Surviving Seemingly Endless Refugeeship—Social Representations and Strategies of Palestinian Refugees in Ein El Hilweh

Abstract

Today, about 470,000 Palestinian refugees are registered with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East in Lebanon, with 45 per cent of them living in the 12 official Palestinian refugee camps. Previous research identified several socio-economic problems facing the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. The refugee camps have generally been very poor and relatively dangerous places to live. Moreover, all the Palestinian camps suffer from overcrowding, unemployment, poor housing conditions, inadequate infrastructure, as well as a lack of access to justice. Although previous research has identified several difficulties with living in a Palestinian refugee camp, this study takes a fresh look at life in the largest camp in Lebanon—Ein El Hilweh. In addition to identifying such problems and difficulties, it also explores the various strategies adopted by Palestinian refugees to handle them. While acknowledging that not all problems can be resolved, these problem-solving strategies of refugees is a significant gap in the literature on refugees that warrants further investigation. The study is grounded in Serge Moscovici’s theory of social representations, analyzing Palestinian refugees’ shared experiences in facing difficult situations as well as their strategies for solving them.

Introduction

In 1948, some 750,000 Palestinians left their homeland, fleeing the 1948 Arab–Israeli War that would lead to the creation of the state of Israel. Today, nearly a third of registered Palestinian refugees, about 1.5 million of the total five million, live in 58 recognized refugee camps inside Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem (UNRWA 2020a). Lebanon received 110,000 of these refugees, mostly from the Galilee region. Palestinian refugees who arrived in Lebanon first found their way to southern Lebanon or the Bekaa Valley, where they were greeted sympathetically by locals who thought their stay would be only temporary (Chatty and Hundt 2005: 134). The Six-Day War in 1967 spurred on a new wave of refugees, however, and the generations since have grown up with little hope that they would ever return to Palestine.

Today, about 470,000 Palestinian refugees are registered with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East in Lebanon (UNRWA 2020b), with 45 per cent of them living in the 12 official Palestinian refugee camps (UNRWA 2020a). Initially, most of these Palestinian refugees lived in tents. Though the tents were slowly replaced with block structures with zinc roofs, overall conditions in the Palestinian camps have not improved even while their populations have continued to multiply, creating a myriad of practical problems for the residents. Focusing on the largest Palestinian camp in Lebanon, Ein El Hilweh, this study analyses the social representations of Palestinian refugees’ reality and the strategies they use for dealing with the practical problems of life in the refugee camp.

Previous research identified several socio-economic problems facing the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon (Abbas et al. 1997; Jacobson 2003; Petrigh 2006; Peteet 2005; Sayigh 1995; Tiltnes 2005, 2007; Ugland 2003). The refugee camps have generally been very poor (Erni 2013; Serhan and Tabari 2005) and relatively dangerous places to live (Serhan and Tabari 2005). Moreover, all the Palestinian camps suffer from overcrowding, unemployment, poor housing conditions, inadequate infrastructure, as well as a lack of access to justice (UNWRA 2020a). For example, Hanafi and Long (2010) found how the lack of legitimate governance structures inhibits the improvement of socio-economic and living conditions in Palestinian camps while jeopardizing the security of Palestinians and Lebanese alike. Moreover, many Lebanese increasingly oppose the resettlement of Palestinians in Lebanon. This opposition arose within the non-Sunni Muslim population of Lebanon out of fears that projected changes to the demographic balance may disrupt the Lebanese political system (Haddad and Jamali 2003) and increase the potential for conflict (Haddad 2002). Needless to say, Palestinians have and will continue to suffer the consequences.

Palestinians in Lebanon do not enjoy several important rights; for example, they cannot work in as many as 39 professions and cannot own property (real estate). Because they are not formally citizens of another state, Palestine refugees are unable to claim the same rights as other foreigners living and working in Lebanon. (UNRWA 2020)

Life under continuous strain and unremitting socioeconomic deprivation (Tiltnes and Zhang 2013) are also likely to create health problems for many Palestinians living in refugee camps (Alduraidi and Waters 2018). As poverty, violence, and little hope of returning to Palestine have led to widespread exasperation within the refugee community, many young Palestinians have expressed a desire to leave the Lebanese camps and emigrate (Serhan and Tabari 2005). To make matters worse, the Syrian Civil War has generated an influx of Syrian refugees into Lebanon and its Palestinian camps, creating additional competition for scarce resources such as aid and work opportunities. This added conflict dimension further exacerbates the Palestinian refugees’ predicament (Nilsson and Badran 2019).

Arguably, the troubles that the Palestinians have faced have contributed to their group identity becoming more conspicuous (Elbedour et al. 1997; Mahjoub et al. 1989). In her seminal work, Sayigh (1979) narrated the history of Palestinians fleeing from their homes and the humiliation that they faced in the camps in Lebanon. She argued that peasant culture and cohesion, not Western-inspired forms of organization, carried forward the Palestinian idea and practice of the resistance. She also described the refugees’ pride in camp militancy, especially during the liberation of the camps in the early 1970s (Sayigh 1979: 150).

The Palestinian identity has provided a motivational force for the refugees by connecting their everyday lives in exile to distant memories or stories of their ancestral homeland. Preserving this identity has thus been crucial to the refugees’ struggle to return to Palestine, but doing so has nonetheless been extremely challenging. In the past, schools built and provided by UNRWA have contributed to the prominence of a collective Palestinian identity and Palestinian nation-building (Al-Husseini 2000: 51; Shabaneh 2012). The Palestinian resistance movement, especially the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), developed in tandem with this rising Palestinian identity and, after 1969, controlled the camps and mobilized many Palestinians (Peteet 2005: 133). In the meantime, the Palestinian refugee camps became extraterritorial entities (Agier 2011) or spaces of exception characterized by hybrid sovereignties (Ramadan and Fregonese 2017).

The military struggle did not, however, end the many Palestinians’ seemingly endless refugeeship or improve their condition in the camps where hybrid sovereignties hampered social development. Erni (2013) argued that the collective identity of Palestinian youth, tired of being refugees, has been in flux. Young Palestinians, currently a much less homogenous group than the earlier generations of refugees have been, are building individual identities that are not only constructed around resistance and conflict (Erni 2013). As Allan (2013: 140) argued, ‘rhetorical language of collective dispossession, struggle, and return that has come to index “Palestinianness”—which finds voice in these more “official” contexts—has lost its resonance … among younger generations of refugees in the camps’. Moreover, although life in a camp can involve many problems and a longing for the ancestral homeland, previous research has also shown that Palestinian camps have been transformed into meaningful places by their inhabitants (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2016; Gabiam 2016; Peteet 2005) who have developed ‘affective attachments and forms of belonging towards them that may be comparable to those one might have towards one’s homeland’ (Gabiam and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2017: 740).

Although previous research has identified several difficulties with living in a Palestinian refugee camp, this study takes a fresh look at life in the largest camp in Lebanon—Ein El Hilweh. In addition to identifying problems and difficulties, which can be conceptualized as symptomatic of spaces of liminality and spaces of exception, it asks about the strategies, also contributing to normalizing life, that Palestinian refugees adopt to handle them. Although refugees’ ‘“home-camps” can themselves become spaces of belonging and longing’ (Gabiam and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2017: 735), problem-solving strategies that are part of these processes have not been investigated. While acknowledging that not all problems can be resolved, which further contributes to a desire to leave the camps, this study’s focus on everyday problem-solving strategies builds on the assumptions that camps have to some degree become normalized, although difficult, spaces of belonging. In doing so, it draws on Serge Moscovici’s (1984) theory of social representations, analyzing the refugees’ shared experiences in facing difficult situations as well as their strategies for solving them.

Methods

To analyze the problems and problem-solving strategies of Palestinian refugees, the study conducts a thematic analysis. The empirical material is comprised of focus-group interviews with Palestinian refugees living in the generally understudied Palestinian refugee camp of Ein El Hilweh, the largest such camp in Lebanon. During the Lebanese civil war, many Palestinian refugees from other camps in Lebanon, particularly those near Tripoli, were displaced to Ein El Hilweh. As a result, it became the largest refugee camp in Lebanon in terms of both area and population, creating a very congested residential area in the outskirts of the city of Saida. Moreover, the camp has increasingly suffered from security problems, adding to the already dire straits of the local residents. Due to the critical security situation in the camp, the interviews were conducted in the spring of 2019 in the neighbouring Saida. When we last visited Ein El Hilweh in 2018, many of the buildings had suffered serious structural damage as a result of infighting between different Palestinian factions (Nilsson and Badran 2019), and we had to leave earlier than planned because of gunfire in the camp.

A total of 20 respondents, 10 men and 10 women, were selected with the help of the Zaituna Association for Social Development, a non-governmental organization working in Ein El Hilweh. The 20 respondents were transported with minibuses out of the camp to a restaurant in Saida, where they were divided into two focus groups of ten respondents each. The respondents’ ages ranged from 18 to 41 years. Interviews were conducted in Arabic and lasted about 2 h on average. They were audio recorded and the respondents’ identities were anonymized in the analysis. The respondents were offered refreshments at the restaurant to create a comfortable atmosphere in which to discuss their problems and possible strategies for dealing with them. Although we do not have a Palestinian background and derive much of our subjectivities and positionality from the academia in Sweden and Lebanon, our previous contacts with the Zaituna Association for Social Development contributed to creating an atmosphere of trust. The respondents were willing to explain their experiences, resulting in a lively discussion. In our previous research (Nilsson and Badran 2019), we had to face a question about how our research can contribute to solving Palestinian refugees’ problems, which led to one potential respondent refusing to participate. These questions were reminiscent of the ones that Allan (2013) also encountered during her fieldwork in the Shatila camp. However, this time there were none and one of the interviewed women initiated the discussion by announcing that ‘we have no solutions; we can only tell you about the problems’. While some strategies for dealing with the problems did emerge in our interviews, they seldom led to real solutions to Palestinians’ seemingly permanent refugeeship. In fact, many of these strategies are so ominous that they could be better described as strategies of giving up. The analysis is developed from the interview data in an abductive way, constantly moving back and forth between inductive and deductive reasoning and developing the theoretical framework during the research process (Hjerm et al. 2014: 67). During this process, Serge Moscovici’s (1984) theory of social representations was found to be analytically fruitful.

Theoretical framework

Serge Moscovici’s (1984) theory of social representations is suitable for analyzing how Palestinian refugees in Ein El Hilweh view their reality and seek to address the challenges created by life in a refugee camp as it stresses the collective nature of thinking and reasoning, seeking an understanding of everyday life and the common-sense knowledge constituting it. Such a focus is important because, as Allan (2013: 143–144) argues,

the ‘victim’ status that much of the research in the camps has helped to create is having the troubling effect of making legal tender of the suffering associated with 1948, as well as the massacre in 1982, while devaluing more mundane and everyday experiences of suffering linked to poverty and the discriminatory policies of the Lebanese government.

The theory suggests that when confronted with new challenging circumstances, members of a social group produce and share knowledge, thus constructing their social reality (Chaib and Orfali 1996; Moscovici 1984, 2000). This common-sense knowledge—social representations—is continuously being created and recreated. Social representations are a means for people to interpret and make sense of their reality. They are defined as shared thoughts, images, or concepts by which people organize the world around them to make sense of it (Moscovici 1984, 2000). They are created when people talk about their experiences, and as they are communicated, they constitute social group cohesion and help people orient themselves within their sociocultural context.

According to Moscovici (1984), all social representations make the unfamiliar familiar and understandable by transforming it into shared common-sense knowledge through the processes of anchoring and objectification. The unfamiliar phenomenon must first be named, and characteristics must be attributed to it so that it can form the basis of a social discourse. Anchoring, then, is the process of classification wherein meaning is ascribed to new phenomena and experiences. The previously unfamiliar object or experience thus becomes associated with more well-known content by comparing it with that content. Objectification, on the other hand, is a process of externalization during which the new phenomena and experiences become familiar by transforming them into something more tangible, for example, through assigning symbolic meaning to concrete objects. In other words, that which is abstract must also first become concrete (Moscovici 1984, 2000).

Social representations tend to emerge in a time of crisis (Cirhinlioğlu et al. 2006; Öner 2002), making the concept eminently suitable for analyzing the experiences of the many Palestinians living in refugee camps. For the refugees facing the difficulties of life in a camp, new challenging phenomena are made more understandable through the social representations created in communicating daily with those who share those adverse conditions. By studying these representations, it is possible to gain a greater understanding of the practical problems of life in Ein El Hilweh and the strategies used for solving them.

Analysis

Life in a refugee camp is replete with practical problems. Some of the problems are general in nature, affecting both men and women. Others are entirely or partially gender specific. Moreover, some of the problems occur only in specific places, making locality an important variable in the experience of refugeeship.

The concrete barrier

In the absence of any Lebanese police presence, the Ein El Hilweh camp has experienced serious security problems caused by fighting between several Palestinian factions. To contain these security issues, a concrete barrier currently encircles the camp and the Lebanese military controls entry and exit points. Seeking passage through these checkpoints has become a major challenge for both men and women, though their experiences are somewhat different. Overall, the respondents reported that the waiting times for leaving and entering the camp was one to one and a half hours at the time the interviews were conducted. Sometimes, this wait can have serious consequences. One of the female respondents recalled that ‘one woman gave birth at the checkpoint while waiting’. Less dramatic incidents still create equally as much frustration for women, though, especially when they know that the leaders of local parties do not face the same kind of harassment. Another woman explained: ‘They check phones and pictures on the phones… they harass girls and ask them where they live and where they go out. They search inside the yogurt, he put his hands in and ruined the yogurt. They go through medicine pills claiming that they’re drugs. Palestinian leaders are never harassed…’.

Men too are harassed at checkpoints and often face a greater risk of being detained. One young man agonizingly spoke of the time a soldier slapped him on his buttocks. ‘What’s wrong? Do you like my ass?’, he asked the soldier. ‘Maybe he was trying to provoke a reaction so he can lock me up and accuse me of terrorism… Sometimes, they strip us naked at the checkpoint. They have no right to humiliate us or check out the women who are with us’. One woman explained that every time her brother tries to leave the camp, he is mistaken for someone else with the same name and detained.

How do the Palestinian refugees deal with the problems they face when trying to leave or enter the camp? In some cases, especially when defending the honor of women, they react aggressively, and this can have severe consequences. The respondents recounted an incident from two years earlier in which a young man attacked two guards at the checkpoint in response to them making insulting comments about his sister. The guards in turn shot the young man to death. Most of the time, however, camp residents seek to avoid conflict and many therefore avoid the checkpoints altogether. One woman’s mother had not left the camp in years because she felt that she was too old to withstand the potential strain caused by the long process of crossing. The decision not to leave the camp or to avoid leaving as much a possible severely restricts the Palestinian refugees’ lives. The wall with its checkpoints symbolizes the seeming indefinite confinement of many individuals to a small world marred by violence and criminality inside it. To return to Moscovici, we can see that their experiences of being refugees were objectified and externalized through the use of a concrete barrier. In contrast to the gun that had become a symbol of Palestinian freedom during the liberation of the camps in the early 1970s (Sayigh 1979: 177), this barrier was a negative symbol forming the basis of a social discourse on the experiences of being humiliated. Even outsiders increasingly avoided entering the camp, partially due to security concerns, but also to avoid the long wait, the hassle, and the possible harassment.

Having the right contacts and connections is often a prerequisite for living a decent life in the camp. A woman explained that this precondition similarly applies when someone is detained at a checkpoint; the concrete perimeter has become like a black hole where men can disappear unless they negotiate with skill and some luck:

While the Lebanese army is partly to blame, Palestinian leaders are equally if not more guilty. Leaders get their men out if there’s any problem, but those with no wasta [connections] can disappear for months in prison without charge. There’s never any trial or follow up. Palestinians spend more time in prisons than the time they’re sentenced, that is when they get a trial.

Compared to many other Palestinian camps in Lebanon, Ein El Hilweh has become an open-air prison for many of its residents, with dire consequences for their psychological and physical health. The respondents reported that depression, suicide, and heart problems have increased. Since most residents find it difficult to avoid leaving the camp, they have found ways to avoid conflict at the checkpoints. The easiest of these is to turn to a blind eye and stoically endure whatever treatment one is subjected to. In addition, the respondents spoke of some local schools that have started to teach children ‘communication skills’ they can leverage to defuse tensions and that may increase their ability to deal with the problems that accompany entering or leaving the camp. Since social representations are socially created and proliferated, projects such as this one have the potential to change the character of social representations such as the concrete barrier.

Corruption

The increasing prevalence of health problems among the residents comes with a growing need for medical care. While political organizations provide health coverage for their members, almost none of the residents can afford private health insurance. And even though those who have refugee status can make use of services provided by UNRWA, even then some ‘doctors ask for more’, a young woman lamented. As a result of such corruption, many Palestinian refugees who cannot afford to pay have stopped visiting health clinics. This is of course a self-defeating strategy, as sick refugees who do not get the help they need stand an even smaller chance of handling their problems in the camp, subsequently causing their condition to deteriorate further in a vicious cycle.

Corruption is similarly evident in the refugees’ housing conditions and their attempts to improve them. The Ein El Hilweh camp was established in 1948 by the International Committee of the Red Cross and UNRWA began operations there in 1952, gradually replacing the tents with concrete shelters. Even today, buildings in the camp remain small and very close to one another, and some still have metal sheet roofing on them. As the number of refugees increased, so did the need to provide more housing. Additionally, the constant violent clashes between different Palestinian factions frequently cause destruction and therefore a need to rebuild. Many people, however, cannot afford to build new houses or rebuild their damaged ones. And even if they get the funds, for example through donations from organizations like UNRWA, ‘Palestinian leaders steal them’, one male respondent complained. If the necessary funds do reach the needy, obtaining construction permits and materials is time consuming. According to respondents, it takes four to five months to get a permit for moving construction materials into the camp. If someone is in a hurry, the best solution is to rely on the black market, which is replete with construction materials. As one young man explained, however, the prices and inequality of access to such materials cause much anger:

There’s plenty of construction materials that you can buy on the black market, but for five to eight times the regular price. Those who control the black market are party executives in collaboration with the Lebanese security apparatus. Someone who has wasta, even if they have committed so many crimes, can get all the construction materials they want, but those who have no wasta get nothing.

Many other objects that people usually take for granted, such as cameras and furniture, also require permits to enter the camp. Becoming a member of a political party is the best way to get the necessary connections to receive access to construction materials and various other items. Increasing party membership, however, also risks drawing more camp residents into the seemingly never-ending cycle of—often violent—conflicts, while contributing to the polarization of life in the camp and enabling corruption. Seeking to avoid this, camp residents sometimes resort to alternative methods such as simple crowdfunding in order to deal with acute problems. For example, some of the respondents narrated how, three weeks earlier, they were unable to find stones to provide a proper grave for a man who had recently died. To solve this problem, they created a WhatsApp group so that others could help them find unused stones in the camp. To return to Moscovici, we can see that such solutions are anchored in deep-rooted ideas about a strong and positive Palestinian identity. Not only do the residents collectively make sense and ascribe meaning to new experiences and problems; they also solve them by anchoring them with a sense of collectivity that has become entrenched among the residents throughout the many generations of refugee life in the camp. Such strategies for solving practical problems have a self-reinforcing effect by further bolstering the Palestinian group identity.

The ability to get things done collectively, without dependency on the political parties that are perceived as corrupt, creates a sliver of hope and pride among the residents. But other times, what seems to be the best solution in the short-term inadvertently increases the risk of great financial losses in the long term. For example, since Palestinians cannot register property in their name in Lebanon, the best way to protect their property is to ask a Lebanese citizen to register it as a front man. Such an act requires a tremendous amount of trust, and some Palestinians end up either being robbed of their property by the front man or losing it when that person dies and his children inherit the property. Solutions to the vast array of practical problems in the camp thus have varying types and degrees of risk associated with them.

Moreover, not all problems can be solved by individuals or small groups and instead require much broader collective action and social change. Such widespread social change is particularly difficult to bring about in the camp, because solving pressing problems requires joining forces with, or at least being on good terms with, the political parties. For example, electricity in the camp is provided by local generators whose owners are associated with the political parties. A small number of sellers dominate the market, have formed a cartel, and use restrictive trade practices and collusion in order to raise prices, making the market structure a true oligopoly. Gas bottles are an alternative source of energy and, in principle, they are easier to move and available for a reasonable price in Lebanon. However, even the market for gas is not free in the camp. As a young woman lamented, ‘You cannot bring it through the checkpoints; someone associated with the parties can, and they will sell it for a lot of money. It is an achievement to be alive and breathing!’ The respondents also complained that rain easily causes flooding in the camp, which could be rather easily prevented with the help of heavy machinery. Yet, these tools also cannot be brought inside the camp out of fear they might be used to dig tunnels.

Dependency on political parties and the ever-present corruption causes much resentment among the residents. Part of this resentment stems from the ominously predictable nature of their lives, paradoxically perceived to be full of unpredictable sources of suffering and with no light at the end of the tunnel. The negative feelings caused by such predictability and the dependency on political parties are explained by relative deprivation. As a young man complained about the privileges enjoyed by the leaders of political parties, he said: ‘They never stand in line, they get the money and distribute to their followers while we get stopped for smiling at the checkpoint and get detained for years sometimes’. As a result of these comparisons, people feel unjustly deprived of power and material goods. This in turn leads to a sense of anger at the perceived injustice and predisposes the residents to support social movements promising an end to the deprivation (Abeles 1976). The Ein El Hilweh camp residents also experience relative deprivation in the context of the many Syrian refugees that have transformed economic competition in the camp into conflictual attitudes between groups (Nilsson and Badran 2019: 13). Nevertheless, the relative deprivation caused by the Palestinian leadership seems to be more problematic, in that the most prominent social movements promising to end the problems are also seen by the residents as the source of relative deprivation.

Because relative deprivation increases the polarization between ordinary camp residents and the leaders of political parties, joining a political party is not a decision taken lightly, and other options are often considered first. Those who have a job may have to work double shifts to get a single paycheck or sell drugs to make ends meet. Even then, trying to work in the camp is often a futile endeavour because of the difficult security situation. One of the respondents told that his cousin owns a barbershop, located on a street nicknamed ‘the Street of Death’ by the residents because of the ongoing violent conflicts. No one in the camp visits it, and people living outside the camp do not dare to go in.

Palestinian identity, intermarriage, and labour market

Although Lebanese regulations bar Palestinians from pursuing several occupations, some respondents were somewhat hopeful that ongoing negotiations would lead to an increased number of work opportunities available to them. However, one young man, in particular, expressed mixed feelings towards this prospect. While he agreed that ‘this is a relief’ to their acute need to make a living, he expressed concern that incorporating Palestinians into the Lebanese society and normalizing their life in Lebanon threatens the Palestinian identity and the resistance project. He argued that doing so is ‘in direct opposition with the right to return. I feel that this is a dangerous trap. If I work, I undermine the right to return and support the Zionist American project’.

Using Moscovici’s concepts, we can see that these concerns are anchored in the idea of a strong Palestinian group identity, as social representations constitute social group cohesion and help people orient themselves within their sociocultural context. According to Gross Stein, group identity often tends to be formed by contrasting it to other groups: ‘Membership in a group leads to systematic comparison, differentiation, and derogation of other groups’ (Gross Stein 1996). Images of the outgroup, such as Israel, and the ingroup arise from the basic human psychological need for identity and to make sense of reality. In conflict situations, this polarization fuels the conflict and further strengthens groups identities. Unsurprisingly, the Palestinian group identity has been argued to be more prominent than Palestinians’ personal identities in the past (Elbebour et al. 1997; Mahjoub et al. 1989). However, Allan (2013: 134) argues that upholding the primacy of the collective identity is not easy for ‘refugees struggling to get by in deepening poverty in the camps, whose first priority is survival and for whom the burden of political remembrance has become increasingly hard to bear’.

As the young man implied, increasing integration of Palestinian refugees into the Lebanese labour market is bound to dilute Palestinian group identity, merge it with local identities in Lebanon, and subsequently diminish the polarization between the Palestinians and Israel. More integration through opportunities could reduce polarization and even violence as the Palestinian resistance organizations would find it increasingly difficult to recruit new members. However, this would require a radical refashioning of the refugees’ sense of being a social group with shared experiences and aspiration and therefore come at the cost of the Palestinian resistance identity.

Palestinian women have also developed strategies for making life more bearable, and one of those is to try leaving the camp through intermarriage. Because this comes with potentially dramatic consequences for the future of the Palestinian identity, this strategy too was viewed with mixed feelings. One of the respondents said that she wants her daughter to marry a Lebanese man because ‘there is no future in having a Palestinian identity’. If a Palestinian woman marries a Lebanese man, their children will be considered Lebanese citizens in accordance with local laws. This leads to demographic changes in that the number of Palestinian refugees in the camps would not increase as rapidly as before. While easing the pressure on the already crowded camp is a positive change, it would nonetheless again weaken the Palestinian group identity and resistance project. In sum, while identity formation is often connected to inter-group conflict, which can enhance group cohesion and homogenize the members of the in-group (Elbedour et al. 1997), the need to obtain access to the Lebanese labour market and the phenomenon of intermarriage have had an opposite effect on Palestinian collective identity. Even so, the female respondents reported that there is an increasing tendency among women not to marry Palestinian men ‘because there is no other way forward’, as one female respondent lamented. She told that her four sisters had all married Lebanese men, while another woman said that she encourages her daughter to marry a non-Palestinian man.

Since its inception in the 1920s, ‘Palestinian women’s movement has developed through its engagement in the broader issues of the nation’ (Kuttab 2009: 106). In the private sphere, women have transmitted narratives to their children, growing up in refugee camps, about their homeland (Hanafi 2011). Although Palestinian women also played prominent roles especially during the first Palestinian intifada of 1987–1991 (Jad 1995; Kuttab 1993), women became increasingly marginalized from the public sphere as the second intifada started in 2000 (Johnsson and Kuttab 2001). Indeed, during the 1990s, the grass-rooted women’s movement was transformed into an elite movement and the national movement expressed ‘indifference’ regarding gender issues (Kuttab 2009: 112). Palestinian women’s willingness to leave the camp through intermarriage, at the cost of weakening the group identity, appears to be symptomatic of these developments, as women’s ‘activities are both seemingly invisible to actual and virtual publics and widely seen by women leaders themselves as inadequate and marginalized’ (Johnsson and Kuttab 2001: 24).

However, some women were afraid that intermarriages would lead to diminished standing in their marriage and therefore create new forms of marginalization. They said that some men are eager to marry Palestinian women so that they could feel superior to their spouses. Some of the respondents therefore feared, as a young woman said, that ‘the Lebanese man would insult them’. The price of getting a better life was, in other words, not only the weakening of the Palestinian resistance identity but also double oppression. As these women risk being oppressed because of their nationality and gender, their experiences can partly be described with the concept of intersectionality, which explains how different forms of oppression work together in producing injustice (Crenshaw 1989). Multiple oppressions are suffered synergistically rather than separately, and intersectional oppression is therefore greater than the sum of its constituent parts. Such dynamics, some have argued, characterize displaced Kurdish women’s experiences in Turkey (Nilsson 2018: 7).

Unfortunately, there are few other options for women. Many Palestinians are well educated, but higher education offers no way out of their predicament; even highly educated individuals frequently end up, for example, selling vegetables in the streets. One young woman said that, despite having studied at a university, she has been unemployed for many years. A mother told us that her son studies, but only for her sake: ‘Once he finishes, he knows that he will just hang his certificate on the wall’. Several homes in the camp have such certificates hanging on the walls, without them having helped the graduates. Using the concepts of social representation theory, such certificates have come to symbolize the futility of higher education when the prospects for the younger generation are lacking. They now objectify the hopelessness of the Palestinians’ life in the camp.

Even though they risk compromising their Palestinian resistance identity by better integrating into the Lebanese job market, many recognize that getting a job is essential to making life bearable. Competition from the many Syrian refugees who have settled into the camp has made jobs scare (Nilsson and Badran 2019), leading many men to increasingly consider other options. However, marrying a Lebanese woman would not improve their lives or affect their or their children’s legal status in Lebanon in the same way it would for a Palestinian woman marrying a Lebanese man. The Palestinian men would still not be able to own property or fully access the labour market in Lebanon, leaving them in a weaker position vis-à-vis their Lebanese wives. The incentive for intermarriage is therefore weaker. Moreover, Lebanese women are often deterred from marrying Palestinian men because doing so would leave their children to be born stateless. One man explained that a Lebanese woman he knows had forbidden her daughter from going out with a Palestinian classmate she had met at the university. She had explained to him that ‘while the boy was extremely good to her daughter, she could not see him ruin her daughter’s life’.

In their current situation of living in a refugee camp, Palestinian men are unlikely to meet women of other nationalities that could help them get a passport. Marrying a Palestinian woman is equally difficult. One woman said that many daughters who do have a job feel an obligation to help their poor parents and stay at home instead of getting married. Moreover, the economic situation prevents many young people from moving in together. Another woman explained that her friend had been engaged for five years but had been unable to get married, since neither she nor her fiancé worked and they could not afford to build a house. Thus, paradoxically, both employment and unemployment constitute unique yet significant obstacles to marriage.

Migration or giving up

As intermarriage with Lebanese women offers little prospect of improvement to their lives, some men seek a way out through migration. Serhan and Tabari (2005) reported that many young Palestinians living in the Lebanese camps would like to emigrate. Especially in the Middle East, displacement has often led to labour migration as a coping strategy (Shami 1993). Moreover, as resettlement in the ancient homeland was deemed unlikely, UNRWA strategically launched educational programs for Palestinian refugees with ‘the goal of removing refugees from camps and ration lists through educating and sending them for work abroad’ (Elnajjar 1993: 36).

Such dreams of migration often arise from depression. A woman expressed that she feels frustration and often cries when she sees her son sleep all day, yet she also understands her son’s despair when he asks, severely depressed, ‘What should I get up for?’ When neither the labour market, education, or marriage offer a way out, her son’s only remaining dream is to migrate. However, the illegal routes are dangerous and expensive. They often lead individuals who attempt to leave to incur significant amounts of debt with no guarantee their attempt will succeed. Previous studies indicate that the dangers posed by the illegal routes to stateless Palestinian refugees significantly inhibit migration attempts, particularly by women (Nilsson and Badran 2019: 16).

The dream of making it to the West and getting a good job encourages risk taking, and the outcome can be disastrous. One of the men said he had tried to use one of these illegal routes to go to Belgium. Instead, he ended up in Brazil, where he was jailed, beaten up, and sent back. Efforts to migrate expose illegal migrants not only to potential violence but also to financial risks that may further exacerbate their already dire situation. Few have the money needed to pay the smugglers and instead need to borrow the necessary funds. The young man who was sent back lost 9 000 USD and is now in severe debt, unable to pay back to his debtors. Some of the respondents also referred to another young man that we had interviewed for a previous study (Nilsson and Badran 2019) and who had been so desperate that he had tried to migrate through the war-torn Syria. He was killed before making it through the country.

Because of these difficulties, Palestinians often resort to strategies of giving up rather than seeking a life outside the camp. Sleeping more than usual is the easiest strategy. Even when standing in the streets, watching the time pass by, the inertia of daily life is countered by giving up mentally. As a young man lamented, ‘you wake up, wash, dress up, stand in the streets, go to bed, wake up, wash, dress up, stand in the streets, go to bed … days are all the same. Nothing happens and we die slowly’. A second strategy to escape the harsh reality in the camp is drug use, which is widespread. Previous research has shown that the increased use of drugs often stems from economic problems and can lead to increasing levels of violence in the camp (Nilsson and Badran 2019). The respondents said that nothing was being done to combat the drug trade or the risk of people starting to use drugs. Mostly men who feel the pressure to work, start a family, and then provide for their families are in the risk category for drug use. That many women are also addicted indicates the scope of the problem.

While many Palestinians used to rely on UNRWA to help endure their refugeeship, there is now a widespread perception that UNRWA no longer channels all that much help to them anymore. Instead, the Syrian refugees are perceived as the main recipients of global sympathy (Nilsson and Badran 2019). The growing sense of desperation also fuels radicalization, as one man explained: ‘We are dying slowly; we are already dead. I support Palestinians becoming terrorists, so we can get some attention and our rights. UNRWA is not paying attention to us anymore’. As this testimony indicates, a third general strategy of giving up is blaming their predicament on various actors such as the USA, Israel, Lebanon, Palestinian political parties, and UNRWA. While these actors may have contributed to the Palestinian plight at various points in time and in different ways, the act of blaming and assigning guilt often becomes a pastime activity that fills the nothingness of ordinary days with meaning. To return to Moscovici’s theory of social representations, assigning guilt to external actors for their hardships is deeply anchored in the traumatic collective memory of Palestinian experience, such as lacking control over their own destiny first under the British Mandate and then under Israeli occupation. By associating a feeling of desperation with previous experiences, such anchoring creates meaning in the midst of suffering and in the face of an uncertain future. It also contributes to preserving the Palestinian resistance identity by upholding the conflictual perceptions of ‘us’ versus ‘them’.

Preserving this identity has been central to the struggle of several generations of Palestinian refugees who want to return to their ancestral homeland. The aid provided by UNRWA, especially its schools, has been important for the preservation and the evolution of a collective Palestinian identity in the past (Al-Husseini 2000: 51; Shabaneh 2012). Years of military struggle conceived the perception that there was no end in sight to their refugeeship and in turn created visions of alternative futures. In a study of life in the Palestinian camp of Burj al-Shamali, Erni (2013) argued that Palestinian youth are tired of being refugees, which has been detrimental to their collective identity. Especially young Palestinians are presenting themselves as less of a homogenous group than earlier generations of refugees did, mostly because individual identities that are no longer constructed solely around conflict have emerged (Erni 2013). Although some of the respondents feared that fully entering the Lebanese labour market might mean compromising their Palestinian identity, others felt that their Palestinian identity was a hindrance to a decent life. Feeling that he is part of the Lebanese society, one man asked:

Why doesn’t the Lebanese government cover us or provide jobs… all the money we have is pumped into the Lebanese economy. All aid we get stays in the Lebanese economy. This is our country. I was born here and my parents were born here. Neither of us knows Palestine! We only know Lebanon.

Conclusion

Social representations are a means for people to interpret and make sense of their reality. Studying social representations is especially suitable for analyzing difficult phenomena and experiences, such as living in a refugee camp, which makes theory of social representations (Moscovici 1984) a highly relevant framework for the current study. Our analysis of such representations in the interviews suggested that Palestinian refugees in Ein El Hilweh construed their experiences along the lines of four main themes that arguably represent these respondents’ current reality: the concrete barrier; corruption; Palestinian identity; and migration or giving up.

Many of the respondents’ representations in these themes were generated through the processes of anchoring and objectification (Moscovici 2000). They were anchored in how they construed their previous experiences such as their ideas about a strong and positive Palestinian identity. Anchoring complicated their relationship with the Lebanese society and labour market, subsequently making normalization of their stay in Lebanon both something to strive for and problematic. Anchoring also occurred in the process of assigning guilt to external actors for their hardships. Not only did the residents collectively make sense and ascribe meaning to new experiences and problems. As the case of finding stones for a burial showed, they could sometimes also solve them by anchoring new problems with a sense of collectivity that has been entrenched among the residents throughout the many generations of refugee life in the camp. Such strategies for solving practical problems have a self-reinforcing impact by further bolstering the Palestinian group identity. Finally, their experiences as refugees were also objectified through the concept of the concrete barrier, which became a symbol forming the basis of a social discourse on the experiences of being humiliated. An interesting outcome of this study is that, in dire situations involving social conflict and contested identities, the process of anchoring and the symbolic meanings can complicate social relationships between the refugees and the surrounding society. How this happens in other contexts, however, may differ from Ein El Hilweh.

Social representations tend to emerge in a time of crisis (Cirhinlioğlu et al. 2006; Öner 2002) and studying these representations makes it possible to gain a greater understanding of the practical problems of camp life and the strategies for solving them. However, in addition to identifying problems and difficulties, which can be conceptualized as symptomatic of spaces of liminality and spaces of exception, the strategies that Palestinian refugees adopt to handle the problems they face also contribute to normalizing life. Although Gabiam and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (2017: 735) noted that refugees’ ‘“home-camps” can themselves become spaces of belonging and longing’, problem-solving strategies that are part of these processes have not been previously investigated. Allan (2013: 143) argues that ‘highlighting of 1948 as a productive historical moment is provoking a sense of frustration among second- and third-generation refugees who have developed their own forms of rootedness and belonging in Lebanon’. Indeed, academic studies should not build Palestinian identity around one historical event, and perspectives such as Moscovici’s theory of social representations can be used for analyzing ‘identity and belonging in terms of present realities and aspirations’ (Allan 2013: 137), which problem-solving strategies are part of.

While some Palestinians seek to migrate and build a better life outside the camp, the associated risks and difficulties prompt many to resort to strategies of giving up instead. Marrying Lebanese women offers no improvement for Palestinian men. Palestinian women sometimes marry Lebanese men. Their willingness to leave the camp through intermarriage, at the cost of weakening the group identity, appears to be symptomatic of the increasingly marginalized position of Palestinian women in the nationalist movement since the 1990s. However, leaving the camp can lead to new forms of marginalization in the form of intersectionality as women fear being oppressed both because of their gender and nationality.

Pursuing a normal life inside the camp can be equally challenging. Both employment and unemployment can be a hindrance to marriage. Joining a political party to deal with the many practical problems in the camp risks further fuelling the vicious cycle of corruption and violence. Surrounded by concrete barriers and marred by violent conflicts between different Palestinian factions, Ein El Hilweh has become an open-air prison for many of its residents, and this has dire repercussions on their health. Meanwhile, the Palestinian political organizations are no longer seen as the standard-bearers of the Palestinian resistance largely because merely acquiring the necessities to survive from day to day has become the primary concern for most individuals. For some, this has led to a weakened Palestinian identity as they wait for the Lebanese government to fully integrate them into the Lebanese society. Paradoxically, the most prominent social movements promising to end the problems in the camp are also seen by the residents as the source of relative deprivation. Despite this resentment, others have radicalized and taken up arms, either because local militias offer to pay for their services and provide new meaning to the perceived nothingness of everyday life in the camp, or simply out of anger.

Although the influx of many Syrian refugees into Palestinian camps in Lebanon has created competition over scarce resources and negative perceptions of the ‘other’ (Nilsson and Badran 2019), social dynamics are bound to change over time. Future studies should analyze how the relationship between the two refugee groups develops through everyday social interactions and how it is constructed in these challenging conditions. More specifically, beyond negative perceptions of the ‘other’ and social interactions involving competition, how do positive interactions involving cooperation and the breaking down of social barriers develop? If they involve acculturation, such social processes may further weaken the Palestinian resistance identity, but they could simultaneously serve as a viable survival strategy as Syrian and Palestinian refugees share many similar experiences. The task ahead is therefore not only to identify the everyday challenges of the Palestinians and Syrian refugees. It is equally necessary to better understand how emerging social processes and collective efforts can contribute to mechanisms for all camp residents to cope with the challenges they face in their shared microcosm behind the concrete barrier, where identity and belonging are negotiated in terms of present realities.