To Subvert, To Deconstruct: Agency in the Qalandiya Refugee Camp
In April 2018, heavy rain destroyed part of the wall near the Shu'fat refugee camp in Jerusalem. In videos that circulated on social media, children seized this opportunity to cross over the ruins of the destroyed wall and play football on the security road beside the fallen wall. This separation road — its function and its meanings — ceased to exist for a moment: the children managed to replace the existing meanings of the wall and the adjacent separation road, embodying daily needs and ephemeral aspirations. What constituted the wall — its meaning, history, structure, political signification, and boundaries — was transformed for a moment, and for these children — not for city dwellers or other refugees, but only for them — into a playground. This transient character of the space is an essential part of the agency or deconstruction for the refugees in Qalandiya, which responds to daily life aspirations along with political questions.
The daily practices of Palestinian refugees have long been understood as a direct reaction to the influences of the political and social structures that exist in Palestinian refugee camps (Woroniecka-Krzyzanowska, 2014). Anthropological studies conducted on similar cases have tended to strip the inhabitants of their agency and reduce them to victims or humanitarian subjects. In this article, I argue that the practices of daily life in Palestinian refugee camps are forms of reclaiming collective and individual agency. They are not only reactions but also attempts toward affirming political rights and achieving daily aspirations in an environment that has been constantly subjected to exception, control, and surveillance (Petti, 2018). The daily practices of the inhabitants of the Qalandiya refugee camp can be understood as a protest against the political and social powers that manage, control, and surveil the camp (Johansson & Vinthagen, 2015). These political and social powers manifest in common spatial circumstances of Palestinian refugee camps, producing spaces of control and surveillance to serve their purposes (Woroniecka-Krzyzanowska, 2014). Meanwhile, with the prolongation of exile, a fourth generation of refugees has been born into overpopulated camps, surrounded by an oppressed, contradictory, and underdeveloped environment (Bshara, 2014).
Framing Everyday Life: From Passive to Active
There is no doubt that Palestinian refugee camps are places of exception, control, and surveillance (Hassan, 2014). Many scholars have discussed the contribution of the different political and humanitarian structures in instituting a "permanent-temporary" reality for the Palestinian refugees (Ramadan, 2012). The inaccessibility to many Palestinians of the three "traditional" solutions for refugees — return to the country of origin (rejected by Israel), host country citizenship (rejected by Palestinians), or resettlement in a third country — has prolonged their exile (Ramadan, 2012).
The prolongation of exile and the persistence of the political question has allowed the emergence of different political structures that see Palestinian camps either as an asset or a threat to their political narrative (for the Palestinian Authority and Israel) or subjects of humanitarian intervention (for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East — UNRWA — and other humanitarian agencies). The influence of political structures in Palestinian refugee camps has established what Nasser Abourahme and Sandi Hilal call the extraterritorial and extrajudicial state of the Palestinian camps (Abourahme and Hilal, 2009).
Stripped of political power vis-à-vis states, refugees became active political agents advocating for their rights by embodying their political struggle in their everyday practices. Abourahme and Hilal, drawing on Eyal Weizman’s notion of "liquid geographies," write of the inhabitants of the Dahaysha camp:
"In flexible territory, a variety of actors and actions can, with varying effect, all physically challenge the envelope of political space and transform it. It is in the space of relative maneuverability that Deheishans consciously produce a space that challenges their marginalization as political actors in city and nation." (Abourahme and Hilal, 2009)
The everyday becomes a way to establish new systems of meaning that allow the emergence of new forms of what can be described as the ordinary — an ordinariness that is only ordinary within the boundaries of the camp (Woroniecka-Krzyzanowska, 2014).
The Camp, Political Structures, and the State of Exception
The Qalandiya camp was established as a refugee camp by the Red Crescent in 1948. Its administration was handed over to UNRWA in 1951, its 1,500 inhabitants being officially designated as refugees at that time (UNRWA, 2015). By the mid-1960s, camps took on real and symbolic significance as lasting evidence of the Nakba and incubators of armed resistance, challenging the legitimacy of Israel as a democratic state before the international community (Mubayd, 2010). The PLO thought of refugee camps as a fertile environment to lay down a base for its armed resistance, seizing the despair and anger, especially after the loss of the 1967 war, to mobilize armed resistance and pressure Israel to recognize Palestinian rights, among them the "right to return" (personal communication, July 2015).
After the Oslo accords of 1993, Israel still exerts a form of remote control over the refugee camps through the closure of streets, isolation, night raids, and military provocation. Yet refugees in the West Bank found moments of opportunity in the withdrawal of the Israeli army from cities and camps. In the case of the Qalandiya camp, this is exacerbated by the fact that it falls partly within Area C (under full Israeli civil and military control according to the Oslo accords) and partly within the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem. The Qalandiya camp is therefore excluded from municipal services, whether provided by Israel or the PA.
The political structures in the Qalandiya camp have thus imposed control, surveillance, and exceptionality, producing an extraterritorial, extrajuridical, and permanently temporary space (Abourahme and Hilal, 2009).
An Agency of Everyday Practices: A Response or Reclaiming Space?
While there is a need to lead an "ordinary" life in Palestinian camps, and at the same time embody the various political rights within those needs, the production of the ordinary happens on several levels and through different, sometimes contradictory, modes of agency. Writing on "everyday activism" during the first intifada, Iris Jean-Klein argued for the "potentiality" of individual agency to drive daily practices, whether "oppositional, emancipatory, or hegemonizing" (Jean-Klein, 2001). Even in the most turbulent times, people try to lead ordinary lives in the camp as a means of resilience and acts of resistance (Woroniecka-Krzyzanowska, 2014). Beyond the regimes of control and exception imposed on the camps, inhabitants feel a need to improve their living conditions, evoking "tensions" seen in the camps' physical and discursive expressions (Sivan, 2005).
In her study of perceptions and reproduction of the ordinary in times of crisis in the al-Am'ari refugee camp, Dorota Woroniecka-Krzyzanowska frames the ordinary as a state that refugees practice in their daily life to achieve and reclaim agency (Woroniecka-Krzyzanowska, 2014). I would expand this definition to assume that the ordinary is a state people construct while negotiating with the cause of the extraordinary. The complex sociopolitical nature of the Palestinian camps imposes a (relatively) extraordinary context on their inhabitants, yet the act of creating the ordinary from the imposed extraordinary is itself a tool to restore collective and individual agency. What is ordinary for the refugee does not have to be for others.
During my fieldwork in the Qalandiya camp, I identified two modes of agency in the camp: a collective agency that subverts and affirms, and an individual one that deconstructs. In the following sections, I examine how both modes of agency — the agency to subvert and affirm and the agency to deconstruct — manifest on a spatial level in the Qalandiya camp.
Agency to Subvert and Affirm
The suspension of everyday life is a form of subverting established systems of meaning imposed by the Israeli military. Collectively, refugees decide to suspend their daily routine as a way of expressing solidarity with each other.
This was seen frequently with regard to festive events like weddings, for example: camp inhabitants chose not to celebrate any weddings as a means of strengthening their solidarity, and not due to a lack of opportunity (Woroniecka-Krzyzanowska, 2014). Where the Israeli army sought to control and pressure camp residents to abandon resistance by imposing measures meant to suspend daily life, the refugees subverted the meanings of such impositions to their favor (personal communication, August 2018).
In the camp, development carries a different significance than in other spaces. While development typically carries associations with permanence and sustainability, development in the camp corresponds to a momentary need of the collective. Development and construction are meant to be temporary until the dismantling of the camp as a whole. Permanence and sustainability are diminished through the materials used, the quality of construction, or simply through perception and the assumption of temporariness. As one landlord in the Qalandiya camp told me:
- "Do you see all those new commercial buildings at the entrance of the camp? … They are as temporary as the camp. Even if they seem new, once we return everything will be gone."
- "Even if this happens soon?"
- "Even if this happens tomorrow."
The spatial character of the Qalandiya camp could be understood as the ultimate manifestation of the agency to affirm.
Take, for example, the main public space of the camp. This space was not planned as a public space; rather, it is a portion of a street that extends from the entrance of the camp toward the main mosque. This street is wider than others, giving it the potential to become a common space. The various social, political, and economic inputs in this public space affirmed its temporary status. The various Palestinian political institutions (the PLO, Fatah, Hamas, and so on) have presented a discourse that, along with the collective view of the inhabitants of the Qalandiya camp, has sought this space to be a space of political mobilization and affirmation of Palestinian claims and rights. The various political factions in the Qalandiya camp held events, raised flags, and organized parades. They painted political graffiti and hung posters of leaders and martyrs all around. These collective social endeavors did not oppose the Palestinian political narrative; rather, they affirmed it (Lehec, 2017). For camp inhabitants, it was important to keep spaces in the camp politicized for the sake of their "right to return."
Agency of Deconstruction. Political Dimensions
In a radio sketch played on Radio Dona Taraddod [meaning both Without Hesitation and Without Frequency], a stranger in his twenties opens the front door of a private house in an unnamed refugee camp in Palestine. The family of the house sits on a sofa in front of the television. The stranger joins the family.
He takes the remote control and starts changing the channels while eating some of the snacks lying on the table. The family continues as if nothing out of the ordinary is taking place. Later, the stranger stands up and walks to the main door. As he opens it, the father asks, "Are you sure they're gone?" The stranger replies, "Maybe," and leaves. It thus becomes clear that the young man was being chased by Israeli soldiers and had entered the home to seek refuge from their presence in the common space of the camp.
The sketch sheds light on sociopolitical phenomena intertwined with the deconstruction of space and architecture in the camp. The stranger's "invasion" of private space during family time is specific to the moment (characterized by the invasion of public space by the Israeli military) and to him (his vulnerability to arrest or assault as a young Palestinian man and, perhaps, an activist). In this moment,
The assumed notions of spaces (in particular regarding private property) are unmade by the young man and replaced with new ones. Space is reduced to its abstract form — its absolute form, mathematical space momentarily stripped of its function, history, and its notions — as part of the process of reconfiguration that allows the young man to mold the space to the needs produced by his current and past conditions.
Another manifestation of the agency of deconstruction on a political level can be found in the alleys of the Qalandiya refugee camp. The semi-public alleys that constitute the camp spaces can momentarily be transformed into "private" refuge for those who are persecuted by various political structures (figure 5). While usually these alleys have specific functions constrained by social considerations of privacy, at certain moments the alleys can acquire other functions, reinvented as strategic escape and supply routes when supporting resistance movements in the camp. During the Second Intifada, the Israeli army demolished large swathes of the Jenin refugee camp in an attempt to undo the spatial order of the alleys.
Social Dimensions
Women's access to the camp's common space is limited by implicit and explicit social norms. Apart from the associations that provide space for women in the Qalandiya camp, like the Women's Programs Center (Markaz al-Baramiz al-Nisawiyya) and the Child Center for Culture and Development (Markaz al-Tifl li-l-Thaqafa wa al-Tanmiya), women also manage to find common space in the private spaces of their houses. M.A., a 37-year-old married mother of four and an active member of the Women's Programs Center, explained that every day she and other women in the camp meet in different living rooms inside their houses in the Qalandiya camp (personal communication, July 2015). These living rooms become like a public space — temporarily transforming private spaces into collective ones.
Thus, women turn these private spaces momentarily into public space. They have altered the boundaries of common space and associated it with time. They have unmade the private nature of living rooms temporarily and established a network of common spaces that are not fixed as either public or private but are dynamic and flexible. The map below (see figure 6) shows various living rooms in the camp that together form a temporary public space for women.
Individual Aspirations
K.S. is a 28-year-old man who lives in the Qalandiya camp. During the Second Intifada, he was injured and lost both of his legs; now he mainly moves around by wheelchair. K.S. noted that the spatial characteristics of the camp do not correspond to his needs for accessibility (personal communication, July 2015). The agency to deconstruct emerges as a way for him to negotiate his daily needs, producing a space that neither the physical environment of the camp nor the collective agencies of affirmation or subversion could provide him.
Practices of daily life required K.S. either to ask the local community council and UNRWA to provide proper infrastructure for public amenities and for his house — which was not possible due to a lack of funds — or to unmake the camp as it is. This latter process entailed re-signifying the spatial and architectural elements of the camp in a way that would correspond to the needs specific to his disability. "I do not see what others see," K.S. told me. "We see the same forms, but we identify them and process them differently." K.S. deconstructed the meanings and the functions of the architectural elements that constitute his space and reinvented them to improve accessibility.
Conclusion
The inhabitants of Palestinian camps have found themselves in a permanent-temporariness, caught between the need to lead an ordinary life and the need to sustain and embody their right to return, between policies of exception and the need to maintain a symbolic image of the camp. This has led to the emergence of different modes of agency that allow the inhabitants to subvert, deconstruct, and reproduce existing systems of meaning to achieve political aspirations and the needs of daily life.
One mode of agency is associated with subverting existing systems of exception to embody political rights. This agency protests efforts to control the camps, normalize crisis, and foster future aspirations. Such agency is manifested in the insistence on the temporary nature of the camp in the production of spaces there.
The second mode of agency has a wide set of embodiments associated with social, political, or simply daily life needs. It is more individual and temporary, corresponding to the need of the moment. Such agency deconstructs existing systems of meaning, allowing inhabitants to construct their own meanings, thoughts, experiences, and needs in the spaces opened up.
