Protection Amid Chaos: The Creation of Property Rights in Palestinian Refugee Camps

CONCLUSION

To know what it is like to live in Yarmouk, turn off your electricity, water, heating, eat once a day, live in the dark, live by burning wood.

—ANAS, YARMOUK REFUGEE CAMP (UNRWA, 2014)

Most houses have no doors or windows, and in the snow storm life became harder. We depend on radishes and lettuce and green things grown in the camp, but those food items had frozen. The water pipe exploded because of the snow.

—RAED’A, YARMOUK REFUGEE CAMP (UNRWA, 2014)

At 7 A.M. I walk one kilometer to get water for my home. I usually spend five hours a day collecting water, but I only collect water every five days because it is only available every five days.

—AZIZ, AGE TEN, YARMOUK REFUGEE CAMP (UNRWA, 2014)

The stories of Anas, Raed’a, and Aziz describe the Palestinian struggle to survive in Yarmouk refugee camp in Syria in 2014. In 2014, Yarmouk, a Palestinian refugee camp that was established shortly after the 1948 Nakbah, was under siege and UNRWA was able to bring food rations on only 113 days, averaging eighty-nine boxes per day over the year (http://www.unrwa.org/crisis-in-yarmouk). To meet the minimum needs of people, UNRWA should have delivered four hundred boxes of food each day (http://www.unrwa.org/crisis-in-yarmouk). As the protracted Syrian civil war pushes slowly toward a conclusion, Palestinians will have to renegotiate institutions in the refugee camps in conditions not of their choosing. What experiences will they strategically draw from to find protection amid chaos?

The Palestinian narrative and the theoretical findings from refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan have direct links and clear implications for the Palestinian refugee community struggling to find protection in Syria today. Interestingly, Ali L.’s story that began this book closely parallels Palestinian refugee stories in Syria that describe the fear, terror, risk, and utter chaos of finding protection in the impossible conditions of violent conflict. Unlike the Palestinian voices from Yarmouk in 2014, Ali L.’s story traced the progression from chaos to order through the creation of informal and formal property rights. His story provides hope for protection in the midst of chaos. When the Syrian conflict one day reaches its end, Palestinian refugees will push for protection and will renegotiate the formation of property rights. It is my contention that Palestinians in Syria can learn from the most recent reconstruction efforts of refugees in Nahr al-Bared.

To make the connection to the current Palestinian refugee crisis in Syria, I begin with a brief review of results from Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan. After the review, findings are extended to Palestinian refugee camps in Syria before the 2011 civil war. In particular, a preliminary set of data I collected in Palestinian refugee camps in Syria in 2007 traces the formation and evolution of property rights in Homs refugee camp. Faced with another catastrophe when their camps were destroyed during the 2011 Syrian civil war, Palestinians are, once again, searching for order in chaos. To forge a pathway to protection and stability, Palestinian refugees in Syria can learn from the recent reconstruction efforts in Nahr al-Bared camp in Lebanon.

SUMMARY OF FINDINGS

First, Palestinians were not passive purveyors of their refugee camp conditions. Detailed interviews with refugees in seven camps across Jordan and Lebanon showed a vibrant community that actively sought to protect itself in the midst of chaos. Most Palestinians lost everything in 1948 and lived in abysmal conditions in the early years inside the camps. There were conflicts and intra-camp battles over resources, geographic positioning inside the camps, and political dominance. At the same time, entrepreneurial Palestinians created small businesses and slowly grew a customer base inside the camps and in neighboring villages. In the meantime, Palestinians felt they had to find a way to get along and looked to their pre-1948 village practices on property management and conflict resolution to anchor behavior in the refugee camps. The initial development of informal property rights was consistent with a “spontaneous order” explanation for institutional evolution. The community selected shared understandings of acceptable behavior and enforcement mechanisms like notions of family honor and shame to govern the camps in the absence of a state authority. In response to the 1948 Nakbah or Catastrophe, they developed informal institutions of property rights patterned on strategically selected pre-1948 norms of defining and enforcing property.

After a series of crises following the Arab defeat in the 1967 war, the 1969 Cairo Accords, and Black September in 1970, Palestinian refugees in camps across Jordan and Lebanon had to contend with new ruling coalitions. In Jordan, a huge influx of Gazans and Fatah’s attacks against Israel prompted Jordanian authorities to clamp down on the refugee camps. Following the bloody Black September battles in 1970, Palestinians were forced to negotiate the formalization of property rights with the Hashemite monarchy. Jordan sought to dominate and control the camps. Palestinians hoped to protect their assets and avoid state incorporation. In response to the constraints of Jordanian authority, Palestinians converted pre-1948 methods of communal enforcement to gel with the Jordanian judicial system. The dual system gave refugees a voice and melded a Palestinian system of protection with a Jordanian model. Though it offered some protection of community assets, Jordanians often engaged in predatory behavior toward the most vulnerable subset of Gazan Palestinian refugees. Despite the shortcomings of the system, Palestinians strategically navigated the transitional landscape and managed to protect their community from outside domination with all odds against them.

In Lebanon after the 1969 Cairo Accords, Palestinian refugees negotiated the formalization of property rights with an outside Palestinian political group called Fatah. Fatah touted a revolutionary agenda that would activate and advocate for refugee interests domestically and internationally. Despite the positive aspects of their revolutionary slogans and local interest, they still sought to dominate and control the camps. In response to Fatah’s new ruling coalition, Palestinian refugees negotiated the formalization of property rights at camp committee offices. Business owners hoped to create an efficient registration process. Palestinian refugees asserted their identity apart from Fatah using informal communal norms of compromise and family agreement to enforce titles. Though the negotiated system provided protection of assets and preserved camp communal behavior, Fatah still engaged in predatory practices with respect to shared resources like electricity and water in the camps. The limits of locally contrived property rights revealed the precarious balance refugees must strike between finding protection with new ruling coalitions and exposing themselves to predation by outsiders.

Finally, the 2007 destruction of Nahr al-Bared camp provides another example of how Palestinians negotiated for protection in the face of outside domination. They mapped pre-2007 practices of titling and enforcement during the “validation process” in which camp residents met with a reconstruction commission to establish property claims in the new camp. Despite their vulnerability to Lebanese mukhabarat or secret police, their ability to infuse Palestinian norms of protection in the confusing post-conflict space reveals the resiliency of communities in finding protection in transitional settings.

THEORETICAL FINDINGS

The results from findings in refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon contribute to theoretical discussions of institutional formation and evolution. Contrary to strict path-dependent interpretations of institutional formation, my study shows that history might constrain but does not completely shackle the role of individual agency in building institutions. Palestinian refugees operated within strict parameters of outside control and rule. Their lives were often subject to broad geopolitical forces not of their choosing. Transitional settings, by their very nature, lack the stability associated with other political landscapes. Despite the limitations, communities can navigate the transitional terrain with a great deal of success and craft property rights that effectively define and enforce claims. Certainly, if conditions had been better, better forms of property rights might have developed. But as Qian (2003) notes, this is not a world in which communities should search for the “best” path, rather they should follow the “feasible” path to institutional formation.

Next, my findings in refugee camps suggest that the “feasible” path is not a linear one. As Thelen (2004) and Pierson (2004) hypothesized, institutional formation and evolution are iterative and dynamic processes. Institutions are not “locked in” but renegotiated in the face of shifting conditions on the ground. For Palestinians, critical junctures like the 1948 Nakbah, the late 1960s introduction of new ruling coalitions in camps across Lebanon and Jordan, and the 2007 reconstruction of NBC created moments in which the community was forced to devise new systems of property rights for protection. Rather than resign themselves to the domination and institutional system of the new and more powerful ruling coalition, refugees found protection when they devised strategies to meld their own Palestinian ways of managing property with outside groups.

Third, Palestinians treated past community experiences in managing and enforcing property rights as malleable identities that could meet the challenges of life in a transitional setting. A rigid understanding of communal identity would have had difficulty in adapting to shifting economic conditions and ruling coalitions in the conditions of refugee camp life. In transitional spaces where everything, including one’s life, is under threat, then Palestinians strategically deployed parts of their pre-Nakbah ways of life, kinship ties, and enforcement practices to meet the challenges of life in the refugee camps. Like a lizard that changes colors to meet the challenges of its environment, a malleable communal identity permitted the community to camouflage itself in the face of dangerous and more powerful outsiders.

Existing approaches undertheorize the limitations of “feasible” property rights in transitional settings. When transitional communities, like Palestinian refugees, must negotiate institutions with more powerful groups, like states or military forces, they often risk endangering the very assets and identity they sought to protect from outsiders. In the Palestinian refugee case, outside groups wanted to control and consolidate power in the refugee camps. Though Palestinians negotiated compromises in enforcement mechanisms by infusing Palestinian methods of adjudication with state judicial systems, they were still vulnerable to predation. By institutionalizing the outside enforcers, they also formalized the dominance of an outside group that controlled more resources and power than the Palestinian community. Striking a balance between protection and predation is not easily achieved in transitional settings when one community is so much weaker from a political perspective than the outsider.

PALESTINIAN REFUGEE CAMPS IN SYRIA PRE-2011

These findings are extendable beyond Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan. In particular, there are a significant number of Palestinian refugees that have lived in refugee camps in Syria since 1948. Palestinian refugees in Syria are now doubly dispossessed because all twelve of UNRWA-operated camps have been severely damaged or rendered inoperable during the Syrian civil war. A scant few Palestinians have been able to flee to neighboring Arab countries due to entrance restrictions established in May 2014. Understanding conditions in Syria prior to 2011 sets the foundation for examining the community’s prospects for protection in the face of this latest iteration of chaos.