The Politics of Suffering

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Nell Gabiam. The Politics of Suffering

THE POLITICS. OF SUFFERING

Contents

Acknowledgments

Note on Transliteration

Introduction

From Humanitarianism to Development

The Politics of Suffering versus the Politics of Citizenship

Fieldwork in Syria

1Informal Citizens. Palestinian Refugees in Syria

A Warm Welcome in Syria

The General Authority for Palestinian Arab Refugees (GAPAR)

The Sites of the Neirab Rehabilitation Project. Neirab Camp

Ein el Tal Camp

Syria’s Endorsement of Development in Palestinian Refugee Camps

The Limits of the (Syrian) State

2From Humanitarianism to Development. UNRWA and Palestinian Refugees

Emphasizing Development

UNRWA’s Financial Crisis

A Global Shift in Assistance to Refugees in Protracted Situations

A Change in the Attitude of Arab Host States

A Shift in Refugee Attitudes

UNRWA and Palestinian Refugees

UNRWA in Syria

The Different Perceptions of UNRWA

3Ṣumūd and Sustainability. Reinterpreting Development in Palestinian Refugee Camps

Sustainable Development

Participation as Control

Palestinian Refugees Debate Sustainability

Sustainability as Resilience

Ṣumūd as a Guiding Concept

4“Must We Live in Barracks to Convince People We Are Refugees?” The Politics of Camp Improvement

Camp Improvement in Historical Perspective

Improving the Neirab Barracks

Improving the Barracks

Neirab Camp as a Laboratory for Urban Development

The Barracks as Witness

5“A Camp Is a Feeling Inside” Urbanization and the Boundaries of Palestinian Refugee Identity

Space and Stigma

The Camp from an Ethnographic Perspective. A Camp Is a Racialized Space

A Camp Is a Political Space

A Camp Is a Feeling Inside

The Desert, the Camp, and the City

Yarmouk as an Exceptional Place

Conclusion. Beyond Suffering and Victimhood

The Outcome of the Neirab Rehabilitation Project

Development and the Right of Return

The Camp as a Laboratory of Knowledge

Toward a New Global Humanitarian Order?

Epilogue

Notes. Introduction

1. Informal Citizens

2. From Humanitarianism to Development

3. Ṣumūd and Sustainability

4. “Must We Live in Barracks to Convince People We Are Refugees?”

5. “A Camp Is a Feeling Inside”

Conclusion

Epilogue

References

Index

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THE POLITICS OF SUFFERING

Paul A. Silverstein, Susan Slyomovics, and Ted Swedenburg, editors

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In addition to expressing their suffering as emotional pain resulting from the injustice of living in forced exile, Palestinian refugees also saw it as a political tool. Suffering took on the form of stoicism, something that needed to be endured to maintain the memory of exile and actualize the narrative of return.6 Stoicism dignified Palestinian suffering understood as part of a larger struggle for liberation and return. Those who earned a camp community’s respect were those who had struggled for Palestinian freedom through their political activism, especially those who had shed blood for the cause. Most were those who lived in humble conditions in the camp, not those who had achieved the dream of modernization, who lived in villas and were economically prosperous, who met the international indicators of well-being that are important to UNRWA. Anthropologist Rosemary Sayigh notes that when Palestinians embraced resistance and armed struggle in Lebanon in the late 1960s, the notion of struggle was closely tied to a “special capacity for suffering” (1979:166). UNRWA’s development discourse is invested in bestowing dignity in the form of “capacity building,” “self-reliance,” and economic prosperity but not in the form conferred by suffering that is viewed strategically, as sacrifice in the name of a larger political struggle.

There is now a solid body of literature exploring the relationship between suffering and political agency (Allen 2009; Asad 2003; Benbassa 2010; Brown 1995; Fassin 2002, 2012; Fassin and Rechtman 2009; Petryna 2002; Ticktin 2006, 2012). To fully understand Palestinian refugees’ engagement with the Neirab Rehabilitation Project, one has to understand suffering both as a passive state that one strives to overcome and as agentive–that is, suffering itself as a kind of action (Asad 2003). Agentive suffering, understood as a political tool or as having political effects, falls within the scope of what I term the politics of suffering. I use this term to describe the ways in which suffering becomes a means–whether deliberately or not–of attaining political legitimacy and rights. For Palestinians in Neirab and Ein el Tal, ongoing suffering testified to the original injustice of the Nakba, which is the term used by Palestinian refugees to describe the dismemberment of Palestinian society and the forced displacement and exile of more than half of the members of this society in the aftermath of the 1948 Arab–Israeli war; it acted as a conduit for neither forgetting the traumatic past nor the claims of redress linked to that past; and it included bodily and material sacrifice in the name of the Palestinian Political struggle.

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