The Politics of Suffering. Nell Gabiam
in project implementation and in the agency’s use of an urban development approach. While the Syrian government legally recognizes that Palestinian refugees on its soil have most of the social rights associated with citizenship, this does not mean that the refugees are always able to access or make the most of these rights in practice, and poverty remains an issue in the camps. In UNRWA’s vision, the goal of development is, on the one hand, to incorporate individuals as much as possible in the institutional framework of the state and, on the other hand, to pursue progress by enabling individuals to attain the social privileges associated with citizenship, if not citizenship itself. Conceived in this manner, development is part of a politics of citizenship. A framing of Palestinian victim-hood as one in which Palestinians are marginalized from the rights, privileges, and opportunities that accrue to citizens of an independent state because they are not fully integrated in this state does not take into account the issue of return to one’s place of residence before exile. Return becomes irrelevant. What is important is the acquisition of substantive citizenship rights, if not citizenship altogether, and the home that counts is not where one has historical or emotional links–the home that counts is where one has the possibility of becoming a full citizen.
Palestinian refugees in Neirab and Ein el Tal did not reject development outright, nor did they reject many of the material outcomes promised by the Neirab Rehabilitation Project. What was at stake for them was the need to articulate a vision of progress and improvement that did not ignore their history or seem to compromise their political claims. As noted by Laleh Khalili (2007), the last few decades have seen the emergence of a global human rights and humanitarian discourse that addresses the suffering of victims of injustice “in such a way that suffering and tragedy are made immanent to their being, sometimes to the exclusion of their political struggle for justice” (Khalili 2007:35). UNRWA-sponsored development is based on an understanding of suffering that is not really able to accommodate Palestinian political claims. UNRWA’s imbrication in the Western-dominated order that created it and that is mostly responsible for funding it, as well as its historical mandate as a humanitarian agency, have curtailed its ability and willingness to address or sometimes even acknowledge the political concerns of the refugees it assists.
However, rather than simply point out the shortcomings (and achievements) of UNRWA’s approach to development in Palestinian refugee camps, this book explores efforts, both Palestinian refugees’ and others’, to come up with a vocabulary and set of practices that transcend the apparent dichotomy between the politics of suffering and the politics of citizenship.
Fieldwork in Syria
My first encounter with a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria was Yarmouk in the summer of 2002, when I was still a graduate student and had traveled to Damascus to study Arabic. I followed a fellow student, an aspiring journalist, who wanted to visit the camp. I was struck by how seamlessly Yarmouk blended into the surrounding city. Without the giant arch featuring a portrait of former President Hafiz al-Asad that signals the entrance, it would have been impossible for a newcomer to know that she was crossing a boundary of sorts. With symmetrically arranged apartment buildings, Yarmouk had the appearance of a typical working/middle-class Syrian neighborhood. It was also a popular commercial area, attracting Syrians from other parts of Damascus. I became interested in examining what it meant for Palestinians living in Yarmouk to be refugees, given the extent of their socioeconomic and physical integration into its surroundings. Thus, when I began my fieldwork in spring 2004, I was based in Damascus and remained there for one year.
In addition to spending a significant amount of time in Yarmouk interviewing Palestinians of various generations and backgrounds, I followed the activities of the Yarmouk Youth Center, one of the camp’s many active grassroots organizations.7 I also worked as a volunteer at the UNRWA field office in Damascus. I wanted to examine the relationship between the agency and the refugees it has been assisting for over six decades.
In the second year of my volunteer work with UNRWA, I had the opportunity to participate in the Neirab Rehabilitation Project, which was taking place in the north of the country, outside Aleppo, Syria’s second largest city. One of the project assistants had become ill and had taken a leave of absence, so the project manager was looking for some extra help. The director of UNRWA in Syria at the time was very receptive to the idea of having an anthropologist participate in one of the agency’s projects.8 UNRWA was in the midst of reassessing its relationship with Palestinian refugees, and the director felt that an anthropologist’s skills would be useful to this effort. For this reason, I spent a large part of 2005 in Aleppo and its surroundings working as a Neirab Rehabilitation Project volunteer.
While working on the project, I was not allowed by Syrian authorities to live in either Ein el Tal or Neirab, so I commuted from Aleppo. Palestinian refugee camps are generally under heavy scrutiny by Syrian authorities, and foreigners are usually discouraged from visiting or spending time in them unless in an official capacity.9 It was not unusual for foreign researchers to live in Yarmouk, which was harder for Syrian authorities to police given its level of integration into Damascus. However, it would have been almost impossible for a foreign anthropologist to settle in or even have regular access to a smaller and more isolated camp like Ein el Tal or Neirab. Through my relationship with UNRWA, I had special permission to come and go, except for spending the night in Ein el Tal or Neirab or both depending on where the project needed me. Overall, I ended up spending most of my time in Ein el Tal, where the project office was located and where phase 1 of the project was still being implemented when I arrived.
With regard to the limitations I faced in conducting research in Syria (or the lack thereof), perhaps a few words need to be said about my own identity and positionality in relation to my object of study: I am the daughter of a Black Togolese father and a White American mother and I was raised in Togo. Most people in Syria, whether Syrian or Palestinian, did not immediately identify me as someone from the West. They usually guessed that I was East or North African or South Asian. I found out over the course of my fieldwork that I could sometimes “pass” for Palestinian. When I went shopping in Aleppo’s commercial district with my friend Muna from Neirab, she introduced me to vendors and store owners as her “cousin,” fearing that they would raise their prices if they found out I was American. These merchants usually accepted my undercover identity until they started a conversation with me in Arabic, forcing me to reveal my accent.
It is hard to know the extent to which the identities I was associated with, coupled with my not being readily recognizable as Western or American, affected my fieldwork or my rapport with the Syrians and Palestinians I encountered. I usually introduced myself to people as an American, although anyone who got to know me very quickly knew my entire background. I purposefully chose to emphasize my American identity when meeting people for the first time because I felt that if I did not disclose this information, and these people found out later, they might become suspicious. My fieldwork coincided with a period during which the US government was particularly unpopular in Syria and American foreign policy was a sensitive issue. When I arrived in April 2004, the atmosphere was tense: about a year before, the United States had invaded Iraq, a deeply unpopular action with both Syrians and Palestinians. To make matters worse, the US government, which at the time was still confident in its invasion of Iraq, was hinting that Syria might be next. Additionally, a few weeks before my arrival, angry Palestinian protesters from Yarmouk had marched to the American embassy in Damascus, scaled the walls, and taken down the US flag in the aftermath of Israel’s assassination of Sheikh Ahmad Yasin, Hamas’s spiritual leader. After the protest, the embassy issued a security briefing urging Americans in Syria to avoid Palestinian areas. As a result of the prevailing atmosphere, I was forbidden–not by Syrian authorities but by the Fulbright office in Damascus–from living in Yarmouk.10 The head of the Fulbright office at the time considered the area too dangerous for me as an American researcher.
I decided it was preferable for people to find out my American identity sooner rather than later, and overall I did not find this disclosure to be a significant hindrance. I made one exception, however, and that was with cabdrivers, to whom I introduced myself as being from Africa (min afrīqia). I had noticed that when I identified myself as an American to Syrian cabbies, most of whom are rumored to be government informants, I was inevitably bombarded with