The Politics of Suffering. Nell Gabiam

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      Introduction

      IN DECEMBER 2005, as we sat in the living room of his family’s house in the Palestinian refugee camp of Neirab in Syria, Younes, a young Palestinian university student in his early twenties, reflected on the controversial Neirab Rehabilitation Project that was taking place in the camp. Sponsored by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (known as UNRWA), the project sought, among other goals, to relocate families living in Neirab’s World War II–era barracks to brand-new UNRWA-built houses in the neighboring Palestinian refugee camp of Ein el Tal. Speaking about the families who had already made the move from the Neirab barracks to the new houses in Ein el Tal, Younes referred to them as having “gone from a life of death (ḥayāt al-mawt) to real life, from living in coffins to living in nice houses” (field notes, December 23, 2005). But Younes could not leave it at that. To live in comfortable houses, he quickly added, was one of the refugees’ rights as human beings, a right that should be clearly separated from their right of return to their homes in what is now the state of Israel. Living in good conditions, Younes explained, “should not mean the disappearance of the right of return” (field notes, December 23, 2005). Younes’s comments illustrate refugees’ fears that supporting camp improvements will be understood as acknowledging that refugees might stay in their host state permanently, thus undermining their claim to return. They allude to suffering as emblematic of the Palestinian refugee condition and as legitimating Palestinian insistence on the right of return.

      One of the most potent symbols of Palestinian suffering and of Palestinians’ commitment to the right of return to their former homes is the refugee camp, which serves not only as a reminder of the suffering that Palestinians have experienced since their forced displacement during the 1948 Arab–Israeli war but also as a sign that its inhabitants’ stay is to be temporary (Al Husseini 2011; Farah 1997, 1999; Feldman 2008b; Khalili 2007; Peteet 2005; Ramadan 2010). Despite their important symbolic role in keeping alive Palestinian political claims linked to the past, refugee camps are not frozen in time: they are dynamic spaces that have undergone much change since their establishment in the aftermath of the 1948 war. A dominant perspective among Palestinian refugees is that improving the infrastructural and socioeconomic fabric of the camps threatens both their identity as refugees and their claims of return to their Palestinian homeland. Such a perspective is encouraged by the fact that, historically, infrastructural and socioeconomic development were used by the United Nations as well as Israel as a means of integrating refugees within their surroundings as an alternative to return (Schiff 1995; Weizman 2007; Hazboun 1996).

      UNRWA is the agency that has been charged with ensuring the welfare of the refugees since 1949. In the last decade, it has initiated internal reforms that aim to shift the agency’s main role from provider of humanitarian relief to promoter of development in its areas of operation. These reforms are themselves part of a broader shift in global humanitarian assistance to refugees whereby socioeconomic development is increasingly proposed as a mode of assistance in protracted refugee situations. In Syria, UNRWA’s attempt at reform took shape as the Neirab Rehabilitation Project, which targeted Neirab and Ein el Tal, two small and isolated camps outside the city of Aleppo in the north of the country.

      In 2004, the Neirab Rehabilitation Project gained the distinction of becoming UNRWA’s pilot project for testing the feasibility of large-scale development in Palestinian refugee camps. More specifically, it became a testing ground for the agency’s attempt to institutionalize a camp improvement program, based on an urban development approach, across its fields of operation. Thus, the lessons learned from the Neirab Rehabilitation Project at that time served as the basis for UNRWA’s 2006 establishment of its Infrastructure and Camp Improvement Program, which has been used in camps in Lebanon, Jordan, Gaza, and the West Bank.

      To determine what is at stake in the Neirab Rehabilitation Project in relation to the goals of urban development, I introduce a third camp where I also conducted research: Yarmouk, in the Syrian capital of Damascus. By several accounts, Yarmouk had successfully integrated into Damascus and yet had maintained its identity as a camp (Kodmani-Darwish 1997; Tiltnes 2007). It sometimes came up as the backdrop against which Palestinian refugees debated the merits of the Neirab Rehabilitation Project. Yarmouk also helps us to think about the question “What is it that makes a place a camp in the twenty-first century?”

      In prewar Syria, Yarmouk stood for the promise of what could be achieved through development in Neirab and Ein el Tal. It simultaneously stood for what could be lost as a result of development in Neirab and Ein el Tal. From a humanitarian perspective, Yarmouk could be hailed as a success story of refugees who overcame exile and dispossession and turned their camp into a thriving community. At the same time, it embodied the blurring of the boundaries between the camp and the city. This blurring threatened to erase the camp’s ability to testify to Palestinian suffering brought about by forced displacement and to affirm the temporariness of its inhabitants’ stay. Neither suffering nor temporariness was readily palpable in Yarmouk’s symmetrically laid out modern apartment buildings, its large roads, or its bustling commercial areas.

      Of course, as I write these lines Yarmouk tells a different story, one that is more familiar to those who study and read about Palestinian refugees. As a result of the war in Syria, Yarmouk was almost completely depopulated in the aftermath of Syrian government shelling СКАЧАТЬ