feldman, ilana - refusing invisibility (original)

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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.

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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


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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

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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.


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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.

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2. A Palestinian American artist, Emily Jacir, whose work is very much part of

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