Displacement and Social Identity: Palestinian Refugees in the West Bank

PWKT111 Diasporn, adenlrity, and the Stale z zyx Displacement and Social 3denfit-y: Palestinian Refugees in the West Bank’ George E. Bisharat Hastings College of the Law, San Francisco tudies of the mass movement of peoples, whether through labor migration or displacement caused by war, natural disasters, or development projects, have achieved what would seem to be an unprecedented centrality in current social scientific concern.‘ On one hand, this is merely the reflection in the academy of the global reality of the postmodern world, in which the presump tions (never other than mythological) of the ethnic purity of nations, and of the natural relationships between territories and culturally unitary groups, seem increasingly ludicrous and insupportable. On the other hand, this flurry of academic interest belies the profound sense in which this postmodern global reality has challenged fundamental social scientific paradigms, particularly in the field of anthropology. What can it mean to study the “Other” - the stock in trade of traditional anthropology - in such a thoroughly intermixed social world, one in which “familiar lines between ‘here’ and ‘there,’ center and periphery, colony and metropole, become blurred” (Ferguson and Gupta, 1992:10), often beyond recognition? Ironically, perhaps, if this is the era of the greatest mobility of peoples and permeability of national boundaries, it is also the era of the resurgence sometimes savage, as in the conflict in formerYugoslavia- of ethnic nationalism. Clearly, these are not unrelated phenomena, at least in some contexts - for example, in the xenophobic riots in contemporary Germany, where socially disenfranchised ethnic Germans vent their frustrations against non-German or immigrant communities. But if the relationship between the post-war movements of peoples and the resurgence of ethnic nationalism is patent in some zy zyxw zy zyxwvu ‘This essay is based on the author’s experiences during numerous trips to the Occupied Territories, Lebanon, and Jordan, on several extended stays in the region, including one of fourteen months in 1984-1985 (during which field research was conducted on the Palestinian legal profession in the West Bank), and on secondary sources. In a region as intensivelystudied as the Occupied Territories, it is remarkable how little sociologicalor anthropological attention has been paid to the West Bank refugees. There are, of course, exceptions, most notably Roy, 1989; Cheal, 1988; Plascov. 1981; Shamir, 1980; Ben Porath and Marx, 1971; and the various articles in an edition of the Journal o/ Refugee Studies, 2(1), 1989, devoted to the Palestinian refugees in the Occupied Territories. The Palestinian refugees in Lebanon have been more frequently studied; see especially Sayigh, 1979, 1977a, 1977b;ulsolrynen, 1990,and Peteet, 1987. Barakatand Dodd (1969) have studied the exodus of Palestinians from the areas occupied by Israel in the 1967 ArabIsraeli war. witness, for example, the appearance in the last five year of three English-language journals substantially devoted to studies of population movements and/or transnational studies: The Journal of Refqee Studies, Diccspuru, and Public Culture. Numerous journal articles, monographs, collections, and conferences have treated these same themes. 165 166 zyxwvuts zyxwv zyxw POPULATION DISPLACEMENT AND m E l T L E M E N T zyxwvu cases, it may not be in others. Nor may the relationship always be identical in diierent places or historical moments. This essay explores the relationship between the displacement of a group of people - those Arab residents of Palestine who left their homes in large numbers in 1948, in the months surrounding the establishment of the State of Israel, and sought refuge in what became known as the West Bank - and transformations in their social identity. The fundamental transformation undergone by West Bank refugees has been from a community defined by the real historical experience of flight and united in the purpose of a physical return to a Palestine geographically and tangibly conceived, to a community bound by the specific experience of life in exile and committed to a return to a Palestine conceived abstractly - that is, as a purportedly natural society free of Israeli occupation. This transformation in social identity is manifested, among other ways, in the leadership roles that West Bank refugees assumed during crucial periods of the Intifada or uprising which convulsed the Israeli-Occupied Territories in December of 1987 and receded only gradually after several years of high foment. Some 360,000 to 380,000 Palestinian refugees presently live in the West Bank, nearly 100,000 in the twenty refugee camps scattered throughout the region (Jabr, 1989;McDowall, 1989).The camp populations range in size from 646 (Ein es-Sultan, near Jericho) to over 12,060 (Balata Camp, adjacent to the city of Nablus) (Jabr, 1989). Together the refugee communities constitute approximately 42 percent of the total population of the West Bank (excluding the 130,000residents of EastJerusalem). To effectively understand the transformations in social identity and political role of the West Bank refugee communities, a survey of the events leading to their establishment is essential . zy The Palestinian Exodus of 1948 As many as 770,000 Palestinians left the areas of former Palestine either all* cated to Israel in the UN Partition Plan of November 29,1947 or conquered by Israel in the ensuingfighting (mostofwhich occurred in 1948).The areas slated in the same plan to become the Palestinian state were seized either by Jewish military forces moving from the coastal regions eastward or by Jordanian forces moving across the Jordan River to the west. The latter portions were shortly thereafter annexed by Jordan, acquiring the name West Bank in distinction from the East Bank or portions of Jordan lying to the east of the Jordan River (Hurewitz, 1968). West Bank residents, including the refugees, were granted Jordanian citizenship (Cohen, 1982; Mishal, 1978). The causes and circumstances of the Palestinian exodus in 1948 constitute one of the great controversies in a region which abounds in them. The official Israeli line on the matter for many years has been that Palestinianswere induced to leave their homes by radio broadcasts emanating from the surrounding Arab countries, the better to facilitate Arab military operations against the nascent Jewish state. Such claims have recently been questioned by revisionist Israeli PALESTINIANS IN T H E W E S T BANK zyxw 167 historians, whose perusal of newly revealed archival material suggests instead that, while the flight of the Palestinians during the months surrounding the establishment of Israel cannot be reduced to a single cause, a large percentage of Palestinian refugees were more or less deliberately expelled byJewish military forces, with the tacit if not explicit approval of political leaders of the Zionist movement (Morris, 1990,1988; Flapan, 1987; Segev, 1986).3Be that as it may, it is clear that this cataclysmic period, referred to by Palestinians simply as an-Nukbu,or the Catastrophe, has passed into their national historical consciousness as one of unexpected, unnatural, and forced exile. It should be noted that gradual displacement of the Palestinian peasantry from the land and accompanying rural-to-urban migration was a phenomenon that well predated the 1948 Catastrophe. The complex socioeconomic and political causes of this phenomenon are beyond the scope of this essay. Suffice it to say here that while some of these causes were linked with the integration of Palestine into the capitalist world system and thus were typical of transformations occurring in many similarly situated societies of the Third World; others were somewhat more specific to Palestine. Of the latter, for example, was the program of Zionist colonization of Palestine, that, by 1948, had resulted in the purchase by Jewish individuals or agencies of between 1.7 and 2 million dunums of land (a dunum is equivalent to one quarter acre). While this amounted to a relatively scant seven percent of the total land area of Palestine, it may have constituted more than a quarter of the total cultivable land at the time. Thus, from one angle, the massive displacement of Palestinians of 1948was simply the rapid acceleration and effectuation by new means (military force as opposed to economic pressures) of an ongoing process of displacement. Of course, the pre-1948 stages of the process did not result in the physical ejection of the peasantry from Palestine but rather their relocation within it, mainly to urban areas - doubtless one of the reasons (but only one) that un-iVukbu is seen by Palestinians as something sui g&, and not as a part of a continuous process.4 zy zy zyxwvut zyxwv It has been argued that one of the key vulnerabilities of Palestinian society leading to its fragmentation and dispersal in 1948 was the fact that its ostensible leadership, drawn from the middle and upper classes, had already abandoned surprisingly, the controversyhas not ended with the revelations of the revisionist school. Benny Morris, the most prominent of the new Israeli historians, has firmly rejected the claim that there was a preexisting Zionist plan to depopulate Palestine of its Arab residents, and has held out for a multicausal. multistage explanation of the exodus. For a review of his and some of his critics' arguments, see exchanges between Finkelstein (1991), Masalha (1991). and Morris (1991) in the JournalofPuleslineStudies,21(1).Foramore conventionalIsraelicritiqueofMorris,seeTeveth(1990). 4Readers interested in these broader issues might consult Taqqu (1980), Miller (1985), Stein (1984), and Ruedy (1971). It must be further noted not only that the 1948 war immediately created nearly 30,000internal Palestinian refugees in Israel, but also that the more gradual process of the transfer of Arab land to Jewish ownership or control did not halt with the war. The medium, however, was not land purchases, as it had been prior to the 1948, nor massive evictions, as had been effected during the war, but rather a variety of legal mechanisms amounting essentially to expropriation (see Lustick, 1980;Jiryis, 1973). 168 zyxwvutsr zyxw POPULATlON DISPLACEMENT AND RESETTLEMENT Palestine in the months between the announcement of the Partition Plan in late 1947, and the formal outbreak of war between the newly-formed Israel and the Arab states in May, 1948. As Morris (1991:lOO) posits the claim: Did this flight of the privileged weaken Palestinian society economically, politically, and militarily? Did it undermine the staying power and self-confidence of those left behind, especially the increasingly unemployed masses in the towns and cities? Did it provide a model of escape for those who were to take to their heels in April-June [of 1948]?The evidence all points to the affirmative, and not too much imagination is required to understand the dynamics of the situation. zyx zyxw Indeed, there seems little doubt that up to 75,000 Palestinians of middle and upper class town origins had begun a relatively deliberate and orderly withdrawal (expected to be temporary, much as had been the case when the same groups left Palestine during the 1936-1939 Arab revolt) from the areas falling within the planned Jewish state. By the time of the 1948 War, they had already ensconced themselves, with their movable assets, in the towns of the West Bank and other areas safely within Arab control (Morris, 1988; see also Tamari, this volume). That the evacuation of the middle and upper classes served as an example for, and hastened, the flight of others seems convincing, at least in relation to the Palestinian urban poor - the majority of whom were relatively recent economic refugees from rural areas. There are reasons for caution, however, in accepting the claim of Morris and others with respect to the Palestinian peasantry still resident in the villages. In the first place, the claim bears disquieting similarities to conventional interpretations of the 1936-1939 Arab revolt, the demise of which has been seen as the product of the peasantry’s accession to leadership in the vacuum left by the departed urban elites. This view of the revolt has been convincingly critiqued by Swedenburg,who marshals evidence of the considerableresourcefulnessand ingenuity of the peasant rebels, and argues that their defeat was ultimately due to the formidable military strength brought to bear against them by the British. In fact, while the revolt gave the Zionist movement an opportunity to build its military capabilities, by the end of the revolt the Arab community was substantially disarmed. This military imbalance, accentuated during World War 11, was a critical factor leading to the disaster of 1948 (Swedenburg, 1988:197). It is not self-evident that, at least at the village level, the Palestinian peasantry was in fact leaderless; such fragmentary evidence as exists hints of much the same resourcefulness and ingenuity as was demonstrated in the previous decade during the revolt. For example, Shoufani’sdescription of the wartime activities in his native village, Micilya, in the Galilee, chronicles elaborately planned and coordinated expeditions behind Israeli military lines in search of food (1972). There are suggestions that the neighborhood committees that became such an effective part of the sustained uprising in the Occupied Territories that began in 1987 may have had precedents in the period of the 1948 war (Giacaman, 1989).Neither is it entirely clear that the outcome of the conflict in 1948would PALESTINIANS IN THE WEST BANK zyxw 169 zy zyx zyxw zy have been greatly different had the middle and upper classes remained in Palestine, given the limited efficacy of the regional and national leadership they provided, the relative weakness of Palestinian national consciousness in the villages, and the aforementioned military imbalance between the Jewish and Arab communities.5 Virtually none of those who left their homes and land during an-Nuhba expected to be gone more than a few days, or at most several weeks. The majority carried with them only their valuables and provisions for a few days. Needless to say, not all Palestinians fled their homes in 1948, nor did all flee to the West Bank. Those who did flee generally sought safety in the nearest territory held by Arab armies. For residents of the northern Galilee and coastal areas, this tended to mean Lebanon and Syria,while for those of the southern coast headed for the Gaza Strip, which fell under Egyptian military control. Large refugee camps sprung up in each of these locales (Abu-Lughod, 1971). Families with kin outside of Palestine often relocated in the towns and villages of their relatives; if not immediately, then in the process of regrouping that continued for months, even years following their initial exodus. Most of the refugees who ended up in the West Bank - perhaps 350,000 of the total of 450,000 Palestinians who entered Jordan in the months before and after the 1948war (Jabr, 1989;Plascov, 1981) -came from the villages and towns in the central coastal plain, such as Lydda, Ramle, andYaf€a,having fled directly eastward and upward into the highlands. Families and often entire villages fled together, reassembling in part spontaneously and in part at the bidding of Jordanian troops in the West Bank adjacent to routes of transportation and to towns, where services and markets were available. A number of these encamp ments were subsequently moved by Jordan in 1950 to a position at least 20 kilometers from the borders, to prevent infiltrations into Israel, and thus to avoid resultant friction with the Jordanian government (Plascov, 1981). UNRWA and the Institutionalization of Refugee Status Emergency relief services were initially offered to the Palestinian refugees by local town councils, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and such charitable agencies as the American Friends Service Committee and UNICEF, which first reached the field with tents and other provisions and supplies in 1948-1949 (Jabr, 1989).By November 1948,the United Nations General Assem5Resourcefulness and ingenuity at the village level could not be a substitute for effective regional and national leadership. As to the level of nationalist consciousness among his fellow villagers, Shoufani noted: "The Micilyan'sworld was his village -the land and the people. Matters of national, or even regional politics were the concern of one or two people in the village. The farmers were totally indifferent to developments elsewhere even in the Galilee itself. They did not, for instance, view an attackonyanuh afew miles to the south as something they should worry about." (1972:120). Also, the deprivation of its most educated and articulate segments doubtless contributed to the observed fragmentation, demoralization, and absence of corporate solidarity or identity among the Palestinian community that remained in what became Israel (see Nakhleh, 1975). z 170 zyxwvutsr zyxw zyxw POPULATION DISPLACEMENT AND RESETTLEMENT bly created a special fund, the UN Relief for Palestinian Refugees (UNRPR), to be disbursed by a director who was also charged with coordinating the relief efforts of local governments, as well as international and voluntary agencies (Buehrig, 1971). After more than a year, and with the likelihood of a quick return of the refugees to their homes fading, the United Nations General Assembly further acted by granting a three-year mandate to a special agency to provide for refugee needs (Roberts, 1989). The mission of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) was to conduct, in coordination with local governments, "direct relief and works programmesn among the Palestinian refugees, and to "prevent conditions of starvation and distress and to further conditions of peace and stability" (Williams, 1989:156) .6 UNRWA began work in May 1950, distributing more tents, emergency medical supplies, and minimum food rations to the refugees. In order to properly apportion these benefits it registered the refugees, issuing them identity cards and for the first time creating a formal institutional category of that group. UNRWA's definition of a refugee entitled to registration was one "whose normal residence was Palestine for a minimum period of two years immediately preceding the outbreak of the conflict in 1948 and who, as a result of this conflict, has lost both his home and means of livelihood" (Buehrig, 1971:39). Just what kind of proof UNRWA required (or could have required) to establish eligibility for registration as a refugee is not evident, given the chaos surrounding the Palestinian exodus. No doubt many Palestinians left their former homes with sufficient documentation to establish residency in Palestine for the requisite two-year period; equally clearly, many others did not. It appears that, in some cases, West Bank town councils certified individuals as refugees by sending letters to UNRWA officials (Plascov, 1981). In any case, during the first years of Palestinian exile there was considerable contention not only as to the application of the definition to specific individuals and groups but also as to the definition itself. For example, though never having left their homes, many residents of villages bordering Israeli-held territory were nonetheless separated from their lands by the armistice lines, thus losing their zyx 6As UNRWAis unique as an international relief organization created specificallyto address the needs of one refugee population, so are the Palestinians unique as the single group in effect excluded by the Statute of the Ofice of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and by the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees which together establish the fundamental international legal regime pertaining to refugees. Paragraph 7(c) of the Statute and Article 1D of the Convention, respectively,exclude persons receiving aid through some other organ of the United Nations. This exclusion reflected the judgment that the "competence of the High Commissioner in the political issues surrounding the Palestinian cause was once thought incompatible with the proclaimed nonpolitical character of the UNHCRs work." Still, in principle. if either UNRWA assistance is terminated prior to resolution of the situation of those it serves, or if particular individuals leave the sphere of UNRWA's operations, Palestinians may then qualify for refugee status under the 1951 UN Convention (GoodwinGill, 198356-57). Palestinian refugees in the West Bank, however,still might not qualify by virtue of their Jordanian citizenship; Article 1E of the Convention excludes a person granted by the country in which he resides the rights and obligations attached to possession of the nationality of that country. It is not clear whether this problem is cured byJordan's formal legal and administrative disengagement from the West Bank in 1988,and its claim to consider residenu of the West Bank from that point as Palestinian citizens, not Jordanians. - zy PALESTINIANS IN THE WEST BANK zyxw zy 171 z zyxwvu livelihoods. UNRWA eventually registered 25,000 such persons as refugees, granting them half rations (Buehrig, 1971).A number of destitute West Bankers sought refugee status, and the meager benefits attaching thereto, claiming to have come from Gaza.7 Efforts by UNRWA to conduct a census of the refugees - seen as a prelude to the curtailment of relief aid - met with fierce opposition in the form of numerous and strident demonstrations in the camps. Some wealthier refugees demanded identity cards from UNRWA, arguing that they “should be issued to all refugees regardless of their need for relief, for they were a symbol of separatism” (Plascov, 1981:49). These more affluent refugees sought an identity card not as proof of entitlement to relief benefits but as a signifier of a temporary, unique status, and a tangible representation of UN commitment to effect their return to Palestine. On the other hand, it is clear that a number of middle-class Palestinians refused registration and the dole offered by UNRWA as a fundamental humiliation (seeRefugeeInterviews, 1988). Importantly, UNRWA also helped to establish refugee camps on government lands or on lands leased by host governments. While many refugees never took up residence in the camps, many others did, giving the refugee population at least a partial spatial segregation from the nonrefugee population of the West Bank. This simultaneously gave rise to a division between the refugee communities themselves, namely camp communities and those attached to towns and villages. Later UNRWA built rudimentary open-air sewage systems in the camps, and provided materials for the construction of semipermanent huts (UNRWA, 1987). UNRWA has come to be viewed by Palestinians with a combination of appreciation and resentment. On one hand, it has evolved gradually into an important provider of health, welfare, and educational services, the latter especially highly prized among Palestinian refugees (Cossali and Robinson, 1986; Badran, 1980). In 1989, in the West Bank alone, UNRWA was running 98 primary and preparatory schools serving some 40,000 students (Arafat, 1989; Schmida, 1983). In the Occupied Territories, UNRWA has been the sole legal administrative agency existing in the camps (whereas in Lebanon, for example, the PLO assumed many administrative and social welfare functions) .s Many of its lower- and middle-level staff are now Palestinians, mostly from the camps themselves, who bring a kind of missionary zeal to their work. Thus, in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, UNRWA has been the closest thing to legitimate self-government the camps have been permitted to achieve by the Israeli authorities. Suspicion among Palestinian refugees concerning UNRWA derives from the sense that it is the instrument through which the international community has 7This occurred in the late 1950s when there were large-scale population movements from Gaza, across Israeli-heldterritories to the Hebron area (Plascov, 1981). *The popular committees that assumed many administrative functions in and outside of the camps during the Intifada were banned by Israeli authorities,as had earlieryouth and studentorganizations affiliatedwith factions of the PLO and which, prior to the Intifada, regularly engaged in small-scale public works efforts in the camps. 172 zyxw zy zyxw zyxwv zy POPULATION DISPLACEMENT AND RESETTLEMENT sought to depoliticize their plight and lull them into a dependent ‘frefugee consciousness” (on the creation of the category “refugee” as a systematized, routine technique for dealing with, and containing, the growing number of refugees in the postwar period, see Malkki, 1989; 1990). In the words of one Palestinian, Hamdi, interviewed by Cossali and Robinson (198612): Everyone was always waiting for things, handouts, forms, cast-off clothes, applications, and so on. The whole sense of rootlessness created a sort of paralysis. The world saw our cause as a refugee one instead of a political one. Hostility toward UNRWA intensified whenever the agency appeared to take steps that would either encourage or accede to the permanence of Palestinian exile.9 For example, the movement to replace tents in the camps with cinderblock or asbestos huts, begun in the early 1950s, was only completed in 1959 in all of the UNRWA-administered camps in the region, largely due to resistance by the camp residents.Even these ostensiblypermanent structureswere referred to by the refugees as shelter ( m u l j u ’ ) , rather than home (buyt). Likewise, refugees flatly refused to participate in several large-scale irrigation projects designed in the 1950s by UNRWA for Jordan and the Sinai Peninsula in order to facilitate refugee settlement and employment. In the mid-fifties, refugees in the Dayr Ammar camp destroyed a nursery established by UNRWA - symbolically resisting the implantation of ‘roots’in their community of exile.10 Interestingly, UNRWA’s later eventual focus on education was apparently impelled by the demands of the refugees themselves, who craved individual advancement and were distrustful of only UNRWA projects aimed at the collective body of refugees as such (Ernst, 1989; Schiff, 1989). A more recent and equally intriguing example of the Palestinians’ ability to transform UNRWA’s mission has occurred during the Intifada,when the agency’staskswere enlarged to encompass general assistance protection of refugees, not merely humanitarian aid. So, for example, newly appointed refugee flairs officers were deployed in the Occupied Territories to monitor demonstrations and reduce violent encounters with Israeli troops by establishinga visible UN presence. Legal affairs officers were sent to observe military court trials of Palestinians and to provide legal advice to UNRWA field directors. UNRWA also began for the first time to distribute aid without regard to refugee status, primarily out of recognition that other Palestinians were, in the circumstances of the Intifada, equally in need of relief (Schiff, 1989). In general, then, the refugees have been anything but passive in dealing with UNRWA, instead vigorously articulating their concerns and pressing their demands - often with success. 91n fact, the UN has never granted UNRWA more than a three-year mandate, instead renewing it repeatedly - primarily to avoid apparent acceptance of the permanent, or even long-term, nature of the Palestinian diaspora. ‘OOn the ubiquity of trees as analogies for the rootedness of nations in particular territories, see Malkki (1992). zyxwvu zyxw zy PALESTINIANS 1N THE WEST BANK 173 Localism and Incorporation into W e s t Bank Society Despite the lengthening of the period of exile and all of the accumulating signs of its permanence, refugees for a number of years continued to conceptualize their state as temporary, and to hope for a return to their homes and villages. If the futility of such hope is apparent in retrospect, it is important to remember that sporadic but neverceasing diplomatic efforts for repatriation and for a general resolution of the Arab-Israeli dispute always admitted some feeble ray of optimism. It is fair to say that in the initial years of exodus, the predominant sentiment underlying this urge to return was the very powerful strain of localism which runs through Palestinian society. Palestinians - and I suspect the members of many other essentially peasant societies - have very strong attachments to the villages and towns of their origins, and to the land more generally. Residents of particular villages and towns are often identifiable by distinct speech patterns and intonation. There is much lore about the purportedly typical characteristics of people from certain towns or villages (Khalzlis, or people from Hebron, are widely believed to be somewhat brutish - stupid and gullible, but physically powerful; Nabulsis, from Nablus, to be clever, but ruthless in business). The oldest Arab organization in the United States, and one of the liveliest, is the Ramallah Federation, linking immigrants and their offspring from the West Bank town of that name. These local attachments were perpetuated in the diaspora in a number of ways. First, residents of many villages who fled simultaneously in 1948 settled in the same quarters of refugee camps, thus preserving a degree of spatial and social cohesion.11 In the months following the war, refugees organized committees composed of former notables and mukhtars in order to ensure their former villages' appropriate shares in the distribution of relief. In some instances, there were attempts to revive prewar local organizations in exile (such as the Haifa Cultural Association in Nablus, and the Jaf€a-Muslim Sport Club in Ramallah) (Plascov, 1981). Streets, alleys, shops and markets that sprouted in the camps were named for the villages and towns from which the residents or proprietors hailed (Said, 1986 Sayigh, 1979). Refugees continued to refer to themselves as coming from their original home villages. This practice was accepted and somewhat formalized in the society at large. Even today, for example, 45 years later, a refugee in a West Bank court (where witnesses are required to state their names and home towns prior to testifying) will identify himself as fulaan ibnfulaan, Ramle, iskaan ad-Dheishe," (so-and-so,son of so-and-so, from Ramle [his town of origin] - reszdenceDheisheh [a refugee camp just South of Bethlehem]), and this is duly recorded by the zyxw zyxwvuts zyxw zyx "The degree to which this cohesion was maintainedvaried considerablyfrom camp to camp. Some camps, for example, concentrated residents of as many as 80 different villages (Tulkarm), while others were built practically for a group of previously linked villages or even for extended families (such as Azzah camp, named for that family) (Plascov. 1981:16). 174 zyxwvut zyxwvu zyxw POPULATION DISPLACEMENT AND RESETTLEMENT court scribe. Many families retain the keys to their homes, prominently displaying them in their camp shelters as symbols of their determination to return. The strong localism among Palestinian refugees was equally characteristic of the West Bank society into which they were cast. Although they shared language, religion or sect, and general culture with West Bank Palestinians,'* the refugees for the most partwere outsiders to the kin and other networkswhich constituted the functioning units of social and political life there and provided the security of an individual and his social standing" (Shoufani, 1972:115). One might say the refugees had no more place in the West Bank socially than they did spatially or geographically (Luttlyya, 1969). In fact, it appears that the refugees were viewed by West Bankers with a mixture of pity and contempt - pity, of course, since the refugees were the most obvious victims in what came to be seen as the great national catastrophe. The contempt perhaps stemmed from more complex sources - the sense that the refugeeswere defeated," losers," perhaps even somehow responsiblefor their state of destitution.15The refugees, of course, were landless in a society in which there was a close nexus between land ownership, wealth, social status, and political influence, exemplified in the folk proverb 'ardi cirdi' (my land is my honor). Though anomalous with respect to West Bank social structure, the category or class with which the refugees were most closely analogous was the landless peasantry, which endured the lowest status in the social hierarchy. Perhaps still worse, as Sayigh suggests, the refugee was like a gypsy or bastard, or "a person of no known social origin, and therefore of no respect, the lowest level of human being" (1979:126). Malkki has suggested that refugees are a categorical anomaly" in the order of nations, and as such represent a political and symbolic threat to that order ( 1990:33). This may also be true of refugees vis-i-visthe social order of the host communities in which they take refuge. Liminal social beings - those who do not fit easily into conventional social categories - especially tend to threaten social order in societies in which social norms are enforced in the first instance, through mutual exchange and reciprocity between known social groups, such as West Bank Palestinian society. Liminality in such circumstances implies a lesser susceptibility to social control. Thus, as Shamir reports, campbased refugees complained that nonrefugee Palestinians considered them "outside any binding code of traditions and customs," refused to give them loans, and were reluctant to sanction intermarriages with their children (1980:150). zyxwv zyxw zyx 'Vhis distinguishes them from Palestinian refugees in some other Arab countries. In Lebanon and Syria, the peasants were predominantly Shiite, Druze, and Christian, and the Sunni majorities primarily urban. Palestinian refugees who settled there, overwhelmingly Sunni peasants, faced either class or sectarian differences in the host societies different from fellow Sunnis in being peasants; dinerent from fellow peasants in being Sunni (Sayigh, 1977). - '*Thecauses of the Palestinian exodus may not have been well understood in the surroundingArab societies;many apparently believed that the refugees had sold their land, or fled out of cowardice (Sayigh, 1979108). This may, however, have been more true of some Arab countries (Lebanon) than others (Jordan). zyxwv zyx PALESTINIANS IN T H E W E S T BANK 175 There is little question, furthermore, that the massive influx of the refugee population into the West Bank was profoundly disruptive to local society in a variety of ways. Town councils, after an initial period of cooperation in relief efforts, chafed at the problems of sewerage, flooding, hygiene, water, inadequate space for burials, and the like created by the refugee presence. Many refugees squatted on the private property of local landowners. Economic friction emerged as shops opened in the camps, offering cheaper goods than merchants in the towns and attracting even town-based patrons, and as refugees competed with poor nonrefugees for jobs (Plascov, 1981). If the refugees were resented and looked down upon by the local population, it is also plainly evident that the refugees judged themselves by the same standards and criteria as the surrounding West Bank society did, and suffered deep senses of shock, shame, and humiliation at their condition. The camps, in a sense, became nearly as much refuges from the surrounding society, full of reminders of the refugees’ degraded status, as from the conditions of war that gave first gave them birth (Shamir, 1980). There was considerably less resistance to the assimilation of the middle and upper class Palestinians who had migrated from towns in the coastal plain to towns in the West Bank. This was probably due to the greater supralocal ties enjoyed by the elites, a function of their historically greater mobility, which eased their entry into West Bank society.l4 Moreover, in their more orderly withdrawal, the well-to-do had managed to preserve more of their material assets, and with them a greater quantum of their previous social status. Thus the spatial division between camp and noncamp refugee communities reiterated and perpetuated preexisting sectoral (rural-urban) and class differences in Palestinian society. It is also apparent that sect played a role in the differential acceptance of refugees into West Bank town society. Virtually all Christian refugees in the West Bank settled in towns and villages. In some locales, such as Ramallah, coreligionists welcomed the Christian refugees and relied on their votes in municipal elections to retain control over town councils. Again, in Ramallah, it was to Christian refugees that local land was first sold, and with whom the first intermarriages with the nonrefugee population occurred (Plascov, 1981) . Those who fled to the towns are now seldom referred to colloquially as refugees (luji’iin)although they still might identify themselves as such, for effect in speaking to a foreigner, for example. The term luji’,singular for refugee, has come to connote a social and demographic category, along with quruwi (villager) or fellah (peasant), and had& or midini (town-dweller). It means primarily a zy zyxwvu zyx zyxwvu zyxw 141talso seems plausible to assume that villagers who fled the shortest distances in 1948 -from areas close to the armistice lines to villages just within the West Bank - would have had kinship ties and other functioning networks that facilitated their acceptance into the communities of refuge as “known” social beings, and thus partially spared them the debilities suflered by other refugees. Furthermore,some of those who fled in 1948 were relatively recent migrants from areas in the West Bank and elsewhere: they doubtless had a considerably easier time returning to their towns and villages than others who were strangers. This was true, for example, of a number of refugees from Haifa, who had moved there during the Mandate years from Nablus and its environs (Plascov,1981). 176 zyxw zyxw POPULATION DISPLACEMENT AND RESElTLEMENT resident of a refugee camp. It thus subsumes some who never actually experienced flight (namely, the children of the original refugees from 1948 who have remained in the camp) and excludes others (those who settled in the towns) who are true refugees in the respect that they actually participated in the exodus.’5 Traces of discrimination even against the town-based migrants are still evident. In my research on the West Bank legal profession, for example, I found that people are generally reluctant to entrust sensitive financial matters especially those involving land - to lawyers who are not members of the putative founding clans of their villages or towns (Bisharat, 1989).And while individuals of nonlocal origins have become increasingly active in elections for municipal councils and local Chambers of Commerce in the West Bank, those with original linkages to the community still enjoy a decided political advantage. z Camp dwellers began to find work as agricultural laborers, and as both skilled and unskilled workers in the West Bank. Some were able to parlay their education into petty bureaucratic positions, or to enter the free professions, such as law and medicine (Bisharat, 1989).A large number of others - typically young men - found employment further afield, in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf States. Their remittances were essential to the survival of their families in the camps (see Saleh, 1990; Abu-Lughod, 1983; Benvenisti, 1984; and Graham-Brown, 1983). Interestingly,these families moved out of the camps at a rate considerably slower than mere economic circumstances dictated. There is no doubt that for many the refusal to leave the camps was a deliberate, conscious statement of the determination not to be assimilated but to return to their ancestral villages,l6 and that their UNRWA identity cards were like the “promissory note” on their right to return to their lands (Shamir, 1980:152). At the political level, West Bank Palestinian refugees, like Palestinians in Lebanon, Syria, and elsewhere, pinned their hopes for salvation on the nationalist Arab governments. This was the era, it should be recalled, of the greatest effervescenceofArab nationalism, under the leadership of Nasser in Egypt, and the Ba’th Party in Syria and Iraq. Palestinians largely shared in the vision of the creation of a great Arab nation of which they would be simply one constituent element (seesahliyeh, 1988,1992;Cohen, 1982;and Mishal, 1978).This did not diminish their longing for return, but again, this was articulated predominantly (although not exclusively) as the longing of individuals to return to homes, and less so as the longing of a people or collectivity to return to a homeland. Thus the lyrics of the famous song sung by the Lebanese artist Fairuz were ” khuthuni zy 151 am told that Palestinians once registered with UNRWA but who, over the years, allowed their refugee status to lapse have recently begun to seek to regain their UNRWA identity cards, in the anticipation of a possible Middle East peace and attendant compensation for lost properties. 16Preciselythat sentiment has been repeated by many Palestinian refugees in conversationsI have had in Lebanon, Jordan, and the Occupied Territories. Nonetheless, it is important that by 1987, on a global basis, only one in five Palestinians resided in a refugee camp (Khalidi, 1987). zyx zy zyxwvuts zyxwvu zyxwvu zyxw PALESTINIANS IN T H E W E S T BANK 177 ilu Beisan, ”“take me to Beisan,” a village in Palestine lost in 1948, rather than “Rhuthuni ilu Filasteen, “or “ take me to Palestine.” The Impact of Israeli Occupation and the Kise of the PU) A number of developments were set into motion by Israel’s resounding defeat of the Arab states in the war of 1967 which radically disrupted the pattern thus far described. Not all of these developments unfolded at the same rate; some were more gradual than others, their effects becoming apparent only in the last few years. One of the relatively immediate ones was the profound discrediting of the Arab nationalist governments, which, for all their bluster, were no more successful in the battlefield than the corrupt regimes from whom they had seized power. A specifically Palestinian national movement, incarnated in the various organizations which together formed the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), arose out the of ashes of the June War. Palestinian national consciousness crystallized around and was greatly strengthened by the emergence of the PLO. Young Palestinians in the diaspora flocked to the resistance organizations (Taraki, 1990; Cobban, 1984). The PLO was based primarily in the Palestinian community in exile - first in Jordan, until King Hussein’s ejection of the movement in “Black September” of 1970, and later in Lebanon. The principal goal of the movement was defined as the liberation of Palestine and the creation there of a “democratic secular state.” The very word return, in Arabic, cawdeh, acquired special meaning in the parlance of the national movement. Thus journals entitled al-cawdeh (“The Return”) cropped up, as did poems, calligraphy, and other artwork playing either on the word itself or on the concept of return. The emblem of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, one of resistance organizations encompassed in the PLO, cleverly superimposed the first letter of the organization’s name, a jiim or “j,” over a map of Palestine, with the initial arc of the letter representing the ejection of the Palestinians, while the finishing stroke, a direct line with an arrow pointing back to Palestine, their still-to-be-realized return. Palestine itself was intensely romanticized - and I mean this quite literally. A recurrent theme in Palestinian poetry of the diaspora, for example, was the likening of the homeland to a lost lover (Elmessiri, 1982; Aruri and Ghareeb, 1970). The West Bank (along with the Sinai Peninsula, Gaza Strip, and Golan Heights), of course, fell under Israeli occupation. The 1967 war witnessed a second mass exodus of Palestinians, primarily from the West Bank to the East Bank; some 175,000 were second-time refugees previously registered with UNRWA, while another 250,000were fleeing Israelijurisdiction for the first time (Buehrig, 1971; Barakat and Dodd, 1969). One effect of Israeli occupation for the refugees who remained in the West Bank was renewed access to the towns and villages of their origins. Shortly after the war, Israel virtually eliminated the borders between itself and the Occupied zyxwvu 178 POPULATION DISPLACEMENT AND RESETTLEMENT zyxw Territories.Although West Bank Palestinianswere not permitted to stay in Israel overnight (let alone resettle), refugees living in camps were able to visit their homes and villages for the first time in nineteen years, and to introduce their children born in exile to these nearly fabled locales. There is scarcely a refugee child who has not made this pilgrimage with his or her family at one point or another since the occupation (cf.Kapferer, 1987). It would seem a logical assumption that this renewed access would strengthen the refugees’ will to return, by breathing new life into aging memories for some and providing tangible visions in the place of previously only imagined ones for others. Ironically, the opposite seems to have occurred. It is crucial to recall here the demographic profile of the West Bank. In 1987, 46 percent of the population of the region was under the age of fourteen, reflecting the Palestinians’very high birth rate (Benvenisti, 1987).Considering that the occupation goes back to 1967,it is clear that a considerable majority of the the Palestinian population now has no direct or personal memory of anything but occupation. It should be equally evident that the number of people who actually experienced the exodus is diminishing,and that the living link they constitute to the real past is weakening. The Palestine to which children of the refugees were introduced after 1967 was vastly different from the one that their parents had fled in 1948. For one, Israel had taken considerable pains to efface the signs of a Palestinian presence, razing approximately 385 of the 475 Palestinian villages that fell within its borders in 1948, and reforesting around many of them (Morris, 1988;Abu-Lughod, 1971).All that remained of many villages was the odd foundation stone or the telltale cactus that ringed most Palestinian settlements to discourage human and animal intruders. Whereas the parents who left in 1948 had vivid images of homes or the well or threshing floor of their village, there was little more than trees and empty land for their children to see. Attachmentsformed on the latter limited exposure simply could not match the intensity of those held by the original exiles. I suspect, moreover, that the renewed accessibility of Palestine robbed it of a good deal of its mystique. The “land of Palestine” and the dream of a geographical, bodily return were compelling metaphors fcr dii end to the Palestinians’ woes as long as they were not juxtaposed to an experiential reality. And that reality could not sustain the weight of all the hopes and longings of the refugees for a better life. Thus, while the intense romanticization of Palestine I mentioned typified the discourse of the Palestinians outside the Occupied Tenitories, the same was not so within the Territories. There, understandably, the poetry, art, and political discussion increasingly focused on the travails of life under occupation (see Taraki, 1990). Israeli occupation also contributed to the broadening of opportunities for wage labor for residents of the Occupied Territories. Israel experienced an economic boom from 1968 to 1973, during which up to 140,000 Palestinian workers from the Occupied Territories migrated daily to work in Israeli agricul- zyxw zyxwvu zyx zyxw PALESTINIANS IN T H E W E S T BANK 179 zyx ture and industry (Graham-Brown,1983).The numbers have varied in the years since, but the trend has generally held up; in the mid-l980s, daily migrants to Israel numbered some 115,000, swelling to as many as 250,000 during harvest time (Saleh, 1990; Shelley, 1989). However, during the Intifada, large numbers of Palestinianswho worked in Israel engaged in prolonged strikes; at least some of these workers have been permanently replaced by hirings of new Jewish immigrants to Israel from the former Soviet Union. Moreover, following the Gulf War, when many Palestinians exhibited open support for Iraq, large numbers of Palestinians were fired from their jobs in Israel. Recent developments notwithstanding, the cumulative effect of more than twentyfive years of access to jobs in Israel, along with the labor migration to the Gulf and elsewhere during the Jordanian period (continuing, and even increasing, during the period of Israeli occupation), has been the economic emancipation of the landless peasantry and the refugees from dependence on the landed class in the West Bank with the resulting decline in that group’s political influence. This process was already apparent in 1976, when PLO-affiliated nationalist leaders swept to victory in municipal elections, defeating the old guard of landowning notables linked withJordan (Sahliyeh, 1988;Ma’oz, 1984). Another dimension of the growth of the nationalist movement was the emergence of an alternative scale of values and status which emphasized service to national political goals. While by no means insensitive to wealth, religiosity, and such traditional elements of social status, the new scale accordingly opened the door to alternative social and political leaders who possessed few of those advantages (Stein, 1991). zyxwv Nationalist Consciousness and the Uprising The Intifada of the last several years in the Occupied Territories represented the further fruition of these processes. One of the notable features of the uprising was that its leadership was decidedly younger than any of the previous nationalist figures - and that a sizable contingent of it apparently came from the refugee camps (Peretz, 1990; Khalidi, 1988).17It is important not to exaggerate this point, however; by no means have the new members of the leadership of the uprising totally supplanted previous social and political elites. Although the uprising actually began in Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza quickly spreading to other camps there and in the West Bank, after six or so weeks other segments of the population, including urban merchants and village youths,joined in and assumed equally active roles. Eventually, a Unified National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU) emerged, and began to issue directives to the population concerning activities of resistance (strikes, demonstrations, boycotts of Israeli goods and services, etc.). Membership in this group was secret, and little was I7One of the interesting indices of the ascendancy of the camp youths to social and political leadership, described by Peteet (1992).is the community’sresort to them to mediate disputes - the role of mediator being a venerated one in Arab society. 180 zyxwvutsr zyxw POPULATION DISPLACEMENT AND RESETTLEMENT zyx known about it beyond the fact each of the four principal nationalist groups in the Occupied Territories (Fateh, the Palestinian Communist Party, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine) were equally represented. As the Intifada lengthened and became more routinized, however, the notables and prominent nationalist personalities who traditionally dominated local politics regained some of the momentum they had lost in earlier stages of the uprising (see Jarbawi, 1990; Tamari, 1990a;Yahya, 1990; and Sahliyeh, 1988). The leaders of the Palestinian delegation to the peace talks that commenced in October 1991 were solid representatives of the pre-Intifada nationalist leadership. Matters might not have progressed to this point if the prior leadership either within or outside the Occupied Territories had been more successfulin realizing community goals -ultimately, bringing an end to Israeli occupation, and at least more modestly, defending the land from expropriations and the people against the relentless pressures toward permanent emigration. In 1982 the nationalist municipal leaders were expelled from office for refusing to cooperate with changes in the Israeli military administration, never subsequently regaining political efficacy (Ma’oz, 1984). In the same year it Hds forced out of Lebanon, the PLO then commenced a period of infighting that extended to the followers of its factions in the Occupied Territories, with ruinous effects on the general community’smorale. The stagnation and inefficacy of the movement created a vacuum into which stepped the new leadership of the uprising, virtually without competition. What are the factors which allowed for the participation of the formerly powerless refugees in the leadership at crucial stages of the national movement in the West Bank? I have already referred to the increase in wage labor and the resulting decline of traditional landowning political elites, as well as the emergence of a new scale of nationalist values. The camp residents generally suffered more severe repression by the Israeli military government than any other demographic sector in the society, over the years offering up more residents to imprisonment, injury, and death in demonstrations (a pattern largely continued during the Intifada; see Zureik et al., 1990-1991). Imprisonment and beatings by the Israeli military are the contemporary “rites of passage” for young Palestinian males (Peteet, 1992). There is a palpable esprit de cgbsin the camps built on this reputation of sacrifice toward the national cause (Yahya, 1990; see also Baumann, 1988). Most importantly, the sharing of the camp youth in the Intifada leadership also reflects the gradual weakening of the current of localism which ran so strongly in the generation of their parents, and the strengthening instead of a national Palestinian identity.ls The emergence of the PLO certainly was a major factor in this, giving the national movement organizational expression zyx zy zyxw ‘%Thisphenomenon is paralleled among the young militant Palestinians in Lebanon,who, as Sayigh documents, criticize the localism of their elders: “All their talk is about their own particular case. their land, their trees, their home, their position” (1979:ll). zyxwv z 181 PALESTINIANS IN THE WEST BANK and international recognition. So too was the intermingling of Palestinians from different backgrounds in universities, workplaces, and other institutions where they met abroad, through which the commonalities of their respective experiences were revealed (Khalidi, 1987). In the West Bank, refugees mixed with town and village residents in high schools, in the fifteen or so institutions of higher learning that were founded ip the West Bank since 1967, through theirjobs, and -very significantly - through membership in political organizations. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of the political groups in the lives of West Bank youths. They eat, sleep, and breathe politics, and spend most of their waking hours with political compatriots. It is these groups, which crosscut local and demographic sectoral ties, that now appear to fulfill the primary social needs for a sense of solidarity and purpose in young Palestinians’ lives.19 By now, of course, the upcoming generation of Palestinian refugee youth shares a more compelling and immediate experience - that of Israeli occupation - with their contemporaries from the towns and villages than it shares with the generation of its parents, who endured the Great Catastrophe. It is a minor but nonetheless telling fact that those street names in the camps, drawn from the ancestral villages, are these days being renamed after individuals who were killed (istashhad, or martyred, in Palestinian terms) in the current uprising (Stork, 1988). Finally, the aforementioned Israeli expropriations of Palestinian lands in the West Bank - conservatively estimated by some to have reached 34 percent of the total land area of the region (McDowall, 1989:20) - have steadily eroded the most meaningful distinction between refugees and the nonrefugee population, namely, landlessness versus ownership of land. zy z zyx From Palestine as Geography to Palestine as Nation 1 suggested at the beginning that the transformation in the political role of the West Bank refugees manifests a transformation in their social identity, from one defined by the experience of flight and exile, united in the purpose of a physical return to Palestine, to one bound by the experience of occupation and committed to a return to Palestine conceived abstractly. Let me turn to the specific issue of the relationship between this identity and the Palestine ideal. One of the most obvious clues that the relationship has undergone change was that the avowed political goal of the uprising was an end to Israeli occupation and the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza - and not a geographical return to all of Palestine, as the first generation of refugees had fantasized. This, of course, was in accord with the political program of the PLO, which increasingly zy 19Membership in hostile organizations” - any group affiliated with the PLO - is a violation of military security regulations punishable by imprisonment (seeshehadeh, 1988).As a consequence, it is impossible to accurately gauge how many young Palestinian men and women actually belong to political groups; my comments about the importance of membership in the lives of the younger generation in the West Bank are accordingly impressionistic. 182 zyxwvutsr POPULATION DISPLACEMENT AND RESE'ITLEMENT and explicitly since 1974 has expressed its acceptance of a 'twestate solution' to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute (Jarbawi, 1990; Khalidi, 1988; Sahliyeh, 1988; and Stork, 1988)". This does not mean that the concept of a return no longer has currency, or that images of the past no longer hold any sway. In fact, the imagined past is still a powerful motivating image (cf: Anderson, 1983). A popular play which I attended in the Occupied Territories during my period of field research (19841985), entitled Wadi al-Ward, or VaUey of theRose, presents a schematic history of the Palestinian experience, beginning with the pre-colonial period. As the title of the play hints, this period was idealized as something akin to an original state of nature, with happy peasants singing and dancing together - never a hint of material hardship, class conflict, Ottoman Turkish domination - which is brought to an abrupt and brutal close only by the intervention of the unnatural forces of first British, then Israeli colonialism.21 Imagery that contrasts the purportedly natural serenity of indigenous Palestinian life, allying it with the earth and the elements, against the unnatural, artificial Israeli intrusion is a common theme in Palestinian cultural expression. One famous poem addresses the Israelis as "Enemy of the Sun" (Aruri and Ghareeb, 1970), while another incants: zyxw zyxwvut zyxw zyx from you the sword - from us the blood from you the steel and fire - from us our flesh from you yet another tank - from us stones from you tear gas - from us rain.?? Thus the colonial episode seems to be conceptualized as a kind of perversion of nature, and a deviation from history. The return which is now sought is a return to history, and to that imagined, purportedly natural Palestinian society free of Israeli occupation. zy "1 would be remiss in failing to mention that there is a current within the West Bank which offers a different, partially competing vision for the future of Palestine linked with a similarly different conception of social identity, which is embodied in the various Muslim movements and organizations. These groups have gained considerable strength in the region (and even more so in the Gaza Strip) since the late 1970s. Initially tolerated, even encouraged by the occupation authorities as rivals to the nationalist organizations, some of the groups have achieved an uneasy but nonetheless working alliance with the nationalist forces during the uprising (Legrain, 1990 Tamari, 1990b). There is reason to believe that the power of these groups has peaked, however, and that the dominant ideology of the young Palestinians is still secular and nationalist. For further discussion of these issues, see Bowman, 1990 Hammami, 1990; Taraki, 1990 Bishop, 1988; and Tamari, 1988. On relations between the PLO leadership outside the Occupied Territories and the UNLU,seeCobban, 1990. 2lTaraki refers to the "museumization" of Palestinian culture, which reached its zenith in the full scale Styrofoam recreation of a Palestinian village on the campus of a West Bank university during its annual "Palestine Week" - this at a time when nearly 70 percent of the population continues to live in villages nearly identical to the model. (1990) 2Wahmoud Darwish, "Those who pass between fleetingwords," trans.,JeruralemPost, April 2,1988. zyxw zyxzy PALESTINIANS IN THE WEST BANK 183 Conclusions For those who fled parts of Palestine falling under Israeli control in 1948 to the West Bank, and for their offspring, refugee status has been, alternately, a brand of disrepute, a strategy for survival, a badge of entitlement, and a moral claim. In the first years following the Great Catastrophe, this status was legally concretized by UNRWA through its issuance of identity cards, and spatially represented through the establishment of refugee camps. Ultimately the distinction between the refugee and nonrefugee communities in the region, which was not otherwise supported by any significant differences in ethnicity, language, religion, or culture, has been eroded by socioeconomic forces and political developments - principally, the diminishing significance of land ownership and the rise of both daily and long-distance labor migration on the one hand, and the development of a transcendant Palestinian national identity, embodied by the PLO, on the other. The once unifying experience of collective flight from Palestine has faded, and been superseded by the gripping drama of life under, and opposition to, Israeli occupation. z Still, refugee status has not been completely occluded as an element of social identity. It remains to be seen whether future socioeconomic and political developments, including some form of Palestinian self-rule in the Occupied Territories, again recalls it to salience. Acknowledgments: I would like to thank Jim Ferguson and Liisa Malkki, first for inviting me initially to examine this topic, second, for reading and responding to various drafts of the essay, and third, for their own very stimulating thoughts and writings on space, place, refugees,social identities, and related topics. I am also indebted to SeteneyShami for giving me incentive for continuing to work on this essay, and for reading and critiquing an earlier draft. REFWU2NCES zyxw zy zyxw Abu-Lughod, J. "The Demographic Consequences of Occupation." In Occupation:Israel werPalcstine.Ed. 1983 N. Aruri. Belmont, MA: Association of ArabAmerican University Graduates Press. 1971 "The Demographic Transformation of Palestine." In The Transfiation of Palestine. Ed. I. Abu-Lughod. 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