Palestinian Refugee Identity: Marginalization and Resistance in Refugee Camps in Lebanon

Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon are often depicted as “no-law zones”: rise of Salafist-Jihadist factions, inter-related military networks between some Lebanese, Palestinian and Syrian groups. Nevertheless, the camps are full of sharp contrasts, and cannot be reduced to Salafist radicalization. An Islamist scene with a nationalist agenda limits for the moment the ascent of extremist factions. Violence and insecurity are not only due to the Jihadist phenomenon: the internal dissensions of Fatah also play a capital role in the ongoing deterioration of the situation. For Lebanese and Palestinian stakeholders, the challenges are multi-fold. They are not able to confront one of the most important factors of radicalization: the constant socio-economic deprivation of Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. But on the security level, some positive steps have been accomplished. The Lebanese army and its intelligence apparatus are not totally in an antagonistic relation with Palestinian actors. Despite their divisions, Palestinians organizations, from Islamists to Nationalists and Leftists, cooperate with each other. Even if they remain fragile, an inter-Palestinian mediation process and a constant dialogue with Lebanese authorities are surely a precondition to face Salafist radicalization.

Based upon over 20 hours of focus groups and in-depth interviews with diverse representation from three Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, the authors analyse Palestinian perceptions of both Lebanese and Palestinian security institutions, detailing the ways in which conventional, state-centric approaches to security by both parties have been insufficient. Special attention is paid to the new security regime in the Nahr al-Bared camp, which was destroyed in 2007 during a protracted battle between the Lebanese army and the militant Islamist group Fatah al-Islam. This is because the Government of Lebanon has made clear its intention that this regime serve as a model for the country's other 11 camps. Ultimately, the authors argue, Palestinian human security is inextricably linked to Lebanese sovereignty and national security, and the improvement of Palestinian human security will yield tangible security benefits for Lebanese and Palestinians alike. Rather than presume to speak on behalf of all Palestinians in Lebanon, the authors have instead opted to present detailed—and sometimes contradictory—quotations from Palestinians interviewed on such subjects as arms, violent extremism, Lebanese–Palestinian relations and the protection of human rights.

101Relationship of international law and municipal law — Act of State and justiciability — United States act of State doctrine — Rationale — Definition of act of State — Purpose of doctrine to prevent court adjudicating upon validity of foreign act of State — Action for defamation — Massacre at refugee camps in Lebanon — Magazine making allegations against former Minister of Defence in Government of Israel — Whether adjudication of claim barred by act of State doctrine — Relations between Israel and the United States — Relationship between act of State and political question doctrines — The law of the United States

How is identity claimed and created in communities that have experienced multiple processes of refugeeness and patterns of mixed migration? This article explores how Palestinian national identity is moulded, influenced, experienced and lived in a context of protracted refugeeness, exile and diaspora in Sweden. Departing from literature on diaspora and Palestinian identity formation and based on the collection of narratives from Palestinians residing in Sweden, the article sheds light on the processes through which Palestinian identity is strongly related to a moral and political commitment to the homeland lost and to issues of solidarity. Palestinians in Sweden also reveal a strong embracement of Swedish citizenship related to aspects such as the passport, the right to vote, security, liberalism and the welfare system. As Palestinians have arrived to Sweden from different instabilities in the Middle East and in different times, there are also affiliations and links to other spatial surroundings such as refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria. The paper also illuminates how multiple refugeeness create both a shared understanding of identity, but also internal rifts and contradictions, relating to former places of residence, to increasing racism and enforced social boundaries in Sweden, and to the different processes of displacement that have brought them to Sweden.

The experience of temporariness is increasingly prevalent across the world, both for transient populations such as refugees and in work life characterized by precarious employment relationships. In this article, we examine how local institutional work can shape people’s experience of indeterminate temporariness and mitigate its pernicious effects. Our qualitative, inductive study is set in refugee camps in Lebanon, where indeterminate temporariness created an oppressive experience of time among Syrian refugees. We document the efforts of an NGO to help refugees rebuild meaningful lives by developing small-scale entrepreneurial ventures – efforts we conceptualize as ‘sheltering work’. Our analysis points to the potential for sheltering work to alleviate the oppressive effects of temporariness by bounding, containing, and structuring individuals’ day-to-day lives. Although sheltering work reshaped refugees’ experience of time, it did not eradicate the oppressive effects of indeterminate temporariness; instead, oppressive and reclaimed experiences of time coexisted, with individuals shifting between them. Our study theorizes sheltering work as a potent form of modest, local institutional work in the face of immutable institutions, and elaborates how individual experiences of time influence embedded agency.

This chapter is written as a letter from one friend to another, exploring if and how we can travel alongside each other in grief. The letter is written by a Spanish-American woman who is PhD student in the United States and is addressed to a Palestinian woman living and working as the director of a women’s empowerment center in a refugee camp in Lebanon. Exploring the ties of friendship on the personal and community level, the author explores her own complicity in the continued grief of her friend while also serving as companion to her friend and the community in that grief. The author grapples with grief as a haunting, asking: What are the ghosts that haunt us in our individual and collective grief, and what stories do they tell us and compel us to tell to others, to the world? What do these hauntings tell us about our desires? The letter is written in English, interspersed with Arabic and Spanish, two languages deeply connected historically, as well as in the embodied experiences of the two women.

In this article, a community music program in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon is explored by means of ethnographic methods of participant observation and semistructured interviews. Judith Butler’s notion of subjectivation is employed in an analysis of how the participants are constituted as national subjects in and through the musical practice. By analyzing the specific instances of agency that this constitution entails, it is argued that even as the musical practice works to consolidate established norms of national belonging and identity, it also enables participants to resignify Palestinian identity in ways that counter experiences of marginalization, exceed certain social norms, and expand the categories through which their existence becomes meaningful. Conceiving a community music practice as a subjectivating practice may prove useful for scholars seeking to analyze musical-social work in terms of its capacity for social transformation, while retaining a critical perspective on the formative and socially reproductive character of such practices.

Vertical Property Challenges to the “Rights of Return”: The Case of Palestinian Refugee Camps in Lebanon

On 8 July 1987, the first team of Malaysian volunteers under the Malaysian Medical Volunteers left for war torn Beirut to volunteer in emergency medical service in the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. It was the most intense and dangerous phase of the bloody 15-year long Lebanese civil war. The Malaysian Medical Volunteers (MMV) is the earliest known example of Malaysians being involved in international volunteering services especially in conflict zone in the Middle East. The example of the MMV has been a role model for other international groups such as the Medical Relief Society (MERCY). While is it known that altruism and religious affinity underpinned the motivations of Malaysians in their decision to volunteer, it is not known whether foreign policy effects their decision to volunteer their services abroad. This article seeks to shed light into this question by tracing the evolution of the MMV and the experience of the volunteers in Lebanon from 1987-1988.

Chapter 22 Networked Narratives: Online Self-Expression from a Palestinian Refugee Camp in Lebanon

Many decades have passed since the Palestinian national movement began its political and military struggle. In that time, poignant memorials at massacre sites, a palimpsest of posters of young heroes and martyrs, sorrowful reminiscences about lost loved ones, and wistful images of young men and women who fought as guerrillas, have all flourished in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine tells the story of how dispossessed Palestinians have commemorated their past, and how through their dynamic everyday narrations, their nation has been made even without the institutional memory-making of a state. Bringing ethnography to political science, Khalili invites us to see Palestinian nationalism in its proper international context and traces its affinities with Third Worldist movements of its time, while tapping a rich and oft-ignored seam of Palestinian voices, histories, and memories.

An ethnographic and diachronic examination of the commemoration of violent events— battles and massacres—in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon shows the shift in mnemonic frames that helps one to understand political contention and strategies of struggle. The transformations in the representation and remembrance of battles and massacres in response to particular audiences and contexts reveal the dynamic and constructed nature of commemorative practices. The persistence of some commemorative narratives at times and their oblivion at others depend on the character and role of local institutions on one hand—political organizations or nongovernmental organizations—and the available and authorized transnational discourses on the other.

First report on the detection of the plasmid-borne colistin resistance gene mcr-1 in multi-drug resistant E. coli isolated from domestic and sewer waters in Syrian refugee camps in Lebanon

The potential impact of water quality on the spread and control of COVID-19 in Syrian refugee camps in Lebanon

Palestinian camps in Lebanon have turned once more into “transitional zones of emplacement” for thousands of people recently fleeing the Syrian conflict. In this context, the plural subjectivities emerging within the camps highlight a further connection between spatial marginalization and precarious legal statuses. My research hinges on the interconnectivities evolving around the Palestinian Bourj el Barajneh camp and Hezbollah-controlled Beirut southern suburbs moving from an ethnographic insight of the Palestinian football society. Inside the “Refugee Football Leagues,” Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese players find a space in leagues whose matches are mostly disputed within the numerous refugee camps scattered throughout the national territory. Moving from newcomers’ strategies for protection, the essay investigates how refugees living in camps experience different scales of mobility and develop a wide range of practices that extend beyond the camp's boundaries, exploring how imperceptible and hyper-mobile tactics of existence re-elaborate Palestinian refugee camps into meaningful places of elusive contestation.