The UNRWA definition of a Palestinian refugee as 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 this conflict, has lost both his home and means of livelihood” is an operational one, meant to identify those persons eligible for assistance and not to declare anything about the political meaning of refugee status. Refugees, though, have seen political implications of this identification from the outset. In the absence of any other mechanism to make their claims to their homes and other rights, recognition as a refugee has taken on tremendous importance. It is for this reason that UNRWA officials noted in 1956 that “the Agency’s ration card was regarded by refugees as their only evidence of refugee status.” In this paper I will explore the intersection of humanitarian procedure and Palestinian political demands around the question of the identification and categorization of refugees. The paper will focus on the 1950s and 1960s, the Agency’s formative years. Drawing on the rich documentary sources of the UNRWA archives, the paper will explore the move from a simple binary categorization of people (eligible for registration or not) to a proliferation of distinctions within the category of registered refugee. While UNRWA’s documentation highlights the administrative procedures by which these categories were elaborated and people properly slotted into them, it also records “refugee thinking” and “requests from refugees.” Reading these different sorts of documents against each other, the paper will seek to understand and describe a field of contestation over the meaning of refugee status. The proliferation of categories is both evidence of these contests and a means of responding to them. The paper will also reflect on what guidance these earlier histories may provide for Agency practice in the future.

The interwar years of Arab rule of the West Bank and Gaza, Palestinian dispersion, and military administration of Palestinians in Israel, has often been characterized as a time of quiescence, and a pre-cursor to the “re-appearance” of Palestinian identity in the early 1960s. In historical studies on the West Bank/Jordan, in particular, the exact nature of the quiescence, or more accurately, the modalities of silencing, is often left unread. One crucial site of early ‘national silencing’ is the educational curriculum of the UNRWA/Unesco school system. Using the Jordanian (and West Bank) schools as point of departure, I interrogate UNRWA’s decision, under pressure of hosts and donors, to adopt the host curriculum(s), and thus deny Palestinian refugees the possibility of their own national curriculum. With UNRWA/Unesco archival material, documents and reports, memoirs of teachers and students, interviews and press articles by UNRWA and Jordanian Ministry of Education curriculum developers, and history, civics and geography textbooks from 1949 to 1958, I draw out the logic of this decision, and its ramifications in shaping the political education of Palestinian refugees, and the ways in which UNRWA schools therefore became regarded by Palestinian teachers and students as impediments to political will. Through a reading of the textbooks, I map the ambivalent and contradictory ways in which the Jordanian curriculum used in UNRWA schools rendered ‘Palestine’ invisible in the single most important set of narrative material Palestinian youth encountered in the aftermath of their dispersal. I measure this ‘de-nationalization’ against the multi-layered and tense role of UNRWA as the primary engine for the emergence of a burgeoning mobile and educated Palestinian class, and its enduring symbolic power as the location of Palestinian ‘success’. By measuring the materials of an UNRWA education against the ‘products’ of this schooling, I attempt to make sense of the ways in which UNRWA’s schools have and continue to act as spaces of contention over the politics of ‘educating refugees.’

UNRWA was established by the UN in December 1949, as an adjust to the UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine (UNCCP), with a short-term mandate to provide humanitarian relief for Palestinian refugees forced from their homes and villages in 1948. Today, UNRWA is the sole international body serving Palestinian refugees and is crucial to their well-being as well as to the realisation of their right to return and restitution. This paper focuses on the tensions stemming from the fact that UNRWA does not have an official mandate to protect refugee rights, and beyond its relief work, UNRWA does not recognise Palestine refugees as invested with rights. The paper examines this tension, its implications and its impact on a refugee community, by taking the case of UNRWA’s reconstruction of Jenin refugee camp. Relying on fieldwork I conducted on the reconstruction of the camp, the paper analyses UNRWA’s humanitarian intervention. The paper focuses on the impact that the lengthy process of negotiations with UNRWA over its humanitarian vision, its notion of “human development”, had on the camp committees and the cohesion of national forces in the camp, drawing attention to the forms of professionalization, depoliticisation that this introduced, fragmenting the representatives of the camp. While emphasising the benefits of UNRWA’s rehabilitation of the camp, the paper underscores the limits of its humanitarian perspective, arguing that its inability to see the actors as situated, and endowed with overlapping rights, means that while its humanitarian operations mitigate the displacement caused by the Israeli invasion of the camp, its operations, however, also end up re-embedding the community in the structures of the occupation and its modes of violence. The paper analyses the refugee committee’s demands and the pressure they exerted on UNRWA in this light.

After multiple refugee local initiatives and conferences in the West Bank and Gaza in the mid 1990s, the PLO Department for Refugee Affairs established the Popular Service Committees (PSCs). PSCs were to play a liaison role between the camp communities and the United Nations Work and Relief Agency (UNRWA). Though the PSCs main goal is to facilitate and coordinate UNRWA services, they also play various local and national political roles with respect to UNRWA. The nature of interaction between both bodies reflects the socio-political particularity of each community/camp, the forms of services provided by UNRWA, and political transformations in the West Bank and Gaza. Formal and informal interactions between PSCs and UNRWA are marked by episodes of contention and cooperation as both sides negotiate and juggle the varying interests and visions at stake. In this regard, it is precisely this site where diverse forces –local community pressure, PLO, PA, and international humanitarian bureaucratic bodies – collide. Negotiations between both parties takes place on multiple organizational levels, from the low ranking UNRWA bureaucracy, all the way up to policy makers, and covering all areas of UNRWA services and programmes. This interaction sheds light on the multiple visions of “development”, “services”, and “rights”, and the respective paradigms they emerge from. This paper explores the relationship between UNRWA and PSCs based upon ethnographic research in the Bethlehem region and its refugee camps, (Deheisheh, Aida, and Beit Jibrin.) It focuses on the PSC practice of “defense” of local community rights and the tactic of putting demands on UNRWA. It will historicize, theorize, and ethnographically test the forms of ongoing cooperation and contention in this relationship. It will also contextualize this relationship within the socio-political transformations of the past 10 years, while investigating the political-cultural logic that governs it.

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.