Beyond refugeeness: complex subjectivities in Palestinian refugee camps

ABSTRACT

This article explores Palestinian refugeeness to argue for a more complex understanding of refugee subjectivity. The subjectivities of Palestinian refugees – and especially of those from the refugee camps – have been informed by their participation in national politics. Therefore, Palestinian refugees, while embodying experiences of violence, displacement and exclusion much like other refugee communities, have also been emphatically seen through their political agencies. In this article, I aim to complicate the emphasis on political subjectivity and explore Palestinian refugee subjectivity as complex, multidimensional, and contradictory. By narrating ethnographic encounters with two of my interlocutors, I demonstrate that subjectivities emerge not only from their politicized position as Palestinian refugees nor from the camp spaces they dwell in but from their complex and mundane relationalities that are neither static nor coherent. By emphasizing this fluid complexity, the aim is to acknowledge refugee subjectivities as multidimensional and fragile formations imbued with internal tensions that emerge from multiple and contradictory desires and from a sense of self that is not reducible to refugeeness.

RESUMEN

Las prácticas fronterizas geopolíticas afectan no sólo a los migrantesy refugiados, sino también a los animales, al medio ambiente y a lascomunidades indígenas. Pero las fronteras metafóricas tambiénexisten en el interior y se imponen a todos. Estas incluyen fronteras emocionales, psíquicas y culturales que limitan las libertades. Esteartículo examina las solidaridades potenciales y las políticasmultiescalar para construir una praxis abolicionista arraigada enesta noción expansiva de fronteras y nuestras luchas colectivas paracruzarlas o abolirlas por completo. Examina la exposición de arteBorderXerde la artista estadounidense Patricia Vázquez Gómez, expuesta porprimera vez en Portland, Oregón, EE. UU., en 2019, para desarrollarun análisis geográfico de los “borderXers” (cruza-fronteras)que operan a escalas que van desde la carne y cuerpo, la comunidad, yhasta lo transnacional. La artista utiliza material fotográfico,instalación, texto y de video para conectar las propias experienciasdel público sobre las fronteras impuestas en sus cuerpos y psiquescon las geografías materiales de las zonas fronterizas entre EstadosUnidos y México. Estas fronteras limitan tanto la libertad demovimiento como la libertad de estar en relación y comunidad con losdemás. Estas obras perturban las nociones de dominio de fronteras yrevelan posibilidades para rehacer las relacionalidades fronterizasexcluyentes. Sostengo que la estética de la exposición desarrollauna perspectiva abolicionista sobre las fronteras que excede losllamados explícitos del artista a “fronteras abiertas”.

RÉSUMÉ

Les pratiques de frontières géopolitiques n’ont pas seulement desrépercussions pour les migrants et les réfugiés, mais aussi pourles animaux non humains, les environnements et les communautés indigènes. Cependant,les frontières métaphoriques existent aussi à l’intérieur ets’imposent à tous. Celainclut les limites culturelles, psychiques et émotionnelles quifreinent les libertés. Cetarticle étudie les solidarités possibles et les politiques multiscalaires liées à l’établissement d’une praxisabolitionniste ancrée dans cette large notion de frontières, ainsique nos luttes collectives pour les franchir ou les abolir. Ils’appuie sur l’exposition BorderXerde Patricia Vázquez Gómez, artiste qui vit aux États-Unis, qui apris place en 2019 à Portland, en Oregon pour développer uneanalyse géographique des « borderXers » (les passeurs defrontières) qui fonctionne sur différentes échelles, de la chair,au corps, à la communauté, jusqu’au transnational. Patricia Vázquez Gómez se sert decréations vidéographiques, textuelles, photographiques et de miseen scène pour établir une connexion entre les expériencespersonnelles du public face aux frontières imposées à leurs corpset leurs psychiques avec la géographie matérielle de la frontièreentre les États-Unis et le Mexique. Ceslimites s’imposent sur la liberté du mouvement ainsi que sur lacapacité de pouvoir être en rapport et en communauté avec lesautres. Cesœuvres dérangent les notions dominantes et dominatrices defrontières et révèlent des possibilités de refabriquer lesrelations d’exclusion frontalières. Jesoutiens que l’esthétique de l’exposition présente uneperspective abolitionniste des frontières qui va plus loin que lesdemandes explicites de l’artiste pour « l’ouverture desfrontières ».

KEYWORDS:

• Palestinian refugees
• subjectivity
• refugee camps
• complex personhood

PALABRAS CLAVE:

• fronteras
• abolición
• ambiente
• no humano
• arte

MOTS CLEFS:

• frontières
• abolition
• environnement
• non-humain
• art

Introduction

Palestinian refugees from the refugee camps have traditionally epitomized the political resistance and the struggle for the liberation of Palestine. In the 1960s and the 70s, the camp refugees formed a large body of fedayeen (freedom fighters), as the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) operated in and through the camps first in Jordan and later in Lebanon. The armed resistance electrified the camp spaces and evoked national pride among the refugees by being able to challenge Israel (Khalili, 2007; Peteet, 2005; Sayigh, 1978), whose settler colonial violence had caused Palestinians’ mass displacements first in the 1948 Nakba, the ethnic cleansing that accompanied the founding of Israel, and again in 1967 when Israel occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the Six-Day War. In these occupied areas it was and is, again, the camp refugees who have organized prominently to resist the Israeli occupation. Due to this active participation in different forms of resistance, ‘the sons of the camp’ has emerged as a positive (yet gendered, see e.g. Kanafani, 2008) subjectivity of political commitment and the camp spaces function as markers for national politics for liberation.

Consequently, in unpacking the Palestinian refugee subjectivity, research has shed light on how the camp refugees have come to serve as symbols for national claims (Allan, 2014, p. 45; Feldman, 2015; Pérez, 2021) and how the refugee camps form political spaces that influence the production of Palestinian refugee subjectivity (Abourahme, 2014; Ramadan, 2009, 2013). Research has also explored the role of humanitarian apparatuses (Feldman, 2015; Peteet, 2005) and the legal, economic, and social exclusion that the Palestinian refugee camps embody (Oesch, 2017; Ramadan & Fregonese, 2017). Furthermore, the question of subjectivity has emerged in discussions on everyday dimensions of Palestinian refugee lives (e.g. Achilli, 2014; Gren, 2015; Kelly, 2008; Pérez, 2018), even though in these explorations, the subjectivity has seldomly been at the forefront of analysis. If it has, it has remained in the frame of refugeeness, camps, and political agency even if the overemphasis on resistance and formal politics has been challenged (Achilli, 2015; Feldman, 2012b; Peteet, 2005).

Hence, there is a prevalence of discussing Palestinian refugee subjectivities either through national politics of resistance or through the political and social exclusion the refugees face. In this article, the aim is to look beyond these aspects to underline the complex subjectivities of the Palestinian camp dwellers. This is done to acknowledge Palestinian refugees – and refugees in general – as something more than governed bodies or heroic ‘superhuman agents’ (Gordon, 2008, p. 4) who immerse their whole being in resistance. I aim to contribute to the discussions on refugee subjectivities by concentrating specifically on how things other than the camps, resistance, and refugeeness are constitutive of Palestinian refugee subjectivities. The aim is to recognize refugee subjectivity in its full complexity and as always in a state of becoming and thus imbued with incompleteness and contradictions (Simpson, 2017; Tuck, 2009, 2010).

However, my aim is not to completely sideline the political but rather to shift the attention to the complex, multidimensional personhood (Gordon, 2008). While Palestinian national narratives often posit the personal and the political against each other (Allan, 2018), my Palestinian interlocutors negotiated their political commitment amid other aspects of life and self: familial relations, everyday encounters, future aspirations, and personal interests. Hence, their subjectivities encompassed both the political and personal, not in exclusionary but in an entangled, complex manner as different positionalities merged and became differentially highlighter based on the situation.

To do justice to this complexity, I turn to ethnographic examples to untangle the entanglements that constitute a subject. The article proceeds in four sections. In the first part, I dwell on refugee subjectivity. In the second section, I elaborate on the specificities of Palestinian refugee subjectivity. In the third section, I explore the theorization of subjectivity as relational, complex, and multifaceted, and in the rest of the paper, I turn to my Palestinian interlocutors, Nada and Samir, to demonstrate the complex and multidimensional becoming of their subjectivities as Palestinian refugees from the West Bank refugee camps. I conclude by stressing the relevance of recognizing the complexities of subjectivity to complicate the simplifying understanding of what it is to be a refugee.

Understanding complex refugee subjectivity

As Vinh Nguyen (2019) has noted, being a refugee informs one’s experiences, consciousness, and knowledge to an extent that it can be considered to construe a subjectivity of its own, one that goes beyond the legal category of a refugee (also, Coddington, 2023; Ehrkamp, 2017). Refugee subjectivity has been considered, inter alia, vis-à-vis refugee governance (de Vries, 2016; Fontanari, 2019), humanitarian infrastructures (Pascucci, 2019; Tazzioli, 2022), refugee experiences (Häkli et al., 2017; Suerbaum, 2018), and the temporalities of refugeeness (Kallio et al., 2021; Nguyen, 2019), with many of the studies touching several of these themes at once. In recent decades, to complicate the image of refugees as suffering victims of governance, the research on refugee subjectivity has turned to emphasize political agency and political subjectivities (Ataç et al., 2016; Ehrkamp, 2017; Kallio et al., 2019; Polychroniou, 2021).

Approaching refugeeness as a political subjectivity has challenged the assumed passivity of refugees and acknowledged the formative role the experience of becoming and being a refugee has for a person. However, while highlighting certain aspects of a refugee’s self, overemphasis on refugeeness can also end up reducing refugees to this single positionality. Like everyone, refugees are – and aspire to be – multiple things at once. Refugee subjects do not act only from the position of refugeeness but from positions of all the other things refugees simultaneously are – fathers, daughters, university students, aspiring artists, caregivers, and whatnot. These subject positions, I stress, cannot be separated from one another, but they simultaneously inform the sense of self and the relation to the world with fluctuating intensity. They are all simultaneously present in actions people take – or do not take.

In grasping this complexity of being a refugee, the intersectional analysis can present a way to incorporate the multiple positionalities into the discussion. However, having its roots in structuralism, intersectionality has at times been criticized for seeing identities as static and coherent entities (Rice et al., 2019). This view has also been challenged as intersecting subject positions can also be seen as open-ended and flexible (Hopkins, 2019; Rice et al., 2019) and intersectionality as helping us recognize ‘the interplay of our many commonalities and differences’ (Rice et al., 2019, p. 418).

However, intersectionality engages with ‘axes of difference’ and thus usually assumes positionalities as separate from one another. Greg Noble (2009) has warned that overemphasis on key positionalities such as gender, class, race, and ethnicity ‘may lose sight of a more nuanced articulation of […] lived experiences that engages with the complex sociability of […] lives’ (p. 877) and collapse ‘complex forms of situated subjectivities’ (ibid.) to simplifying subject positions. Therefore, I find subjectivity more attuned to the aims of this article, that is, bringing attention to the complex personhood of Palestinian refugees.

Subjectivity as becoming, as I will elaborate, allows us to highlight that we rarely experience positionalities in their ‘pure’ form. While for analytical purposes it can be justified to separate positions such as gender, class and race, in lived reality they are always enmeshed. Accordingly, highlighting refugeeness as a separate subject position – while allowing to acknowledge certain constitutive aspects of self – can simplify the complexity of how refugees experience their refugeeness.

The subjectivities of Palestinian camp dwellers

Compared to communities for whom the experience of becoming a refugee is more recent and who are still adjusting – or refusing to adjust (Suerbaum, 2018) – to their new situation, Palestinian refugee subjectivity is shaped by the decades of exile. It is, hence, the longevity of the Palestinian refugee experience that creates the specific conditions for being a Palestinian refugee. After 75 years of continuing refugeeness, it is fair to say that for Palestinians refugeeness and life in the camp have not been liminal nor temporary experiences (cf. Biehl, 2015; Ramadan, 2013). A great majority of those living in the camps today have been born in them and have thus not personally experienced the displacement. Therefore, rather than a subjectivity framed by rupturing becomings and extensive violence of refugee control and surveillance (Fontanari, 2019; Topak, 2021), Palestinian refugee subjectivity is forged in established communities that continue to be excluded in many ways but that nevertheless have their institutions and ways of communal being.

In the years following the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Nakba which saw approximately 800 000 Palestinians driven from their homes (e.g. Sa’di & Abu-Lughod, 2007), those from less-affluent backgrounds – mainly peasants from villages who lost their livelihood in the displacement – settled to the refugee camps. In 1950, the United Nations Relief and Work Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) was created to cater for the needs of the camp communities under the state sovereigns that took differing stances in positioning the Palestinians. These refugee communities have their own specific experiences of being Palestinian refugees (Järvi, 2021; Sayigh, 2012), but there are also similarities in the ways the camp refugees and camps themselves have come to represent national aspirations.

Research on Palestinian refugee subjectivity has elaborated on the roles of the refugee status and the camp spaces in constituting Palestinian refugee subjectivity. The focus has been, for example, on UNRWA, which both grants official refugee status and is supposed to provide the basic services for those in its registries (Feldman, 2012a, 2015; Marshall, 2023). Among geographers, David Marshall has explored the political subjectivity among Palestinian refugee children in the frame of humanitarian trauma relief projects (Marshall, 2013, 2014), while he has also stressed that the sense of Palestinian refugeeness is developed in the context of ‘their social, symbolic, and material surroundings’ (Marshall, 2023, p. 797). Palestinian refugee camps are part of these surroundings and their role in forging subjectivities has been approached from the perspective of exclusion, governance and control they embody (Abourahme, 2014; Oesch, 2017; Ramadan, 2013) but also from the perspective of everyday life lived in them (Gren, 2015; Peteet, 2005).

Political subjectivity has been emphatically present in the discussions. Researchers have explored subjectivities vis-a-vis different forms of political struggle (Ajour, 2021; Meari, 2014), or considered how traditional political subjectivities centring on resistance movement and formal politics have lost their prevalence and been replaced by another sort of political subjectivities (Achilli, 2014, 2015; Casati, 2016; Salih, 2018). Camp spaces have been part of the elaboration on refugee politics and not only as spaces in which resistance has been organized but also as symbols of displacement. Enforcing Palestinian belonging to historical Palestine by maintaining the connection between the camp refugees and their villages of origin is one example of this (Abourahme, 2014; Abourahme & Hilal, 2009; Khalili, 2004; Marshall, 2023), as is the materialization of the claim for the right to return to the pre-exile homes by the camps. This claim for return has thus become part of the subjectification of the camp refugees (Feldman, 2015).

In studies on refugee subjectivities, the excluded and governed subject has often been placed in opposition to a political subject (Ehrkamp, 2017). In the case of Palestinian refugee subjectivity, however, the political has been empathetically present alongside – and in relation to – the narratives on suffering (Gabiam, 2012; Hammami, 2015; Richter-Devroe, 2013; Sayigh, 2011), as suffering has been incorporated into Palestinian refugees’ politics by using it in claiming rights and recognition (Allen, 2009; Gren, 2015; Marshall, 2014). The question, then, is not how to claim political agency amidst passive suffering but how to acknowledge Palestinian refugees as something more than ‘one-dimensional political subjects’ (Taraki, 2006, p. xi).

Understanding the political is pivotal in making sense of the everyday lives and the power relations embedded in it as Palestinian refugees are necessarily affected by the failures of the national political project (Richter-Devroe, 2021). However, the lives and hence the subjectivities are neither reducible to the political conditions in which refugees live nor to their status as refugees. In other words, Palestinian refugees’ subjectivities encompass aspects that go beyond the idea of political agency. It had evident that my Palestinian refugee interlocutors had multiple desires that drew them to different directions and that both their desires and relational positionalities had changed over time. They negotiated themselves in social and cultural spaces in ways that corresponded to some aspects of shared narratives, but always in a manner that was entangled, contradictory, and partial.

Therefore, research that emphasizes governing, violence, and suffering, on the one hand, or forms of political resistance and other forms of political agency, on the other, should be accompanied by debates on how Palestinian refugees’ subjectivities come into being in ordinary lives that are lived in the ‘unruly mess of material quotidian life’ (Abourahme, 2014). As others have noted, Palestinian refugees are much more than their refugeeness (Barbosa, 2022, p. 114), and therefore kin relations, occupational and educational circumstances, practices of care, hobbies, fields of interest, and aspirations for the future are central in considering their subjectivities. These quotidian aspects of being are part of subject formation just as much as the politics of Palestinian refugeeness. Therefore, to accommodate these different aspects, I turn to discuss the complexity that should be acknowledged when discussing Palestinian refugee subjectivity.

Becoming a complex subject

While refugeeness and the experience of being from a refugee camp surely form part of a refugee’s subjectivity, subjectivity is such a complex phenomenon that it cannot be exhausted by simplified positionalities of dictated subjectification or always abled agencies. Even the meaning of refugeeness cannot be considered as fixed but always in the process of formation, in as much as refugee subjectivities emerge in relation to the changing social, political and cultural relations that keep complexly re-entwining with the sense of self (on changing ‘Palestinianness’, see Sayigh, 2012).

Therefore, refugee subjectivity is not something that can be completely predefined, nor something simply imposed on a person, but a fragile relation ‘between self and world’ (Rose, 2006, p. 546). This relation is frail not only because of the changing circumstances of the world we relate to but also because of ‘the “internal” differences that exist within us’ (Simpson, 2017, p. 3), the fluctuating entanglement of multiple things refugees always simultaneously are. I, therefore, suggest that also refugee subjectivity should be seen as always incomplete and complex, as manifesting complex personhood (Gordon, 2008), and revolving around the becoming of multiple desires (Tuck, 2010). Furthermore, subjectivity can be considered as a contextual becoming (e.g. Simpson, 2017), which suggests that it is capable of encompassing contradictory aspects (Gordon, 2008; Tuck, 2010).

That subjectivity can be ‘beset by contradiction’ (Gordon, 2008, p. 4) recognizes that there are multiple positions in and from which a person’s subjectivity emerges. This became evident in my interlocutors’ reflections on the meanings that refugee camps carried for them. They could stress the political importance and the meaningfulness of the camp spaces but on other occasions lament the negative sides of camp life and seek ways to move out from them. They could separate themselves from others living in the camps by elaborating how their experiences, hopes, accents, or ways of discussing matters were not like that of ‘ordinary’ camp dwellers’, yet they could still stress that their important relations were in the camp community.

While it would be easy to bypass these types of contradictions by labelling some ways of relating and representing oneself as more authentic and others as merely performative, this would simply contribute to a one-dimensional understanding of a person. Rather, we all have more than one thing that is important to us, we consider ourselves and the world around us in different ways in different situations, and our lives and selves are, as Avery F. Gordon puts it, ‘simultaneously straightforward and full of enormously subtle meaning’ (Gordon, 2008, p. 5). We all have multiple desires all of which are not compatible (Tuck, 2010) and which become differentially highlighted based on the contextual relationalities.

A way to approach subjectivity as contextually defined is to consider it as an ‘unfolding of actions’ (Simpson, 2017). This approach implies that there is no unified core in a subject, but it is constantly becoming and taking shape in events, actions, and encounters, which allows us to recognize the contradictions and complexities in expressing the sense of self. However, the emphasis on becoming and contextuality should not be taken to mean that there is no continuity in a subject (Kinkaid, 2021; see also Ortega, 2016, pp. 77–84) but that as temporally and culturally located beings, our subjectivity is relationally emerging in complex conditions that are not static. Different aspects of a self become highlighted and thus observable according to the context. A person is not a refugee in one situation and a teacher in another, and a father in yet another, but all those things at once, as they are entwined and inform each other, and in coming together create a specific way for each of these subject positions to emerge.

Furthermore, subjectivity does not emerge in isolation but in relation to changing geographical, cultural, and political contexts, which create certain but changing expectations and aspirations that come to define one’s lifeworld. In the case of my Palestinian interlocutors, their subjectivity is defined by social reality in which the sense of self is deeply relational (Jean-Klein, 2000; see also Järvi, 2023), and intergenerational and collective (Marshall, 2023) rather than individual. Therefore, the centrality of the collective – or communal, familial, or other more-than-individual – for subjectivity and self-making is central to recognize, as it underlines that subjectivities are relationally forged amongst those we share a space with.

Consequently, subjectivity emerges in specific and mundane situations that highlight certain aspects of one’s sense of self, based on the nuances of the situation and relations that are activated in them. It emerges within the unpredictable aspects of life, the routes one’s life takes and the changing positions that one comes to occupy over the life course. Hence, a sense of self is always a matter of becoming and unbecoming, moulded by the successes and failures one faces in life, by the societal and political conditions that can be enabling or incapacitating, and by the multiple plans not all of which actualize but which nevertheless construe the way one relates to oneself and the world one dwells in. Furthermore, being in the world and thus also the sense of self is as much about reacting to the world around us as it is about acting purposefully and intentionally (Harrison, 2008; Wylie, 2006), if not more so.

In sum, subjectivity encompasses the inner idea of who we are and what is important to us, which is complex and multifaceted because we are and desire multiple things at once. Furthermore, subjectivity emerges relationally within the surrounding society, family, peer group and their cultural and societal norms and expectations, which, again, emerge in specific contexts with their histories and power relations. Palestinian refugees construct their subjectivity within the surrounding conditions, with finite possibilities to ‘actualise’ themselves; in conditions that are often defined by adynamia and intermittence rather than potentialities (Harrison, 2009). But while these conditions set the frames for being, the sense of self is not reduced to them, and this is the aspect of Palestinian refugee subjectivity I will now turn to highlight.

Methods

When the aim is to consider the complexity of subjectivity, long-term ethnographic engagement provides a feasible basis for the analysis (Hughes, 2022; Oesch, 2017; Pascucci, 2019). With ethnographic methodology, it is possible to encounter ‘the concrete constellations in which people forge and foreclose their lives around what is most at stake’ (Biehl et al., 2007, p. 5), and the approach thus welcomes rather than excludes complexities of subject-formation. Furthermore, ‘accessing’ the multidimensionality and complexity of subjectivity requires spending time with a person in different situations that allow for different dimensions of self to emerge (also, Noble, 2009). Ethnography is the ideal methodology for doing so, as it is defined not only by long-term engagement but also by openness to the field, which enables getting beyond the initial understanding of what is important and how different categories are defined.

My tacit understanding of Palestinian refugee subjectivity has been formed in recurring fieldwork in Palestinian refugee camps in Palestine, Lebanon, and Jordan from 2015 to 2023, but the ethnographic vignettes I build on are from two months of intensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the West Bank in 2016. The fieldwork included daily informal interaction with the research subjects and the field. During that time, I lived in a refugee camp located in the Bethlehem area, spent time in other camps in the central and southern West Bank, hung out with Palestinian refugees at their homes, on the premises of different organizations, visited them at work, ran errands with them, went to walks, cafes and restaurants, joined them to cultural and political events and demonstrations, and conducted formal and informal interviews. After the work in the field, I kept in touch with some of my interlocutors and have thus been able to follow and learn what has happened in their lives since 2016.

To get into the different dimensions of self, I chose to approach the topic through thick descriptions of two of my interlocutors, Nada and Samir, both Palestinian refugees in their twenties and from refugee camps located in the West Bank. While it would have been possible to include a wider set of voices, I adopted this approach to get into the nuances of subjectivity that become observable in a thick description of the life of one person but could get lost in shorter quotes that jump from one person to another. The cases that I present do not claim to be representative of Palestinian refugees’ subjectivities and the positionalities that come into play in them, but they demonstrate the complexity and multidimensionality of what it is to be a Palestinian refugee.

Mapping complex subjectivity in Kalandia Refugee Camp

I got in touch with Nada through a mutual acquaintance when I was conducting fieldwork in the refugee camps in the southern West Bank. Back in 2016, Nada was a 22-year-old university graduate who was preparing her departure abroad to continue her studies. She was from Kalandia refugee camp, located between Jerusalem and Ramallah in the central West Bank. After meeting her in Bethlehem, where I was based at the time, Nada invited me to visit her family, who resided just outside the camp’s main entrance, by a busy street through which those coming to Ramallah from the south entered the administrative capital.

Living in a camp was something Nada had to take into consideration in her everyday life. At times, it caused difficulties. When she went out to meet friends in Ramallah, her parents would get worried that the Israeli soldiers might enter the camp – as they regularly do – before she got back, and thus compromise her safety when she tried to reach home. Furthermore, the proximity of the checkpoint between Ramallah and Jerusalem to their home meant that teargas, smoke from burning tyres, and firing of live ammunition were common occurrences, as it was a place where demonstrators often clashed with Israeli soldiers. Therefore, Nada always had to keep in mind that something might happen, as she did not want to make her parents worry.

From a material outset, Kalandia is a typical Palestinian refugee camp: barren concrete buildings accompanied by few more polished houses, narrow alleys and undermaintained streets, and schools and healthcare centres marked by the bright blue of UNRWA, which provide the basic services in the refugee camps. Kalandia is, however, also singled out by its location. In addition to the proximity of the main checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah, Kalandia lies on the municipality border between Ramallah and Jerusalem, resulting in the division of IDs. Those living on the Jerusalem side have the blue Jerusalem IDs, meaning that they can cross the checkpoint without separate permits, whereas those within the West Bank side live in Area C and have green IDs of the Palestinian Authority, making their movement and dwellings much more controlled, limited, and precarious.

Nada was one of those with the blue ID, making others consider her ‘a lucky one’, as she could cross to the checkpoint without permits that are notoriously hard to get. Not only could she access Jerusalem and the al-Aqsa mosque, but also the Mediterranean and even meet Palestinians of 1948, those with Israeli citizenship. While the blue ID gave Nada much more freedom than her peers with the Green ID had, she considered it also a burden. It meant having to pay higher insurance fees and other expenses and having to keep up with the changing Israeli regulations. For instance, to meet the requirements of Israel’s ‘centre of life’ policy (Jefferis, 2012), her family was forced to move from their spacious and quiet house at the eastern end of the camp to a smaller place right next to the main street to maintain their ID by living within Jerusalem borders. Nada also recounted clashes between young men caused by the division, as those with the blue Jerusalem ID caused trouble within the community because they thought themselves untouchable by the Palestinian Authority officials whose control did not extend to the Jerusalem side.

Shortly after I arrived in Kalandia to visit Nada’s family for the first time, Nada took me with her to visit her elderly aunt. Nada’s aunt lived in the parts of the camp that fall under Area C, at the other end of the camp from the main entrance, on the southern side of the main street that runs across the camp from west to east. The aunt lived with relatives, and Nada visited her regularly not only for social reasons but also to care for her. The time we visited her was one of those occasions. The aunt needed regular massages to ease the pain in her legs that no longer supported her properly, leaving her more or less confined to the house.

While the place was full of people at the time of our visit, Nada was the only person the aunt allowed to massage her. The regular visits were, however, about to come to an end, as Nada was preparing to emigrate for her studies, and she expressed her worries about how her aunt would manage without her being around. The old age and frail condition made Nada fear that she might pass away when she was abroad, enhancing the ambivalence with which she viewed her upcoming departure.

Many in the occupied West Bank dream of the possibility of studying abroad, and Nada was well aware of her privileged position to be able to do so. Finding a way to travel even for a few weeks was a constant consideration among the youth I spent time with, and it could be a source of arguments and clashes if a person felt that someone else was getting an opportunity that should have belonged to them. Different organizations provided such opportunities to travel abroad as there was an abundance of cultural and civil society projects and initiatives that sent delegations to different parts of the world, mostly to Europe and North America. Nada’s friend with whom we sat one evening in a café in Ramallah was among those given such a chance, as he was about to travel with a delegation to Boston to participate in an initiative by an NGO. The idea was to propose a project to be implemented back in Palestine, only a few of which would be actualized in the end.

Unlike her friend who was reviewing his options to stay in the US – spanning from using his contacts to getting enrolled in a university to getting married – Nada had a secured route out, to experience life without occupation. She had another citizenship, which she had gotten from her mother who, again, had acquired it thanks to Nada’s great uncle, who was the one who lived in the said country. When Nada visited the place for the first time in her late teens, she felt overwhelmed when the border officer welcomed her back home, something that had never happened in the place she actually considered home, as she was a refugee living under occupation that constantly worked to deny her belonging.

When Nada’s departure was approaching, she had conflicting feelings about leaving. She knew that others in Palestine would consider her stay abroad as ‘a way to enjoy’, as she expressed it. She was thus eager to assure that in her case, the plan was not to escape, but to use the possibility she had been given to improve herself. She explained that after returning home from her first visit, she felt more committed to Palestine than before. Before being abroad, she had just wanted to get out and live life not limited by the occupation, but after actually being outside Palestine, she felt she had obligations towards her homeland.

Certain assumptions are associated with growing up in the camp, which are widely recognized among the camp dwellers. It is thought that children in the camps are brought up by the streets, in the crowdedness of the camp. The children of the camps are also thought to be the ones who stand against the occupation more so than their peers in the cities: it is the camp kids who throw stones in demonstrations, confront the occupying forces when they invade the camps in regular incursions, and the ones being martyred when the soldiers respond with live ammunition. While Nada maintained that she had not been brought up as ‘a kid from a camp’ – that she had had a more orderly upbringing – she nevertheless reiterated the commitment the camp refugees are expected to feel towards the political struggle in her own way. She planned to establish an organization with which she would support her community, and she also felt the need to educate people on Palestine while she was away as she had been frustrated by the lack of knowledge she had encountered during her first visit.

Nada had multiple plans related to her studies abroad. While some of them told of the political commitment she felt – to get an education and then return to help those in need of support and to educate her fellow students to make them understand the Palestinian reality a bit better – she also explained that she had contacted professors from her university on what to study to get a job in the local parliament after graduation. Hence, Nada had several – and contradictory – aspirations, none of which actualized in the end, but which nevertheless informed her sense of self when I spent time with her in 2016.

It is clear that being a Palestinian – and all that connotes under Israeli occupation – was part of Nada’s subjectivity. She repeated time and again that in Israeli eyes Palestinian existence had no importance, that Israel coerced Palestinians to act the way it wanted them to, and that the constant manoeuvring of different forms of Israel’s colonial violence made it difficult to maintain the same level of ambition in life. It is also clear that being from a camp was part of Nada’s sense of self, as was being a refugee who felt a political commitment towards her homeland. Yet these formed only part of her subjectivity, which revolved around multiple positions that coexisted and informed her being with fluctuating intensity. Her subjectivity emerged in the moments of caring for her kin. It emerged when she considered her plans for the future and when she thought about what others might think of her decisions. Her subjectivity encompassed her understanding of the camps as well as her aspirations and things important to her.

Nada’s subjectivity was thus not reducible to her refugeeness She was not only a refugee but a daughter and a niece who had gendered responsibilities. She did not want to make her parents worry and felt a sense of obligation towards her relative. She was someone who had been brought up in a family that held education and ‘organized upbringing’ in high regard, which she considered as something that differentiated her and her siblings from ‘the kids of the camp’. She was someone with a Blue ID and, central to her horizon of opportunities, someone with foreign citizenship, which provided her not only the opportunity to continue her education but also possibilities beyond those available in the West Bank.

Being a Muslim was also part of Nada’s subjectivity, which became highlighted when I visited her in Kalandia during Ramadan which she observed with her family. Nada was reflective on the meaning of the holy month – it is a time of giving, family, and introspection – and criticized those who simply slept the day and woke up a few hours before iftar, the meal that breaks the fast. For her, that meant disregarding the spirit of Ramadan, that of empathizing with those in hunger and poverty. Nada reflected also on being a non-hijabi Muslim when she stressed that wearing a hijab did not make someone more devout or signal that they would be knowledgeable on Islam, and for her, it was the latter that was important.

Politics of being a Palestinian Refugee

With the help of Nada, I demonstrated the multiple positionalities that are in play in forming subjectivity, and next, I turn to complicate what the politics of Palestinian refugee subjectivity denotes. In this, I rely on Samir from Dheisheh refugee camp. In 2016, Samir was a 28-year-old active member of the camp’s civil society, and he was well-articulate on the politics of the camp. Samir was from a political family, even by the standards of a Palestinian refugee camp. His father had been actively involved in the First Intifada, had served time in Israeli prison, and continued to be engaged with the camp community even in the time that saw a decline in political participation. Living in a camp that has the reputation of being the political pacesetter among the camps in the West Bank, Samir continued the political activism of the family.

The first time I met him, Samir was giving a tour to a delegation of French-Catalan trade unionists who were visiting the camp. He narrated the history of the camp for them, explaining how Israel had built a wall around Dheisheh in the early 80s to shield the settlers who before the area division of the Oslo Accords had to drive through the Palestinian city to reach the settlements in the southern West Bank. He said that the wall had been damaged by the refugees in the First Intifada, and eventually demolished. Nowadays the only reminder of it is a checkpoint left standing by the Hebron Road that runs by the camp. Samir told of the political exceptionalism, that the demand of the refugees to return to their places of origin was maintained by considering them as visitors to the municipal community, and for that reason, those in the camps did not pay municipality taxes. The reasoning was that taxation would normalize their status and thus erode their belonging to the places they were expelled from in 1948.

Samir also referred to the regular incursions of Israeli soldiers who invaded the camp at night – usually more than once a week – to arrest people, patrol the streets of the camp, or just disturb the sleeping camp community. On such occasions, the Shabaab (boys and young men) of the camp usually confronted the soldiers, which at times resulted in someone being maimed or even martyred. Camps have their fair share of political martyrs – those killed by the occupying forces – and they are commemorated in graffiti that colours the camp landscape. The camp refugees are well-represented in demonstrations and other situations in which they directly confronted the Israeli soldiers, which increased the vulnerability of their lives.

However, while Samir was active in politics, his political agency was not that of clashing with the soldiers or throwing stones. Rather, it had a more academic tinge to it. In one of our discussions, Samir confessed that every time he met someone visiting the camp to do fieldwork, he felt a bit jealous. He had the hope to continue his studies beyond his bachelor’s degree, but the economic realities had not allowed him to do so. He worked hard to earn a scholarship to continue his studies abroad but, in the meantime, he projected his academic ambitions to writing and participating in academically inclined initiatives that aimed to renegotiate the meanings of a refugee camp, to shift the traditional understandings of camp and the role it plays in the refugee identity.

One such understanding is the equation of camp residency with being a refugee. Thus, one question considered by Samir and his friends was ‘Can one continue being a refugee if one no longer lives in a refugee camp’. Moving out from the camp, or Palestine in general, is often considered in negative terms, as an abandonment of the national cause, as camps are seen to uphold the right of return, and staying in Palestine has become a form of resistance in itself, part of Palestinians’ steadfastness, sumud. My interlocutors, however, challenged these dichotomous views on staying and political commitment in their discussions. For Samir, these discussions were an important venue not only to redefine the politics of the camp but also to actualize his academic ambitions by theorizing his personal experiences on camp life vis-a-vis how refugee camps are stereotypically considered.

While actively reflecting on the camp and the position of a refugee, Samir’s self was, nevertheless, not exhausted by the politics of being a Palestinian refugee. Rather, camp was part of his self rather organically, because he was born into a camp and thus had the experiences it had produced. He was, however, more than ‘a refugee from a camp’, and he was constantly working on becoming what he wanted to be. To enhance his chances of earning a scholarship, he studied languages. To fulfil his dream of becoming an author, he turned to his connections and collected funding for publishing his work.

Furthermore, when Samir, in the end, moved out from the camp and Palestine, it did not mean the end of his engagement with the politics of being a Palestinian refugee. For him, and many others, it is not a matter of either or, but a matter of constant negotiation and finding an own way of being multiple things at once. Not only a Palestinian refugee from a camp but one with ambitions beyond the camp borders. Unlike the traditional understandings assume – that leaving the camps would mean abandoning or at least side-lining the political struggle – it was clear that the camp remained meaningful for Samir’s political subjectivity – it fills his social media account, for example – even when he no longer lived there. It remains part of his history, it still holds his familial relations, and relating to it and its community was part of his sense of self even after living in the camp no longer was a desired option.

Conclusion

As the ethnographic vignettes above indicate, a person’s subjectivity is neither one-dimensional nor static. Rather, it is a constellation which becomes observable differently based on the perspective. In some situations, one aspect of the self is highlighted, and in a different situation another. As becomes evident in Nada’s reflections on the challenges, restrictions and divisions Palestinians face, it is obvious that the constraints of the occupation affect the sense of self of Palestinians. It imposes separations, but also creates counterreactions, as Palestinians fight the conditions they are forced into. In Nada’s case, it also creates her specific position as someone with a Blue ID and, importantly, someone with foreign citizenship. Both affected her subjectivity as someone living the reality of occupation, as they defined how others saw her, how she reflected on others’ perceptions, and how she was able to imagine her life and future.

The occupation is, however, only part of the story. When Nada was caring for her aunt and considering her parents’ worry, it became evident that she is someone who values her kin relations and takes her (gendered) familial obligations seriously. When she was pondering her plans for the future, it was clear that she was someone with ambitions but also someone who wanted to do something to support her community and homeland. She is a person who is reflexive on her religiosity, and she is a Palestinian refugee from a camp who nevertheless thought that she did not fit into the image of a camp refugee because, in her own words, she ‘never lived the life [of the camp]’. While displacement was part of her family history, she did not fully identify with the connotations that ‘a Palestinian refugee’ holds. It is thus clear that Nada’s being cannot be reduced to her being a Palestinian refugee from a camp; her subjectivity is much more complicated than that.

This is the case also with Samir, even as his sense of self was more clearly entwined with the politics of the camp and the politics of refugees and Palestine in general. Samir did not simply accept the traditional understandings of the camp that supposed that the way to be committed to the refugees’ political cause would require staying in one. Rather, he found his ways of being political in a manner that allowed him to pursue other things in life, and not to be confined by the image of a steadfast Palestinian refugee who remains in the camp until the return becomes possible. He was reflective of his refugeeness, but he was also someone who was not ready to give up his ambitions for the sake of it.

While the ethnographic vignettes on both Samir and Nada demonstrate the complexities of their subjectivities, they also demonstrate that the camp does play out in the subjectivities of those inhabiting them, as does the politics of refugeeness. However, the way it does so is usually more multidimensional and complex than discussions centring on exclusion and resistance might suggest. Some of my interlocutors did feel that the camp held them down, marked them as excluded, and limited their opportunities, but even this experience was usually more complex than simply being excluded from the legal protection of the sovereign (cf. Oesch, 2017; Ramadan & Fregonese, 2017). It could be the way other people stereotyped those from the camp and the way the conservative camp community set limits for ways of being that defined the experience of being from a camp, rather than it as a legal apparatus of exclusion. The camp could also be a source of pride, but also simply a home, a place of meaningful relations. And importantly, Palestinian refugees’ subjectivities are not confined to the camps, and their sense of self – and also the effects of the camp and refugeeness to it – emerged in encounters that involved the multiple other qualities they had and positions they occupied on top of being refugees from camps.

In this article I have tried to underline – as others have done before me (Allan, 2014, p. 45; Barbosa, 2022, p. 114) – the self-evident fact that Palestinian refugees are much more than political markers of suffering and resistance. They are complete and complex human beings who do not deserve to be reduced to simplifying subjectivities. Acknowledging the multidimensionality allows us to see people in their complexity rather than as representatives of a single subject position they are thought to embody. It also allows us to recognize that subjectivities are not straightforward, but emerge from the multiple qualities, positions, and desires that are full of contradictions and incompleteness.

While I have discussed the matter of complex subjectivity in relation to Palestinian refugees, and the specific connotations that refugeeness and refugee camps carry in this context, a similar framework has value in exploring refugee subjectivity in general. In academic literature, it has been common to focus on refugeeness as a marker of exclusion that shows us the unequal distribution of rights, or as a marker of political subjectivity that acts from the position of that inequality. This type of research tells us important things about the current ordering of the world, but it does not provide a full picture of what it is to be a refugee.

Being a refugee surely has unifying features, as the practices of governance and distribution of rights mark them out. However, refugeeness cannot be considered a unifying experience as the way it affects the sense of self or even creates a political subjectivity is always entangled with other aspects of self beyond refugeeness. Stressing these other aspects that are central in the making of subjectivity forces us to see refugees not as defined by a single category that is often imposed on them, but as people who have multiple (in)capacities, desires, interests, and aspirations; who act not only as refugees and whose ways of acting as refugees are affected by their complex personhood. To attune to these complexities – and contradictories they often create – challenges us to encounter refugees not only as ‘refugees’ but to recognize them as the complex, multidimensional human beings that they are.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Academy of Finland [322025].