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Refusing Invisibility: Documentation and
Memorialization in Palestinian Refugee
Claims
I L A N A F E L D M A N
Department of Anthropology, George Washington University, 2110 G St. NW,Washington DC [email protected]
This essay explores the means through which Palestinian refugees have sought
to make themselves and their claims visible, both within their community and
to the ‘international community’. The principal site for this exploration is the
Gaza Strip under Egyptian Administration (1948–1967). Because Gaza is home
to both a large refugee population and a significant native population that was
also dispossessed in the aftermath of 1948, it is an illuminating site for this
investigation. In mapping the visibility field, the essay looks at both the monu-
mental and the mundane, at both the bureaucratic and the symbolic, and at
both the instrumental and the affective. Particular attention is given to iden-tification documents, whether issued by governments or humanitarian organi-
zations, as visible markers of existence and continued claims. The essay
illuminates ways that a humanitarian apparatus can incidentally offer tools
for ordinary people to demand that they and their community be recognized.
Keywords: humanitarianism, Palestine, refugees, political claims, visibility
In an article published in 1984, Edward Said called attention to the fact that
Palestinians did not have ‘permission to narrate’—to tell their own histories,
to make their own claims—in mainstream media outlets. Said directed a
considerable portion of his own efforts to changing this situation, to opening
up space for Palestinian voices in dominant discourse. The desire to increase
Palestinian visibility to an ‘international community’, and to do so in a way
that gives Palestinians an opportunity to be agentive, not simply observed,
has been part of the Palestinian struggle since the outset of the British
Mandate (which formalized international responsibility for the future dispen-
sation of Palestine) and has, if anything, become more central in the years
since their massive dispossession and displacement in 1948. This struggle has
been pursued in a variety of forums and by a diversity of actors, including
intellectuals like Said, artists and writers, and activists and militants. While it
has certainly not concluded, in the years since the first Palestinian uprising
Journal of Refugee Studies Vol. 21, No. 4 The Author [2008]. Published by Oxford University Press.All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected]:10.1093/jrs/fen044
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against Israeli occupation (1987–1993) Palestinians have achieved greater
visibility to international audiences.
To further understand the Palestinian battle for visibility, this essay
focuses on an earlier moment in this struggle, and a somewhat different
set of Palestinian actors. I look particularly at how, in the first years after
the massive dispossession of 1948, Palestinian refugees sought to make them-
selves and their claims visible. The humanitarian regime that developed in the
aftermath of 1948 to aid the population that was then described as ‘Palestine
Arab refugees’ proved to be a crucial space, and to provide crucial instru-
ments, for making Palestinians visible. In looking at visibility practices, this
essay necessarily considers the articulation of Palestinian national identity—
this being a fundamental claim in these practices. Its primary purpose is not,
though, to offer a new understanding of Palestinian nationalism, a subject
well described by many others (see for example: Schulz 2003; Khalidi 1997;Swedenburg 1995; Peteet 1991), but rather to illuminate the ways that
a humanitarian apparatus can incidentally offer tools for ordinary people
to demand that they and their community be recognized. In exploring these
efforts I look at both the monumental and the mundane, at both the bureau-
cratic and the symbolic, and at both the instrumental and the affective.
My discussion draws heavily from research I have conducted on and in the
Gaza Strip, research which has focused on the years before the Israeli occu-
pation began in 1967. I also situate this material within the broader landscape
of the Palestinian diaspora and in the context of more recent projects to makePalestine and Palestinians visible. Gaza is a helpful starting point for this
consideration because of its particular place in Palestinian geography. It is
part of historic Palestine and its population includes both Palestinians who
are recognized as refugees by the United Nations and provided services by
the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), and those who are
native to Gaza. This second group also suffered the consequences of 1948.
Many lost their lands, which lay on the other side of the border that was
provisionally delineated by the 1949 armistice agreement between Israel and
Egypt. Everyone experienced the destruction of the economy—a product of both the cutting off of Gaza from its hinterland and markets and the massive
population influx which far exceeded the capacities of the space. The 80,000
original inhabitants of Gaza were joined by approximately 250,000 refugees.
Equally, everyone was hurt by the loss of political identity produced by the
dissolution of Palestine.
Before 1948, Palestine was recognized as a state, though not an indepen-
dent one, and to be Palestinian was an acknowledged nationality, though one
that included the Jewish and Arab populations of the country. In the immedi-
ate aftermath of 1948 the 750,000 persons displaced from their homes lost
this nationality and became instead part of the broader category of ‘refugees’.
This new categorization could very well have led to the dissolution of
Palestinian national identity. That it did not speaks to the efforts by leaders
of the community and the population as a whole to insist that they were not
Refusing Invisibility: Palestinian Refugee Claims 499
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simply refugees, but Palestinian refugees. Indeed, one of the major successes
of Palestinian efforts to become and remain visible to non-Arab actors has
been the recognition, once again, that Palestinians constitute a national group
and a broad (though not universal) acceptance, also once again, that they
should have an independent state.
Even as the forms of visibility practice I explore here point to Palestinian
vitality in the face of dispossession and the capacity to keep community alive
despite its dispersal, it must be noted that these practices also highlight some
of the frictions within this community. There is sometimes conflict between
individual and collective claims to Palestine, and it is in part because of this
that the establishment of a Palestinian state without addressing the right of
return seems so inadequate to Palestinians in exile. There has been additional
tension between various parts of this community—between refugees and
natives in Gaza, between those living in Palestinian territory and those
living in exile, between those who are active in resistance and those who
focus on the struggle for survival. As part of a political project, being visible
is, after all, only the beginning. Palestinians, and any other actors struggling
for recognition, also have to confront the question of how they are (and
should be) visible and what they hope to (and can) gain from that visibility.
My purpose here is not to adjudicate among competing claims about strategy
or outcome, but rather to explore the mechanisms through which this first
step has been taken.
Refugee Regimes and the Pragmatics of Recognition
Humanitarianism has been frequently criticized for depoliticizing and dehis-
toricizing refugee conditions (Agamben 1998; Malkki 1996). Also frequently,
though, this non-political approach is lauded as the only means of ensuring
the possibility of action (Rieff 2002). Here I do not seek to adjudicate this
debate, but rather to explore ways that refugees make use of humanitarian
instruments to press their claims, sometimes in ways at odds with how policy-makers and aid-givers may understand this regime. In the Palestinian case,
and certainly not only in this case, refugees have both refused a de-politicized
stance and have often turned humanitarian objects and practices into sites
and sources of political visibility. Palestinian visibility projects, that is, inter-
sect in important ways with relief work and governing practices. I call partic-
ular attention here to the diverse life of identification documents. Forms
of official identification that were developed for the purpose of managing
relief distribution or governing population have become, additionally, crucial
markers of continued Palestinian existence. This multiplicity of uses clearly
shows that documents and objects can be actively appropriated for purposes
not imagined by their issuing bodies. It confirms as well how humanitarian-
ism not only makes certain aspects of people’s experiences invisible, but also,
and often unintentionally, can open new spaces of visibility.
500 Ilana Feldman
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The challenges and possibilities in maintaining Palestinian visibility after
the nakba (catastrophe) were caught up in transformations in international
humanitarian practice at the same time. In the aftermath of the Second
World War, which led to the development of the international humanitarian
regime as we now know it (exemplified by the 1951 UN Convention and
UNHCR), efforts to respond to refugee crises underwent a shift from
a group response to a more individualized identification of refugee status
(Skran 1995; Cohen 2006). For much of the inter-war period, refugees had
been considered as ‘ groups of persons outside their State of origin’ (Hathaway
1984: 349; emphasis added). In these circumstances, to qualify for refugee
status one needed to prove membership in a designated group. In the post-
war era, persons increasingly have had to prove their individual qualifications
for this status—that they in particular have suffered or are at risk, even if the
source of their suffering was group membership (see for example, Fassinand D’Halluin 2005; Fiddian 2006; Ticktin 2006).
Despite the structural features of the refugee regime which mean that
humanitarian recognition can be somewhat at odds with national recognition,
it is not only Palestinians who have found this apparatus to be important for
community maintenance and national visibility. Cohen shows, for instance,
how important humanitarianism was for Jewish national recognition in the
wake of the Holocaust. ‘It was as displaced refugees’, he argues, ‘that Jews
were ultimately ‘‘nationalised’’ as a people entitled to self-determination’
(2006: 129). Cohen suggests that mechanisms of refugee management—suchas having specifically Jewish displaced-persons camps and the establishment
of self-management in the camps—proved crucial to both the acknow-
ledgment of Jewish claims to self-determination and the ‘subjectification’
(Diner 1997, cited in Cohen 2006: 134) of Jewish DPs as Jewish nationals.
Comparison of the Jewish and Palestinian refugee experiences, a com-
parison that Cohen argues for in his article, illuminates not only points of
contrast (particularly around the realization of self-determination), but also
some significant commonalities. Among these commonalities is the impor-
tance of the humanitarian apparatus to national visibility. The time-scalefor Palestinian recognition was much longer and is obviously not solely
attributable to humanitarian technologies. Elsewhere I have explored the
ways that humanitarian population distinctions contributed to both social
tension and political identification among Palestinians in Gaza (Feldman
2007). Here I focus more on how visibility practices, a means of making
claims, contributed to recognition both as refugees and as specifically
Palestinian refugees: that is, as displaced nationals.
Within the international humanitarian landscape, Palestinians have always
had a special status and indeed are excluded from many of the principal
bodies of post-war humanitarianism, such as the 1951 Convention and
UNHCR protections (Feldman 2007; and see Takkenberg 1998). The reasons
for this distinction are complicated and multiple. The ‘universalist’ 1951
Convention was not really made universal until 1967; until then there were
Refusing Invisibility: Palestinian Refugee Claims 501
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both temporal and geographic limits on inclusion. Further, the Arab coun-
tries which were serving as hosts for displaced Palestinians did not want these
people to be folded into the generic category of refugee; they worried that this
status would militate against finding a political resolution to the problem.Indeed, the primary protection of refugee status— non-refoulement, the right
not to be returned to a country where one was at risk—does not match easily
with Palestinians’ central demand: the right to return to their homes. The
establishment of a UN agency dedicated specifically to Palestinian refugees
(UNRWA) in 1950 was in part an acknowledgment of the close UN involve-
ment in the situation in Palestine and therefore of the body’s responsibility
to its displaced population. The UNRWA mandate was to provide relief
and other assistance (the ‘works’ portion of its title) to Palestinians who
were displaced, dispossessed, needy, and living within the UNRWA zone of
operations (West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria). This mandate
clearly did not encompass the entire Palestinian population or even the entire
population that had suffered losses in 1948. UNRWA’s mission was also to
provide assistance, not protection (as UNHCR is supposed to do). These
limitations in UNRWA’s mandate have further added to the tension that
always exists among refugee populations between individual and group
identification and recognition.1
Since the Second World War, procedures for managing refugee populations
have focused heavily on resettlement and incorporation of refugees into
new populations. In the Palestinian case, such massive resettlement was gen-
erally acknowledged as extremely difficult, and fulfilling the portion of the
UNRWA mandate that was intended to encourage refugees to become self-
supporting was nearly impossible to accomplish. Both political considerations
(refugee and host country resistance to anything that promoted resettlement
rather than return) and structural constraints (limits on the capacity of the
territories where refugees lived to absorb these populations) limited the range
of UNRWA activities. As some of the difficulties that have confronted
UNRWA suggest, Palestinians have often been caught in a tension between
being recognized as refugees, and therefore deserving of the international
protections and assistance that accrue to this status, and being recognized
as Palestinian nationals, and therefore distinct in their needs and rights.
While in the immediate crisis of dispossession people’s first concerns were
to feed their families, by the 1960s observers commented on the widely shared
ideology against any kind of individual solution to the refugee problem. The
problem has to be solved for everybody and at the same time, or for nobody
at all. Nobody should be paid off by compensation or individual settlement
(Galtung and Galtung 1964: 22).
This demand for collective resolution was, in essence, a demand for a political
rather than a technical solution to the refugee problem. Further, it seems
clear that despite the demographic limitations in UNRWA’s coverage and
502 Ilana Feldman
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the restrictions in its mandate, Palestinians saw agency instruments as crucial
markers of more comprehensive political claims. Even with UNRWA’s dis-
tinctions, these instruments are much the same as those used by refugee aid
organizations world-wide: camps and cards, population counts and ration
delivery (Hyndman 2000). These instruments of relief have served as visible
markers of Palestinian dispossession and continued existence. They are also
part of a broader visibility field, to which I turn now.
Mapping the Visibility Field
It is certainly not surprising that visibility has long been important to
Palestinians. They are acutely aware of the importance of having tangible
evidence of their claims: claims to their homes, to self-determination, and to
existence as an identifiable people. These claims are both collective and indi-vidual, and the materials that have come to serve as evidence reflect this dual
character, and reflect as well as the tension that sometimes exists between
these aspects of Palestinian claims. In order to make sense of the diverse
array of materials and mechanisms through which Palestinians have staked
their claims, it is helpful to think about a visibility field within which different
objects and practices speak for Palestinians both to foreign audiences and to
each other. Worn papers which show ownership of land in pre-1948 Palestine
have been as important as Palestinian flags in the conceptual field of
Palestinian commemoration. This visibility field finds expression in the vari-ety of places where Palestinians have lived since 1948: from historic Palestine,
to the nearby zone of UNRWA operations, to more distant European and
American locales, to, in recent years, the transnational spaces of the internet
and global media.
Anyone familiar with Palestinian visibility practices will certainly be aware
of the importance of certain central objects within this field. Many refugees
still have the keys to their houses in Palestine. Keeping these keys, and
showing them to visitors and researchers, is part of a hope for return and
a claim to these properties. Given this widespread practice, these keys, withtheir distinctive old-fashioned look, have also become symbols of refugee
commitment to Palestine. At demonstrations in support of Palestinians one
can often find people carrying enlarged replicas of these keys—in the process
transforming individual objects into collective symbols. Less easily translata-
ble into symbolic form, but equally important to refugees who have lost their
homes, are the deeds and other documents that prove their legal claim to
these properties. These sorts of documents are also visibility makers, but they
speak in a different register and to a slightly different audience. While they
certainly can be mobilized in a social field of recognition—as when people
brought these papers out to show me when I visited them—one does not see
replicas of land deeds as visual symbols in demonstrations. Rather, these
documents speak most clearly to the space of the office and the court,
bureaucratic and legal realms which imbued them with power in the past.
Refusing Invisibility: Palestinian Refugee Claims 503
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Flags can speak across multiple registers. While the very ubiquity of their
display can diminish the meaning of flags in nation-states, for years the dis-
play of Palestinian flags in the West Bank and Gaza Strip was a clear act of
resistance. Before the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, such formal
symbols of Palestinian nationality were outlawed. One of the features of
the first intifada was a battle over their display. Palestinians would hang
flags in public places and Israeli soldiers would tear them down. In this
environment the display of the flag was more than a symbolic reference to
the nation as codified by a state; it was very much a claim both to rights and
to existence. The flags stood out sharply in the visual field and to see one was
to be forced to recognize the presence of not simply ‘Arabs’, but
‘Palestinians’. In the wake of the Oslo Accords and the establishment of
the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), flags have proliferated across
the landscape of the territories. As the powers of that Authority have beenincreasingly and dramatically diminished in recent years, though, the meaning
of the flag itself seems potentially at risk.
Objects such as flags and keys are part of what has become a relatively
dense landscape of memorialization. This memorialization has been focused
inward as much as outward. That is, it has been as much concerned with
making and keeping the Palestinian past and future possibility visible to the
Palestinian community as with making outsiders aware of Palestinian claims.
Laleh Khalili, for instance, has traced the commemoration of both ‘heroic
personae’ and ‘iconic moments’ (2007: 9). The former have been concep-tualized variously as guerrillas and martyrs and have been commemorated
through photographs, exhibits, posters, and, especially in the case of martyrs,
funerals (on this last see also Allen 2006). The major events of Palestinian
history—among which the nakba of 1948 is the most pivotal—are commem-
orated in demonstrations, formal memorials, and in songs and stories.
Narratives, of life before 1948 and of the years of struggle since then, have
been central modes of commemoration and of visibility. These narratives
circulate in such forms as village memorial books (Davis 2002; Slymovics
1998), memoirs (Barghouti 2000; Turki 1994), and as stories told to family,friends, and the occasional anthropologist (Feldman 2006; Farah 1999).
While these practices have an internal voice, the refusal to forget the past
has also been one of the crucial mechanisms through which Palestinians have
promoted their visibility to an international audience.
Symbolic objects and stories are by no means the only form of visibility
practice among Palestinians. Equally important are the variety of modes of
speech that seek to reach this international audience. These include involve-
ment in United Nations deliberations, participation in global social move-
ments, as well as various forms of artistic expression that speak to a globalaesthetic community.2 In each of these different venues people need to speak
the language that can be heard in that environment, whether the language of
rights, of identity, or of suffering (Allen 2005). Since 1974, when the PLO was
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recognized by the Arab League as ‘the sole legitimate representative of the
Palestinian people’—a recognition soon followed by the UN—this organiza-
tion has been the principal voice for Palestine in the international arena.
While there were always Palestinian political groups which were not part of
the PLO umbrella, it was not until Hamas (the Islamic Resistance Movement)
gained widespread popularity among Palestinians that there was a serious
competitor for this position. Who can and should speak for Palestine and
Palestinians is a subject of considerable and obvious contention now. In this
essay, however, I focus on an earlier moment, before the codification of any
official Palestinian representative, but when, even so, there was vibrant and
vocal Palestinian politics.
The Mundane and the MonumentalWhile humanitarian work seeks to be ethical and not political, working
to keep people alive rather than to provide a forum for the expression of
their full range of convictions and demands, this separation, as I have already
suggested, is often difficult to maintain. In Gaza under Egyptian Administra-
tion (1948–1967), we can see clearly how national iconography and human-
itarian objects share space in a visibility field. The former tend to be
monumental and the latter mundane, and Gaza’s experience shows that it is
sometimes mundane forms of visibility that prove more durable. This differ-
ence in durability is connected both to features of the forms themselves and toparticularities of the history of Gaza. The 1967 occupation of Gaza by Israel
brought both monumental and mundane forms of Palestinian visibility under
assault. Monumental forms of commemoration turned out to be the most
vulnerable, as they could be (and were) quickly and easily destroyed
by occupying forces. Efforts were certainly made to alter the landscape of
refugeedom, and therefore to remove some of the visible signs of displacement,
but erasing mundane markers of visibility proved to be much more difficult.
A monument obviously, but significantly, is an object that seeks to capture
an event, a person, or sometimes a sentiment or belief. To be successful, tobe an object of memory, monuments need to produce in the viewer some kind
of experience of the subject being commemorated. Whether that connection is
one of empathy in the outsider or one of visceral recall in the participant,
a monument is intended to take the viewer out of his or her ordinary reality
to recall or re-experience the dramatic moments being commemorated.
But there is clearly a problem with monuments—and it is connected to
their quality as permanent objects. The ability of monuments to provoke
this response, to be really visible to people, is connected to their own dra-
matic qualities—qualities that are often diminished on repeated viewings.Monuments lose power when they become mundane, as they frequently do.
Further, monuments are frequently official representations, which may be at
odds with popular understandings of these same events.
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Refugee camps—while by no means ‘ordinary’ dwelling spaces—exemplify
the capacity of mundane spaces, objects, and practices to operate as forms of
visible commemoration. Camps are organized for instrumental purposes:
management of population, efficiency of aid delivery, vagaries of available
land and resources. Along with these crucial instrumental functions, refugee
camps operate as mechanisms of visibility, and Palestinian refugees have
been acutely aware of this feature of camps since the early years after their
displacement. Given this importance, it is no surprise that changes in camp
conditions, structures, and population have been tremendously controversial
and have frequently elicited vociferous protests from refugees. Whatever lan-
guage has been used to justify these changes—whether that of improvements
of living standards or security—refugees have understood the stakes to include
their visibility to the outside world. Contests around camps also reveal often
un-talked about, but potentially significant tensions among Palestinians.
UNRWA maintains 58 official camps across the Middle East, 10 estab-
lished after 1967 (UNRWA n.d.). Eight camps are located in the Gaza Strip.
The importance of camps as visible reminders not only of Palestinian losses,
but of their claims to their homes, clearly extends beyond the refugees they
house. UNRWA indicates that currently one-third of registered refugees live
in camps. While that number was higher initially, camps never housed the
whole, or even the majority of the refugee population. That the camps remain
has, however, been deemed important by all Palestinians. Some were built on
former British army bases, where refugees lived in army barracks. In most
places, though, people lived in tents until UNRWA replaced them, first with
mud brick houses and then with asbestos-roofed, cement-block houses. The
move from tents to more permanent structures across the area of UNRWA
operations in the 1950s reflected a recognition that these people were not
going home any time soon, and for that reason the transition was sometimes
resisted. UNRWA officials reported on particularly strong opposition to any
changes in Lebanon and Syria:
strikes against making any improvements, such as school buildings, in camps incase this might mean permanent resettlement; experimental houses to replace
tents, erected by the Agency, have been torn down; and for many months, in
Syria and Lebanon, there was widespread refusal to work on agency road-
building and afforestation schemes (UNRWA 1951).
Refugees were not wrong to see the efforts to transform camp conditions
within the context of a broader UN interest in resettlement. In UNRWA’s
annual reports, such as the one quoted above, housing projects were explicitly
discussed in relation to ‘integration’ and ‘self-support’, though it must also be
noted that the success of such efforts was extremely limited:
In Gaza, a large-scale housing project has already been undertaken . . . although
these are not up to the standard of the somewhat more elaborate and
permanent housing necessary in a reintegration scheme (UNRWA 1951).
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In Gaza the initial transformations did not meet with the same level of
resistance as in Lebanon, but concern about maintaining the camps as visible
symbols of displacement remained. The 1964 Norwegian report hinted at
some of the internal dissension that may have accompanied this stance:
Above certain minimal requirements (the camp) should not be improved, to
improve was to settle and to settle was treason. Again, however, it may be
that there is a certain amount of pluralistic ignorance at work also here: that
individual refugees perhaps would like to do more to improve their lot, but
were held back by the impression that everybody else would be against
it . . . Whatever was done was done by outside agencies (above all by the
UNRWA) so as to relieve the local refugees of the moral burden of improving
their conditions themselves (Galtung and Galtung 1964 p. 25).
The tension between individual needs and desires and collective demands andobligations is clearly evident in responses to camp improvements. In this case,
the tension seems to be, if not entirely resolved, at least mitigated by what
might be considered a strategic refusal, or displacement, of agency. By not
being, or appearing, agentive, by not being able to control the conditions of
their existence, refugees seem to have been able to deflect responsibility for
these changes. Willingness to accept a lack of agency only went so far, how-
ever, and when dramatic changes in conditions were proposed, opposition
was strong. When the Egyptian authorities, working with UNRWA, explored
the possibility of resettling a portion of the refugees in the Sinai, Gazansdemonstrated vociferously against the idea and ultimately the Egyptians
dropped it (Feldman 2002; Basisu 1980).
The Israeli occupation of Gaza introduced new visibility challenges. Israeli
forces moved quickly to transform the landscape. The monuments described
above were destroyed and new features were introduced. In the immediate
aftermath of occupation, Israeli officials considered a variety of possibilities
for changing the landscape by reducing the population. Segev (2007) describes
the early Israeli efforts to encourage out-migration. A wide variety of ideas
about how to increase movement out of the Strip were discussed, including thepossibility of ensuring that living conditions got worse, the distribution of
black market passports to facilitate travel to other countries, and direct pay-
ments to refugees to leave (Segev 2007: 528–542). This last idea was actually
implemented and ‘‘‘emigration offices’’ (were) set up by the military govern-
ment in the camps’ (Segev 2007: 536). While a certain number of people did
leave Gaza in 1967 and 1968, mostly to either the West Bank or Jordan, the
wholesale depopulation of the Strip proved to be impossible.
Efforts to reduce population were accompanied by changes in the physical
layout of the camps, changes that were enacted in the name sometimes of
‘security’ and sometimes of ‘humanitarian’ considerations (Abu-Ayyash
1976). As part of an attempt to combat Palestinian resistance to the occupa-
tion, under the command of Ariel Sharon the army created wide roads
through the camps (to make them more secure for soldiers) by bulldozing
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houses (Roy 1995). Further, in the course of demolitions and capturing fight-
ers, 400 families were moved to El-Arish in the Sinai and ‘12,000 relatives
of suspected guerillas were deported to detention camps in the Sinai desert’
(Roy 1995: 105). Other people were moved, not under the banner of security,but with a claim about humanitarian concern:
the refugee camps have had to be dismantled and cleaned under the cover
of urban renewal and health improvement programmes, although in the West
Bank and Gaza Strip, the ‘urban renewal’ and ‘health improvement’ left
hundreds of homes destroyed and thousands of innocent people homeless
(Abu Ayyash 1976: 100).
The extent of these efforts to change the camps suggests that Israeli officials
concurred with Palestinians that the presence of camps was a powerful visible
sign of Palestinian displacement.
Later, the Israelis began to build new neighbourhoods outside the camps,
encouraging and sometimes imposing the move to these new spaces. Reports
from this time indicate refugees’ mixed feelings about these new homes.
After his move one refugee told a reporter: ‘This house is bigger, better
and cleaner than the old one. . . We have electricity, running water and
room to breathe here’ (New York Times 1973). But another insisted that ‘I
had no choice . . . They came and said I had to go . . . It’s a miserable place
with only three small rooms’ (ibid .). When I spoke with Gazans in the late
1990s in the course of my own research, people expressed their clear belief
that Israel was interested in rendering them invisible. As one Gazan told me,
Israel wanted to ‘replace the word ‘‘refugee’’ with the word ‘‘citizen’’ and
settle them so that they could say to the United Nations that they solved
the issue of the refugees’ (Interview, Khan Yunis, 15 June 1999). Another
person commented:
They wanted them all to be citizens . . . they thought that if they made someone
a normal citizen then he would not think about returning to his house in Lyd,
Ramla, Jaffa and Haifa. The Jews did not want there to be something calleda ‘refugee’ (Interview, Gaza City, 23 March 1999).
Over the years, Gazans have consistently seen efforts at ‘integration’—
whether promoted by UNRWA, by Arab countries, or by Israel—as part
of a project to reduce the visibility of Palestinian refugees. As another kind
of monument to refugee claims, the camps have been crucial spaces through
which Palestinians have insisted on being visible—to themselves and to the
outside world. The fact of the camps means that the very conditions of
people’s daily lives (or at least some people’s lives) articulate both displace-
ment and desire to return to their homes. Living in a camp is one way for
people to ‘authentically’ embody the experience of being Palestinian. That
many refugees have never lived in camps serves as a reminder that visibility is
also a site of tension among Palestinians. Such tensions are also clear in
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another and if anything more mundane and instrumental source of visibility:
identification documents.
Worn Mementos: Tokens of Identity and Loss
In the early 1950s, UN officials described two different mementos of identity
that were treasured by refugees. One, the ‘worn dog-eared Palestine passport
issued in Mandate days by a government that no longer legally exists’
(UNRWA 1952: 3) was a token of a lost past. The other memento, a new
document of the post-1948 refugee experience, was both a token of identity
and a practical tool for living. The ration card issued by UNRWA had
become, officials commented, ‘so much a part of the life and economy of
refugees that it is not unusual for it to be used as a tangible asset upon the
strength of which substantial sums can be borrowed’ (UNRWA 1954: 15).The persistence of these two seemingly incompatible tokens of identity—
one signalling continuity with a past that the other marked as ruptured—
illuminates the difficulties that historical identity and visibility posed in this
new Gaza Strip.
Much of the scholarship on identity documentation has linked the emer-
gence and spread of such documents to the growth of the nation-state system
as a means of governing populations and territory (Caplan and Torpey 2001;
Torpey 2000; Jeganathan 2004). By linking people to their ‘proper’ place,
these documents both facilitate movement for those able to acquire themand expose to surveillance those compelled to carry them (Scott 1998;
Gordillo 2006). This ambivalence in the meaning of identity papers is clearly
evident in the Palestinian case. In this instance, though, it is not just—or
even primarily—state documents that are at issue. Rather, for many people,
humanitarian documents, specifically ration cards, have been the most crucial
form of documented visibility, as well as sometimes a source of shame
and control.
By the time Palestinians were displaced, the question what sort of papers
refugees might be able to acquire had already been a long-standing concern,and was part of a broader constellation of anxieties about the place of
stateless people in a world of nation-states (Arendt 1951). In the period
between the two world wars, one of the benefits the League of Nations
helped facilitate for some refugees as part of its developing refugee regime
was travel papers, called Nansen passports after the first High Commissioner
for Refugees. These documents, which were issued by governments, ‘allow(ed)
refugees to travel legally across international boundaries’ but ‘did not confer
upon the bearer citizenship rights’ (Skran 1995: 105). While Skran notes the
significant limitations of this passport, she also argues that in this instrument
the beginnings of international legal protections for refugees can be found.
When the Palestinian refugee crisis began, the League of Nations had been
replaced by the United Nations and negotiations were under way on the new
refugee definition that would be codified in the 1951 Convention. As I have
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noted, Palestinians did not come under the authority of UNHCR and thus
did not receive its documentation of their status. Palestinian papers came
from UNRWA, and these were primarily pragmatic documents that tracked
eligibility for rations and other forms of assistance. These papers entered an
existing field of documentation that included Palestine government passports,
land registration records, school registers, and personnel forms. This multi-
plicity of paper, in turn, circulated within the broader field of Palestinian
visibility claims. Mandate-era documents had symbolic significance, but no
longer any practical value. UNRWA papers, on the other hand, were both
materially and symbolically important.
Like refugee camps, ration cards are prosaic signifiers of Palestinian
national existence. They are not grand and they do not even promise very
much. They have proven to be, however, a crucial part of Palestinian claim-
making. It should also be noted, though, that these papers fit somewhatuncomfortably within the field of national iconography. Unlike other images
of Palestine and Palestinians which speak either about a longed-for past, like
the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and smaller-scale icons such the olive tree
or the prickly pear (sabr) plant, or the heroic fight for the future, whether
the feda’i (guerilla) and his rifle or the shabab (young men) and their stones,
ration cards evoke Palestinian dependence. Even as people fought to retain
their cards, and with them their rights, they also were discomforted by their
need for them. In some ways, to be a refugee, to be in need of a ration
card, was to symbolize Palestinian failure. Even with this ambivalence, bothrefugee status and the papers that prove it have been crucial sources of
Palestinian visibility.
Ration cards further articulate the friction I have described between col-
lective and individual visibility. Even as the very fact of these cards attested
to the collective experience of loss, they were intended, first and foremost, to
identify their bearers as eligible for the receipt of UNRWA assistance: a
marker of individual visibility. Ration cards also marked a new step in the
documentary differentiation of the population. While previously, there were
plenty of documents that not everybody might have (such as passports), nowfor the first time, there were documents for which only particular categories
of people were eligible. The grounds for eligibility were not only related to
‘need’ (the avowed purpose of the cards), but to ‘kind’ (native Gazans, no
matter how destitute, were not eligible for ration cards). Ration cards, in
signalling need, also signalled the historical losses of 1948. But, since alloca-
tion was limited, and because it was related to kind as well as to need, they
had the effect of differentiating among Palestinians in relation to history as
well as bureaucracy. Some Palestinians more than others carried ‘proof’ of
the loss they all suffered (Feldman 2007).
Limits on UNRWA resources meant that there was also a cap on the
number of cards available, so it was possible that eligible refugees could
be denied a card, whether due to fraud in the rolls or simple overcrowding.
The significance of these cards in the lives of Gazans made holding on to
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them (whether legitimately or not) a primary objective. As an UNRWA
report noted about refugees:
To increase or to prevent decreases in their ration issue, they eagerly report
births, sometimes by passing a new-born baby from family to family, andreluctantly report deaths, resorting often to surreptitious burial to avoid
giving up a ration card (UNRWA 1952: 3).
Children were supposed to be registered when they turned one year old, but
the only way this could happen was to ‘arrange for the surrender of the cards
of an equivalent number of ineligible recipients, of whom there are undoubt-
edly considerable numbers’ (UNRWA 1958: 2).
In its annual reports, UNRWA described its progress in regulating the
rolls. These reports indicate a transformation in UNRWA’s understanding
of the nature of the problem, and of refugees’ interests in the cards. In 1952,
the report described the Agency’s interest in moving people off the rolls,
clearly seeing the cards entirely in instrumental terms:
The Agency’s basic operating datum is the number of refugees on the ration
rolls. Its assistance is confined to those individuals and its objective is their
ultimate removal from international relief rolls (UNRWA 1952: 2).
The 1954 report complained that the Agency had not yet been able to
develop a good regulatory system and that
it has not yet been possible to make it clear to the refugees . . . and to those
Governments where doubt remains . . . that it is the refugees only who suffer
from improper or false registrations (UNRWA 1954: 2).
By 1956, however, the Agency recognized that resistance to regulation arose
not simply from lack of understanding, or simple thievery, on the part of
refugees. ‘The Agency’s ration card’, that year’s report noted, ‘was regarded
by refugees as their only evidence of refugee status’ (UNRWA 1956: 3).
Any system for registering those cards with more accuracy, therefore, had
to be aware of the importance of these cards as visibility documents, and not
simply as bureaucratic instruments.
Over the years, UNRWA tried to develop mechanisms for acknowledging
this importance, suggesting that refugees had some success at claiming a
broader purpose for these cards. While refugee status was initially a binary
matter—you were either registered or not, and you could lose your registra-
tion if your income went up, if you moved away from the area of UNRWA
operations, or, if a woman, if you married a non-refugee—over the years
additional categorizations were introduced. These categories were in part
intended to manage resources better, identifying, for instance, people who
were no longer eligible for food rations, but who would still have access
to UNRWA schools and health services. But they also clearly responded to
Palestinian demands for recognition of their displacement and dispossession.
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The importance of this recognition was acknowledged by the UN more
broadly in a 1982 General Assembly decision to ask UNRWA
to issue identification cards to all Palestine refugees and their descendants,
irrespective of whether they are recipients or not of rations and services fromthe Agency, as well as to all displaced persons and to those who have been
prevented from returning to their home as a result of the 1967 hostilities, and
their descendants (UN A/RES/37/120, 16 December 1982).
The difficulty in accomplishing this goal was indicated in the fact that a
year later, UNRWA declared that it had not received sufficient information
from host countries to proceed with implementation of the resolution
(UNRWA 1983).
As great as are the challenges involved with humanitarian papers, such
documents have often proven to have greater longevity than those issuedby governments. The many changes in rule in Gaza have made government
paper quite precarious. Just as the Mandate-era Palestine passport became
a mere token after 1948, Egyptian papers were replaced by Israeli ones after
1967, which were then partly superseded by PNA documents after 1994. Not
surprisingly, the transformations in these documents are directly connected to
the interests of governing bodies. When the Egyptian Administration issued
Egyptian laissez passers (travel documents) to allow Gazans to travel abroad,
these documents declared the nationality of the holder to be Palestinian (even
in the absence of a Palestinian state) and identified the bearer as a refugee(whether they were or not) (Dar Al-Watha’iq 1958). These documents served,
therefore, to make two visibility claims, claims that as I have already dis-
cussed were sometimes in tension. Indeed some Gazan natives objected to
being described as refugees in their official papers (Dar Al-Watha’iq 1959).
Under Israeli occupation, the official representation of the population chan-
ged dramatically and these documents described the bearer’s nationality as
‘undefined’. The PNA issues passports, but whatever visible claims they may
make on behalf of Gazans is severely curtailed by Israeli restrictions on
movement out of Gaza. Both humanitarian papers and official documentsrepresent people in ways that are not entirely within their control and for
many Palestinians humanitarian objects have been the more consistent in
their claims.
Conclusion
It is no surprise that people who have been displaced from their homes seek
both to hold on to objects that serve as evidence of their former lives and to
acquire new sources of visibility. The length of Palestinian displacement,
60 years as of this writing, means that this case provides a clear window
into the kind of visibility strategies that displaced populations pursue
over time. In this article I have focused particularly on the ways that
refugee camps, ration cards, and other material artifacts of humanitarian
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operations enter into this visibility field. While the first purpose of these
objects is instrumental, to house and feed displaced persons, they are quickly
and often effectively utilized to make broader claims than humanitarian
action typically embraces. Humanitarian forms enter into a wider landscape
that includes not only personal and social forms of documented visibility
(such as keys and flags), but also government sponsored objects and papers
(such as the Egyptian-built statue of the unknown soldier). Mundane experi-
ences and objects can be as significant as monuments and symbols in declar-
ing people’s presence and articulating their demands. The Palestinian case
further confirms that humanitarian processes and objects which have often
been seen as disempowering of refugees—reducing them to a ‘sea of human-
ity’ (Malkki 1996) or ‘bare life’ (Agamben 1998)—can sometimes be used by
refugees to make themselves visible on an international stage.
1. In 2002 UNHCR updated its interpretation of the ‘exclusion clause’ of the 1951
Convention and indicated that there were circumstances in which Palestinians
would fall under UNHCR (UNHCR, ‘Note on the Applicability of Article 1D
of the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, October 2002).
2. A Palestinian American artist, Emily Jacir, whose work is very much part of
a Palestinian visibility project recently won a major award at the Venice Biennale.
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