While the United Nations obliges UNRWA to be a non-political body, UNRWA's very existence as the only body representing Palestinian refugees allows the refugees to endow it with a dimension that satisfies their own needs to express and pass on their local and national identification practices. Thus UNRWA schools provide a place for Palestinians to teach their history and about their identity as Palestinians, which are manifest in various unofficial activities and projects designed and implemented by individuals who work as its employees. The commemorations marking the 60th year of the destruction of Palestine [the Nakba] in the camps in Syria and Lebanon enabled people--students and adults alike--to learn about, express, and transmit to others both local identifications and national sentiments. While there was no official UNRWA educational policy on the 60th anniversary of the Nakba, individual teachers and school leaders encouraged and allowed the school grounds and the school children themselves to become sites on which the commemorations were played out: celebrations, school assignments, posters, books, and clothing. Through ethnographic research, interviews and analysis of student projects, my paper presents a perspective on the UNRWA mandate and the educational process of refugee communities. Programs were developed requiring and/or encouraging children to write essays about their own families' experiences both before 1948 and during the war, thereby creating a narrative of existence, destruction, and rebuilding and that necessitated the participation of many in students' families and in the community. I analyze videos of the commemorative events, essays written by the children, activity books produced for them, interviews I conducted with those involved. This body of material forms the basis for my paper. In general, these educational activities ensured in the end that the children knew their past--what long ago destroyed villages or cities they were from and the major places and events connected to their village and historic Palestine. My argument is that the refugees use the schools and these commemorative and supplemental educational projects to learn their own histories in addition to the histories of the states whose borders they live within. Unlike standard schooling, however, these Palestinian school projects involve multiple generations in this educational process and thus building Palestinian identity not only among children, but also in the local communities within the camps.