Review of 'Refuge and Resistance: Palestinians and the International Refugee System' by Anne Irfan
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency, colloquially known as UNRWA, was founded in 1949 as a temporary organization charged with the welfare of displaced Palestinians until such time as a political solution to their banishment could be found. Seventy-plus years later, it counts 5.9 million registered refugees among its wards and employs thirty thousand people to run its 58 camps, more than 700 schools, and 140 health care clinics across the Middle East, to the tune of an $817 million annual programming budget in 2022. With more staff than the UNHCR, older than any but the most central institutions of the United Nations, UNRWA now represents one of the largest and longest-established institutions not just in the Middle East but in the UN system writ large – though in some respects its existence remains tenuous, with its financing entirely dependent on annual donations and a continued requirement to re-up its mandate in the General Assembly every few years.
Given the extent and intensity of scholarly hand-wringing over Palestine in the half-century-plus since the 1948 war, it is surprising – indeed, astonishing – that there has been no book-length exploration of this central institution of the conflict and indeed of Palestinian life in exile. Anne Irfan’s Refuge and Resistance: Palestinians and the International Refugee System fills this gap with style and verve. At the heart of her account is a profound contradiction: the problem, instantly recognizable to scholars of refugeehood everywhere, of positioning a theoretically apolitical solution of aid against the deeply, inescapably political problem of displacement. With the nakba, as Irfan puts it, Palestinians “not only cross[ed] a geographical border [but] … a categorical one, moving from citizenship to refugeehood.” The remaking of Palestinians as refugees, in other words, fundamentally had to do not just with their expulsion and dispossession at the hands of the Zionist militaries, but also with the international community’s collective decision to reimagine Palestinians as wards of the United Nations: recipients of aid rather than political agents, of statehood or anything else.
Over the subsequent decades, though, the UN’s effortful (and profoundly self-interested) recasting of the Palestinians as apolitical recipients of humanitarian aid proved impossible to sustain in the face of Palestinian resistance. From the beginning, displaced Palestinians insisted on their own political being, rejecting UNRWA’s terms even as they demanded its continued practical operation. In the first years of the agency’s operation refugees across the Middle East protested it at every opportunity, believing its officials to be intent on their permanent resettlement via employment elsewhere in the region. “There have been demonstrations,” a 1951 report to the UNGA ran, “over the census operations, strikes against the medical and welfare services, strikes for cash payment instead of relief, strikes against making any improvements, such as school buildings, in camps in case this might mean permanent resettlement; experimental houses to replace tents, erected by the Agency, have been torn down; and for many months, in Syria and Lebanon, there was widespread refusal to work on agency road-building and afforestation schemes.” This kind of obstructionism – which, it must be noted, reflected a thoroughly accurate assessment of the agency’s initial goals for its Palestinian charges – chalked up some real successes in the years following the nakba. By the late 1950s, UNRWA had been forced quietly to abandon its goals of mass resettlement and concentrate on something with a great deal more support among displaced Palestinians: education.
There were other arenas, too, where Palestinian resistance and activism proved able to shape UNRWA’s institutional presence and turn it to nationalist ends. Refugee camps, conceived at the UN as modern developmentalist villages, became crucial spaces of Palestinian preservation: of cultural practice, of village geographies, of political self-definition. The agency’s insistence on regimes of documentation, registration, and enrolment became crucial constituent pieces of a formally defined and broadly recognized Palestinian national exile. Its educational institutions and practices, increasingly run by Palestinians themselves, offered a venue for the dissemination of nationalist narratives, histories, and tactics. By the time the 1967 war demonstrated the hollowness of Arab regimes’ (including Nasser’s) promises to the Palestinians, the camps were ripe for a revolution. In the thawra (revolution) of the late 1960s and early 1970s, in which the PLO claimed and received acknowledgement of its state-like (military) authority over refugee camps in Lebanon, UNRWA officials witnessed the ground-level transformation of one of the agency’s most fundamental institutions. Refugee camps’ distinct geographies had, as Irfan puts it, been converted “from a feature that enabled state control to one that facilitated and incubated autonomous political activism.” Revolution until victory, indeed.
Still, the “international” had its own cards to play – as did the state of Israel, now occupying the West Bank and Gaza. The Israeli government also understood what had happened in the camps and responded with violence, none-too-subtly encouraging what might now be called self-deportation and bulldozing pieces of the most troublesome camps: Jabalia, Rafah, Shati. Its relationship with UNRWA in the post-1967 period was fraught but ongoing, with state officials resenting what they understood as UNRWA’s harboring and encouragement of Palestinian militancy but reluctantly acknowledging their dependence on the agency’s social controls via the provision of services. Arab host states, too, stood in perpetual distrust of UNRWA for the ways in which it empowered Palestinians to exempt themselves from state authority and itself took on state-like powers on Arab soil; but the Syrian, Lebanon, and Jordanian regimes all continued to rely on it to control and succor the refugees within their borders. Perhaps the most concise summary of the agency’s relationships with its Arab host countries is the one Irfan uses to describe Jordan: it was “in no way equipped to get rid of UNRWA.”
So: UNRWA was here to stay, a reality Palestinians thoroughly understood. (As the PLO operative Salah Salah put it trenchantly, “The Jews got Israel and we got UNRWA.”) The immediate task, then, was to turn the agency – its institutions, its staff, its activities – to Palestinian ends. The second half of Irfan’s book tracks Palestinian efforts to render UNRWA’s political existence visible, particularly through rendering and publicizing its existence as an ongoing public acknowledgement of the international community’s unpaid debt to the Palestinians. (Anthropologist Ilana Feldman has also recently explored the development of what Irfan here calls “rights-based entitlement,” a conception of UNRWA’s services as a wholly inadequate but nevertheless crucial baseline recompense for Palestinian dispossession at the hands not just of the Zionists but of the UN.) UNRWA’s much-disputed role as a quasi-state came into this claim as well; what did an agency using Western donor money to provide state-like services to a refugee population owe to its wards, particularly as they increasingly proclaimed political positions at odds with donor interests? An attempt in 1978 to distance UNRWA from the militancy so evident in its camps by moving its headquarters from Beirut to Vienna triggered howls of protest, from both Palestinians themselves and from Arab host states. To both, the decision appeared (as a PLO memo put it at the time) to have been taken “in response to pressures from imperials and Zionist forces to compel UNRWA to shirk its international responsibilities and obligations towards the Palestinian refugees.”
UNRWA, in other words, was a radically insufficient reparation for Palestinian losses: profoundly disingenuous in its claims of neutrality, undermined by its dependence on money from some of the architects of Palestinian dispossession, tainted by its perpetual efforts to undermine and dismiss the more militant manifestations of Palestinian nationalism in its midst. And yet it could not be abandoned, for it represented the only acknowledgement the international community had ever made of the injustice visited on Palestinians in 1948 and every year since. The same could be said of the UN itself, which in the 1970s became an ever more important venue for Palestinian claims and Palestinian activism as the PLO took firmer hold of the reins of power. Palestinian activists from Arafat down thoroughly understood all the ways in which the “international” derived from the imperial, but they saw no other sphere in which their claims could be as effectively made.
What to do, then, about an institutional setup that has for decades simultaneously supported and undermined the maintenance, development, and reproduction of Palestinian national claims? It is an impossible question. For now, Irfan writes, “the refugees’ relationship with UNRWA remains dominated by the same dynamics that drove it in the early 1950s: calls for the regime to properly represent the political nature of their plight and fierce opposition to any moves to reduce its provisions.” There are no evident or easy answers, here or anywhere else. But Irfan’s crisp, clear, straightforward account of the ways in which UNRWA has at once preserved and restrained its wards’ activism does a service to readers – and not just those interested in Palestinian affairs. The troubled (and troubling) dynamics of a project of aid designed to depoliticize mass dispossession is, after all, one of the central stories of modern humanitarianism.
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The header image shows the book under review.
