This book on Palestinian refugees in Lebanon tells the story of a continuing journey through multiple places that has been propelled by intense violence. It explores how the refugees created a sense of place, identity, and meaning in new spaces, using the tools of culture, memory, and militancy. The construction of the Palestinian refugee as a category of person and an object of intervention both constrained and enabled the refugees’ practice of crafting new worlds. The book’s title encapsulates the contradictory meaning of refugee camps—sites of poverty, marginality, and terror as well as remarkable creativity. Thus they were places...

Nations may well be imagined communities but they are also spatialized. Lefebvre argues of the state, “without the concepts of space and its production, the framework of power (whether as reality or concept) simply cannot achieve concreteness” (1991:281). Fashioning knowledge about space and its circulation is integral to producing and claiming it. My interest is to connect these spatializing strategies of the state to the production of a refugee population, a population in space.

This chapter broaches the Zionist production of knowledge about the space and population of Palestine and the indigenous relation to place. Such knowledge was pivotal in...

The constitution of the Palestinian refugee has transpired in a multiplicity of places and historical periods and has been shaped by imbricated forms of power, knowledge, institutions and administrative-bureaucratic practices. Both conscious and serendipitous, these processes were historically situated and thus fluid. In other words, the best laid plans can always be waylaid by unexpected and unintended consequences. This chapter explores the centrality of an aid regime in the project of refashioning and managing Palestinians, collectively and individually, and the forms of knowledge on which the project was based and generated. As spatialized strategies for governance and reconstitution, the relief...

When I returned to Beirut in the early 1990s after a hiatus of nearly ten years, the contrast with Shatila camp in the 1970s and early 1980s was stunning. A once vibrant, jam-packed camp with a fairly decent standard of living was now a debris-encircled, rubble-filled, geosocially isolated, and poverty-stricken patch of land. The historicity of space, as well as its violently contested nature, was tangibly inscribed in the new perimeters and devastated interior. While the relationship between space and society, between spatial forms and power, and the role of history and social institutions in the built environment is theoretically...

The camps could be seen as a built environment, as everyday abodes, and as places where possibilities for the future emerged, took shape, and were acted upon. Maintaining secrecy about the fidaʾiyyin signaled a community boundary, a defensive line of inclusion in a community of shared marginality and repression, and of militant action. This chapter explores place-making and identity in the resistance era (1968 82) and during the camp wars (1985–87), both periods of extraordinary violence. Rafiq and Abu Fadi’s statements evoke this landscape.

Before the revolution, we couldn’t stack two stones on top of one another. When the...

As the millennium came to a close, the inscription of violence assaulted one at every step: the armed guards ringing the camp, the massive piles of rubble from dynamited or shelled buildings left by nearly two decades of war, the open sewage systems, the somber black and white faces of the dead on posters plastered on nearly every wall, the pervasiveness of the handicapped, extreme forms of poverty, and the multitude of female-headed households. Shatila camp was a highly demarcated space; entry required a lengthy walk through Lebanese Shiʿа areas with a profusion of signs that proclaimed their territorial dominance...

A curious story circulated in the refugee camps in the 1990s and in the wider Palestinian exile community. A young boy from the Shatila refugee camp has a dream of the long awaited and fought for return to Palestine. All the refugees board buses and head south for the border. Once in Palestine, the people of the village of Tarshiha return to Tarshiha, the people of the village of al-Bassa return to al-Bassa, and so on. A busload of refugees from Shatila choose not to return to their places of origin. As former Shatila residents, they stay together and build...