Landscape of Hope and Despair: Palestinian Refugee Camps

Based on intermittent but in-depth field research spanning three decades, this book chronicles the experience of Palestinians living in the camps of Lebanon from the perspective of place and space, and how these parameters have affected their identity.

Julie Peteet is associate professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Louisville. By focusing on place/space, she connects a cutting-edge form of social research with what has always been central to the Palestinian cause: land. For stateless persons forcibly separated from their land, place and space can be life or death matters, as the history of Palestinians in Lebanon shows all too well.

As an anthropologist, Peteet sees it as her task to “humanise those otherwise marginalised and demonised, giving them a voice and bringing their life experience to others.”

“Landscapes of Hope and Despair” focuses on the everyday life of camp residents, drawing on the extensive interviews Peteet conducted with Palestinians, who are the oldest refugee group in the world and, alongside Afghanis, the largest.

Beginning with the nakba, where “space was splintered as was time” (p. 3), Palestinians in Lebanon have been dislocated and relocated numerous times by state intervention and successive waves of violence, resulting in their being confined to ever-shrinking spaces. Yet, Palestinians have also had an impact on place and space, crafting their surroundings to meet their survival needs and promote their struggle to return to their homeland.

“Dislocation launched the Palestinians on an objectifying pursuit of place.... This book explores how Palestinians imprinted the camps with a landscape of hope for the return.” (pp. 5, 31)

The book highlights the people of Shatilla, but includes many references to Ain Al Hilweh, Burj Al Barajneh and other camps in Lebanon. There are fascinating accounts of the immediate post-war days from the viewpoint of aid workers, especially the Friends, and the refugees themselves, up through the establishment of the camps and UNRWA, whose impact on Palestinian agency and identity is extensively examined.

In the 1950s and early 60s, camps served mainly as places of confinement and management, mapped out according to the villages from which the refugees had come. Aid was distributed on a village basis, reconstituting the power of the village mukhtar in a new context. Social relations followed kinship and village patterns, but this in itself was a challenge to Israeli intentions. By recreating a microcosm of the Galilee in the Lebanon camps, Palestinians challenged the idea that they could be alienated from their sense of place and identity.

Meanwhile, a new generation was being educated and trained in UNRWA facilities, acquiring broader social relations in the process. An all-Palestine identity evolved and became pivotal in the next stage, when the PLO gained control of the camps in 1968. This ushered in an era of relative autonomy, spatial expansion of the camps and greater mobility outside their boundaries, institution building, expansion of social services, political activism, economic upswing, community mobilisation, advances for women and inter-camp coordination.

“Designed as transit centres to prepare refugees for local integration, Palestinian camps instead became oppositional spaces appropriated and endowed with alternative meanings.... The militant Palestinian identity fomented in them asserted that defeat, loss and bereavement did not mark the end of a process but rather were a spur to action.” (p. 95)

However, after the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the PLO's departure and recurrent attacks on the camps, they reverted to being places of incarceration. “In the early 1990s, Shatilla resembled a ruralised holding centre in the midst of a teeming post-war city... the refugees have been spatially confined, legally marginalised, and socially outcast.” (pp. 171, 224)

In terms of confinement and its implications, Peteet draws a parallel with Palestinians living under occupation and subject to the Israeli policies of closure, checkpoints and the apartheid wall, all of which allow for intensified surveillance and, in effect, create “open-air prisons”. Her current research aims to determine if these policies have made Palestinians' lives so impossible that a “silent, creeping transfer” is, in fact, occurring.

Certainly, there is ample evidence that some wish for the Palestinians in Lebanon to simply disappear. “Landscapes of Hope and Despair” is a timely book both in terms of its analysis and in calling attention to the plight of this most disadvantaged community. It is a touching tribute to the ingenuity and strength in the face of adversity displayed by the men, women and children of Shatilla and other camps, breaking through the walls of imposed invisibility to tell their story.

Sally Bland