecture
• private
• public
• destruction

Acknowledgements

I thank my supervisors Dr Marina Epstein-Pliouchtch and Assistant Prof. Alona Nitzan-Shiftan at the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning in the Technion, and Assistant Prof. Ariella Azoulay at the Department of Comparative Literature and Modern Culture and Media, Brown University. All three have been a constant source of support and sensible advice. I also thank Prof. Dr Ing Philipp Misselwitz who heads the Department of International Urbanism at the Insttutei of Urban Planning, University of Stuttgart, Germany. He provided me the maps and the plans as a basic part of the documents and materials of my research. The materials prepared in frame of ‘Camp Development Pilot Research Project – cooperation between University of Stuttgart and UNRWA, 2006–2008.’

Notes

^1. This article is based on extensive research which I conducted between 2006 and 2010, in which I described, in detail, the spatial history of the formation of the Palestinian refugee camps and their development from an architectural point of view, between the years 1948 to 1967. On this, see Abreek-Zubiedat (2010).

^2. There is a disagreement regarding the number of refugees created by war, and the number remains a subject of dispute between Israel, the Arabs, the Britain Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the United Nations Reconciliation Commission, and the US State Department. Israel has upheld the lowest number – some 500,000 refugees. According to the UN Reconciliation Commission, the number is about 800,000, the UNRWA estimated the number at approximately 726,000, while the British Foreign Office claimed the number of refugees was between 600,000 and 700,000. For a more detailed discussion in relation to refugees and their numbers, see Morris ([1986] 2005, 397–399). Estimates of the number of emptied villages range from 356 (Kimmerling 1974, 162) to 531 (Abu-Sitta 2000).

^3. For Bishara (2003, 156), for example, the moment of expulsion can not only be summed up in the destruction of villages and cities or the eviction of Palestinian residents from their physical and metaphorical civil status, but also in the destruction of the local residents' Arab Palestinian national project. Bishara argues that Israeli modernism caused the failure, historically, of Palestinian modernism. The dream of moderna was also destroyed, together with the physical destruction: the dream of the Arab elite and middle class living between the two world wars, of creating an independent Arab nationality, and of implementing the ideas of modernism under the rule of the British Mandate (Bishsara 2009, 140).

^4. When Azoulay describes the ‘destruction,’ ‘the non-governed,’ and ‘refugees,’ and places them within one sphere of action, she instead suggests defining the refugees as non-governed, contrasts the definition of Arendt (1966, 296), who defines the phenomenon of ‘statelessness’ as the result of a process, ending with any relation to the community. Individuals ‘lacking citizenship’ are those who no longer belong to any community.

^5. The description of the years of fear and despair experienced by the refugees during the 2 years of the war, 1947–1949, based on in-depth interviews about the refugee camps conducted for the study (see Note 1).

^6. Despite the humanitarian concern of various international bodies, the political–economic concern had increased to stabilize the situation in the Middle East. The official Israeli position had always been that there could be no returning of the refugees to Israeli territories and that the only solution to the problem was their resettlement in the Arab states or elsewhere. To this end, several economic–architectural plans were implemented to resettle the refugees. Among the various plans was the establishing of the UNRWA, by recommendation of Gordon Clapp. Some of these plans are: McGhee's plan, in cooperation with Clapp in 1949, to resettle the Palestinian refugees in Trans-Jordan, Syria and Iraq; John Blandford's plan in 1951; John Foster Dulles' plan in 1953, when Dulles sent Ambassador Eric Johnston to discuss the refugees' resettlement in the Jordan Valley and in Sinai; Eisenhower's plan in 1956; and Hammarskjold's plan in 1959 (Forsythe 1971, Shadid 1981, Hazboun 1996; Tonini 1999). In addition, there have been various Israeli plans to resettle the refugees. For these plans, see my research (see Note 1).

^7. Bishara (2009, 141) refers to balad in the narrow sense as the village, safeguarded later in the camps themselves, but the political significance of the homeland requires the plural: bilad. Returning to ‘balad’ is returning to the village, and returning to bilad, is returning to Palestine.

^8. From the UNRWA's memorandum, 23 December 1969, ‘Definition of a Refugee,’ Amman HQ, RE 100. This definition was revised many times, in 1952, 1954, 1957, 1961, 1965, 1967, and 1975. Today, the UNRWA's working definition for the Palestinian refugee is as follow: ‘A Palestinian refugee is a person whose normal residence was Palestine for a minimum of two years preceding the outbreak of the conflict in 1948 and who, as a result of the conflict, has lost both his home and his means of livelihood.’

^9. The description is according to interviews conducted with refugees from different camps in the west bank and with the UNRWA engineer, Mostafa Abu Bahaa, in Rammala, West Bank. For more details, see Note 1.

^10. In addition to Jordan, Saudi Arabia in 1951 and Iraq in 1953 hosted a relatively small number of refugees and gave them citizenship and complete equality, apart for voting rights (Plascov 1981).

^11. A family of four to six persons received one rod to support the tent. For 6–10 persons, the UNRWA supplied two rods. This rod was known as ‘zaamoot’ among the refugees themselves.

^12. For a discussion of the ‘sovereignty’ over refugee camps, see, for example, Diken's discussion, which is based on Bauman's perception of the refugee as a ‘zombie,’ and on Agamben and his definition of the refugee as ‘homo sacer’ (Bauman 2002, 116; Agamben 1998, 104–105 quoted in Diken 2004, 83–84). The existence of the camp is equal to the existence of the ‘bare life,’ it is the not-city (Malkki 2002). Alsyyad and Roy (2006, 16) argue that camps as spaces of exception are ‘the “constitutive inside” of cities.’ This discussion comes into sharper focus when considering Butler's own attitude to the specific case of the Palestinian refugees and to the Nakba that had befallen them. According to Butler, the Palestinians had been expelled or transferred in order to found a State. This is a mechanism that allows complete management of exclusion beyond the boundaries of the political space. The Palestinian refugees are in no way relegated to the ‘bare life’ – this is a life steeped in power (Butler and Spivak 2007, 7–9).

^13. This description relies on interviews with Dheisheh refugees conducted in the framework of my research, on their memories of the camp's first years, in addition to an interview with a UNWRA engineer, Mustafa Abu Bahaa. See Note 1. Also for further discussion, see Plascov (1981, 53).

^14. The refugees identified each other according to these same neighborhood names, not according to the UNWRA's system of numbered tents. The refugees tried, through these activities, to reconstruct the village space lost to them and to defend themselves from succumbing once again to this same loss.

^15. These interviews are part of the interviews conducted for this study (see Note 1) with professionals and stakeholders formerly or presently active in the camps.

^16. ‘Resettlement’ practices were applied mainly in Europe during the 1950s and even the 1960s; only during the 1970s were ‘resettlement’ operations carried out in Latin America, Africa, and later in South-East Asia.

^17. According to the architect Ian Davis, even though there are no plans, maps or handbooks showing camps that developed as a result of the period of the two world wars, a period that was characterized by waves of refugees, it is, in any case, possible to point out a settlement that was shaped by Morgenthau for the Greek refugees in the 1920s and Alvar Aalto, marking a kind of beginning of a model of planning and design for a shelter for displaced persons, a prototype of a shelter which could contain a large family. This plan was made following the blitz in London in September 1940 (Davis 1977, 87, quoted in Kennedy 2008, 78–79).

^18. Mount Artasse is the mountain where the Dheisheh camp is located.

^19. This approach is reminiscent of the approach that was prevalent in the early congresses of the International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM). According to Mumford (2000, 56), for example, there is no better idea than that of Le Corbusier and his perception of the city garden, which meets the vision of rational planning. Even during the 1930s and immediately after its third congress, CIAM focuses on the idea of the ‘functional city,’ offering planning based on ‘zoning,’ the separation between ‘private’ and ‘public’ spaces and on rational planning ideas (Mumford 2000, 59–66).

^20. Hammarskjöld suggested solving the refugee ‘problem’ by including them in the process of developing the entire region, particularly given the capital surplus accumulated by oil-producing countries. To achieve this, UNRWA was required to develop educational and occupational training programs. See the source in Note 1 for further discussion.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Fatina Abreek-Zubiedat

Fatina Abreek-Zubiedat is an architect, and a partner in Zubieadat Architects Office, in Sakhneen, Israel. Currently, she is conducting a research on the development of architectural culture beyond the Green Line as part of her Ph.D. studies at the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Design, in the Technion.