IDENTIFYING PALESTINIANS: PALESTINIAN REFUGEES AND THE POLITICS OF
ETHNO-NATIONAL IDENTITY IN JORDAN

By

Michael Vicente Pérez

A DISSERTATION

Submitted To
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Anthropology

2011

ABSTRACT

IDENTIFYING PALESTINIAN: PALESTINIAN REFUGEES AND THE POLITICS OF
ETHNO-NATIONAL IDENTITY IN JORDAN

By

Michael Vicente Pérez

Based on extensive research (January 2006 – January 2008) among Palestinian refugees
living within United Nations Relief and Works Agency camps in Amman, Jordan,

my

dissertation examines how the contingencies of local and transnational politics constitute
particular forms of identification that underscore the possibilities and limits of Palestinian
ethnicity and nationhood. My dissertation underscores three critical issues within the process of
ethno-national identification among diaspora Palestinians.

First, my research shows how

Palestinian ethno-national identifications reflect two critical issues: (1) the exclusionary
discourse and practices of Transjordanian nationalists and the Jordanian State and (2) the desire
to identify as Palestinians, not Jordanians.

To challenge their marginalization in Jordan,

Palestinians rely on pan-Arab and religious identifications that emphasize their ethno-religious
commonality with Jordanians while preserving their distinct ethno-national identification as
Palestinians.
Second, my research demonstrates how categories of national and religious identification
among refugees indicate the intersections between local concerns and transnational politics. I
show how the idioms of religious nationalism articulated by refugees concerning the homeland
reflect the significance of Palestinian homeland politics in Jordanian camps and offer

Palestinians an opportunity to assert national identifications in a context where Palestinian
nationalism is strictly controlled.
Finally, my dissertation examines how the unique experience and meaning of life as a
refugee in Jordan facilitates national identifications defined in terms of displacement and exile.
As I show, refugee status constitutes a central point of identification among Palestinians that
enables specific forms of ethnic and national belonging grounded in the experience of prolonged
displacement and the myth of return.
This dissertation reflects a central concern over the impact of transnational migration and
displacement upon the formation and meaning of ethno-national communities and their location
within the nation-state. My work examines how ethnic and national categories, whether at the
level of the state, national elites, or everyday people, are produced within the nexus of local and
transnational struggles that underscore the often contentious position of migrant communities
within host states and homeland politics. By recognizing that the process of identification
among displaced peoples reflects transnational realities, my research highlights the instability of
social categories and the conditions under which they are represented, resisted, and claimed.

Copyright by
MICHAEL VICENTE PÉREZ
2011

To my mother, Magdalena Medel, and father, Alfredo Pérez, whose families brought them to the
United States and made my education possible. To my loving and supporting wife, Fatima
Bahloul, who sacrificed her time and ambitions in order to support me in the field. Her patience
and love were essential for this dissertation. Finally, to my sons, Joaquín Pérez-Bahloul and
Māzen Pérez-Bahloul, who I pray will draw inspiration from my work and will exceed me in all
endeavors.

v

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My first thanks goes to the countless individuals in East Lansing, Michigan, and Amman,
Jordan, who helped facilitate my contact with the research participants and made this dissertation
possible. In particular, I would like to thank Abu Anas for his sincere interest in my research
project and assistance during the initial stages of my research. His connections in Amman
helped me begin my research and proved to be invaluable for this dissertation. I am also grateful
for the innumerable Palestinians who participated in this study. Their patience, compassion, and
sincerity helped make this project both enjoyable and an exceptional learning experience. A
special bit of gratitude must be offered to the Bazrāwī family for their friendship and
consideration. The countless hours we spent talking, playing chess, watching the news, and
simply living together made Jordan feel like home. I must also thank the various institutions and
figures that made this research a largely unproblematic experience. Alain McNamara of the
Jordan Fulbright office was particularly helpful. His knowledge of the institutional landscape of
Jordan was essential. Alain was also a kind and supportive man who cared greatly for me, my
wife, and my research project. The individuals at UNRWA were also kind and essential for this
research. I must also thank the DPA for its authorization of my research project for two years in
Jordan. Back in the USA, I must thank my wise committee including Drs. William Derman,
Elizabeth Drexler, Mara Leichtman, Salah Hassan, and Anne Ferguson. Their patience and
support were essential for the success of this dissertation project. Bill and Mara were both
particularly helpful with my draft chapters and offered important feedback that improved the
quality of this dissertation. A special “big up” goes out to Andrea Freidus, who Skyped with me
throughout the writing process and whose encouragement kept me going. Finally, this research
vi

was generously funded by a Fulbright IIE and a Wenner-Gren dissertation research grant. A
Dissertation Completion Fellowship was kindly provided by the Michigan State University
Graduate School.

vii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF TABLES ........................................................................................................................ XI
LIST OF FIGURES ..................................................................................................................... XII
KEY TO ABBREVIATIONS ...................................................................................................... XV
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION ...........................................................................................................................1
Context and Concerns ..............................................................................................................1
The Politics of Identification ....................................................................................................6
The Imagined Homeland ........................................................................................................19
The Chapters ...........................................................................................................................22
CHAPTER TWO
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY: THE SITES, THE PROCESS, AND THE
ANTHROPOLOGIST....................................................................................................................28
Research Routes and Trajectory .............................................................................................28
Research Sites: The Fields......................................................................................................33
Interviews ...............................................................................................................................44
Participant Observation ..........................................................................................................49
Document Research ................................................................................................................51
Research Questions and Answers ...........................................................................................52
Positionality and Fieldwork in Jordan ....................................................................................55
Background in Jordan ............................................................................................55
Arrivals ..................................................................................................................58
Positionality and Challenges in the Field...............................................................61
Muslim Amrīkī.......................................................................................................64
Inta Amrīkī? ...........................................................................................................67
Spies Like Us .........................................................................................................69
CHAPTER THREE
IDENTIFYING REFUGEES THE CLAIMS OF EXILE AND THE MEANING OF
“PALESTINIAN REFUGEES” .....................................................................................................72
Introduction ............................................................................................................................72
The Unmaking of Palestine and the Making of Palestine Refugees ......................................78
Two Wars, Two Waves: Palestinian Refugees in Jordan .......................................................83
The Camp and Its Meanings ...................................................................................................86
viii

Camp Demography.................................................................................................................88
Identifying Refugees: Refugeeness for All .............................................................................93
The Displaced and the Persistence of Exile............................................................................95
The Inheritance of Exile .......................................................................................................102
Al-Mukhayyamāt and The City ............................................................................................115
“The Home of the Refugees” ...............................................................................................117
“Without the Camps, The Refugee Issue Will Disappear” ..................................................120
Poverty and the Camps: Refugess and Camp Refugees .......................................................123
Marrying the Camp, Divorcing the Camp ............................................................................141
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................148
CHAPTER FOUR
NATIONALIZING STATES: TRANSJORDANIANS, THE STATE, AND THE
PALESTINIANS .........................................................................................................................152
Introduction ..........................................................................................................................152
Transjordanians Then ...........................................................................................................161
Transjordanians Now............................................................................................................167
Unequal Partners: The De-Palestinianization of Jordan .......................................................176
Discrimination and Difference .............................................................................................186
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................197
CHAPTER FIVE
CITIZENSHIP WITHOUT NATIONALITY: THE “INS” AND “OUTS” OF PALESTINIAN
JORDANIANS ............................................................................................................................201
Introduction ..........................................................................................................................201
Debating “Palestinians” in Jordan: Exclusivism and Pluralism ...........................................203
Jordan is an Arab and Muslim Country................................................................................207
Guests and Hosts ..................................................................................................................214
Citizenship without Nationality............................................................................................222
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................229
CHAPTER SIX
HOMELAND MATTERS ...........................................................................................................233
Introduction ..........................................................................................................................233
Palestine: A Brief History of Borders ..................................................................................241
Locating the Homeland: Min Al-Bahar ilāl Nahar (From the Sea to the River) .................244
Palestinians and Palestine: An Original Community ...........................................................256
Being National Without Nationalism: Materializing the Homeland in Everyday Life ........270
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................290
CHAPTER SEVEN
ix

MUSLIM PALESTINE: HOMELAND, NATIONAL POLITICS, AND THE ISLAMIC
NATION OF PALESTINE ..........................................................................................................295
Introduction ..........................................................................................................................295
Hamas and the Democratic Landslide ..................................................................................303
Hamas and the Hashemite Kingdom ....................................................................................306
Muslim Palestine ..................................................................................................................310
Islam, Nationalism, and the Homeland ................................................................................313
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................335
CHAPTER EIGHT
CONCLUSIONS..........................................................................................................................339
Displacement and the Politics of Identity.............................................................................339
The Politics of Ethno-National Identity in Jordan................................................................344
Identifying the Homeland: Diaspora, Diasporization, and Nationhood ..............................351
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................361
BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................................365

x

LIST OF TABLES

TABLE ONE
UNRWA REFUGEE CAMP PROFILES IN JORDAN................................................................37
TABLE TWO
CRITERIA FOR PARTICIPANT SELECTION ..........................................................................49
TABLE THREE
JORDAN REFUGEE CAMP PROFILES .....................................................................................90
TABLE FOUR
POVERTY LEVELS BY HOUSEHOLD COMPOSITION .........................................................92
TABLE FIVE
PALESTINIAN/JORDANIAN REPRESENTATION
WITHIN POLITICAL STRUCTURE .........................................................................................184

xi

LIST OF FIGURES

FIGURE ONE
MAP OF THE HASHEMITE KINGDOM OF JORDAN.............................................................34
FIGURE TWO
AERIAL VIEW OF WIHDAT CAMP (NEW AMMAN CAMP) ................................................38
FIGURE THREE
AERIAL VIEW OF BAQA’A REFUGEE CAMP .......................................................................38
FIGURE FOUR
JARASH REFUGEE CAMP .......................................................................................................124
FIGURE FIVE
JARASH REFUGEE CAMP .......................................................................................................125
FIGURE SIX
BAQA’A REFUGEE CAMP.......................................................................................................127
FIGURE SEVEN
HOME IN BAQA’A REFUGEE CAMP .....................................................................................130
FIGURE EIGHT
MEN WALKING IN WIHDAT REFUGEE CAMP ...................................................................132
FIGURE NINE
JORDAN FIRST AD ...................................................................................................................154
FIGURE TEN
MAP OF TRANSJORDAN 1922 ................................................................................................163
FIGURE ELEVEN
MANDATE PALESTINE ...........................................................................................................246
FIGURE TWELVE
AERIAL VIEW OF BAQA’A REFUGEE CAMP .....................................................................259
FIGURE THIRTEEN
BAQA’A REFUGEE CAMP.......................................................................................................260
FIGURE FOURTEEN
xii

GRAFFITI ON WALL IN BAQ’A REFUGEE CAMP ..............................................................261
FIGURE FIFTEEN
PALESTINIAN DISPLAYING A “PALESTINIAN” ABAYA .................................................268
FIGURE SIXTEEN
FRAMED IMAGE .......................................................................................................................276
FIGURE SEVENTEEN
IMAGE OF THE DOME OF THE ROCK, AL-AQSĀ MOSQUE, AND PATTERNS OF THE
“PALESTINIAN” KAFĪYA .......................................................................................................277
FIGURE EIGHTEEN
IMAGE OF AL-AQSĀ MOSQUE AND “THE DREAM” ........................................................279
FIGURE NINETEEN
“PALESTINE” BY ISMĀ’ĪL SHAMŪT ....................................................................................281
FIGURE TWENTY
DOME OF THE ROCK, AL-AQSĀ, AND PATTERN OF “PALESTINIAN” KAFĪYA .........285
FIGURE TWENTY-ONE
CHILDREN RAISING ARMS AND FORMING “V” WITH HANDS .....................................286
FIGURE TWENTY-TWO
CARVING OF “NAKBA PALESTINE” WITH PALESTINIAN FLAG COLORS AND IMAGE
OF “REFUGEE” ..........................................................................................................................287
FIGURE TWENTY-THREE
WOVEN PALESTINIAN FLAG IN HOME IN BAQ’A CAMP ...............................................289
FIGURE TWENTY-FOUR
LARGE ARMOIRE DISPLAYING IMAGES OF HAMAS LEADERS AND FATAH
LEADER, YASSER ARAFAT ...................................................................................................290
FIGURE TWENTY-FIVE
SYMBOL ON MARKAZ BROCHURE AND SYMBOL OF HAMAS ....................................299
FIGURE TWENTY-SIX
POSITION PAGE OF THE CD TRANSLATED AS “OUR POSITIONS CLARIFIED FOR
YOU” ...........................................................................................................................................326
FIGURE TWENTY-SEVEN
MENU PAGE FROM MULTIMEDIA CD TITLED “OUR MARTYRED LEADERS” ..........327
xiii

FIGURE TWENTY-EIGHT
PHOTOGRAPHS OF HAMAS FIGHTER ................................................................................328

xiv

KEY TO ABBREVIATIONS

DPA

Department of Palestinian Affairs

EU

European Union

FAFO

FAFO Institute for Labor and Social Research

PLO

Palestine Liberation Organization

PNA/PA

Palestinian National Authority

UN

United Nations

UNGA

United Nations General Assembly

UNHCR

United Nations High Commission for Refugees

UNRWA

United Nations Relief and Works Agency

WHO

World Health Organization

1951 Convention

1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees

1967 Protocol

1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees

xv

Chapter One:
Introduction
There are many different kinds of Palestinian experience, which cannot all be assembled into
one. One would therefore have to write parallel histories of the communities in Lebanon, the
Occupied Territories, and so on. That is the central problem. It is almost impossible to imagine
a single narrative: It would have to be the kind of crazy history that comes out in Midnight’s
Children, with all those little strands coming and going in and out.
Edward Said, 1986
Context and Concerns:
For over sixty years, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan has been home to one of the
largest Palestinian refugee populations in the world. Beginning with the Palestine War in 1948,
or Al-Nakba (the tragedy), approximately 105,000 Palestine refugees crossed the Jordan River
into the East Bank of what was then Transjordan (Mishal 1978a). Following King ‘Abdullah’s
decision to annex the unconquered area of central Palestine including East Jerusalem (the West
Bank), another 450,000 refugees were brought into what became the Hashemite Kingdom of
Jordan. In 1967, the East Bank absorbed another 400,000 Palestinian refugees primarily
displaced from the Israeli conquered West Bank and, to a lesser extent, from the Gaza Stip.
Categorized as “internally displaced persons,” many of these refugees lost their homes for a
second time, first in 1948 and again in 1967. Finally, in 1991, another important yet less known
influx of refugees occurred following Saddam Hussein’s invasion and occupation of Kuwait.
1

During this migration, approximately 285,000 Palestinians “returned ” to Jordan after being
expelled from Kuwait (Troquer and al-Oudat 1999). Altogether, estimates suggest that
Palestinian refugees and their descendants today constitute more than half of the Kingdom’s

1

Many of these Palestinians established their homes and livelihoods within Kuwait. Their
expulsion from Kuwait to Jordan thus undermined the only social and economic existence they
knew. Thus the idea that they “returned” to Jordan risks obscuring their deep connections within
Kuwait.
1

2

population of five million . At least 330,000 of these refugees live within United Nations Relief
3

and Works Agency (UNRWA) camps throughout Jordan .
In addition to its sizable refugee population, several factors distinguish Jordan from other
countries in which Palestinians live. First, Jordan is the only Arab State to offer its citizenship to
Palestinian refugees. Although the decision to nationalize Palestinians reflected an expansionist
policy concerned more with extending the borders of the Hashemite Kingdom than with the fate
of the refugees, the act nevertheless afforded refugees practical benefits unavailable to
4

Palestinians in other countries such as Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt . Second, until the 1970 War
of Black September between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Jordanian
military, Jordan served as the nucleus of Palestinian national organizing and activities (Cobban
1985; Sirriyeh 2000; Yezid Sayigh 2000). Indeed, it was after the mythologized battle of
Karameh in Jordan that a new generation of Palestinian fedā’iyyīn (guerillas/freedom fighters)
ended their hopes for external Arab support and prepared to take the struggle for Palestine into
their own hands (Terrill 2001; Khalidi 1998). Third, before the signing of the Oslo Accords
between the PLO and Israeli government and the establishment of the Palestinian National
Authority (PA) in parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the Jordanian government engaged in a
long and perilous struggle against Palestinian nationalists to assert its representational authority
over Jordan’s Palestinian refugees. Ruling over a significant Palestinian population and, until
2

The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics suggests that 3.24 million Palestinians currently
reside in Jordan (http://www.pcbs.gov.ps/Portals/_pcbs/PressRelease/nakba_e.pdf).
3
UNRWA estimates that at least 1.9 million Palestinians in Jordan are registered refugees
(http://www.unrwa.org/etemplate.php?id=100).
4
The territorial and legal union between central Palestine (the West Bank) and the East Bank of
Transjordan did not necessarily translate into formal equality between Palestinians and
Transjordanians. For a discussion of the union and its implications for Palestinians and
Transjordanians, see Massad, 2001 and Mishal, 1978.
2

1988, the entire West Bank, King Hussein challenged the PLO’s position as the sole legitimate
representative of the Palestinian people through a variety of policies that exacerbated tensions
between the Kingdom’s Transjordanian and Palestinian populations.
Despite the demographic and political significance of Jordan’s Palestinian refugee
population, surprisingly little work has been done to document or understand the history, politics,
5

and lives of this community . Whether on questions of identity and nationalism (Khalidi 1998;
Abu El-Haj 2006; Muslih 1988; Lybarger 2007; Jamal 2005), the refugee crisis (Fischbach 2003;
Peteet 1992a; Peteet 2009a; Bowker 2003; Masalha 2005; Masalha 1992; Masalha 2008;
Hammer 2005; Aruri 2001; Rosemary Sayigh 2008a; Rosemary Sayigh 1994a), history and
memory (Slyomovics 1998; Sa'di 2002; Swedenburg 2003; Kimmerling and Migdal 2003), or
the conflict with Zionism (Pappe 2006; Kimmerling and Migdal 2003; Rubenberg 2003;
Chomsky 2004), Palestinian studies have largely ignored the Jordanian context focusing instead
on the more urgent circumstances of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, Gaza, Israel, and
Lebanon. In this case, the necessity of addressing the extremes of occupation (Finkelstein and
Finkelstein 2003; Makdisi 2008; Bucaille 2006; Rosenfeld 2004), colonization (Zureik 1979;
Said 1992; Piterberg 2006; Fayez 1992; Masalha 1992), and armed conflict (Taraki 2006;
Abufarha 2009; Hasso 2005b) unwittingly led to a serious neglect of the less dramatic albeit
important stories of Palestinians living in places like Jordan. Save for the occasional reference to
refugee profiles and demography (Schulz 2003; Shiblak 1996; Akram 2002), historical studies of
Jordan-Israel relations (Shlaim 1988; Satloff 1994; Stewart 2007; Nevo and Pappé 1994a;
Shwadran 1959; Abu-Odeh 1999a), or attention to the pre-1970 Palestinian nationalist period

5

Some notable exceptions include Marshood, 2009; Hart, 2002; Massad, 2001; Farah, 1999;
Brand, 1988; Plascov, 1981; and Mishal, 1978.
3

(Cobban 1985; Yezid Sayigh 2000; Rubenberg 1983), the Hashemite Kingdom remains an
academic blind spot in the field of Palestine studies.
This dissertation seeks to address this lacuna by examining the situation of Palestine
6

refugees living in three camps in Amman, Jordan . In particular, this work considers the
significance of local national and transnational politics for understanding ethnic, religious, and
national identifications (Brubaker and Cooper 2000) among refugees. As citizen-refugees,
Palestinians occupy a liminal (Turner 1982) position in the Jordanian national context: they are
at once included as citizens and excluded as nationals. Thus as Jordanian citizens, they enjoy
relative social, political, and economic equality with Transjordanians. Yet as Palestinian
refugees, they are also excluded from the Jordanian “nation” and important aspects of social life
through the chauvinistic discourse of Transjordanian nationalists and an entrenched policy of
discrimination by the Jordanian State. Palestinians’ liminality also extends into the nationalist
context in Palestine, where a divided national movement competes for authority while struggling
against rapid colonization, an international embargo in Gaza, and a 43-year occupation. Under
such conditions, neither the Hamas government in Gaza nor the Fatah-dominated PA in the West
Bank seem capable of, or willing to, offer more than nominal consideration for the hopes of
refugees to “return” to Palestine. It is within this context that my dissertation explores several
key questions concerning the politics of identification among Palestinian refugees in Jordan. As
displaced refugee-citizens of Jordan, how do Palestinians affirm their “identity” as Palestinians?
What can account for the meaning of this identification and what does it reveal about the social
conditions and political imperatives of a marginalized population? Grounded in the context of
everyday life in Jordan, my research examines the extent to which ethnic, religious, and national
6

My primary data comes from three particular refugee camps in Amman. However, throughout
my research period, I visited numerous camps in both Amman and Irbid.
4

identifications among Palestinians suggest the possibilities and limits of a unified Palestinian
nation.
This dissertation focuses on the ways in which Palestinian refugees articulate ethnic,
religious, and national identifications within the context of everyday life in Jordan. Within
Palestinian identity discourse, ethnicity, religion, and nationhood function in a variety of ways
that, I argue, reflects the dynamic interplay between two essential components. The first
concerns Palestinians’ location within the social-political context of Jordan. Faced with the
marginalizing discourse of Transjordanian nationalists and the discriminatory practices of the
Jordanian State, Palestinians assert ethnic and religious identifications to normalize their status
as non-national citizen refugees. While claiming an essential commonality (Brubaker and
Cooper 2000) with Jordanians as Arabs and Muslims, Palestinians identify in national terms as a
unique community distinguishable from their Jordanian co-citizens. The second element
concerns the aspirations of a refugee community marginalized from Palestinian national
objectives and struggling to preserve their claim to an indissoluble right of return. Within this
context, ethnicity and religion function as important symbolic resources within a nationalizing
discourse (Brubaker 1996) that claims Palestine as a sacred national homeland and represents the
nation as an ethno-religious national community. Moreover, Palestinians have turned their
refugee status into a critical point of commonality grounded in the experience of displacement
and an ongoing condition of exile. Palestinians thus identify as refugees in ways that sustains the
idea of a Palestinian national community in Jordan with a collective right to return to their
national homeland, Palestine.

5

The Politics of Identification:
The central thesis of this dissertation is that ethnic and national identifications among
Palestinian refugees in Jordan are political; that is, they are constituted within a transnational
field (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992) reflecting the exigencies of the local social-political context
and the imperatives of a refugee community frustrated by their marginalization from Palestinian
national life and inability to return. At the core of this study is an attempt to provide a more
nuanced approach to questions of identity—a “thick description” of identity (Geertz 1977)—
through an analysis that can account for the ways in which individuals identify themselves and
what these identifications tell us about larger social and political processes. As Dhooleka Raj
has noted, identities have qualities that give them form, substance, and meaning in everyday life.
People speak about themselves or others, or fill out government forms and job applications in
ways that give identity an existence seemingly independent of contextualized social action (Raj
2003, 6). But the fact that individuals experience or claim an identity as a fixed, stable feature of
their personhood should not lead us to treat their “identity” as such. Instead, it is the analyst’s
task to understand the process and meaning of that claim—the identification—within the social
context in which it emerges.
To this end, my research employs an analytical vocabulary grounded in recent studies of
ethnicity (Brubaker 2006; Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1993; Jenkins 1994; Raj 2003; Hopkins
2007; Bloul 1999; Brubaker et al. 2008) and nation (Billig 1995; Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008;
Calhoun 1998; Calhoun 1997; Brubaker et al. 2008) that move beyond the idea of identity as a
static thing that people have or share to consider how identity works as something people resist,
subvert, internalize, or claim. In particular, I draw on several key terms that facilitate an
approach to identities as sociocultural categories (Raj 2003) that are fundamentally processual

6

and contingent (Brubaker 1996) and situated within specific socio-political contexts. One of the
most basic terms I use throughout this dissertation is identification (Brubaker and Cooper,
7

2000) . As an alternative to identity, identification refers to an active process formulated within
the variety of circumstances in which an individual is called upon to identify herself, to
characterize herself, to locate herself vis-à-vis known others, to situate herself in a narrative, or
to place herself in a category (Brubaker and Cooper 2000, 14). It reflects the basic idea that how
an individual identifies herself, and how she is identified by others, varies from context to
context and is therefore situational. Throughout this dissertation, I primarily focus on categorical
modes of identification, which suggest a claim to membership in a class of persons in virtue of
some shared categorical attribute including race, ethnicity, gender, language, religion,
nationality, citizenship, etc. (Brubaker and Cooper 2000, 15). The second analytical term I use is
commonality, which refers to the sharing of some attribute that facilitates both a claim of
membership and feeling of belonging or togetherness. Much like Max Weber’s description of a
“sentiment of solidarity” (Weber 2009, 172), commonality refers to an affective tie or a sense of
affiliation and connectedness between an individual and particular others. As Brubaker and
Cooper note, such a feeling may indeed depend in part on the degrees and forms of commonality,
but it will also depend on other factors such as particular events, their encoding in compelling
public narratives, prevailing discursive frames, and so on (Brubaker and Cooper 2000, 20).
Central to what I call the “politics of identification” among Palestinian refugees are three
particular identifications: ethnic, religious, and national. The literature on ethnicity is vast and
includes a variety of theories and approaches that consider its primordial, subjective, objective,
7

Throughout this dissertation, I also use the terms self-identification. By self-identification I
mean to emphasize the fact that it is the individual agent who is identifying herself as opposed to
being identified by others, which is also called external identification (Jenkins 1994, 198-199;
Brubaker and Cooper 2000, 15).
7

essential, symbolic, and constructed qualities (Geertz 1977; Gans 1979; Anthony D. Smith 1991;
Nash 1993; Barth 1998; Connor 1993; Grosby 1994; Weber 2009; Abner Cohen 2003).
Scholarly work on nations, nationalism, and nationhood is equally great and reflects similar
theoretical and methodological approaches (Gellner 1998; Gellner 2009; Marx 2005; Benedict
Anderson 2006; Chatterjee 1993b; Anthony D. Smith 1991; Verdery 1993; Hobsbawm 1992;
Bhabha 1990; Duara 1997; Geertz 1977; Herzfeld 2004; Handler 1988). Common to both
literatures is the idea that ethnic groups and nations are substantive entities in the world. The
theoretical challenge has thus been to produce a framework capable of explaining the origin and
continuity of ethnic and national groups. Recently, however, interdisciplinary work has begun to
look more closely at ethnicity and nationhood not as distinct expressions of group being but as
common forms of categorization and classification (Brubaker 2002; Jenkins 1994; Eriksen 2002;
Brubaker et al. 2008; Billig 1995; Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1993; Barth 1998). Within this
literature, ethnicity and nation have been seen not as substances, things, groups, or collective
entities but as practical categories, cultural idioms, discursive frames, institutional forms, and
contingent events (Brubaker 2006, 167). Moving beyond theory to analysis, work within this
approach has asked not what ethnic groups and nations are but what ethnicity and nation do in
the world (Brubaker, Loveman, and Stamatov 2004; Brubaker 2009). Brubaker, for example,
has examined the ways in which ethnic and national categories have been mobilized at specific
times for specific purposes.
Ethnic category membership can be invoked to account for—to explain, justify, or
excuse—an action, stance, or opinion; to hold others accountable for actions or
stances imputable to them as category members; to establish one’s standing as an
“insider” in order to criticize fellow category members or to advocate an
unorthodox, controversial, or potentially discrediting view; to account for an
unexpected category membership of a third party; to police the boundaries of a
category; or to mark or qualify membership status (Brubaker et al. 2008, 224-225)

8

Emphasizing the importance of structural factors, Anthias and Yuval-Davis, have also showed
how ethnic identifications do not always rely on the presumption of shared cultural properties.
Ethnicity can also involve partaking in shared social conditions reflecting unequal access to
resources that position individuals as groups and promote particular forms of difference (Anthias
and Yuval-Davis 1993, 9). In this case, ethnic identifications can cut across class, gender, and
other social markers of distinction and facilitate “group” homogeneity grounded in material
exclusions.
In this dissertation, I draw on this literature and examine the function of ethnicity and
nation as social categories within the process of self/other identification and within the
constitution of social boundaries based on ideas about commonality and difference. By doing so,
I emphasize the fact that, at any given time, what counts for ethnicity and/or nationhood could be
different. At any specific time and in some particular context, for example, there may be a
dominant view of the “essential” character of the putative ethnic or national group grounded in
language, religion, or race (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1993, 8). At another, ethnicity and/or
nationhood may reflect a commonality of history, traditions, descent, or a claim to a homeland
and/or state. What matters for my analysis is therefore not if the meaning of “Palestinian
identity” is ethnic or national (or, as I believe, both); rather, my focus is on how ethnic and
national identifications function within particular settings and under particular circumstances. I
am interested in how the cultural resources constitituve of such identifications (language,
memories, descent, homeland, claim to a state) work within the context of Jordan in the claim to
8

a distinct “Palestinian identity .”

8

As Walker Connor noted in his work on ethnonationalism: [when] analyzing sociopolitical
situations, what ultimately matters is not what is but what people believe is (Connor 1993, 93)
9

Interspersed throughout the literature on ethnicity and nations/nationalism is the issue of
religion. Concerning the subjective qualities of ethnicity, for example, Max Weber listed
religion as one of several features of everyday life, such as language, that was capable of
9

promoting feelings of ethnic affinity . According to Weber, common language and the ritual
regulation of life, as determined by shared religious beliefs, everywhere are conducive to
feelings of ethnic affinity, especially since the intelligibility of the behavior of others is the most
fundamental presupposition of group formation (Weber 1978, 390). Similarly, Geertz
characterized religion as one of the “givens” of social life and elements of what he called
“primordial attachments.” Primordial attachments, according to Geertz, stemmed from the
givens of social existence: immediate contiguity and kin connection mainly, but beyond the
giveness that stems from being born into a particular religious community, speaking a particular
language, or even a dialect of a language, and following particular social practices (Geertz 1977,
259). Cynthia Enloe extended the Weberian and Geertzian approach to religion by focusing on
its use by ethnic “groups” in the promotion of an ethno-religious community. According to
Enloe, it may be futile and unrealistic to separate religion and ethnic identity since many
individuals behave as if their ethnic affiliation and professed religion are one and the same: to be
born Croatian is to be born Catholic (Enloe 1996, 199).
While most scholars have been willing to admit religion into conceptualizations of
ethnicity, few have been as readily accepting of religion’s role within the field of nationalism
(Mihelj 2007). Drawing a line between ethnies (Anthony D. Smith 1991) as “pre-modern
formations” and nations as “modern,” most approaches to nationalism have emphasized the
secular dimensions of national formations to the exclusion of religion. Weber, for example,
9

Manning Nash went further to claim that religion, or what he referred to as a common cult, was
one of the most common and pervasive markers of ethnic boundaries (Nash 1993).
10

defined the nation as a community of sentiment “which would adequately manifest itself in a
state of its own (Weber 2009, 176).” Although Weber accepted the idea that religion could
function as one of many sentimental bonds between the members of a “nation,” he nevertheless
saw the modern political quest for a state as one of the nation’s defining features. Other scholars
have characterized the relationship between religion and nationalism in less flattering ways. In
his seminal work, Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson described nationalism in terms of
a world marked by the break with a “traditional” past and the development of “modern”
10

processes . According to Anderson, nationalism appeared when the two large cultural systems
that preceded it—the religious community and the dynastic realm—disappeared (Veer 1994, 15).
In Nations and Nationalism Since 1780, Eric Hobsbawm took a similar approach suggesting that
religion, although often intertwined with nationalism, nevertheless represented an oppositional
force capable of threatening the nation’s essentially secular character. According to Hobsbawm:
[Religion] is a paradoxical cement for proto-nationalism, and indeed for modern
nationalism, which has usually (at least in its more crusading phases) treated it
with considerable reserve as a force which could challenge the ‘nation’s’
monopoly claim to its member’s loyalty (Hobsbawm 1992, 68).
My own approach in this dissertation looks at religion in two ways. At a general level,
my analysis situates religion within a nexus of identifications, including ethnic and national, that
function to promote particular meanings of the “Palestinian people.” In this sense, I consider
religious identifications only to the degree to which, as Walker Connor noted, they contribute to
a “notion or sense of self-identity and groupness (Connor 1993, 104).” I thus look at how
Palestinian identifications as “Muslims,” or through the idioms of “Islam,” work within an
overall discourse of difference and commonality through which ideas about who the Palestinians
10

“What I am proposing is that nationalism has to be understood by aligning it, not with selfconsciously held political ideologies, but with the large cultural systems that preceded it, out of
which – as well as against which – it came into being (Benedict Anderson 2006, 12).
11

are, and what Palestine means, become possible. In a more specific sense, however, I take
religion as a constitutive feature of national discourse or nation-talk (Fox and Miller-Idriss
2008). Thus whereas some scholars see religion in competition with nationalism, I look at how
religion functions within national frameworks to generate particular forms of nationhood through
what Mark Juergensmeyer has called religious nationalism. According to Juergensmeyer,
religious nationalism represents the inclusion of a religious perspective within a broader
prescription about the social and political destiny of “the nation” (Juergensmeyer 1994, 6). In
this sense, I avoid the substantialist question of what a nation is (ethnic, religious, modern, etc.)
and instead emphasize how the “nation” looks in symbolic terms when religious ideas are
constitutive of that formation. Echoing the work of Katherine Verdery, who argues that the
“nation” should be conceived as a symbol having multiple meanings, offered as alternatives and
competed over by different groups maneuvering to capture the symbol’s definition and its
legitimating effects (Verdery 1993, 39), I examine how religion facilitates particular symbolic
meanings of the Palestinian nation.
Concerned with the meaning and function of ethno- national identifications, my
dissertation also draws on recent work focused on the significance of gender for the social
construction of nations and nationalism (Gocek 2002). One of the key problems within the
literature on nationalism concerns the failure to consider the importance of gender for
understanding nationalist imaginings and projects. As Yuval-Davis noted in her seminal work
Gender and Nation, most of the hegemonic theorizations about nations and nationalism, even
including, sometimes, those written by women, have ignored gender relations as irrelevant
(Yuval-Davis 1997, 1). Recent attention to the relationship between gender and nationalism,
however, has shown the extent to which gender ideas and relations are implicated within

12

nationalist projects (Yuval-Davis 1997; Yuval-Davis, Anthias, and Campling 1989; Mosse 1997;
Layoun 2001; Chatterjee 1993b; Jayawardena 1986; Kaplan, Alarcon, and Moallem 1999).
Concerning the role of women in nationalist movements, for example, Anthias, Yuval-Davis and
Campling have identified at least five major ways in which women are involved: as biological
reproducers of the members of ethnic/national groups; as reproducers of the boundaries of
ethnic/national groups; as ideological reproducers of the collectivity and its culture; as signifiers
of ethnic/national differences—as a focus and symbol in ideological discourses used in the
construction, reproduction, and transformation of ethnic/national categories; and as participants
in national struggles (Yuval-Davis, Anthias, and Campling 1989). In her analysis of Greek
Cypriot and Palestinian nationalism, Mary Layoun has argued that gender, much more than a
mere feature of nationalism, is essential for its very emergence. Its boundaries constitute the
basis for the imagining of the nation and its practical expression, the nation-state. As Layoun has
noted, to speak of “the woman question” in nationalism is to miss the point.
The question of woman—and of women, and of men—is the foundation of
nationalism. The very basic rhetorical and organizational principles of the nation
are tropes for and expressions of gendered power. They familiarly include
rhetorical notions of, and sociopolitical organization based on, a homosocial
community of heterosexual men (who protect women, children, and land from
foreign threat); the primary identification and allegiance of individual (male)
citizens who congregate in the public sphere to rally, lobby, and legislate for the
continued (often near fictive) sequestering of a private sphere where women,
children, sexuality, and family reside; the genesis of the nation-state as the
(masculine) principle thaht brings regulatory order to the undisciplined and
excessive (feminized) masses (Layoun 2001, 14-15).
Working in the field of Palestinian studies, several authors have examined the ways in
which gender and nationalism are mutually constituted within the context of nationalist projects
of liberation and state-building (Peteet 1992a; Abdo and Lentin 2002; Fleischmann 2003;
Kanaaneh 2002; Sharoni 1994; Hasso 2005b). Joseph Massad (1995), for example, has

13

examined gender within the discourse and practice of the Palestinian national movement led by
the PLO. According to Massad, despite the anti-colonial focus of nationalisms within the Middle
East and Asia, they have nevertheless entailed gendered narratives of expression reflective of
their epistemological origins in European philosophy. Thus the metaphor of the nation as
mother- or fatherland, the practice of defending and administering it with homosocial instituions
like the military and the bureaucracy, and the gendered strategies of reproducing not only the
nation and its nationalist agents but also the very anti-colonial culture defining it, have all been
constitutive features of nationalist discourse (Massad 1995, 468). Looking at the discourse
expressed within the Palestinian National Charter, Massad examines how gender is configured
through metaphors of Palestine as the “mother-land,” Palestinians as its/her “children,” and
Zionists as the masculine force that “raped” the land. Beyond discourse, Massad also considers
the gendered meaning of nationalist agency during the national uprising or Intifada of 1988.
Examining the communiqués of the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising, Massad reveals
the masculinization of agency and, more significantly, the ambiguities surrounding the meaning
and role of women as national agents.
In some communiqués, women are listed with occupational groups such as
merchants, peasants, students, and workers. This gives the impresson that these
occupational groups include men only, or that “women,” unlike “men,” constitute
a separate occupational group, taking for granted women’s roles as housewives
and denyinig this role the dignity of an occupation. In other communiqués,
women are mentoned together with vulnerable sectors of the population, mainly
children and old people. Women are listed with men only in the context of
resistance and struggle, thus recognizing mens’ agency as their only defining
attribute, while women (who are not mothers) possess limited agency (Massad
1995, 475)
In her work on the politics of reproduction among Palestinians in Israel, Rhoda Kanaaneh has
also examined the role of gender albeit within the context of birthing policies of the Israeli state
and Palestinian nationalist strategies. In looking at family-planning processes among
14

Palestinians in the Galilee, Kanaaneh argues that it is important to recognize how reproduction,
in its biological and social sense, is inextricably bound with the production of culture.
The negotiation of reproductive decisions in the Galilee has recently become a
struggle not only over women’s bodies and lives but also over significant social
concepts such as “the feminine,” “the masculine,” “the household,” “our culture,”
“the nation,” and “progress. Family planning is now part of the social processes
in which these concepts are daily defined, changed, and redefined in people’s
lives; in which gender is configured, communities are imagined, and boundaries
of the modern are drawn (Kanaaneh 2002, 1).
What the work of Massad, Kanaaneh, and other scholars concerned with the relationship
between gender and nationalism show is that gender, far from being a single feature of
nationalism, is often the very basis from which nationalism becomes possible. They show how
nationalism is always already constituted within a generalized sexual politics that finds
expression within its own particular historical context (Kaplan, Alarcon, and Moallem 1999).
This dissertation draws on the insights offered by the literature on gender and nationalism
to examine how gender is implicated within ethnic and national identifications among refugees.
Although my research does not concern the specific topic of gender or examine the activities of
any particular nationalist movement or mobilization, I nevertheless consider how the sexual
politics of ethnic and nationalist discourse is constituted within the claims of a population
identifying in national terms. In particular, my analysis examines how ethnic and national
identifications are gendered in ways that underscore key distinctions between men and women’s
roles in the biological and social reproduction of the ethno-national community of Palestinians.
According to the gendered logic of ethnic and national identification among Palestinians I
researched, women are essential for the biological and social reproduction of the ethno-national
group: they reproduce the members of the group and ensure that the culture of the group is
passed on to the younger generation (Yuval-Davis, Anthias, and Campling 1989). In so doing,

15

women are not only promoting the biological “continuity” of the group but also reinscribing the
ethnic and national boundaries that distinguish them as an imagined ethno-national collectivity.
But women alone are insufficient for performing their reproductive roles; it is only through a
Palestinian man’s contribution—both biological and social—that a woman can birth the nation
(Kanaaneh 2002). Thus it is only through marriage to a Palestinian male, identified by his
lineage’s historical presence in the mother-land—Palestine—that a Palestinian woman can
reproduce the group. Gender also emerges within conceptions of nationalist agency. Much as
Massad has shown within the secular rhetoric of the PLO, the religious nationalism espoused by
Palestinian refugees I met also promoted distinct forms of agency in which women’s
reproductive roles were reconstituted as nationalist acts of devotion. By reproducing the
imagined community of Palestinians, women were also described as serving the national cause.
Moreover, their particular contribution of sons to the cause is hailed as the gift of martyrs who
11

will defend and/or liberate the mother-land from Zionist invasion or die in the process .
Taken together, my analysis situates ethnic, religious, and national identifications among
Palestinians within what Brubaker, drawing on the work of Bourdieu, has called a relational
nexus (Brubaker 1996) or political field (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). For Bourdieu, to think
12

in terms of a field is to think relationally between positions within something like a game .
In analytic terms, a field may be defined as a network, or a configuration, of
objective relations between positions. These positions are objectively defined, in
their existence and in the determinations they impose upon their occupants, agents
or institutions, by their present and potential situation in the structure of the
11

For an examination of female martyrdom in the Intifada see (Hasso 2005a)

12

“We can indeed, with caution, compare a field to a game…[Thus] we have stakes, which are
for the most part the product of the competition between players. We have an investment in the
game: players are taken in by the game, they oppose one another, sometimes with ferocity, only
to the extent that they concur in their belief (doxa) in the game and its stakes; they grant these a
recognition that escapes questioning (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 98).”
16

distribution of species of power…as well as by their objective relation to other
positions (domination, subordination, homology, etc.) (Bourdieu and Wacquant
1992, 97).
Understood this way, nationalism is not engendered by nations; rather [i]t is produced—or better,
it is induced—by political fields of particular kinds (Brubaker 1996, 17). It is, as Prasenjit Duara
13

has described, a relational “identity ” representing a relationship among constituents, not the
realization of an original essence (Duara 1997, 15). Within the context of “multi-ethnic” states
such as Jordan, we can therefore understand ethno-national identifications as “happenings” or as
“events” occurring within a field constituted by a triadic nexus involving three mutual and often
antagonistic nationalisms: the nationalizing nationalisms of host states, the nationalizing
nationalisms of external homeland nationalists, and the nationalizing nationalisms of minorities.
Nationalizing nationalisms involve claims made in the name of a “core nation” or nationality,
defined in ethnocultural terms, and sharply distinguished from the citizenry as a whole (Brubaker
1996, 5). It is visible within the discourse and practice of nationalists who, because they are the
core nation, claim the state as their own and deny it to others.
Homeland nationalisms refer to the nationalisms of elites in “external national
homelands” who claim to represent, support, and protect “their” ethno-national kin in other states
(Brubaker 1996, 5). Engaging in trans-national politics, homeland nationalists assert certain
rights and responsibilities to their co-nationals abroad in ways that transcend geopolitical borders
and often rub against the claim by host states that their national minorities are an internal matter.
Finally, there are the nationalizing discourses and practices of national minorities who make their
own claims on the grounds of their ethno-national status. National minorities are not, according
to Brubaker, internally unified, externally sharply bounded groups (Brubaker 1996, 62). Rather,
13

According to Duara, identity can be understood as referring to subject positions produced by
representations in relation to other representations (Duara 1997, 7)
17

like the nationalizing nationalism of the state and the nationalizing nationalism of the homeland,
national minorities represent a political stance: they are political stances taken by agents within a
14

relational field that “ethnicize” and “nationalize” people in particular ways .
Within the context of my own research, I apply Brubaker’s notion of a political field and
use the constituent elements he identifies within the context of Eastern Europe to examine ethnonational identifications among Palestinians, albeit with minor revisions. First, I do not consider
the position of Palestinians as that of a national minority. Indeed, in Jordan there is no single
party, organization, or institution involved in any forms of nationalist politics claiming to work
on behalf of Palestinians. Nonetheless, my research shows that Palestinians do engage in
ethnicizing and nationalizing discourses and practices that indicate a discernible political stance
within the context of everyday life. Second, Brubaker’s idea of the nationalizing nationalism of
host states has to be slightly modified. In Jordan, I look at the nationalizing nationalism of
Transjordanian nationalists and the practices of the Hashemite state not as a single “element” but
rather as mutually reinforcing stances that function together within a broader political field. In
addition, my analysis does not necessarily focus on the nationalizing practices of either Hamas or
Fatah vis-à-vis Palestinian refugees in Jordan. Rather, I look at how nationalist politics in
Palestine are brought into the local context by refugees seeking to claim a place within homeland
politics and assert a stance relevant to their situation as refugees in Jordan.

14

Using this notion, developed and employed by Pierre Bourdieu in an impressive variety of
studies, we can think of a national minority not as a fixed entity or a unitary group but rather in
terms of the field of differentiated and competitive positions or stances adopted by different
organizations, parties, movements, or individual political entrepreneurs, each seeking to
“represent” the minority to its own putative members, to the host state, or to the outside world,
each seeking to monopolize the legitimate representation of the group (Brubaker 1996, 61).
18

The Imagined Homeland:
Recent studies have shown the importance of putative homelands for understanding
ethnic and national claims among migrants, refugees, and displaced peoples (Sheffer 2006;
Gupta and Ferguson 1992; Burawoy et al. 2000; Appadurai 2001; Robert Smith 2005; Vertovec
and Robin Cohen 1999; Al-Rasheed 2005; Vertovec 2009; Michael Smith and Guarnizo 1998;
Malkki 1995; Brettell 2003). For scholars of nationalism like Anthony Smith, the homeland
plays an important role in the formation of ethnic and national communities. In his view, the
homeland constitutes an historic or ancestral land that not only provides the setting upon which
the “nation’s” history is inscribed

15

but, like the nation itself, takes on its own particular identity

distinguishable in its landscapes from “other” territories and histories. Thus Smith has argued
that every nationalism seeks to cultivate and preserve its own special values in its own manner
and on a territory it considers a historic homeland (Anthony D. Smith 1993, 33).
Beyond questions of ethnicity and nationhood, the homeland concept has often appeared
among scholars interested in transnationalism, globalization, and the formation of diasporas
(Sheffer 2006; Brah 1996; Clifford 1994; Robin Cohen 1996; Safran 1991; Robin Cohen 1997;
Hear 1998; Patterson 2006). Concerned with transnational cultural flows, the mass movement of
populations, and the increasing deterritorialization of peoples, Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson
described the homeland as one of the most powerful unifying symbols for mobile and displaced
peoples (Gupta and Ferguson 1992, 11). According to them, attention to the “pulverized space
of post-modernity” reveals that the meaning of “home” and “homelands” no longer reflects the
stable relationships anthropologists once assumed between people and places. Instead, the
15

According to Smith, the homeland provides the “arena and indispensible setting for the great
men and women, and the turning points, in the nation’s history – battles, treaties, synods and
assemblies, the exploits of heroes and the shrines and schools of saints and sages (Anthony D.
Smith 2002, 32).”
19

situation of migrants, refugees, and stateless people underscores the ways in which home and
homelands serve as symbolic anchors for dispersed communities who use memories of place to
imaginatively construct their new lived world (Gupta and Ferguson 1992, 11).
For scholars like Robin Cohen and William Safran, the homeland concept is at the center
of all diaspora communities in at least two ways: (1) as an idealized ancestral territory grounded
in collective memory and tied to a myth of return and (2) as a putative ancestral home
demanding a collective commitment to its maintenance, restoration, safety, and prosperity
(Robin Cohen 1996; Robin Cohen 1997; Safran 1991). Taking the Jewish diaspora as the
paradigmatic case, both Cohen and Safran understand the homeland as a key concept not only for
identifying diasporas but also for determining the kind of diasporas they might be: victim, labor,
trade, imperial, or cultural.
More recently, critics have revealed several limitations within the idea that homeland
connections are sufficient for characterizing the relationship between people and place in
diasporic terms (Dufoix 2008; Brubaker 2005; Anthias 1998). By emphasizing the more general
idea of a connection to the homeland, these critics argue that diaspora scholars have often
ignored the complex meanings of that homeland for the various populations living in distinct
circumstances. In so doing, scholars have precluded their ability to account for how the specific
local conditions affecting each population factor into the production of homeland connections
and, in some cases, politics. As Stephane Dufoix noted, studies of “diasporas” often fail to
present the workings of the thing they ought best describe: the relationship to a “referentorigin”(Dufoix 2008, 2). Such inadequacies in diaspora accounts often result in a flattening of
difference whereby the concept of homeland remains unspecified and otherwise disparate
populations are forced into bounded categorical groups that need to be explained, not assumed

20

(Dufoix 2008, 2). Moreover, Floya Anthias has argued that the application of the diaspora
category often reflects a failure to specify the distinct conditions under which populations
migrate and, more importantly, ignores the impact of local conditions upon these populations.
Putative diasporas have thus appeared in ways that suggest far more homogeneity than actually
exists and have essentialized the relationship between people and place (Anthias 1998, 564).
Among the Palestinians I researched, Palestine emerged as an important feature of ethnonational identifications. For them, it was the ancestral homeland representing a fundamental
commonality that enabled particular forms of ethno-national belonging grounded in ideas about
culture and descent. In this sense, my work is consistent with the findings of other scholars
whose work within Palestinian communities has revealed a strong and enduring connection to
their former homeland (Peteet 2009a; Said 2002; Hammer 2005; Schulz 2003; Staughton Lynd,
Bahour, and Alice Lynd 1998). Yet my research departs with these studies in an important way.
Whereas most scholars have looked at the importance of the homeland for the meaning of
“Palestinian identity,” few have considered the meaning of the homeland itself. Thus the idea of
the national homeland remains an underanalyzed feature of Palestinian life.
In this dissertation, I consider the homeland in two ways. First, I examine the homeland
as a referent-origin (Dufoix 2008) linked to what Stephan Dufoix has called an atopic mode of
being. According to Dufoix, atopic modes of being refer to a way of being in the world between
states that is built around a claim to a common origin, ethnicity, or religion and that does not
reduce one to being a subject of a host country (Dufoix 2008, 63). Second, I examine the
function of the homeland within an ethno-national discourse grounded in genealogical ties (Ho
2004) and reflecting what Anthony Smith described as a common community of descent.
According to this idea, whether an individual is within her community or has emigrated to

21

another, she remains ineluctably and organically a member of the community of her birth and is
forever stamped by it (Anthony D. Smith 1993, 11).
The Chapters:
This dissertation consists of eight chapters, six of which present my methodological
approach and data analysis. In the following chapter, titled “Research Methodology: The Sites,
The Process, and The Anthropologist,” I present my key methodologies and offer an overview of
my research field sites. The chapter opens with an explanation/exploration of my dissertation
topic: how I came to decide on my topic and the challenges I faced in realizing my research. The
next section of the chapter provides a detailed account of the Palestinian refugee camps in
Jordan. It presents some of the demographic and socio-economic features of the camps and their
location within Jordan. In the next four sections, I articulate my specific research methods and
address what questions they attempted to answer in the field. The final two sections offer an
exploration of my positionality within the field highlighting some of the interactions between
myself and my interlocutors and what these encounters suggested for my own position as an
anthropologist in the field.
In the first substantive chapter of this dissertation, “Chapter Three: Identifying Refugees:
The Claims of Exile and the Meaning of “Palestinian Refugees,” I offer a critical examination of
the meaning of displacement and exile among Palestinian refugees in three UNRWA refugee
camps and several urban areas of Amman. Of particular concern are cultural meanings of
“refugees” and “the camps.” In the first sections of this chapter, I provide a brief account of
Palestinian displacement and its connection to the creation of an official definition of a Palestine
refugee articulated by the UNRWA. I also consider the context of UNRWA refugee camps
through demographic data. The next section moves to examine the meanings of refugee

22

identification claimed by Palestinians in two particular settings: the refugee camps and the city.
In both contexts, I argue that Palestinians claim to be refugees in ways that transcend the official
status of a refugee ascribed by UNRWA. For Palestinians, it is both the experience and
persistence of displacement and its inheritance that identifies one as a refugee.
But claiming refugeeness is about much more than simply identifying oneself as a
refugee; it is an important link established to a particular place and people that, in turn, marks
one as “matter out of place” (Malkki, 1995). Reinscribing the idea that people belong naturally in
particular places, Palestinians claim refugeeness as a way of articulating their non-belonging to
Jordan. As refugees, they are in exile: a condition of being outside of one’s normal existence.
Also, being a refugee means that one is going to return, that the only negation of refugeeness is
through the restoration of Palestine and its people in it. In the final section of the chapter, I
examine how refugee identifications are implicated within cultural ideas about the relationship
between identity and place. Although the shared experiences of displacement and exile
established an important link between Palestinians across space and time, I argue that the
material and symbolic boundaries between the city and the camps nevertheless have significant
consequences for what it means to be a refugee living in both spaces.
The second substantive chapter of my dissertation, “Chapter Four: Nationalizing States:
Transjordanians, the State, and the Palestinians,” examines how Palestinians articulate their
position in Jordan in light of the exclusionary discourse and practice of Transjordanian
nationalists and the Hashemite state. My aims in this chapter are twofold. First, this chapter
seeks to provide a background on two elements constitutive of the political field in which

23

16

Palestinian nationhood takes place in Jordan . The first element concerns the nationalist stance
taken by Transjordanian nationalists. As the “true” nation of Jordan, Transjordanians claim that
the state belongs exclusively to them and thus represent Palestinians as a foreign presence on
Jordanian soil. The second element I discuss concerns Jordanian state policies towards the
Palestinians and its importance for the meaning of Palestinian identity. In the Jordanian context,
discriminatory treatment of Palestinian citizens has not only reinforced the idea that Palestinians
and Jordanians represent distinct ethno-national communities but has also given practical
meaning to such distinctions in terms of access to political and economic resources. The state
has thus played a critical role in the establishment of ethno-national boundaries that underscores
Palestinians’ unequal status as citizens and reinforces an important aspect of their shared
condition as a group.
In the next chapter, “Chapter Five: Citizenship Without Nationality: The “Ins” and
“Outs” of Palestinian Jordanians,” I focus on the impact of the Transjordanian political field
upon the meaning of Palestinian identity among refugees in Amman as expressed through ideas
about nationality and citizenship. Faced with the exclusionary politics of Transjordanian
nationalists and the discriminatory practices of the state, Palestinians engage in a tenuous form of
ethno-national discourse. As citizens of Jordan confronting prolonged displacement and the
unlikelihood of any immediate return, Palestinians assert a universalist form of discourse that
seeks to normalize their presence in Jordan as Arabs and Muslims and challenge the exclusivist

16

As noted by Brubaker, “nationalism is not engendered by nations. It is produced—or better, it
is induced—by political fields of particular kinds. Its dynamics are governed by the properties of
political fields, not by the properties of collectivities (Brubaker 1996, 17).
24

claims of their Transjordanian peers. Through pan-Arab

17

and religious discourse, Palestinians

thus identify with Transjordanians and claim a legitimate right to belong in Jordan as Arabs and
Muslims. But Palestinians also promote a particularist claim to Palestine and Palestinian
nationhood. They thus assert a unique ethno-national identity as Palestinians that allows them to
disidentify with Jordan and claim a stronger sense of belonging to Palestine and the idea of a
Palestinian nation. These two positions form an important part of the meaning of Palestinian
nationhood in Jordan. Together, they underscore the interactive stances Palestinians take within
Jordan vis-à-vis the state and Transjordanian nationalists. More importantly, they suggest the
basic idea that forms the central claim of this dissertation, namely that Palestinian nationhood in
Jordan should be understood not as something that is produced but rather induced by interacting
factors in a broader political field.
The following chapter, “Chapter Six: Homeland Matters,” examines the meaning of the
Palestinian homeland for refugees in Jordan and considers its significance for understanding how
Palestinians identify in ethnic, religious, and national terms. Divided into four sections, this
chapter aims to elucidate several features of the Palestinian homeland as conceived by camp
refugees. In the first section, I begin with a brief history of the colonial and post-colonial
geography of Palestine giving particular attention to its shifting territorial borders and location
within the regional context. The next section considers how descriptions of the homeland among
two particular categories of refugees—those born in Palestine and those born in Jordan—
reflected the widespread idea of an unchanging Palestinian geography. Despite their location
within distinct generational groups, both articulated a similar conception of the homeland rooted

17

According to Rashid Khalidi, Arab nationalism is the idea that Arabs are a people linked by
special bonds of language and history (and many would add religion), and that their political
organization should in some way reflect this reality.
25

in the colonial borders of the British Mandate. The third section of this chapter considers the
significance of the homeland for the maintenance of an ethno-national Palestinian identity. As I
show, for Palestinian refugees, identifying the homeland was no trivial matter. It not only
indicated a commitment to preserving a connection to a particular territory but also reflected a
common will to resist the ongoing erasure (Piterberg 2001) of that place by a population
claiming the land as its own. In the final section of this chapter, I consider the homeland within
the context of everyday life among Palestinian refugees. Looked at ethnographically, I show
how material representations of the homeland reflect what Jon Fox and Cynthia Miller-Idriss
have called “everyday nationhood” (Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008). In Jordan, where public
expressions of Palestinian nationalism are strictly monitored and controlled, I argue that
representations of the homeland offer refugees an important opportunity to engage in the practice
of nationhood.
In the next chapter, “Chapter Seven: Muslim Palestine: Homeland, National Politics, and
the Islamic Nation of Palestine,” I examine the significance of religious nationalism for
Palestinian refugees in Jordan. In particular, I explore how the religious nationalist discourse of
Hamas in the Palestinian context of the West Bank and Gaza Strip has been adopted by
Palestinian refugees in Jordan and is reflected in local identifications of the Palestinian people,
homeland and struggle. I argue that national identifications among Palestinian refugees in
Jordan not only reflect the influence of Hamas in the camps but also the willful engagement of
Palestinians with homeland politics. Despite their marginal status as refugees living beyond the
center of Palestinian national politics, Palestinians are not passive spectators of homeland
nationalism. Rather, they stake meaningful claims within homeland politics from afar in ways
that underscores the significance of national politics for their specific situation in Jordan.

26

In the final chapter of this dissertation titled “Chapter Eight: Conclusions,” I present
some of my key findings and highlight their significance for larger issues within the discipline of
anthropology. Divided into three sections, I review my dissertation chapters thematically
considering their relationship to questions about refugees and citizenship, ethnicity and
nationhood, and homelands and diasporas. Together, these sections underscore the various
intersections of this dissertation with different literatures that are united by a common interest in
understanding how “identities” are constituted within and by particular politico-cultural
conditions.

27

Chapter Two:
Research Methodology: The Sites, The Process, and The Anthropologist
Research Routes and Trajectory:
A research project always defies the boundaries we typically assign it in our proposals. If
this is true, then understanding the constitution of a project requires that we transcend the limits
of the academic proposal to include a variety of decisions, experiences, and efforts that establish
the basis for engaging with a particular topic. In my own case, the formation of my research
project took a dramatic turn that ultimately changed the place and purpose of my fieldwork.
Originally, my research did not concern nationalism nor was it grounded in the refugee camps of
Jordan. In the following section, I aim to provide a brief, personal background of my research
project detailing its awkward routes of production. My reasons for doing so are not without
academic purpose. To be sure, by writing this section I aim to highlight an often neglected
dimension of the research project that, I believe, is essential for understanding the vicissitudes of
doing fieldwork in contentious times and places.
My original research project concerned the topics of violence and suffering. Upon
completing my second year of graduate studies in 2004, I was interested in conducting an
ethnographic study of violence within the Occupied West Bank in Palestine. My interest in the
topic reflected my growing concern over the breakdown of the Peace Process

18

18

and what Baruch

The terms “Peace Process” are often used to refer to the period following the signing of the
Oslo Accords between Israeli and PLO representatives in Oslo, Norway on August 20, 1993.
Throughout this dissertation, I will use the terms Peace Process more broadly to refer to the
period of negotiations between the PLO and Israeli government that began with the 1993 signing
of the Oslo Accords and have ostensibly continued until the present day.
28

19

Kimmerling called the politicide

20

outbreak of the Al-Aqsā Intifāda

(Kimmerling 2006) of the Palestinian people. Since the
in September 2000, I was engulfed by the almost daily

spectacles of violence flickering on the mainstream news networks and their often simplified and
ahistorical analyses. Suicide bombings, home demolitions, air strikes, and other forms of routine
violence compelled me to consider how an anthropologist might make a meaningful contribution
toward understanding the escalating conflict between the Israeli military and a consortium of
organized Palestinian militias that, by 2008, had killed over 4,500 Palestinians and 400
21

Israelis . How, I wondered, do communities under siege understand and survive the routine
violence of daily life under military occupation and a thriving resistance? Is normal life
possible?
Awarded a National Science Foundation pre-dissertation research grant by the
Anthropology Department at Michigan State University in the summer of 2004, I left the
comforts of Michigan in order to conduct the first phase of my ethnographic study of violence
and survival in the Occupied West Bank. Although the grant was designed to ease students into
their new field sites and facilitate the development of the much longer experience of dissertation
fieldwork, my departure was neither unfamiliar nor new. The previous summer I traveled to the
West Bank with a local peace organization called The Michigan Peace Team. Through the
19

According to Kimmerling, politicide refers to the process that has, as its ultimate goal, the
dissolution of the Palestinian people’s existence as a legitimate social, political, and economic
entity (Kimmerling 2006, 3-4).
20
The Al-Aqsa Intifada derives its name from the site of clashes that many commentators use to
mark the start of the post-Oslo period. Al-Aqsa is the name of one of the mosques located in
Jerusalem within the Al-Haram Al-Sharif (The Noble Sanctuary). It is widely known as the third
holiest mosque for Muslims as its location was the first qibla (direction of prayer for Muslims)
for Muslims until the shift to the Ka’ba in the city of Mecca. It is also the site of the Prophet
Muhammad’s Al-Isrā’ wal-Mi’rāj (night journey).
21

B'Tselem. http://www.btselem.org/English/Statistics/Casualties.asp (11 January 2010).

29

generous financial and moral support of local peace advocates within the Lansing community, I
and several Michigan activists joined the International Solidarity Movement in Palestine and
other non-governmental organizations in the Palestinian cities of Jenin and Nablus in order to
promote peaceful alternatives to violent resistance and document Israeli abuses against
Palestinian communities.
As a result of my experiences that summer, I wrote and presented a paper on violence and
resistance in the West Bank at the 2003 annual meeting of the Middle Eastern Studies
Association (MESA). The paper was well received and formed the basis of a preliminary
research paper. Suffice it to say that I perceived both my initial visit to Palestine and subsequent
participation in the MESA conference as two logical steps towards building an academic project
that, in 2004, was ready for a new phase. As I was soon to learn, however, the seemingly logical
trajectory of my research plans had unexpected consequences that not only changed the entire
course of my academic studies but also revealed the inherent risks and uncertainties of doing
research in the politically charged field of Palestine studies.
In a sense, my fieldwork ended before it began. As a fieldsite, Palestine is a bounded
territory strictly monitored and controlled by the Israeli military. In practical terms, this means
that getting into the West Bank and leaving it is determined by the Israeli authorities. Contrary
to the celebrated flows of globalization, Palestine is located within a tangible matrix of military
control. Borders in Palestine are solid. This is true whether one arrives at the Jordanian Allenby
Bridge, the Egyptian-Israeli border, or Tel Aviv: Israel controls the Occupied Territories. My
experience of arrival one year earlier brought this reality into sharp focus. Entering the West
Bank via Israel involved a complex set of connections and deceptions that together established a
credible purpose for visiting Israel. This time, however, I believed a more truthful declaration

30

about my intentions in Palestine were a sure ticket in. When I arrived at the Ben Gurion
International Airport of Tel Aviv, two Israeli security agents began their routine questioning of
select passengers. As anticipated, I was selected. But what began as a series of short and simple
questions soon became a 17-hour experience of waiting and queries that culminated in an
interrogation of Orwellian qualities. After more than 12 hours of isolation in the airport, I was
escorted through a long, narrow corridor into a cold white room with two agents, a computer,
and a chair. Within the next five hours, I was forced to board a British Airways flight back to the
United States from where I came. The reason: security concerns.
Once in the United States, I began a critical evaluation of the viability of my current
research project. After serious consideration over the uncertainties of returning to Palestine and
the possibilities of formulating a new topic in Palestine studies, I determined that Jordan offered
a feasible and important alternative. My new research topic thus shifted from the lived
experience of violence in the West Bank to the core of the Palestinian predicament:
displacement. The new turn in my research wasn’t a complete break from my anthropological
concerns. While studying the history of the conflict, I had developed an interest in the issue of
Palestinian refugees. In particular, I was struck by their protracted condition of exile and
statelessness and felt it provided an important opening for examining questions about
displacement and community, human rights, and the structures and function of the international
refugee regime. Notwithstanding the significance of the refugees to the Palestine question during
my original studies, I nevertheless felt that the urgency of military occupation and violence in the
West Bank and Gaza Strip demanded immediate attention. This led me to concentrate, as many
scholars do, on the occupation. More importantly, the U.S. war on terror and recent invasion of
Iraq made questions of violence, Islam, and the Middle East particularly salient. To be sure, it

31

wasn’t long after the 9/11 attacks that former Israeli Prime Minister, Arial Sharon, began to
situate Israel’s military strikes and destruction within the discursive frame of the war on terror.
For these reasons, I developed a project within the West Bank.
My decision to change topics and fieldsites proved to be a good one. For the next three
years (2005-2007), I traveled to and from Jordan with few obstacles. Not without some sense of
irony, it was the constitutional monarchy of Jordan that welcomed me into its borders and
allowed me to complete my fieldwork. That is, despite the sensitivity of the Palestinian issue in
Jordan, my research experience was mostly unhindered and proved a serious challenge to the
myth of Israel’s excusivley liberal character. Often hailed by U.S. pundits for its openness and
democratic uniqueness within the region, Israel was in fact the less welcoming and free of the
two states. As I learned, the state’s intolerance of critique not only constrained my own research
ambitions but proved that restrictions of movement and the suppression of truth are not the
22

exclusive province of monarchies and authoritarian governments in the Middle East . On the
contrary, my own assessment is that Israel, like other states, understands the importance of
criticism and thus decided that the benefits of prohibiting one anthropologist from conducting his
research was well worth the seemingly trivial costs.
The preceding narrative is meant to provide a background to my research project in
Jordan. It is an attempt to construct a short but detailed representation of my research routes and
how I arrived in Jordan. Although any account is always incomplete insofar as the selection of
some facts entails the silencing of others (Trouillot 1997), it nevertheless highlights some of the
contingencies of fieldwork that constitute the research project as a whole. As Occupied Palestine

22

Upon discussing my experience with several friends and colleagues, I learned that my
situation was not uncommon in the context of the new Intifada. Both activists and scholars were
being deprived access to the territories.
32

so compelling illustrates, unstable places are unstable fieldsites. While this should not deter
anthropologists from conducting research in such locations, it does require a certain kind of
flexibility unnecessary in other contexts. It also shows that fieldsites are not the passive,
accessible places we often imagine them to be. Many research projects are formulated far from
the actual sites we intend on visiting. From texts, conversations, media, and our own
imaginations, we construct our sites in the absence of its tangible and uncertain dimensions. My
own experience taught me the limits of my ethnographic imagination and that fieldsites are
constituted by and through powerful forces well beyond the control or manipulations of a wellintentioned anthropologist.
Research Sites: The Fields
The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan shares the longest border with the Occupied West
Bank and Israel. Unsurprisingly, it also shelters the largest number of Palestinian refugees in the
Middle East and world. At least seventeen percent (approximately 400,000) of Palestinian
refugees in Jordan live in and receive services from the United Nations Relief and Works
23

Agency (UNRWA)

in the Middle East. Throughout the Kingdom, UNRWA provides shelter
24

and services in ten official camps and services in three unofficial camps . Not all refugees live
within camps. In 2008, UNRWA estimated that a total of 1.5 million registered refugees did not
live in any refugee camp. This number does not account for Palestinians who are not registered

23

Established by United Nations General Assembly resolution 302 (IV) of December 8, 1949,
UNRWA is responsible for the implementation of direct relief and works programs for Palestine
refugees. It began its operations on May 1, 1950. Since 1949 and in the absence of a solution to
the Palestine refugee problem, the General Assembly has repeatedly renewed UNRWA’s
mandate.
24
There are currently three neighborhoods in Amman, Zarqā’ and Madaba that are considered
refugee camps by the Jordanian government and "unofficial" camps by UNRWA. See
UNRWA.org for more information.
33

with UNRWA but are nevertheless refugees displaced during the Palestine War of 1948 or ArabIsraeli War of 1967.

25

Figure One: Map of The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan

Conducting an ethnographic research project on Palestinian national formations among
such a large and dispersed population required an expansive definition of a fieldsite. At times,
the ethnographic field included anywhere I happened to be. Indeed, whether riding the bus

25

From https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/jo.html
34

through the circuitous streets of Amman or walking through the narrow Siq of Petra, the question
of Palestine and the Palestinians emerged in unexpected and often serendipitous moments. On
other occasions, the field was confined to the space of the refugee camps I visited while
conducting interviews or other more focused endeavors. Despite the elusive boundaries of my
fieldwork, there were nevertheless several sites that constituted the basis of my fieldwork and
thus deserve particular attention.
Primarily, my research sites were confined to the Jordanian capital, Amman. Although
several cities in Jordan could have provided a productive site for my research, there were several
reasons for choosing Amman. First, it has the largest number of refugee camps in the country.
Second, the greatest concentration of Palestinian refugees and their descendants live within the
capital. These two facts of Amman facilitated my access to the Palestinians I hoped to meet,
engage, study, and learn from: camp refugees and non-camp refugees. Amman also provided
several institutional advantages that eased the research process. For example, Amman housed
The Jordanian-American Commission for Educational Exchange (JACEE) run by The Binational Fulbright Commission in Jordan. As a Fulbright recipient, the friendly staff and
institutional affiliations offered through JACEE proved an invaluable resource throughout my
research period. In addition, UNRWA had several offices spread throughout the city including
their central headquarters. Finally, the Department of Palestinian Affairs (DPA) was also located
in Amman. As the main government agency responsible for the administration of the Kingdom’s
refugee camps, the DPA controlled access to all non-UNRWA projects within the camps. This
included providing security clearances for researchers like me. Suffice it to say that access to the
DPA office in Amman was essential for obtaining all the permits necessary for conducting my
research.

35

Most of my research data among registered Palestine refugees
specific refugee camps in Jordan: the Wihdāt

27

26

comes from three
28

camp, the Baqa’a camp, and the Hittīn

camp.

The Wihdāt refugee camp is located slightly south east of Amman. Although the camp is not
technically considered part of Amman, it is nevertheless contiguous with other urban areas
within the city. Less like a camp, it better resembles an urban slum characterized by high
population density, poor infrastructure, tightly-packed houses made of concrete and often zinc
roofs, and narrow streets. It was established in 1955 following the 1948 Palestine War and today
houses a variety of refugees including those displaced in 1948 and 1967. In addition, the camp
now has a small section in which Iraqi refugees have begun to settle. As one of the older camps
in Jordan, it has a population of approximately 50,000 registered refugees, thirteen primary
29

schools, and two health centers . In addition, Wihdāt has approximately 14 NGOs including
cultural activities centers, Islamic charities, a community rehabilitation center, and a woman’s
program center.

26

UNRWA’s official definition of a Palestine refugee includes all “persons whose normal place
of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948, who lost both their homes and
means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict.” This definition, however, does
not assign refugee status per se. Rather, it provides the parameters for determining who can
receive services from UNRWA. According to UNRWA, “[its] definition of refugees is
necessarily restricted to those eligible to receive its aid, as the definition explicitly states that the
refugee must have lost both home and means of livelihood to be eligible for registration with
UNRWA.” Currently, the universally accepted definition of a “refugee” expressed by Article 1A
(2) in the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees does not apply to the majority of
Palestinian refugees (Rempel 2006).
27
The official UNRWA name of the camp is Amman New Camp. However, all of my
participants and locals referred to it as Wihdat. Throughout this paper, I will refer to it as the
Wihdat camp.
28
The official UNRWA name of the camp is Marka Camp. However, all of my participants and
locals referred to it as the Hittīn and Schlinner camp. Throughout this paper, I will refer to it as
the Hittīn camp.
29
See http://www.un.org/unrwa/refugees/jordan/newamman.html (11 January 2010).
36

Camp

Number of Registered
Refugees

Baqa'a

93,916

Wihdāt

51,443

Marka

45,593

Jabal el-Hussein

29,464

Irbid

25,250

Husn

22,194

Zarqā’

18,509

Souf

20,142

Jerash

24,090

Talbīyeh

6,970

Table One: UNRWA Refuee Camp Profiles in Jordan

30

The Wihdāt camp was my first research site and I spent a considerable amount of time
shopping, talking, and observing life and institutions within the camp. Indeed, a significant
number of my participants lived within the camp. Originally, one of my early contacts in Jordan,
31

Hāzim , suggested that I visit the camp and begin my interviews there. A camp resident
himself, he situated the camp within a broader historical context taking particular pride in its
short-lived autonomy during the peak of PLO power in Jordan. Through Hāzim and other
helpful Palestinians, I was able to visit the camp regularly and set up several interviews with
individuals and families. I was also able to establish a critical relationship with two Islamic
charities within the camp. These institutions provided an ideal opportunity to examine how

30

From http://www.unrwa.org/etemplate.php?id=66

31

Hāzim is a pseudonym used to protect the participant’s identity. Throughout this dissertation,
I use pseudonyms for participants in order to preserve their anonymity.
37

religious education and nationalism mingled within the context of social services. In addition,
several residents in the camp were relatives of our close friends in Michigan. This not only
facilitated research goals but ensured that we made regular visits to the camp for casual
interaction with new-found friends. On a more practical level, Wihdāt offered an important
context for observing and participating in camp life and movement. Throughout our residence in
Jordan, my wife, Fatima, and I took the local servīs

32

to the Raghadān bus station in the valley,

jumped on the Kullīyāt Hittīn bus, and traveled up Jabal Amman (Amman Mountain) in order to
reach the camp. Once there, we’d join hundreds of camp residents and ‘outsiders’ in the busy
sūq Al-Wihdāt (Wihdāt market) to buy cheap vegetables, meats, olives, and imported products.
We also bought several furniture items and often visited our friends in the sūq for tea, coffee, and
stimulating conversations.

Figure Two: Aerial View of Wihdāt Camp (New Amman Camp)

33

Not long after visiting Wihdāt, my contacts in Amman helped me establish new
connections with refugees in the Baqa’a camp. Located in a wide valley 20 km north of the
32

Servīs is the Arabic term used by locals to refer to fixed-route taxis that hold up to four
passengers at a time.
33
From http://www.unrwa.org/etemplate.php?id=129
38

capital, Baqa’a is the largest and most populous camp in the country. Unlike Wihdāt, the Baqa’a
camp was built in response to the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and thus provided emergency shelter
for thousands of refugees and internally displaced persons

34

(IDPs) primarily fleeing hostilities

in the West Bank. According to UNRWA, Baqa'a was originally a temporary camp set up to
accommodate approximately 26,000 refugees and IDPs in only 5,000 tents. After the war,
however, it became clear that no immediate return of the refugees was likely and, given the harsh
weather conditions, something slightly more permanent was necessary. In 1969-1971, with the
support of the Federal Republic of Germany, UNRWA constructed about 8,000 prefabricated
shelters. Today, the camp shelters almost 100,000 registered refugees, has 16 primary schools,
35

its own bus station, market, and youth center, and two health centers .

Figure Three: Aerial View of Baqa’a Refugee Camp

36

Like most camps in Jordan, the Baqa’a camp was easily accessible through local
transportation. Unlike most camps, however, the journey was long and tiring. My visits to the

34

In the Jordanian context, IDPs are Palestine refugees originally displaced in 1948 who, after
settling in the Jordanian-ruled West Bank, were subsequently displaced in 1967 into the East
Bank. For more on the legal status of Palestinian IDPs, see: www.badil.org
35
From http://www.un.org/unrwa/refugees/jordan/baqaa.html (12 January 2010).
36

From http://www.unrwa.org/etemplate.php?id=123
39

camp were thus strictly organized around research purposes. There were, of course, notable
exceptions. Depending on the receptivity and curiosity of my participants, my wife and I
occasionally returned to the camp for friendly engagements over coffee, lunch, or dinner (and
sometimes all three). Of all my research participants in the camp, two particular families stood
out for their generosity and help. From them, I learned about various camp details that would
have otherwise passed unnoticed. For example, Rāmī introduced me to the small, tightly-knit
community of Shiite Muslims in the camp. A low-key minority in a predominantly Sunni
Muslim context, it was Rāmī’s introduction and trust that allowed me to interview several
Palestinian Shiites whose thoughts and experiences provided me with important insights into the
shifting boundaries of the Palestinian national ethos. Beyond the few but productive
relationships we established with Baqa’a families, the camp provided an important institutional
context for examining particular issues within my research. It was in Baqa’a that I observed how
the activities and spirit of a children’s summer camp organized by camp residents captured the
tensions of homeland politics. While conducting a focus group interview with several camp
organizers, for example, I was invited to attend a daily ritual of national expression and pride. In
this case, two separate lines of primary school children chanted their praise for both Hamas and
Fatah as national movements. Furthermore, it was in Baqa’a that my research in a small Islamic
charity exposed me to teenage activists peacefully representing their political allegiances to
Fatah and Hamas. Unlike the bloody encounters of the Gaza Strip, these teenage refugees
debated homeland politics without the trappings of power faced by Palestinians back home.

40

37

Although not the last refugee camp I visited , Hittīn was the final site of considerable
ethnographic research among camp refugees. Officially known as Marka Camp, the Hittīn
refugee camp was also established to address Palestinians’ immediate need for shelter in the
wake of the 1967 war. Like the Baqa’a camp, it primarily houses Palestine refugees and IDPs.
There are, however, a significant number of Gaza refugees living within the camp. Unlike
Palestine refugees who crossed into the East and West Bank in 1948 or East Bank in 1967, these
refugees were displaced from the Gaza Strip in the 1967 war and subsequently denied Jordanian
citizenship. Because Gaza was under Egyptian administration until Israeli forces occupied the
territory, Jordanian authorities argue that their status is an exclusively Egyptian problem.
Currently, these refugees reside primarily in the Hittīn and Gaza camp in the northern city of
Jarash. UNRWA estimates that approximately 45,000 refugees and IDPs reside within the camp.
Because the surrounding neighborhoods also contain a significant population of unofficial
refugees, UNRWA extends some of its services to Palestinian neighborhoods beyond the borders
of Hittīn making these areas unofficial camps.
My decision to include the Hittīn camp as a research site was largely determined by two
factors. First, the camp was the closest in proximity to where we lived for the first nine months
of fieldwork. Whereas reaching the Wihdāt and Baqa’a camps by servīs and bus took 30 and 60
minutes respectively, getting to Hittīn camp took only 15 minutes. The camp thus offered a
convenient location for short observational visits long before contacts were ever established.
Second, the opportunity to broaden my participant pool by including Gaza refugees within my
research made Hittīn all the more appealing. This is not to say that my visits to Wihdāt and
37

My research also includes visits to the Jabal Al-Hussein Camp, Zarqā’ Camp, Irbid Camp,
Gaza Camp (officially known as the Jarash camp) and the unofficial Naser camp. Here I am
only highlighting three camps because of the preponderance of data derived from these particular
camps.
41

Baqa’a did not offer similar opportunities. Indeed, while in both camps I met and interviewed
several stateless

38

refugees displaced from the coastal territory in 1967. Nevertheless, Hittīn has

a significant population of Gazans living within the same area. This eased access to the the Gaza
community and provided a chance to explore a set of particular questions within a consistent
39

research period .
Wihdāt, Baqa’a, and Hittīn provided the primary setting for exploring my research
questions among registered refugees living in camps. In addition to my interest in camp
refugees, my research interests included Palestinian refugees (both registered and unregistered)
living in urban, non-camp settings. This aspect of my research project did not require any
sustained focus on a particular area of Amman. Palestinians reside throughout the city in all
areas including the affluent neighborhoods of West Amman and the more sha’bi

40

sections of

the east side. Because I wanted to access a diverse sample of non-camp Palestinian refugees, I
intentionally broadened my efforts to various areas of Amman. Admittedly, this often depended
on my contacts; who I interviewed and what I observed was primarily an extension of who I
knew. But the overwhelming presence of Palestinians in Amman allowed for numerous

38

All Palestine refugees in Jordan have full Jordanian citizenship with the exception of about
120,000 refugees originally from the Gaza Strip, which up to 1967 was administered by Egypt.
They are eligible for temporary Jordanian passports, which do not entitle them to full citizenship
rights such as the right to vote and employment with the government. See:
http://www.un.org/unrwa/refugees/jordan.html
39
I later conducted several interviews with Gaza refugees in the Gaza camp in Jarash. My
interviews during this phase of my research project expanded to include a new set of questions
concerning human rights and statelessness.
40
The Arabic word “sha’bi” has various connotations. In this context, the closest meaning in
English is “folk-ish” or “ghetto.” The term is multi-layered and can include both a class element
(poor or lower class) and cultural element (uneducated, simple-minded, and uncultured). The
term was often used by locals living in the west side of Amman and, at times, by locals from the
area itself to refer to other, less fortunate members of the same community.
42

opportunities to encounter individuals through daily interaction that ultimately became part of
my research. Despite the expansive borders of my non-camp fieldwork, I can nevertheless
provide a rough description of the research sites using the local division of east/west Amman.
For the first nine months of my fieldwork, my wife and I lived in a small section of the
Hāshmī Shamāli in east Amman. Known by locals as Abu Jissār, our residence and experiences
in the area made it a productive research site. There are many reasons for choosing this site but I
can identify two particular reasons that informed my decision at the time. First, it was a location
known for its high concentration of Palestinians. I reasoned that living in such an area would
provide an ideal setting for getting the feel of a small, non-camp urban setting. It also broke with
the expat tradition of living in the wealthy, more familiar context of west Amman. Second, and
more importantly, the area was rich in ethnographic data derived from the innumerable
experiences of hanging out, daily prayer at the local mosques, visiting friends for video games,
chess, and lunch, and all of the daily encounters that constitute the anthropological metaphysics
of “being there”

41

(Borneman and Hammoudi 2009, 19). In the Hāshmī, I had close ties with a

Palestinian family that, the previous year, allowed me to live with them while studying Arabic at
the University of Jordan. I originally contacted and met the Khalīlī family through close friends
in Michigan. Throughout my summer studies, they were warm and supportive. It was through
Fāris

42

and his brothers that I learned how to navigate the complex arrangement of local

transportation and was able to establish a visible presence in an area tourists never frequented.
By the time I returned to the Hāshmī in 2006 to begin my fieldwork, I was well acquainted with
41

According to Borneman and Hammoudi, fieldwork encounters offer experiential insights that
come not only from the formal process of observation and interviews but also from the linguistic
exchanges, (mis)translations, feeling of attraction and repulsion, discussions and arguments, and
fights and power tactics that make up the ethnographic experience as a whole.
42
Fāris is a pseudonym used to protect the participant’s identity.
43

locals in the area including the staff at the local bakery and sweets shop, the owner of the internet
café where I spent countless hours chatting with my wife the previous year, several fast food
shops, and the local bread shop two blocks from my apartment. Moreover, I knew several
residents in the area who I met through the Khalīlī brothers and mosque.
West Amman offered various opportunities for conducting interviews with Palestinian
refugees. Some of my contacts with individuals and families were built from contacts in
Michigan. Others were established through expats and acquaintances we made during our twoyear residence in Jordan. But the majority of my research with Palestinians on the west side
extended from my contacts at a local secondary school where I taught for a full academic period.
The school was located in one of the more affluent areas of Amman, just a few kilometers from
the newly built King Hussein mosque in Dābūq. Students at the school were from elite families
and many of them and their families were dual citizens of the United States and Canada. Their
curiosities and interest in their Islamic History and English instructor’s research allowed me to
form friendly relationships with them and their families. Also, the opportunity to invite an
American-Muslim researcher to their homes for dinner and conversations was as attractive to
them as it was to me. Suffice it to say that my experiences at the school and the relationships I
formed with my students and their families enabled me to conduct a large chunk of my research
with non-camp Palestinian refugees throughout west Amman in areas including Khālda, Um
Utheina, and Sweifīyeh.
Interviews:
The decision of who to interview and why is always complex. Long before reaching the
field, anthropologists formulate manageable categorical criteria for determining who would be
the ideal candidate for an interview or long-term observation. Then, upon our arrival and often

44

within the first few attempts at conducting research, we basically start from scratch accepting
any individual willing to speak with (and listen to) an eager anthropologist. My own situation
was, fortunately, not so rudimentary. I had the luxury of what proved to be reliable and
supportive individuals who understood who I was looking for and, more importantly, how to
contact them. At the most basic level, I wanted to arrange as many interviews as I could with
two primary categories of Palestinians related to the concept of place: camp refugees and noncamp refugees. As Julie Peteet noted in her insightful study of Palestinian identity among
refugees in Lebanon, place is critical to those excised from particular places; it is central to their
subjectivity and sense of location in the world (Peteet 2009b, 18). Concerned with similar
issues, I felt that researching the lives and experiences of refugees necessitated particular
attention to the places Palestinians inhabited. Although broadly conceived, thinking in terms of
camps and non-camps allowed me to develop a good starting point for determining who I should
interview and why.
In addition to location, there were several other characteristics important for determining
who I wanted to include in my research. Because my research concerned questions of national
identity and connections to the homeland among a large population, it was important that I
include Palestinian refugees according to the many experiences that constituted their status as
such. This included three particular groups: (1) Palestinians displaced either in 1948 or 1967 (or
both) who, subsequent to their displacement, became official refugees according to UNRWA’s
operational definition and resettled in a refugee camp; (2) Palestinians displaced either in 1948 or
1967 who, subsequent to their displacement, became official refugees and (a) temporarily
resettled in a refugee camp or (b) never resettled in a refugee camp; and 3) Palestinians displaced
either in 1948 or 1967 who, subsequent to their displacement, did not register with UNRWA or

45

resettle in a camp but nevertheless were (a) displaced and (b) self-identified as refugees. In
addition to these three groups, I included their descendants within the participant pool. This
ensured that I address generational location and its impact upon the process of identification and
connections to the Palestinian homeland.
More general considerations included that my participants reflect—to the extent
possible—a balanced sample of women and men. The significance of gender to the study of the
construction of nation has been well documented. For example, the collection of oral histories
with women and men can reveal the ways in which gender and memory converge to produce
specific forms of the national community. Thus women tell history as witnesses and participants
of political events as mothers, wives, and community members whose roles also reflect political,
ideological, economic, and social change (Abu-Lughod 2008; Rosemary Sayigh 1998; Atiya
1982; Mahmood 2005). Furthermore, I was interested in building a participant pool that
included Palestinian refugees from various economic backgrounds. As I discovered in the field,
my interest in class distinctions was significant for constructing a diverse participant pool and,
more importantly, was irreducible to the economic divisions between camp and non-camp
refugees. Despite their overall poverty, for example, Palestinian camps revealed considerable
economic diversity among their inhabitants. Moreover, urban settings in Amman such as the
Hāshmī Shamālī also reflected a variety of economic situations. Within the area, for example,
Palestinians identified several class positions including the masākīn (poor people) and (the) AlAghanīyā’ (wealthy families). Finally, interview participants were also selected according to
their association with particular institutions including UNRWA, the DPA, and Islamic charities.
Two years of living, working, and researching in Amman provided a wealth of
opportunities to meet, contact, and arrange interviews with Palestinians throughout the city. In

46

total, my wife

43

and I conducted approximately 70 structured and semi structured interviews and
44

oral histories with individual camp and non-camp refugees in both Arabic and English . I also
interviewed several officials working with the DPA and UNRWA. When possible, interviews
were recorded using audio equipment. Methodologically, individual interviews and oral
histories allowed for examining how personal experiences and perceptions were organized into
narratives of national identity and history. Narrative activity during interviews provides tellers
of history with an opportunity to impose order on otherwise disconnected events and to create
continuity between past, present, and an imagined future (Ochs and Capps 1996). Moreover, the
collection of oral stories provided an opportunity for examining the ways in which gender,
religion, and history converged to produce specific forms of the nation, its history, and cause.
Individual interviews were conducted in various locations including participants’ homes,
Islamic charities, professional offices, and UNRWA schools and offices. The interviews
generally consisted of two procedural steps. First, we began an interview with preliminary
structured questions used to elicit general information including a participant’s age and place of
birth (generation), marital status and family size, education and employment (class status), and
religion. Second, we used this general information to conduct semi-structured and structured
interviews and oral histories. For example, if an individual was a female registered refugee
displaced from Palestine in 1948, we proceeded with a set of specific questions appropriate for
that participant’s age and experiences or conducted an unguided oral history.

43

Throughout my research period, my wife, Fatima, was an invaluable research assistant. The
majority of the research included her assistance in various capacities. At times, she was able to
assist me with interviews through interpretative support and, at others, conducted interviews with
women who were uncomfortable sitting alone with a foreign, male researcher.
44
All interviews were transcribed/translated by the author and/or his loving and supportive
research assistant, Fatima.
47

In addition to individual interviews, we conducted five focus group interviews with both
small and large groups including family members, youth organization members, and community
friends and neighbors. Focus groups were semi-structured and recorded. As Esther Madriz
noted, focus group interviews provide an alternative to the individualistic research method by
shifting attention to the multivocality of participants’ attitudes, experiences, and beliefs and
facilitate a context in which to examine the process of social interaction (Madriz 2000). In the
context of my own research, this method allowed me to observe how families, friends, and
affiliates discussed and debated history, connections to the homeland and the broader Palestinian
nation. The majority of participants were selected through snowball sampling methods. Prior to
arriving in Amman, I had established various contacts in the city through friends within the
Lansing community. None of the individuals referred through my Lansing friends were used as
research participants. That is, I decided not to include them within the research pool as either
interviewees or subjects of observation. This decision reflected two concerns. First, I felt that
their immediate connection to people within my community and social obligation to assist me
might prejudice their interactions. In order to help me with my research, I feared they might act
out of what they perceived were my needs rather than the more distant approach of a person
hitherto unknown to me. Second, I wanted to limit the inconvenience of my presence and
believed that a few infrequent visits and requests for contacts within the camp were enough to
ask. Other participants were selected according to my own pool of contacts within Amman.
Whether while living in Hāshmī Shamālī or working at the school in Dābūq, I used the best of
my judgment to meet, observe, and interview Palestinians who met my research criteria.
Finally, institutional access was often established through two means. First, as a
Fulbright researcher, I often relied on the generous support of the JACEE director to access and

48

research institutional settings. Through the director’s intimate knowledge of the institutional
fabric of Amman and, more importantly, his strong ties to government and non-government
organizations, I was able to interview a key official in the DPA and access several UNRWA
sites. Additionally, informal contacts established through participants and my own personal
relationships with locals facilitated opportunities to meet two key UNRWA officials who
supported my research in a vocational center and a children’s summer camp reunion held outside
of Amman.

Registered
Refugee – Citizen
of Jordan
Non-Registered
Refugee – Citizen
of Jordan
Registered
Refugee – Noncitizen of Jordan

1948 Refugee – Laji’
Displaced from Mandate
Palestine and resettled in
UNRWA camp in East
Bank
Displaced from Mandate
Palestine and resettled in
East Bank
NA

1967 IDP – Nāzih
Originally from West Bank and displaced to
East Bank, settled in UNRWA camp

Originally from West Bank and displaced to
East Bank, resettled in Amman
Displaced from Mandate Palestine and
resettled in UNRWA camp in Gaza Strip;
Displaced from Gaza Strip and resettled in
UNRWA camp in East Bank

Table Two: Criteria for Participant Selection

45

Participant Observation:
Participant observation is a key methodology for anthropologists and formed an essential
component of my research. Although living, working, and traveling throughout the country
offered innumerable observational opportunities for research, there were nevertheless several
critical periods of participant observation worth mentioning. First, during my nine-month stay in
the Hāshmī Shamālī, my engagement with friends, neighbors, and community members provided
several experiences that contributed to my understandings of national belonging among noncamp Palestinians. For example, my wife and I attended several weddings in the area between
45

Although this table does not include the descendants of all categories, they were included
within the research.
49

Palestinians. We also frequented local mosques and shared considerable time with a family
whose trust allowed us to observe intimate details about how siblings negotiate their connections
with Palestine. After accepting a teaching job at a local baccalaureate school and moving to
Fheis, a predominantly Christian area outside of Amman, the school environment quickly
became a site for important observations. The tensions between instructors and students at the
school provided invaluable experiences for considering how Palestinians and Jordanians
negotiate contentious issues of national pride and loyalty. In addition, the school employed
several camp Palestinians as janitors whose treatment by upper staff revealed significant
dimensions to the social and economic hierarchy between camp and non-camp Palestinians and
Jordanians.
Beyond the insights offered by the informal experiences of daily life, interviews provided
an essential avenue for participant observation. Within the camps, interviews were often daylong affairs that enabled us to spend lengthy periods within the camps among families and
individuals. They also allowed us to acquaint ourselves with important features of camp life
including festivals and mosques. In the Wihdāt camp, we also observed two key Islamic
charities and a women’s Islamic center in east Amman that provided a wealth of data about how
religious studies and national identity are integrated into one broad experience. Second, I was
able to visit and observe a children’s summer camp in the Baqa’a camp where local Hamas and
Fatah activists blended politics with recreational activities. While in Baqa’a we also visited an
orphanage in which several Hamas and Fatah activists attended. Finally, of the many UNRWA
institutions we visited, it was the 2007 summer camp finale that gave us an opportunity to
observe various national performances and activities among children, teens, and upper-level

50

officials. This experience was unique insofar as it allowed us to observe an annual event in
which dramatic depictions of the nation were performed and represented.
Document Research:
Documents were primarily collected from UNRWA and the DPA. Most of these
documents concerned various aspects of the refugee camps and their inhabitants. Demographic
information, for example, was important for understanding the broader context of the camps.
Such information included data concerning the establishment of the camps, their territorial
composition (area in square kilometers and/or dunnums), their population size across time, their
institutional configurations (schools, clinics, women’s centers, etc.), their infrastructure, social
conditions (health, economics, etc.), etc. In addition to UNRWA, I also acquired several
documents and brochures from the DPA concerning their research and data on the Palestinian
refugee camps. While many of their reports reflected research originally conducted by
UNRWA, there were several cases in which their own data was provided. In particular, their
documents offered an important insight into what the Jordanian government’s involvement is and
has been in the administration of the camps. To broaden data on the camps I also acquired
reports from Fafo

46

concerning the social and economic constitution of Palestinian refugee

camps in Jordan. Their status as an NGO allowed for an interesting reference for comparing
UNRWA and DPA data. Throughout my research periods, I have also collected newspaper
clippings and internet reports from local and regional press (Jordan Times, Al-Rai’, Al-Ghad, AlJazīra) and reviewed and collected articles and postings from the internet (Jordanian Department
of Statistics, Al-Baqa’a blog, The Arabist). Finally, when relevant, I relied on satellite television
46

According to their website and informational brochure, Fafo describes itself as “an
independent and multidisciplinary research foundation focusing on social welfare and trade
policy, labor and living conditions, public health, migration and integration, and transnational
security and development issues.”
51

news networks including Al-Jazīra and Al-‘Alam. As two of the leading news networks in the
Middle East, they provided important updates on events important for my research including
daily news on the Occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip and the Hamas elections.
Research Questions and Answers:
My dissertation research can best be described as an ethnographic study of Palestinian
nationalism in the diaspora. As such, my research questions and methods were designed to
examine what it means to be national as a refugee confined to the existential condition of exile
and the physical borders of a state with its own distinct national project. Although my study
reflects attention to a diverse tradition of scholarly ideas and approaches to nations and
nationalism, the development and scope of my research questions were particularly influenced
by what Jon E. Fox and Cynthia Miller-Idriss referred to as the politics of everyday nationalism
(Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008). Breaking with conventional studies of nationalism that focus
exclusively on elite representations and the institutional productions of the state, their work
instead looks to the more mundane and everyday idioms of ordinary people for determining how
the nation is both invoked and constituted through discourse. Attention to the politics of the
everyday allows us to examine the ways in which ordinary people talk about and with the nation
in ways that matter to them (Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008, 539). Relying on well-established
methodologies including individual interviews, focus groups, and oral histories, it is the task of
the researcher to facilitate critical engagements with ordinary people about what the nation is and
means in their lives. With these methods, the anthropologist can provide a richer and more
balanced picture of the scope, depth, and content of the everyday meanings of the nation (Fox
and Miller-Idriss 2008, 555).

52

My own research was an evolving project constituted by and through the process of
fieldwork. Research questions were thus fluid and attuned to the shifting trends and experiences
discovered throughout my ethnographic encounters. Nevertheless, two primary research
questions included:

1. Given over 40 years of exile, what is the meaning of the Palestinian nation,
homeland, and cause for refugees in Jordan?
2. In what ways do the contingencies of life in refugee camps and in urban areas of
Amman contribute to Palestinians’ (dis)connections with the nation, homeland,
and its cause?
To answer these questions, my research methods included semi-structured and structured
interviews (individual, focus groups, oral histories) and participant observation (Islamic
charities, festivals, daily interactions, etc.). Although never fixed, my research questions were
organized around three broad areas of concern designed to examine how individuals discuss,
represent, contest, and deny their national connections. First, I constructed several questions
surrounding the theme of “Palestinian identity.” Questions in this section concerned why (if at
all) an individual considered his or her self a Palestinian and what it meant to be such. Examples
of interview questions included:

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.

Why do you consider yourself Palestinian?
Do you consider yourself anything else? Why?
Palestinians today live all over the world. Are they all one nation?
Who are the Palestinian people?
Is there a Palestinian nation?
When did you realize you were Palestinian?
Are there differences between Palestinians? If so, like what?
Are there differences between Palestinians and other Arabs?
Are there differences between Palestinians and Jordanians? How do you know one from
the other?

53

Second, I constructed several questions according to the issue of Palestine (the homeland). In
this section, I presented various questions about Palestine in order to examine the kinds of
representations and meanings emerged. Examples of these questions included:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.

Where is Palestine? What are its borders?
What is your earliest memory of Palestine?
Do you fear that Palestinians will forget (have forgotten) Palestine?
What do you know about Palestine?
Have you ever visited Palestine? Describe that experience?
If you could talk about Palestine for two minutes, what would you want to say?
Is Jordan your country? Why or why not?
Is Palestine your country? Why or why not?

Third, my interviews focused on the relationship between place and identity. This section
included several specific questions about the meaning of the term “refugee” and the “refugee
camp.” Some examples of questions in this section included:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

Are you a refugee? What makes you a refugee?
Who lives in the refugee camps? Why?
Why are there refugee camps?
Are there differences between the refugee camps? If so, like what?
Are there differences between the refugee camps and other areas of Amman? If so, like
what?
6. Are there differences between refugees? If so, like what?
7. What is life like for refugees who live in the camps?
8. What is life for refugees who do not live in the camps?
The answers to these questions and others were organized according to participant
categories (see above) and compared using thematic analysis. In examining participant
responses, I paid particular attention to continuities and ruptures in representations of the nation,
homeland, and history. Responses were also situated within broader fields of discourse and
practice including the two leading representatives of Palestinian nationalism: the PLO (mainly
Fatah) and Hamas. The Islamic charities, for example, were intimately connected to the political
and religious vision of Hamas. Throughout the Wihdāt orphanage, the walls were thus decorated
with stickers of Hamas’s martyred leaders including Sheikh Ahmed Yāsīn and Sheikh Abdel
54

‘Aziz Al-Rantīsī. Interviews with participants within these institutions could therefore not
exclude attention to the instructional and religious practices of the organization in which
participants were members.
Participant observation allowed for critical investigations into both the representation and
practice of the Palestinian nation. Whether through observing weddings, festivals, the
institutional practices of the Markaz Ridhwān, or UNRWA, the experience of being there and
observing were important for gathering a multitude of data. For example, while attending the
grand conclusion of the UNRWA summer camp, I was able to observe several musical and
theatrical performances made according to “Palestinian tradition.” The musicians’ clothing and
the songs they sung were thus reflective of particular local traditions in pre-Israel Palestine.
Also, observing and participating in the build up to an ultimately failed wedding between a
Palestinian from the Hāshmī Shamālī and the Nāser refugee camp provided invaluable
opportunities to examine the politics of class, gender, and place. As the wedding crumbled, it
was the would-be bride who took the blame as her camp status explained why the union failed.
Positionality and Fieldwork in Jordan:
Background in Jordan
My decision to change research topics and fieldsites required serious deliberation. As I
discovered in 2004, accessing the West Bank was no longer certain and the stakes were simply
too high to risk being refused entry a second time. But the question of where else to conduct my
research project wasn’t easy to answer. Through local friends and acquaintances in Michigan, I
had connections to Lebanon, Jordan, and possibly Syria—all of which were important countries
for considering the status of Palestinian refugees. Lebanon, for example, is well known for its
discriminatory policies towards its Palestinian refugees. Its governments have consistently

55

refused to offer Palestinians citizenship and have strictly regulated their economic opportunities
within the country. In addition, during the 15-year civil war, Palestinians were the subjects of
extreme forms of violence including the infamous Sabra and Shatila massacres, during which
approximately 800 refugees were slaughtered by Christian militias under the auspices of the
47

Israeli military .
Like Lebanon, the Syrian government has also refused to extend its citizenship to
Palestinians living within its borders. For over 40 years now, Palestinian refugees have thus
lived as stateless refugees within UNRWA camps subject to state scrutiny and limited
48

opportunities . Unlike Lebanon, however, the Syrians have allowed Palestinians greater
economic mobility and, to some extent, facilitated their social integration into the country.
Finally, there was Jordan. Since the 1948 Palestine War and the creation of the State of Israel,
the Jordanian relationship to the Palestinians has been arguably the most intimate of all the Arab
states. After the war, for example, the late King Abdullah I annexed what remained of central
Palestine (the West Bank) extending Jordanian citizenship to all of its inhabitants including
hundreds of thousands of refugees on both sides of the Jordan River. After Abdullah’s
assassination in Jerusalem in 1951, his grandson, King Hussein ibn Talāl, maintained Jordanian
control over Palestinian territory and its population well beyond the 1967 Israeli occupation of
the West Bank. Notwithstanding the creation of the PLO in 1964, its bloody conflict with the
Jordanian military in 1970, and its recognition as the “sole legitimate representative of the

47

For research on Palestinian refugees in Lebanon see: (Peteet 1992b; Borneman 2004; Haddad
2003; Rosemary Sayigh 2008b; Rosemary Sayigh 1994b).
48
This includes a more recent wave of Palestinian refugees who fled Iraq in 2003-2006
following the U.S. invasion and occupation. See IRIN report:
http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=77645 and Amnesty report:
http://www.amnesty.org.au/refugees/comments/19950/
56

49

Palestinian people” in 1974 , the late King Hussein continued to vie for representational power
over his Palestinian subjects until the creation of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) in
50

1994 and the subsequent disengagement plan of 1988 . Yet despite the formal separation
between the two banks, Jordan continued to shelter the largest Palestinian refugee population in
the world.
Suffice it to say that all three countries offered a significant opportunity for addressing
important questions about the Palestinian refugee crisis in all of its complexity. Despite their
suitability as fieldsites, however, I decided that Jordan presented the best situation for conducting
my research project. My decision reflected several considerations. First, Jordan was unique
insofar as it formally extended citizenship to all Palestinian refugees. Second and relatedly, the
historic decision to include Palestinians within the national body of the Jordanian state ultimately
facilitated particular forms of instability. Palestinians in Jordan were and remain a majority.
This uncommon imbalance—a state with a resident “nation” larger than its own—made Jordan
51

an exceptional and intriguing context for looking into national formations . Third, Jordan has
the greatest number of refugees of all Middle Eastern countries and the most populous refugee
camps in the region. Baqa’a, for example, has a population exceeding 100,000. In addition,

49

At the 1974 Arab League Summit in Rabbat, Morocco, leaders of 20 Arab states agreed to a
resolution recognizing the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as the sole legitimate
representative of the Palestinian people.
50
On July 31, King Hussein announced the severance of all administrative and legal ties with
the Israeli occupied West Bank and stripped all Palestinians within the territory of Jordanian
citizenship.
51
It is true that the parameters “Jordanian” and “Palestinian” identity are not always concrete or
distinguishable. As I discovered in my research, there was considerable overlap in these
concepts of national identification. However, these concepts were not always fluid and even in
cases were intermarriage had occurred and the familial lines blurred, there was nevertheless
particular ways of drawing new ones.
57

although most of the Kingdom’s Palestinian refugees are citizens, they are nonetheless
inextricably linked to the quasi-state apparatus of UNRWA and thus live the peculiar existence
of citizen-refugees. Finally, of the three countries, Jordan presented the fewest practical
challenges. In domestic terms, Jordan was politically stable and faced nothing similar to the
tense and often violent political scenarios found in Lebanon. Regionally, the Kingdom had not
fought a war since its bloody conflict with the PLO in 1970. It had also signed a peace treaty
with Israel in 1994 and thus avoided territorial conflicts like those fought over Israeli-occupied
territory in Lebanon. Moreover, its treaty with Israel strengthened its political and economic
relationship with the U.S. Internationally, Jordan was on the “right side” of the war on terror
assisting the U.S. military in Iraq and, unlike Syria, was excluded from former President George
52

W. Bush’s “axis of evil” .
Arrivals
My trip to Jordan in January 2006 was not the first. The previous summer, I lived in the
Hāshmī Shamālī with the Khalīdī family during my enrollment in an intensive summer Arabic
language program at the University of Jordan. During my brief stay in the Kingdom, I
admittedly did little traveling. With the exception of a brief trip to ‘Aqaba in the south, I spent
the bulk of my time within the Hāshmī getting to know my hosts, their friends and family, and
the social life of the community in which they lived. The decision proved a good one; the
Hāshmī was an energetic place providing plenty of opportunities to get a sense of what I later
discovered were shared features of life in east Amman. For example, summer was the season of
52

George W. Bush originally used the terms in his January 29, 2002, State of the Union Address
to describe Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. For the full text of the speech, see:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/onpolitics/transcripts/sou012902.htm. In a later speech
by former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., John Bolton, Syria, Cuba, and Libya were added to the
list. On January 20, 2006, former Israeli Defense Minister, Shaul Mofaz, referred to Iran and
Syria as the “axis of terror.” See: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4630650.stm
58

weddings. Fireworks, music, and impressive gatherings of friends and families were thus daily
occurrences in the Hāshmī. The Hāshmī also had its own public spaces where locals gathered
for daily social intercourse. Joining the building boom throughout Amman, for example, the
newly built Plaza Mall was the center of gravity attracting legions of young men and women
interested in eating, shopping, and occasional flirting. For all these reasons and more, I was
content to confine my experience to the Hāshmī and realized the benefits of my decision when I
returned six months later to begin my first phase of dissertation research.
Less than two months before my wife and I arrived in Jordan in 2006, at least 57 people
53

were killed and 300 injured in carefully coordinated suicide attacks in Amman . The attackers
targeted three “western” hotels including the Grand Hyatt, the Radison SAS, and the Days Inn.
According to the international press and Jordanian authorities, Abu Musab Zarqāwī, a Jordanian
national and member of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, was responsible for the attacks. Watching from afar,
the gruesome assaults suggested that Jordan was not immune to the ongoing violence in Iraq. It
also suggested that the Kingdom’s support for the U.S. occupation of Iraq was being used by a
dangerous set of new enemies to “legitimize” their attacks. Indeed, one of the suicide bombers
captured after her belt failed to detonate was of Iraqi nationality and Zarqāwī cited Jordan’s
support for the U.S. war on terror and occupation of Iraq as a motivation for the attacks. What, I
wondered, did the attacks mean for the possibility of research in Jordan? Could this be the
beginning of the end of Jordan’s reputation as the most stable country in the Middle East?
Surprisingly, little had changed in Amman since my last visit. Despite the attacks, our
entry into the country was relatively smooth and there were no obvious signs of increased
security or tension. My wife’s Algerian passport, for example, presented no particular

53

See: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4423008.stm
59

challenges and airport security had few questions about the nature of our stay. Not without a hint
of irony, fears over our personal security or a new wave of suicide attacks were the least of our
immediate concerns. On the contrary, the most difficult aspect of our first week in the city
concerned our living arrangements. Through a friend in Michigan, we connected with a
Jordanian professor who found us a spacious apartment near the University of Jordan in AlSweilih. Given recent influx of Iraqi refugees in Jordan, apartments were scarce when we
arrived. We were thus appreciative of the fact that someone put aside their own time to facilitate
our living needs. The apartment was relatively clean and we were excited about its close
proximity to the university. There was, however, one important, unanticipated problem: the
weather. My last visit to Jordan was in the summer; days were thus sunny and warm. In
January, the weather is cold and wet. Unprepared for the bitter cold of Amman’s winter, we
quickly discovered that the absence of central heating made life in the apartment simply
unbearable. Within two week’s time, we were back with my original summer hosts, the Khālidī
family, in the familiar surroundings of the Hāshmī Shamālī. Their generosity and assistance
facilitated new living arrangements within the community I came to know the previous summer
and helped us learn the tricks of confronting the cold.
After three weeks of adjusting to our new apartment and the cold weather, we began
establishing our research contacts. The first step was to visit the Fulbright office in Amman and
begin acquiring all the necessary permits for my research in the camps. Having lived in Amman
for years with his wife and daughter, the Fulbright director, Alain McNamara, suggested that I
pay a courtesy visit to the DPA in order to introduce myself to the director, His Excellency
Wajīh Azaizeh. I wasn’t the first Fulbright researcher to request permission to enter and research
the camps. I therefore had to follow the well-established tradition of bureaucratic rituals and

60

performances and “introduce” myself to H.E. Azaizeh and “assure” him that my research
concerned a benign topic. As I later learned, what we actually did in the camps was of little
importance to the DPA. What was important was that I didn’t “present” my research in any way
that sounded controversial or critical of the Jordanians. Not long after my visit to the DPA and
formal introduction to H.E. Azaizeh, I received a nine-month permit to conduct an ethnographic
study within the Palestinian refugee camps of Jordan.
The second step of my research efforts included contacting the many people my
Michigan friends had informed of my travels and research in Amman. Although several contacts
proved helpful for my research, there was one particular individual whose relationships with
Palestinians in the camps were extensive. A local writer and editor for a popular Muslimoriented publication, Sādiq

54

introduced me to many Palestinian refugees in both Wihdāt and

Baqa’a. We originally met in his office during work hours. Sādiq was a middle-aged Palestinian
whose close friendship with and respect for my Michigan contact made our interaction feel
smooth and comfortable. I discussed my research interests at length with him and offered a
background to my travels and experiences within the Middle East. From then on, Sādiq was a
regular contact who referred me to Palestinians in the camps who, in turn, introduced me to other
Palestinians, and so on. Although not exactly a random sample, Sādiq’s many friends in the
camps provided various unrelated connections with refugees of diverse social, economic, and
religious backgrounds.
Positionalities and Challenges in the Field
In her 2002 critique of reflexivity, Jennifer Robertson discusses several problems with
the positioning of the self in ethnographic writing. One problem with positionality, she argues,

54

Sadiq is a pseudonym used to protect the participant’s identity.
61

concerns its reliance on ready-made identities that tend to not only stereotype ourselves but also
our interlocutors. In this sense, the meaning of being an “academic white female” in a particular
context is taken for granted as the ethnographer proceeds to describe its pre-packaged relevance
for understanding her experience in the field. These categories also tend to imply an imbalance
of power in which the ethnographer’s status as a [insert identity category here] render her more
powerful than her [insert identity category here] interlocutors (Jennifer Robertson 2002). For
example, representations of positionality often exclude any consideration of what power meant
in a particular context and instead present an unproblematic picture of the powerful First-world
researcher and the passive Third-world participant. More importantly, by writing according to
such specific categories, Robertson states that the ethnographer risks making two problematic
assumptions. First, the ethnographer assumes that multi-sensory human beings with unique
personal histories are reducible to, or universally intelligible as, one or several “ready to wear”
identities (Jennifer Robertson 2002, 789). Second, Robertson argues that ethnographers assume
that their research participants and the communities in which they live and work are only capable
of reacting to her presence. The implication, she suggests, is that people everywhere, regardless
of every possible distinguishing variable, are susceptible to the whims of the puissant
ethnographer, whether she is doing fieldwork in her own country or elsewhere (Jennifer
Robertson 2002, 790). In her concluding remarks, Robertson challenges ethnographers to break
with traditional categories of our essentialized position in the field and to pay more attention to
how particular positions emerge in the process of fieldwork.
The foregoing summary of Robertson’s critique of reflexivity and positionality offers an
important preface for discussing my own positionalities in the field. There is no single way to
describe myself that can adequately represent my position in the field. To be sure, throughout

62

my research I engaged in numerous discussions with diverse individuals in various contexts.
How, then, can I reduce my position to any particular set of identities that can both account for
all of my experiences and satisfy the necessity of reflexive writing? In what follows, I will
attempt to meet Robertson’s challenge by writing about my positionalities in the field. In order
to do so, I will avoid discussing positionality as a unified categorical representation that
encompasses the entire fieldwork experience. I will not say, for example, that my Muslim or
Cuban-American identity led to any one reaction among Palestinians. That would be both too
simplistic and basically untrue. Rather, I will offer a few illustrative examples in which my
positionality emerged and mattered in particular ways that offers insights into the meaning of an
ethnographic encounter and the complexities of doing fieldwork. For obvious reasons, I cannot
provide a comprehensive summary of all my experiences. There are simply too many to
describe. But I will nevertheless show how some patterns emerged and how they presented
challenges and opportunities within the field.
One of the most important aspects of my positionality in the field was my status as an
Amrīkī and Muslim. What being an Amrīkī and Muslim meant, of course, was diverse and it
compelled particular kinds of reactions in different settings. It also underscored the various
attitudes and ideas Palestinians held about the American people and its culture and the U.S.
government and its policies. In some cases, for example, my Amrīkī status was complicated by
other features of my identity: Muslim, child of Cuban immigrants, married to an Arab-American
Algerian citizen, scholar, etc. In other cases, it was singled out, scrutinized, and even ridiculed.
In the following section, I will provide just a few brief examples of how my status as an Amrīkī
and Muslim (or both) were understood and constructed by Palestinians and what it suggested
about their relationship to me and whatever they felt I represented.

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Muslim Amrīkī
Rāmī was a Palestinian resident of Baqa’a. We met him through Sādiq, who suggested
we visit Rāmī after our first connection in Baqa’a fell through. Rāmī agreed to meet with us on a
Friday, the first day of the weekend for Muslims in Jordan. After attending the local Juma’
prayer in the Hāshmī, Fatima and I boarded the crowded bus at the ‘Abdali station and headed
for the camp. Sādiq had explained my research to Rāmī prior to our arrival in Baqa’a but, after
meeting him, I felt it important to restate my interests. Shortly after introducing ourselves, I
therefore explained my research interests and questions. He invited us to join him in his home
for lunch and thereafter introduced us to his wife and two children. Rāmī was a soft-spoken and
gentle personality who listened attentively to each question I asked. He also seemed
unintimidated by my research questions and showed comfort and interest throughout the
interview. But after the interview, Rāmī showed great interest in my conversion to Islam. He
was struck by the fact that an Amrīkī had accepted Islam. “How, he asked, did you become a
Muslim?” I fumbled through a short explanation in Arabic that I thought satisfied his curiosities.
It didn’t.
“Muslim Amrīkī.” It must have been a fascinating combination of words for someone
observing the hostilities of the Bush Administration towards the Arab Muslim world. What
exactly it meant to Rāmī, I can only speculate. But his actions suggested some interesting and
common reactions that illustrated one way of understanding the meaning of being a Muslim
Amrīkī in a Palestinian refugee camp. For example, Rāmī could have let the interview conclude
our interactions permanently. Yet, after our interview and a filling lunch, Rāmī walked us
through the narrow streets of the camp to visit a close friend. After we arrived, he introduced me
as the Muslim Amrīkī interested in the qādhīyya filistīnīyya (Palestinian situation). We never

64

asked him for any new participants. On the contrary, both Fatima and I were satisfied with our
lengthy interview for the day and didn’t want to overstay our visit. But shortly after the maghrib
(sunset) prayer, we began another interview with two more camp Palestinians courtesy of our
Palestinian interlocutor. As both a Palestinian and Muslim, Rāmī wanted to help his newfound
Muslim Amrīkī. After the interview, Rāmī invited us to return to his house the following Friday
for lunch and a trip to the mountains to watch the sunset over tea and bizir (nuts). We returned
the next week and enjoyed another pleasant experience.
For Rāmī, my status as a Muslim Amrīkī suggested a simultaneous nearness and distance.
As a Muslim, for example, he felt very comfortable discussing his religious views about the
Palestinian conflict and Islam’s significance for the moral community of Muslims. Given the
recent attacks in Jordan and the government’s anxiety about the growing influence of Muslim
politics (Eickelman and Piscatori 2004) in the region, not everyone was comfortable discussing
religious politics. In this regard, Rāmī’s confessions were an indication of (at least) some level
of comfort. Even more telling was Rāmī’s declaration of faith as a devote Shiite. Shiites are a
minority in Jordan and most of them are Iraqi refugees. With the ongoing sectarian violence in
Iraq, popular Sunni attitudes in Jordan towards Shiites were, from my experience, far from
friendly. In this sense, Rāmī offered an unsolicited and potentially dangerous bit of information
about his status as a Muslim. But Rāmī’s interactions also hinted at a significant space between
our Muslim bonds. “Why, he asked, did America hate Muslims?” “What were America’s
ambitions in Iraq?” “What do you think about us?” The questions were not a request for
speculation. In both his tone and sincerity, Rāmī requested an answer from an Amrīkī. I, more
than Fatima, was an Amrīkī and thus could “speak” for America. Such inquiries were common
among the Palestinian Muslims I met. Even in the Hāshmī, Muslims regularly expected the

65

Amrīkī to explain America. To differing degrees, then, my status as Muslim allowed for frank
responses from one “brother to the next” and intense questions from “one Muslim to an
American.”
Being a Muslim in a context where Islamic idioms and practices were becoming a more
salient feature of everyday life did seem to have some practical advantages. For example, trips
to the local masājid (mosques) were seen as a natural extension of my identity as a Muslim. No
one in the Hāshmī or Wihdāt was thus surprised to find me sitting near the Imam during Friday
prayers especially after several visits with locals like Fāris. In this regard, the question of access
was resolved; as a Muslim space, the masjid was open and available. Once in the masjid or
immediately after the prayers, I could readily engage in conversations relevant to my research
questions without raising (too many) suspicions about my presence. By attending the masjid
regularly, I also increased my social capital as many Palestinians were attentive to who did or
didn’t participate in regular prayers. Prayer was thus an important practice for establishing an
acceptable and, in some cases, respectable presence among both participants and the community
in which we lived.
But my status as a Muslim didn’t always make things easy. On the contrary, it often
frustrated attempts to get beyond the question of religion and on to issues of nationalism,
55

dispossession, and politics . In some cases, discussions digressed to questions like “Why did
you come to Islam?” or “Are there many American Muslims?” These queries not only revealed
some of the challenges of conducting an interview but also underscored the fact that, contrary to
the idea of the passive subject, participants often talk back. Through their own manipulations

55

This is not to suggest that “religion” and “politics” are mutually exclusive categories of
speech. But there were several clear instances in which discussions revolved around the most
mundane aspects of Islam that had nothing to do with my research questions or interests.
66

and insatiable curiosities, participants can direct the flow of an ethnographic encounter in ways
that disrupt the simple binary of researcher/subject. In other cases, participants turned
discussions into challenging debates in which my knowledge of Islam and its history were tested.
On several occasions, for example, Muslims questioned if I read the Qur’an or lectured me about
what “Islam says” about numerous topics including prayer, fasting, and Muslim dress.
Particularly upsetting were the more extreme ideas about the kufār (infidels) and their harām
(prohibited/sinful) behaviors in the U.S. With little knowledge of the diverse moral systems
according to which Americans live, some Palestinians ridiculed the loose sexual behaviors of the
nation of infidels. From these experiences, I learned that my status as a Muslim could be used by
my participants as much as it could be used by me. Each engagement was an unpredictable flow
of discourse that opened some doors while shutting others.
Inta Amrīkī?
For the first year of fieldwork, my research focused primarily on Palestinian refugees in
the camp or in the Hāhsmī Shamālī. In both cases, interviews were often combined with a dinner
invitation and informal conversations over tea, coffee, and sweets. Without giving it much
thought, we allowed our hosts to determine the appropriate etiquette. For example, if everyone
ate with their hands and bread, then we did the same. After months of home visits and generous
meals, we grew accustomed to the manners and methods of eating, talking, and relaxing in both
the camps and the Hāshmī. Palestinians in both cases were unassuming and rarely scrutinized
our eating habits or manners. Eventually, however, we began interviewing Palestinians in the
wealthier areas of Amman. Some of these experiences revealed some interesting dynamics about
our class status as Amrīkān (Americans) in Jordan. One particular experience captured what we
later discovered were some common ideas among affluent Palestinians about “real” Americans.

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Through mutual friends, we met a high ranking Palestinian UNRWA official who invited
us to join her and her relatives for dinner. Leila

56

worked at an UNRWA vocational school and

her husband was a sailor involved in imports and exports. They lived in an affluent area of west
Amman and had two children and a maid. They were also fluent in English; a skill they used to
preclude their maid from learning Arabic and understanding what they discussed in private. For
dinner, Leila and her maid prepared an elaborate meal including fish and other more common
Arabic dishes. She invited several relatives including one of her brothers and his wife. During
the meal, I found myself struggling with the fish and proceeded to pick out the bones with my
hands. Leila and her brother turned in my direction and laughed. “You eat with your hands,”
they asked? I was as stunned as them. “I’m comfortable eating with my hands,” I replied. For
the rest of the evening, I realized that Leila and her brother were constantly asserting their
privileged status in ways that revealed both insecurity and confidence. Her brother, for example,
constantly referred to his children living in Australia and “the West.” He also discussed the
differences between Cuban Spanish and the “correct” Spanish of the Spaniards. Extending his
arrogance to my wife, he claimed that the French occupation of Algeria had thoroughly polluted
their Arabic and needed the Shāmī (Levantine) Arabs to help them relearn what they forgot.
Among many Arabs, a snub of this sort can be highly offensive.
Our encounter with Leila and her brother occurred after our interviewing her and she
nevertheless facilitated important interviews with other Palestinians at an UNRWA vocation
school. It didn’t, in other words, compromise my research. But it did show me that my status as
an Amrīkī often came with various expectations about how who I was supposed to be, how I was
supposed to speak, eat, and dress. As I discovered, wealthier families often expected an Amrīkī

56

Leila is a pseudonym used to protect the identity of my participant.
68

researcher to behave in ways that, in some cases, was crucial to establishing both the seriousness
of my research and the credibility I had as a researcher. They expected an articulate, “mannered”
Amrīkī. Although they were impressed by my Arabic and willingness to speak it, they
nonetheless wanted to speak in English. Although they were impressed by my familiarity with
Arabic cuisine, they nonetheless wanted to “show me something new.” And finally, although
they were impressed by my knowledge of the camps, they nonetheless expected an Amrīkī
researcher to behave like an Amrīkī.
Spies Like Us
Few anthropologists can conclude a discussion of positionality without a good spy story.
Of all my readings in anthropological reflexivity and positionality, I think it is the “spy” label
that has received the most attention. In this regard, my discussion is no exception. Like many
anthropologists in the field, I too encountered several experiences in which the spy accusation
was made and debated. I should say, however, that such experiences were actually few and
presented no substantial complications. With the exception of my encounter with the Jordanian
mukhābarāt (security and intelligence), no serious challenges resulted from the few instances in
which my potential status as a spy emerged. In most cases, the mukhābarāt were mentioned
within the context of joke or invoked to confirm the truth of a statement. For example, some
participants would say things like “I don’t care if the mukhābarāt hears me.” Such declarations,
as I understood them, indicated the participant’s willingness to express a statement that they
understood could be controversial and/or to suggest its truth. It also underscored that the
assumed omnipresence of the mukhābarāt served as a tool of censorship that ostensibly
precluded certain kinds of conversations. “I don’t care if the mukhābarāt hears me” was thus an
act of defiance and a willingness to utter a truth that might otherwise be unspeakable. The idea

69

that the mukhābarāt might hear a participant also implied that a spy might be present or “they”
might be listening. This could mean that either I was a spy or that the mukhābarāt were
following me. In both cases, such “possibilities” never precluded an interview.
In general, the idea of the mukhābarāt was something stated in passing; it received little
attention and didn’t inhibit the flow of an interview. On the one occasion in which a
participant’s friend interrupted an interview by accusing me of working for the mukhābarāt, I
simply challenged him to give one reason why the intelligence services would care about him.
Admittedly angered by the absurdity of his accusation, I insisted that my research could do more
for Palestinians than anything he could or would do in his life. Suffice it to say that my anger
(however inappropriate) and confidence ended the discussion and the interview continued
uninterrupted. But beyond the concerns of my participants, my potential status as a spy was of
interest to another set of actors: the Jordanian government. For the first year and a half, my
research proceeded unhindered by any visible acts of the government. Then, upon returning
from a brief trip to the U.S. in the spring of 2007, two peculiar things occurred. First, my request
for a renewal of my research permits for the camps was taking unusually long. Second, I was
detained at the airport for two hours and released only after receiving an “invitation” to the
mukhābarāt offices in Amman.
Resolving the delay on my permits required some creative solutions. First, I visited the
DPA offices in order to speak with someone about the process. They denied responsibility for
the delays stating that the requests were with the security division. Until they received an
approval from them, I was told, the permits could not be approved. More importantly, no one
told me where I could go to speak with the security division. This stage of the process was “an
internal matter” and thus could not be addressed by from the outside. Faced with a bureaucratic

70

roadblock, I revisited McNamara at the Fulbright office in Amman and asked for some advice.
Despite the fact that my term with the Fulbright had expired, he prepared an official letter
expressing his support for my research and requesting that my renewal requests be expedited. A
few weeks later, the permits were renewed. The reasons for my visit to the mukhābarāt offices
were also unclear. While waiting at the airport, no one informed me about the nature of my
detainment. Upon my release, they gave me a slip of paper indicating where to go and when.
Once at the mukhābarāt offices, the agent I spoke with only informed me that this was “routine.”
Why this invitation came over one year after my arrival in Jordan was left unexplained. The
interview took about one hour and covered a range of personal questions including what high
school I attended to when I became Muslim. While the implications of my interview never
became fully clear, I couldn’t help but think that the delay in my permits and the interview were
related. For the final eight months of my research, I never saw the mukhābarāt again.

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Chapter Three:
Identifying Refugees: The Claims of Exile and the Meaning of “Palestinian Refugees”
Introduction:
When I first set out to conduct my research among Palestinians in Jordan, I assumed that
57

the conceptual distinction between the camp and the city

would be useful for distinguishing

between Palestinian refugees and Palestinians living throughout the urban areas of Amman.
The term “refugee,” I assumed, would be a category of identification reserved for those living
within the camps. Influenced by Liisa Malkki’s work in Tanzania, I thought that the camp, as
the quintessential symbol of displacement, represented the lived experience of a refugee: a space
beyond the “national order of things” marked by humanitarian interventions, dependence, and
marginalization (Malkki 1995). In the city, I believed that Palestinians could—and would—shed
their refugee identity and existence through assimilation into mainstream Jordanian society. I
thus believed that determining the status of my research participants would be an easy task: if a
Palestinian lived in a refugee camp, then he or she would identify as a refugee. Conversely, if a
Palestinian didn’t live in a camp, then he or she wouldn’t identify as a refugee. Although the
issue of refugee identity proved to be much more complicated than determining where an
individual lived, the reasoning appeared sound at the time. Where else would Palestinian
refugees be if not in a refugee camp? Or perhaps more precisely, why else would Palestinians
identify as refugees if they weren’t living in a camp? Of course, I was aware that United Nations
estimates indicated that approximately two million registered refugees lived in the Kingdom. I
also knew that Palestinians constituted slightly more than half of the entire population of

57

Throughout this dissertation, I use the terms “camp” and “city” to distinguish between the
context of refugee camps and areas of Amman that are not refugee camps. Although some of the
refugee camps are integrated areas of the city, they are nevertheless distinguishable from the
surrounding area by the presence of UNRWA institutions and those who receive its services.
72

58

Jordan . But being a “registered” refugee in the city and living that status in a camp, I believed,
had to be fundamentally different experiences and constitutive of unique forms of identification.
Living within an area of Amman primarily populated by Palestinians, I quickly learned
the limitations of my research assumptions. I soon discovered that just about everyone I
interviewed in the city identified as a “Palestinian refugee.” On many occasions, Palestinians
claimed the identity without solicitation. Being a Palestinian and a refugee seemed inextricably
linked regardless if the individual lived in a camp or an urban area of Amman. “I am a refugee”
became an oft-repeated phrase that expressed an important idea about the meaning of
displacement and its relationship to being Palestinian in Jordan. Whether one was rich or poor,
first generation or third, female or male, or living in a camp or the city, Palestinians were in
some sense all identifying as refugees. The claim to refugeeness thus cut across social and
economic milieus providing an unexpected category of identification between Palestinians
throughout Amman. Much like the fellah in Ted Swedenburg’s analysis of Palestinian
nationalism and resistance to Israeli colonization in the West Bank (Swedenburg 1990), the
category “refugee” in Amman functioned as the basis of an important commonality grounded in
claims about historical dislocations from the homeland and the myth of return.
Intrigued by the widespread assertion of a refugee identity, I decided to look deeper into
this newfound phenomenon. Could the self-categorization as a refugee provide the basis of a
commonality that united Palestinians across the diverse circumstances of Amman? As I soon
learned, the almost unanimous claim to refugee identity was not without its complexities and
58

In its 2005 report, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics estimated that approximately
29.4% of the Palestinian population (10.1 million) lived in Jordan. Estimated at 2,969,400
Palestinians, this number is slightly more than half of the total population of Jordan estimated at
5,100,981 by the 2004 Jordanian Population and Housing Census. According to the MAR
Project (Minorities at Risk), an extension of the Center for International Development and
Conflict Management, Palestinians constitute more than half of Jordan’s population.
73

contradictions. Despite the fact that Palestinians identified as refugees, the meaning of that
identity differed in ways that reflected an important cultural distinction between the refugee min
Al-Mukhayyam (of the camp) and the refugee of the city. While Palestinians within both the
mukhayyam and the city claimed to be refugees, cultural understandings about the relationship
between people and place generated conflicting ideas about what being a refugee actually meant.
According to Palestinians in the city, there were camp refugees and there were city refugees. In
the camp, Palestinians were masākīn (poor/unfortunate ones) since displacement forced them
into dependence and a marginal space of moral despair and decay. Refugees in the city,
however, were in a better social space: their social and economic challenges were not so grave as
to compromise the fabric of the moral community. Reflecting the cultural logics of being in
place (Low and Lawrence-Zunigais 2003; Carter and Donald 1994; Tuan et al. 2001), city
refugees understood the camps as bounded homogenous spaces constitutive of a life marked by
particular forms of social, economic, and political difference.
59

In the mukhayyamāt , Palestinians were less reluctant to claim unity. Within the
refugee camps I conducted most of my fieldwork between 2006-2008, Palestinians drew no
similar distinctions between refugees of the mukhayyam and the city. A Palestinian refugee
60

identified either as a lāji’

61

(Palestinian displaced in 1948) or nāzih

(Palestinian displaced in

1967), terms reflecting the origin of one’s displacement in time. It was the experience of
displacement, in other words, that formed the basis of a Palestinian’s identification as a refugee
59

Mukhayyamāt is the Arabic plural for “camp”. Mukhayyam/Muhkayyamāt translates in this
context as “refugee camp/refugee camps.”
60
In Arabic, the word lāji’ can be used to refer to an individual who is seeking refuge, a refugee,
emigrant, or inmate of an asylum.
61
In Arabic, the word nāzih stems from the word nazuha, which means “to be far from.”
However, within the discourse of Palestinian refugees, nāzih refers to the internally displaced
refugees of 1967.
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and established an “essential” commonality with other Palestinians. Indeed, it seemed that the
very claim to being “Palestinian” often necessitated the commonality of displacement. Neither
the context of displacement nor its specific consequences for those living in it mattered when
identifying who was or wasn’t a refugee.
To be sure, Palestinians living in the camps were fully aware of the unique hardships of
camp life and never denied it. As I will show below, they readily commented on the widespread
poverty, poor infrastructure, overcrowding, and limited services in the camps. In some cases,
camp refugees described these conditions as serious challenges and the cause of problems among
the youth. But these dhurūf Al-Ma’īsha (living conditions), as they were described by
participants, were often understood as material obstacles to living a better life and not
constitutive of who or what a refugee was. If there were any differences between refugees, many
Palestinians explained, it was the better services and economic opportunities available for those
living beyond the borders of the UNRWA camps. In their view, while the mukhayyam did
structure a particular kind of existence, one could not draw any specific conclusions about the
moral makeup of those raised within those structures. Difference, in other words, was a material
condition.
The difference between Palestinian conceptions of the relationship between
“refugeeness” and the place in which that status was lived speaks to a broader literature on
questions of identity and place. Concerned with the question of place in anthropological writing,
Margaret Rodman, for example, argued for a multivocal approach that considers its multiple
social, political, and historical meanings. According to Rodman, places should be understood as
socially constructed; that is, each place should be seen as having multiple meanings grounded in
the physical, emotional and experiential realities they hold for their inhabitants (Rodman 1992,

75

641). In this sense, Rodman urged anthropologists to move beyond their own constructions of
place to consider how individuals construct their own meanings of place. Rather than places
becoming exemplars of our concepts, they should be seen as, to varying degrees, socially
constructed products of others’ interests (material as well as ideational) and as mnemonics of
others’ experiences (Rodman 1992, 644). By examining the role of participants in the placemaking process, Rodman suggested that anthropologists could better understand how the
meanings of particular places reflect specific forms of competition and struggle. Although place
may have a unique reality for each inhabitant, and while the meanings may be shared with
others, Rodman argued that the views of place are often likely to be competing and contested in
practice (Low and Lawrence-Zunigais 2003, 15). Thus place can be seen as a multivocal project
reflecting competing interests and claims over its meanings and significance for its inhabitants.
In the following analysis, I draw on Rodman’s insights to consider the social construction
of the refugee camps among Palestinian refugees in both the camps and the city and its role in
the constitution of refugee identifications. My aim in this section is to broaden the scope of
multivocality by examining how Palestinian refugees understand place both from within its
boundaries and without. By juxtaposing the views of city refugees with those of the camp, I will
show that where one is located within space matters for the social construction of place and
62

community . Specifically, I examine how Palestinians construct and contest the meaning of
place and how these constructions are implicated in ideas about Palestinianness in Jordan.
According to Palestinians in the city, to be a refugee of the camp is to be a refugee of a particular
62

Drawing on Julie Peteet’s approach to place, I will avoid the space/place binary used within
much of the literature on place. As Peteet noted, “If place is crafted through the imposition of
human meaning and daily practices, space is, and perhaps can only be, defined and take shape
through being exterior to place. Thus from an anthropological perspective, with its focus on
meaning, practice, and agency, place and space are mutually interactive and constitutive (Peteet
2009a, 28-29).”
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kind: one marked by the social and economic poverty distinctive of that place. Thus conceived,
the camp provides a symbolic boundary understood by Palestinians in the city as a dividing line
between themselves and the refugees of the camp. From within the camps, however,
Palestinians see themselves not as constituted by the camp but as trapped by or struggling against
its material conditions. They are no more or less a part of the Palestinian community of
refugees. The material circumstances of the camps notwithstanding, they are of the same social
fabric as every other Palestinian in Jordan.
The following chapter thus offers a critical examination of the politics of meaning
(Geertz 2000) among Palestinian refugees in UNRWA refugee camps and several urban areas of
Amman. Of particular concern are cultural meanings of refugee identification and the refugee
camp. In the first two sections of this chapter, I provide a brief account of Palestinian
displacement and its connection to the creation of an official definition of a Palestine refugee
articulated by the UNRWA. The following two sections offer a brief description of refugee
camp conditions including demographic factors. In the next section, which is sub-divided into
two sections, I examine the meanings of refugee identification claimed by Palestinians in two
particular settings: the refugee camps and the city. The final section extends the analysis to
include how refugee identifications are implicated in cultural ideas about the relationship
between identity and place. Although the shared experiences of displacement and exile
established an important link between Palestinians across space and time, I argue that the
material and symbolic boundaries between the city and the camps nevertheless had significant
consequences for what it meant to be a refugee living in both spaces.

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The Unmaking of Palestine and the Making of Palestine Refugees:
The existence of Palestine refugees now exceeds 60 years. Their genesis is grounded in
the devastating results of the Palestine War of 1948, during which approximately 600,00063

900,000

Palestinian Arabs were ethnically cleansed (Masalha 1992; Pappe 2007; Morris 2004;

Rogan and Shlaim 2007) from their homes, villages, and cities in Palestine and prevented from
returning. Known to Palestinians as Al-Nakba

64

(the catastrophe), the exodus of 85% of the

indigenous population of Palestine and the establishment of the Israeli state within its borders
fundamentally altered the geographic constitution of the Palestinian people. In the aftermath of
the war, three particular sets of circumstances defined the context of the fractured Palestinian
community. First, there was a relatively small but significant population of Palestinians who
remained in what became Israel. Estimated at 160,000, these Palestinians either remained within

63

The precise number of Palestinians displaced in 1948 is unknown. The most widely accepted
sources reflect a number between 600,000 and 900,000. The United Nations Relief and Works
Agency, for example, provides an estimate of 750,000 Palestinians. This figure only includes the
number of documented refugees who were, in 1950, receiving aid from the agency. Relying on
figures provided by the British Foreign Office in 1949, Israeli historian, Benny Morris, estimates
that 600,000 to 760,000 Palestinians became refugees in 1948 (Morris 2004). According to the
Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights, Badil, the number provided by
the Final Report of the United Nations Survey Mission for the Middle East was 750,000.
However, this number does not include Palestinians who were displaced and lost their
livelihoods but did not lose their homes. If this population is included, then the number of
refugees rises to approximately 900,000 (Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Residency &
Refugee Rights. n.d., 34).
64
In a recent editorial in Egypt’s Al-Ahram, Joseph Massad cautions scholars and activists about
the risks in describing Al-Nakba as a singular event in the past. Instead, he argues for an
expanded conceptualization of Al-Nakba as an historical epoch beginning over 100 years ago
and continuing into the present. According to Massad, “the year 1881 is the date when Jewish
colonization of Palestine started and, as everyone knows, it has never ended. Much as the world
would like to present Palestinians as living in a post-Nakba period, I insist that we live
thoroughly in Nakba times (Massad 2008).”
78

65

their homes and villages or were internally displaced

from their homes to other areas within

Jewish-controlled territory (Morris 2004). The second group of Palestinians was displaced to
areas of Palestine unconquered by Jewish forces. These Palestinians became refugees
temporarily resettled within the Gaza Strip or the area of central Palestine annexed by Jordan and
66

known today as the West Bank . Finally, thousands of Palestinians displaced during the war
became refugees within the borders of the surrounding Arab states including Jordan, Syria, and
Lebanon. Like Palestinians internally displaced within the new-found Jewish state or to the
remaining areas of Palestine, these externally displaced refugees were denied the ability to return
to their homes losing both their properties and livelihoods.
The massive displacement of Palestinians from their territorial homeland in 1948
necessitated a response far beyond the will and capabilities of the international nongovernmental organizations (INGO) on the ground and the governments of the surrounding Arab
states. Immediately following the outbreak of hostilities and subsequent flight of Palestinian
refugees, several INGOs including the International Committee of the Red Cross, the League of
Red Cross Societies, and the American Friends Service Committee responded to the crisis by
providing basic services including food, health care, and temporary shelter. Plagued by the
growing number of displaced Palestinians and the poor economic conditions within neighboring
states, however, a larger intervention by the international community became essential for
addressing the needs of the refugees. In its report to the United Nations General Assembly, for
example, the Clapp Economic Survey Mission described “the extreme poverty” of refugee host
65

According to Badil, between 35,000 and 45,000 of Palestinians who remained within areas of
Palestine that became part of Israel were displaced (Badil Resource Center for Palestinian
Residency & Refugee Rights. n.d., 4).
66
By 1949, approximately 78% of Palestinian territory was conquered by Jewish forces. The
remaining 22% fell under Egyptian and Jordanian rule.
79

countries whose influx of refugees created “conditions of intense pressure and of hungry
populations upon closely limited resources (Barakat 1973, 148).” Given the grim conditions on
the ground and the absence of any immediate efforts towards returning the refugees to their
homes, plans for temporary resettlement began to take shape. For this effort, the United Nations
took a primary role.
Faced with its own responsibility in the creation of the Palestine conflict

67

and the

severity of the refugee crisis, the United Nations created several ad hoc agencies designed for
both assessing the extent of the humanitarian challenges and providing immediate aid. These
agencies included the United Nations Mediator for Palestine, the United Nations Relief for
Palestine Refugees (UNRPR), the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine
(UNCCP), and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near
East (UNRWA) (Parvathaneni 2004, 3). Although each agency played a critical role in
addressing some of the political, economic, and humanitarian aspects of the crisis, it wasn’t until
68

the creation of UNRWA

in 1949 that a more coordinated and systematic response was

implemented. Sponsored by the United Kingdom, the United States, France, Turkey, and all of
the Arab states (and later Israel), the agency was given two duties: first to carry out in
collaboration with local governments the direct relief and works programs for the Palestine
refugees and, second, to consult with interested Middle Eastern governments about measures to
67

In 1947, against the wishes and rights of the Palestinian people, the United Nations General
Assembly passed Resolution 181 recommending the Partition of Palestine into two states: one
Jewish, one Arab. According to the resolution, only 43% of Palestine was to be given to the
Palestinian Arabs despite the fact that they lived on well over 60% of the land and constituted
about 67% of the population. Jews, comprising only 33% of the population, were offered 56%
of Palestine.
68
UNRWA was established in December 8, 1949, in accordance with United Nations General
Assembly resolution 302 (IV). The agency began its operations within Gaza, the West Bank,
Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan on My 1, 1950.
80

be taken by them against the time when international assistance for relief and works projects
would no longer be available (Dale 1974, 579-580). Thus designed, the agency was restricted to
operations guided by the principles of relief and works. It could not, in other words, engage in
any political activities aimed towards the realization of Palestine refugee rights as outlined in
United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194 (11). According to the resolution, any
“refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be
permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and compensation should be paid for the
property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property, which under
principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the governments or
authorities responsible (Dale 1974, 581).”
One of the principal outcomes of the establishment of UNRWA was to create and
operationalize an official definition of a “Palestine refugee.” According to its mandate,
UNRWA defined a Palestine refugee as all persons who lived in Palestine for at least two years
before the Arab-Israel conflict of 1948, and who as a result of the war lost both their homes and
their means of earning a living. This definition was later expanded to include refugees displaced
in 1967 and the descendants of both groups of registered Palestine refugees. When the agency
began its services in 1950, about 750,000 Palestinians met the agency’s definition and were
receiving assistance in one of its official areas of operation including Jordan, Lebanon, Syria,
Gaza, and the West Bank. All registered refugees were entitled to four principal forms of
assistance: rations, housing, medical care, and education (Dale 1974, 587).
Despite their official status under UNRWA, the definition of a Palestine refugee did not
afford Palestinians the legal status or rights defined by the primary international convention for

81

refugees, the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees

69

(1951 Convention).

According to the Article 1A (2) of the 1951 Convention, a refugee was any person who:
As a result of events occurring before 1 January 1951 and owing to well-founded
fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a
particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his
nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of
the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside
the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable
or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.
Although Palestinian refugees met the criteria of a refugee outlined above, Article 1D provided
the following exception:
This Convention shall not apply to persons who are at present receiving from
organs or agencies of the United Nations other than the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees protection or assistance.
Receiving services from UNRWA at the time of the passing of the 1951 Convention,
Palestinians were thus excluded from its provisions and all subsequent protocols including the
1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees. This had two particularly important
consequences for Palestinian refugees living under the auspices of UNRWA. First, while
refugees who met the definition articulated in the 1951 Convention were entitled to, inter alia,
three fundamental rights including voluntary repatriation (return), permanent settlement in
country of residence, or resettlement in a third country, Palestinian refugees receiving UNRWA
services were entitled to no such guarantees. Second, refugees who met the definition of a
refugee described in the 1951 Convention were entitled to the protections offered by the chief
international agency for refugees, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
(UNHCR). Established by the UN General Assembly in 1950, UNHCR was mandated to both

69

For an extensive discussion on the status of Palestinian refugees in international law and the
1951 Convention, see Susan Akram 2002.
82

protect refugees and actively engage in efforts to resolve their social, political, and economic
problems.
Based on their exclusion from the 1951 Convention and UNRWA’s service-based
mandate, Palestinian refugees did not qualify for similar protections. According to its mandate,
UNRWA’s political activities were restricted to addressing matters of relief and works programs
with local governments. Questions of refugee rights or a solution to their displacement was
simply beyond the agency’s scope and purpose. This left Palestinians within a legal lacuna in
which neither their rights nor protections could be ensured by any United Nations agency. While
the UNHCR could not extend its protection role to the Palestinians, UNRWA didn’t have the
mandate to do so. Their exclusion from the 1951 Convention, in other words, confined them to
the framework of an international agency lacking the mandate necessary for ensuring and
protecting their rights as refugees and solving their predicament as a stateless community.
Two Wars, Two Waves: Palestinian Refugees in Jordan:
70

The Palestinian presence in Jordan is grounded in two particular events . The first was
the catastrophic war of 1948 and subsequent annexation of central Palestine. Of all regional
actors, the Hashemite King of Jordan was unique in his approach to the Palestinians. Left with a
chunk of central Palestine that included the historic city of Jerusalem, Khalīl (Hebron), Nablus,
Ramallah, and Jenin, King Abdullah I officially annexed the territory making it the West Bank of
Jordan and transforming its Palestinian population into citizens of the Jordanian state through an
addendum to the 1928 Law of Nationality (Massad 2001a). Cementing the legal and territorial
incorporation of central Palestine and the Palestinians into the Hashemite Kingdom, the
addendum Law of 1949 was later amended by the Law of Jordanian Nationality in 1954. The
70

For the purposes of my discussion, I am restricting my historical background to the two major
events that directly impacted my research participants.
83

legal shift effectively replaced all former laws relating to the question of nationality in order to
ensure that Palestinians who entered the Kingdom after 1949 were also offered Jordanian
71

nationality . In demographic terms, the annexation of the West Bank not only meant the
addition of native West Bank Palestinians to the Jordanian national body but also required the
inclusion of about 500,000 displaced refugees now residing in both the East and West Banks.
This brought the Kingdom’s population to about one and one-half million, of whom less than
half a million were Transjordanians

72

(Salibi 1998a). Thus between 1954 and 1967, West Bank

Palestinians and 1948 refugees achieved legal equality through their constitutional status as
73

citizens of the Jordanian state .
The second major event was the Arab-Israeli War of June 1967 between three Arab states
including Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, and the state of Israel. Expanding its territory well beyond
the de facto borders of 1949, Israel successfully defeated all three armies conquering large
swaths of territory in the process. Israel’s unexpected victory dealt a heavy blow to the cause of
Arab nationalism championed by its primary spokesman, Gamal Abdul Nasser. For years the

71

According to Jordanian Law No. 6 of 1954 on Nationality, Article 3 (b), Palestinians living
within the annexed territory of Palestine following the 1948 Palestine War became Jordanian
nationals (citizens). The Law states that a Jordanian national is “[a]ny person who, not being
Jewish, possessed Palestinian nationality before 15 May 1948 and was a regular resident in the
Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan between 20 December 1949 and 16 February 1954.”
72
The term Transjordanians refers to the population who, according to the nationality laws of
1928 of the Emirate of Jordan, became citizens of the State of Transjordan and subsequently
citizens of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
73
The geographic and constitutional union of central Palestine (the West Bank) and East Bank
of Transjordan did not necessarily translate into formal equality. As Joseph Massad has noted,
Palestinians raised several complaints against the Jordanian government for its failure to invest
in both banks equally. In 1950, Palestinian merchants, for example, claimed that they were
discriminated against in the issuance of import licenses, “a complaint that seems quite reasonable
given that two-thirds of the import licenses were given to East Bank residents” (Massad 2001b,
235).”
84

Egyptian president raised the banner of Arab unity throughout the region. Charismatic and
convincing, Nasser gained popular support through his declarations about the inevitable
liberation of Palestine and unification of the Arab people while often challenging the legitimacy
of the colonial monarchies in Jordan and the Gulf (Kamrava 2005; Dawisha 2005; Gawrych
2000). Suspicious of his Egyptian adversary and doubtful of the feasibility of defeating Israel in
another war, the late King Hussein had little incentive to enter the war. But with Arab
nationalism at its peak and popular unrest within its borders, Jordan couldn’t afford to stay out of
the fight. Once Israel launched its first strikes in June, Hussein reluctantly joined the war effort
suffering considerable losses as a result. In addition to the conquest and subsequent Israeli
occupation of the Jordanian-ruled West Bank including the eastern half of Al-Quds, the
Kingdom’s East Bank population swelled as approximately 400,000 displaced Palestinians
sought safety in the east (Segev 2007; Salibi 1998a; Robins 2004).
For Palestinians, the post war status quo was particularly distressing. Not only were the
remaining territories of Mandate Palestine now occupied by Israeli forces but a new wave of
displacement and destruction left many Palestinians homeless for the first time. In both the West
Bank and Gaza Strip, indigenous Palestinians fled invading Israeli forces seeking shelter
74

primarily in the East Bank of Jordan . These Palestinians joined 1948 refugees in UNRWA
refugee camps adding new pressures to the already burdened agency. In addition, the war
75

produced a second group of Palestinian refugees who were originally displaced in 1948 .
Primarily from the West Bank, this group of refugees was also forced across the Jordan River
74

According to the UNRWA, approximately 240,000 citizens of the West Bank were displaced
and categorized as "displaced persons" (the West Bank was administered by Jordan between
1948 and 1967).
75
UNRWA estimates that 140,000 Palestinians already registered with UNRWA were displaced
in 1967.
85

into the East Bank of the Kingdom. Already dependent upon UNRWA services, many of these
Palestinians lost what little they had acquired since their displacement in 1948 and began a new
life in Jordan’s expanding refugee camps. By the end of the war, the new refugees were
relocated to six new emergency camps raising the total number of UNRWA camps to ten.
The Camp and Its Meanings:
In Jordan, Palestinian refugee camps represent a peculiar phenomenon. One of the most
striking features of the camps, for example, is their age. Initially created in response to the 1948
displacement of over 100,000 refugees who crossed the Jordan River into the East Bank, the
camps fell under the official management of UNRWA in 1950. Only four years earlier, the late
King Abdullah I declared the British-controlled territory an independent Hashemite Kingdom.
In this sense, the camps are almost as old as the country itself. Second, due to rapid population
growth and extensive urbanization, some of the refugee camps have developed into massive
urban slums contiguous with other non-camp neighborhoods. In Amman, for example, the
Wihdāt and Al-Hussein camps are geographically indistinguishable from the surrounding areas.
Established in the wake of the 1948 war, both camps have developed from small encampments
into sprawling quarters replete with local shops, schools, and mosques. Third, unlike other
refugee camps throughout the world, Palestinian camps in Jordan shelter refugees who are also
Jordanian citizens. Despite their official status as refugees and their connection to the
international services provided by UNRWA, Palestinians in the camps are legal equals with

86

76

Jordanian nationals . Whether in terms of work, education, or healthcare, most Palestinian
77

refugees are thus guaranteed the same rights and privileges of all Jordanian citizens .
Unlike the isolated and controlled environments of many refugee camps throughout the
world, Palestinian camps in Jordan are also unique for their political histories as sites of intense
national mobilization and resistance. Historically, this was most visible during the rise and
culmination of PLO power in Jordan. From the emergence of the PLO in the 1960s until its
expulsion in 1970-1971 by the Jordanian military during Black September, Palestinian refugee
camps in Jordan achieved an almost unlimited autonomy functioning as a state within a state;
they were governed by the PLO and served as the center of gravity for Palestinian political
activity in the diaspora. Even after the PLO’s demise in Jordan, the camps have maintained a
distinct Palestinian character known culturally and politically as symbols of the Palestinian
struggle and people. Throughout the Kingdom, the camps have thus come to represent
Palestinian national spaces with their own unique communities and histories. Finally, the
continuing presence of UNRWA institutions and their exclusive functions for Palestinian
refugees has also facilitated their development into distinctly Palestinian locales emplaced within
the Jordanian national geography. Located within the territorial borders of the Jordanian state,
the camps nevertheless function as transnational spaces constituted by the presence and services
of international humanitarian agencies including UNRWA and the symbolic extension of the
Palestinian nation in exile.
76

All Palestinian refugees in Jordan have citizenship except for approximately 120,000 Gaza
refugees.
77
This is not to deny that discrimination exists between Palestinian citizens of Jordan and
Jordanians. As will be discussed later, Palestinians’ status as Jordanian citizens does not
necessarily mean that they are treated as full citizens. However, Palestinians’ citizenship status
in Jordan does afford them opportunities and rights that have been denied to other Palestinian
refugees throughout the region.
87

Despite their enduring presence in Jordan and their historical and symbolic significance
to the Palestinian national ethos, the camps occupy an ambiguous place in the Palestinian context
of Amman today. From the city, they are perceived as marginal spaces characterized by
economic and social poverty and the cultural status of what might be described as a Palestinian
ghetto. In material terms, for example, Palestinians often explained how the camps were
distinguishably poorer than other urban areas of Jordan. The claim was not altogether untrue:
Palestinian camps throughout the Kingdom bear the distinct features of an undeveloped urban
slum with inadequate infrastructures. For example, most camps have homes with zinc roofs held
by heavy stones and debris, extremely narrow passageways, and raw sewage running through the
streets. Culturally, the camps were also described places marked by all the signs of “social
decay” including unemployment, a burgeoning population of young people, crime, violence, and
unrefined manners. Within the camps, however, their meanings were less straightforward.
Material conditions notwithstanding, the camps were often described as spaces of strong social
cohesion and national belonging. In the following section, I will provide a brief demographic
portrait of the camps with specific attention to material conditions of poverty. I will then
examine some of the various meanings ascribed to the camps emphasizing how their
constructions as places of poverty and social decline enabled particular ideas about the
Palestinian community of refugees.
Camp Demography:
Ten official and three unofficial UNRWA refugee camps exist in Jordan. The majority of
these camps are located in or around the Jordanian capital, Amman. According to UNRWA, five
of the camps were established on the East Bank after the 1948 war for about 100,000 refugees
while the remaining eight were built after 1967 to accommodate approximately 140,000

88

refugees. Within the camps, UNRWA provides basic assistance including primary education and
general healthcare. It also organizes community support organizations such as women’s
program centers and coordinates with governmental and non-governmental organizations on
economic development efforts including micro-financing projects. Although UNRWA does
play an active role in improving camp conditions, the Jordanian government is primarily
responsible for the infrastructure of the camps. Most of its operations in the camps are run
78

through the Department of Palestinian Affairs (DPA)

and the Ministry of Construction and

Restoration.

78

The DPA is an extension of Jordan’s Ministry of Refugees. In 1951, the ministry established
the Ministry of Construction and Restoration, which was assigned the responsibility of
organizing and supervising the establishment of residential units for the refugees in accordance
with a 1951 agreement between UNRWA and the Jordanian government. (See:
http://www.dpa.gov.jo/MenuHistoricalindex.html)
89

Camp Name

Year
Established

Camp
Population

Housing
Units

Number of
Families

Wihdāt
‘Azmi AlMufti (Husn)
Souf
Talbīyeh
Sukhneh
Jabal AlHussein
Irbid
Mādaba
Baqa’a
Hittīn (Marka)
Jarash (Gaza)
Prince AlHassan
Zarqā’’

1948
1968

51,000
22,000

2,130
2,314

9,800
4,505

Family Hardship
79
Cases
2,044
413

1967
1968
1969
1952

20,000
7,000
6,000
29,000

1,179
810
500
2,488

4,029
1,313
620
5,811

322
134
95
1,320

1951
1956
1968
1968
1968
1967

25,000
5,500
94,000
45,000
24,000
10,000

1,693
512
7,100
2,844
2,130
648

5,142
813
18,129
8,700
4,726
1,190

1,747
249
1,740
965
538
331

1949

18,000

1,135

3,862

1,181

Table Three: Jordan Refugee Camp Profiles

80
81

Although camp conditions can differ according to their establishment , population size
and density, and infrastructure, refugee camps are nevertheless distinguishable from urban areas

79

The special hardship assistance program assists the most disadvantaged and vulnerable
refugees including women whose husbands have died or whose husbands have divorced or
abandoned them, the elderly, the chronically ill, refugees with disabilities, and the very young.
Families that meet UNRWA’s criteria are eligible for food and cash assistance, shelter
rehabilitation, are given priority in the programs organized by the social services division, and
preference in enrolling at the vocational training centers. (See:
http://www.un.org/unrwa/programmes/rss/specialhardship.html)
80
Figures in this table are drawn from UNRWA and the DPA 2008 report “60 Years Serving
Refugee Camps.”
81
According to UNRWA, although refugees live under similar socio-economic conditions,
camps established in the wake of the 1948 war are generally better off than those created in
1967. Despite various improvements made within the 1967 camps, they are nevertheless “less
developed than those established in the 1950s. Some of them lack basic infrastructure and public
services, especially the camps in remote areas.” (See: http://unrwa.org/etemplate.php?id=100)
90

in Jordan in several ways. In 2000, for example, a joint study conducted by Fafo

82

noted that

fertility rates among Palestinian refugees in the camps were generally higher (4.6 children) than
the national average (3 children). With limited economic opportunities, higher fertility rates
were linked to increased population density and general overcrowding throughout the camps.
The Fafo study also reported that one-third of all refugee camp households had eight or more
individuals whereas the Jordanian national average was approximately six individuals per
household. Within the home, quarters were particularly crowded as about 45% of all camp
households had three or more individuals for every room. Female-headed families were also
more widespread in the camps. While women headed about 15% of all camp households, the
national figure was only 10% (Khawaja and Tiltnes 2002, 25). In the camps, unemployment was
also higher than other areas of Jordan with a particular glut among the youth. Unemployment
among males between the ages of 15-24, for example, was about 16% and roughly 30% for
women of the same ages (Khawaja and Tiltnes 2002, 49). According to a 2002 Fafo report, two
factors helped explain the high levels of unemployment in the camps. First, camp youth were
typically less educated than their non-camp peers due to high drop-out rates. Second, the young
were generally less skilled than the older generation and thus had few opportunities for entering
the work force (Khawaja and Tiltnes 2002, 49).

82

According to its website, Fafo is an independent and multidisciplinary research foundation
focusing on social welfare and trade policy, labor and living conditions, public health, migration
and integration, and transnational security and development issues. (See:
http://www.fafo.no/indexenglish.htm)
91

90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
Male-Headed
Percent

Femaleheaded

Dependency
rate 2+

Childless
Couples

Spouse with
Children

Loner

27

55

33

38

45

84

83

Table Four: Poverty Levels by Household Composition

Income and poverty levels also suggest important differences between the camp
populations and refugees in the city. In 2000, Fafo reported the national poverty line for a family
of six persons at JD 1,250 (roughly U.S. $1700). The same year, approximately 30% of camp
households fell below the national poverty line. Two years later, 22% of camp households were
reported to be making less than JD 900 per year compared to the national average of 10%
84

(Khawaja and Tiltnes 2002, 56) . Moreover, poverty levels were considerably high among
female-headed households. Whereas approximately 27% of male-headed households in the
camps were poor, 55% of female-headed households lived below the national poverty line. The
differences in income and poverty were particularly striking given that both camp and non-camp
refugees have equal legal standing in Jordan. That is, with the exception of about 120,000
83

Adapted from Khawaja and Tiltnes, 2002.

84

Although camps tend to be generally poorer than non-camp areas, it is important to mention
that considerable differences between camps exist. For example, whereas approximately 33% of
camps located in northern Jordan meet the definition of poverty, only 27% of Amman camps are
poor (Arneberg 1997).
92

refugees from Gaza, all Palestinian refugees have Jordanian citizenship and are thus guaranteed
equal status in terms of education and employment. According to Fafo, several factors
accounted for the economic disparities between camp and non-camp residents: business flight
due to lack of space (overcrowding), low wages due to competition with foreign labor, locational
disadvantages including long distances from work areas, and decreased migration to the Gulf
following the 1991 Gulf War (Arneberg 1997).
Identifying Refugees: Refugeeness for All:
Throughout my research, the historical episodes of 1948 and 1967 were essential for
understanding the formation of the Palestinian refugee diaspora (Al-Shattāt) in general and the
presence of Palestinians in Jordan in particular. In local terms, however, Palestinians typically
85

referred to Al-Nakba and Al-Naksa

in order to locate particular events or people in time. Al-

Nakba could thus refer to the displacement of Palestinians and partition of Palestine, the
destruction of Palestinian territory through the establishment of Israel, and/or the Arab armies’
failure to defeat Zionist forces. It could also mean the culmination of Zionist colonization that
began long before the 1948 war. Similarly, Al-Naksa signified the defeat of Arab forces in 1967,
the displacement of Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank, the fragmentation of Arab
territory through Israeli occupation in Syria, Egypt, and Jordan, and the specific conquest of
Gaza and the West Bank. For some, it also signified the failure of Arab nationalism and the
beginning of the Islamic resistance. In addition to particular events, Al-Nakba and Al-Naksa
could refer to an individual’s physical origin in Palestine and/or metaphysical location within the
history of Palestinian displacement. A Palestinian could thus be of the jīl Al-Nakba (the Nakba
generation) if he or she was displaced from a village or city in Palestine conquered by Zionist
85

Palestinians explained that the word “naksa” expressed the “setback” following the 1967 war
and/or the “breaking” up of Palestine and Arab territory.
93

forces in 1948 or of the jīl Al-Naksa (the Naksa generation) if he or she was displaced from a
village or city in the Gaza Strip or West Bank in 1967. In the next section, I will discuss how
these two historical markers functioned in self-categorizations as “refugees” among camp and
city Palestinians.
When I began conducting interviews with Palestinians in the refugee camps, I always
started with what may have seemed an odd question: “Are you a refugee?” Initially, I thought
the question was a good opening for a series of queries meant to establish a participant’s
background. Not long after my first interview, however, I realized that the question was far
more significant than I originally thought. The fact that respondents answered in the affirmative,
“I am a refugee,” was not the issue. As I mentioned above, I expected that Palestinians in
refugee camps would readily identify as refugees. Rather, I was struck by how Palestinians
anchored their claims to being a refugee. Contrary to my assumptions about the camp and its
residents, neither official UNRWA status nor life in the camp emerged as the basis for
identifying oneself as a refugee. Instead, Palestinians’ identification as refugees relied on a
concept of displacement understood both as a lived experience and inherited condition. A
refugee was thus either a lāji’ of the Nakba or nāzih of the Naksa regardless of his or her
UNRWA status. Moreover, while one’s status as a resident of the camp could be used to
emphasize refugeeness, it was ultimately an individual’s ability to establish a link to a particular
displacement that authenticated his or her identification as a refugee.
In the following section, I will highlight two key features of how Palestinians identified
as refugees in both camps and the city. The first concerns the direct experience of displacement
from Palestine. Experientially framed, identifying as a refugee reflected two things: first, the
experience of displacement and, second, the persistence of exile in an individual’s life following

94

his or her removal from Palestine during the Nakba or Naksa. The second feature is what I will
call the “inheritance of exile.” In this case, refugee status is inherited by a descendant of a
refugee who directly experienced displacement or was himself a descendant of someone
86

displaced. Following the logic of a nationalized patrilineal descent , refugee identification was
conceived as a gendered national inheritance primarily based on the origin and displacement of
male relatives from Palestine. A Palestinian refugee could claim refugeeness in virtue of an
essential Palestinianness established through a link to a Palestinian male’s displacement from the
“motherland” in 1947 or after.
The Displaced and the Persistence of Exile:
Refugee camps in Jordan are not a recent phenomenon. Several of the camps were
established immediately following the displacement in 1948, only a few years after King
Abdullah I declared Jordan’s independence from British colonial rule. Others were created as
temporary shelters for Palestinians displaced in 1967. In both cases, what began as small,
temporary encampments in 1948 and 1967 have developed into sprawling urban neighborhoods
resembling inner-city slums. In the camps established in 1948 such as Al-Wihdāt, the population
reflects the long-term presence of the camp. One can thus expect to find refugees displaced in
1948 and 1967 living alongside of their children, grandchildren, and even great grandchildren.
In the Baqa’a camp, for example, I spent considerable time with a family living in a three story
dwelling in which each floor housed members of different generations. In the city, one can find
similar living arrangements to the camps: multiple generations inhabit the same apartment
buildings (and sometimes apartments) or neighborhoods. Several families I met either purchased

86

Patrilineal descent, or agnatic kinship, typically refers to a genealogical system in which an
individual primarily belongs to her or his father’s lineage. It can also involve inheritance
including familial name and property.
95

nearby apartments or built upon the existing structures of their homes to accommodate newlywedded sons, their wives, and their children.
But as the Palestinian refugee crisis

87

continues unresolved, the demographics of the

camps and cities are rapidly changing. Most Palestinians from jīl Al-Nakba are now within their
70s or 80s or are now deceased. Finding Palestinians displaced during the Nakba is thus no
longer as simple as a selfish researcher would hope. Nonetheless, two years of fieldwork
afforded me several opportunities to meet and interview a significant number of Palestinians
displaced during the Nakba. These encounters were always animated by the passion and
sincerity of the elders. Often dressed in the worn yet colorful thobe

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described as “malābis

Filastīnīyya” (Palestinian dress), these mostly Palestinian women spoke frankly about their lives
and their intense longing for a return to the past. In particular, I was struck by their deep
connection to the land and life-ways of pre-Partition Palestine. It was primarily a result of their
unique expressions that helped me realize that their country, Palestine, and their displacement
from it in 1948, were still at work in their lives. Being a refugee was, for them, an identity and
experience: it was the ceaseless condition of a life everywhere except in Palestine. This pattern
emerged again as I encountered Palestinians displaced in 1967 among the jīl Al-Naksa. They too
identified as refugees trapped within an ongoing experience marked by displacement and the

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Authors like Benny Morris have described the displacement of Palestinian refugees as a
“problem” (Morris 2004). I prefer to use the term “crisis” to underscore the urgency of the
situation for both Palestinians living as refugees and the national contexts in which they are in.
In truth, however, it is not the fact of Palestinian refugees that is the problem. Rather, it is the
Israeli state’s unwillingness to take responsibility for their displacement by addressing the rights
of refugees established in UN General Assembly Resolution 194 (11).
88
Thobes are typically long garments covering both the arms and legs down to the ankles. They
are often stitched with differing patterns using red, white, green, and yellow thread.
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“foreignness” of their life in Jordan. In the following discussion, I examine how these two
89

generations articulated the meaning and condition of being a refugee .
Um Fādī and I met during my second visit to the Baqa’a. She lived in a small,
one-story dwelling within the camp. Originally from Al-Sawāfīr in Gaza, she and
her husband were displaced in 1967. Most of her relatives, she explained,
remained in Gaza. She was 72 years old at the time of our meeting and, like most
Palestinians of her age, was comfortable speaking with strangers. When asked if
she was a refugee, her response was “na’m, ana nāzih (yes, I am a refugee).” I
then asked, “Are you registered with UNRWA?” Referring to the UNRWA card
used to prove registration with the agency, Um Fādī responded, “I have the card.”
I was introduced to Abu Raid in the Baqa’a camp. Originally from Dura in the
city of Khalīl (Hebron), Abu Raid identified himself as a nāzih displaced in 1967.
He, his brothers, and one of his sisters all lived in the Baqa’a camp. Abu Raid’s
second sister was a refugee living in mukhayyam Gaza in the city of Jarash. Like
his brothers and sisters, he said, I am registered with UNRWA as a refugee.
Um Shāhid and I shared a mutual friend in the Wihdāt camp. We met in the
central sūq (market) at the watch shop owned by my friend. After offering a brief
explanation of my research, she led me through the narrow streets of the camp to
the homes of friends and family. One of our visits included a home with three
elderly Palestinians. Two of the hajjāt (elderly women) began describing their
rural lifestyle before the Zionist occupation. When asked if they were refugees,
they both said “yes, we are lāji’īn from Palestine.” All three women said they had
UNRWA cards.
Abu Asad never lived in a camp. He and his family fled an area near Al-Quds
called ‘ayn Karam in 1948. They moved to Amman and eventually managed to
purchase an apartment in the Hāshmi Shamāli in East Amman. Over time, the
Hāshmi became an area heavily populated by Palestinians. Abu Asad never
registered with UNRWA nor did he live in a camp. He nevertheless said he was a
lāji’ min Filastīn (from Palestine).
The four profiles above reflect interviews conducted with the Nakba and Naksa
generations of Palestine displaced from Palestine in 1948 or 1967. Representing two refugee
camps and an urban area of Amman, their experiences were not untypical. During most of my

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The similarity in claims discussed at this stage in the analysis should not be taken to mean that
both generations felt loss the same way. What was lost and how it was expressed were, at times,
very different things reflecting broader changes within the Palestinian ethos of which they were
raised. This, however, will be discussed at a later point.
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interviews with the older generation, the question “are you a refugee” was addressed by
identifying oneself as a lāji’ or nāzih. In this sense, whether or not they identified as refugees did
not depend on their UNRWA status. Rather, it was their direct experience of displacement from
Palestine that informed their response. Abu Asad, for example, never received the assistance
offered by UNRWA. He and his family moved directly into the East Bank in search of work and
managed to find a stable source of income. In time, they moved into the eastern area of Amman
where homes were cheap and land was plentiful. His children, all born in Amman, were raised
in the city far from the camps. Nonetheless, Abu Asad was “a lāji’, displaced from his homeland
by the Zionist occupation.”
In Wihdāt, Um ‘Ammār also claimed to be a lāji’a. Unlike Abu Asad, she and her family
could not afford to find shelter beyond the camps. She thus registered with UNRWA and, along
with her family, moved into the camp receiving the agency’s services. Yet her identification as a
refugee was grounded in the existence she lost when forced from her homeland and her exilic
condition in Jordan. During our interview, Um ‘Ammār explained: “I live in a country and it’s
not my country; I acknowledge that. Here, I am considered a refugee or guest in Jordan. But my
asās (original) country is Palestine.” For Um ‘Ammār, her identification as a refugee expressed
her connection to Palestine and, consequently, her status as a “guest” in Jordan. Not being in
Palestine, in other words, established her refugeeness. Responses provided during a survey
administered at an UNRWA vocational center reflected similar issues. In one of the responses,
the participant described himself in the following way:
I am a nāzih. I am registered with UNRWA. I was born in 1964 in ‘Ayn AlBaydha in Palestine. Now I live in Amman, Jordan. I am originally from Nablus
in Palestine. I do not consider myself a Palestinian refugee because of my
[UNRWA] papers. I consider myself a Palestinian refugee because Palestine is
my homeland (wattan).

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In another survey response, the participant provided the following answer to the question of
refugee identity:
I am a lāji’. I am registered with UNRWA. I was born in 1962 in Al-Zarqā’ in
Amman. I now live in Wadī As-Sīr in Amman. I am originally from a village in
northern Palestine called Qanīr. I am not a Palestinian refugee because of my
documents. My blood was made of Palestinian mud and our religion has taught
us to love the land we are from.
Also drawing on the symbol of blood, another respondent provided the following answer:
I am a lāji’ and I am registered with UNRWA. I was born in 1988 in Amman,
Jordan. I now live in Amman but I am originally from Khalīl in Palestine. I do
not consider myself a Palestinian refugee because of my documents. I am a
Palestinian refugee because I have the Palestinian blood running through my
veins.
The three responses above reveal a common attempt by Palestinians to avoid conflating
their official status as registered refugees with their existential status as refugees. In the first
excerpt, it was his connection to the Palestinian homeland that grounded his identification as a
refugee. Displaced in 1967, he was living beyond the borders of his homeland and,
consequently, living as a refugee in Jordan. In the next two excerpts, both UNRWA-registered
respondents draw on organic metaphors of the body including blood to describe their
identification as a refugee. For the first respondent, the very earth of Palestine is constitutive of
his being. The land of Palestine is a part of his very body: he is of Palestine and it of him. But
his inability to live in Palestine and experience that connection in a particular place has forced
him into a state of displacement and, consequently, refugeeness. Similarly, it is the presence of
Palestinian blood that makes the third respondent a refugee. To be anywhere but in Palestine is
to render him a refugee living with the blood of his country yet removed from its body.
The claim to refugee identity offered by Palestinians in camps and the city suggested a
concept of displacement rooted in time yet ongoing and thus continuous. Being a refugee, in

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other words, was an identification grounded in and lived through a persistent state of separation
and distance from the homeland. Moreover, the persistence of displacement wasn’t necessarily
the experience of living in a camp. Rather, it was the “liminal state of being out of place (outside
of Palestine) or in between (connected to Palestine and Palestinians but in the context of Jordan)
(Malkki 1995, 6-7).” More specifically, displacement was the persistent state of not being fully
here, in Jordan, nor there, in Palestine. Um ‘Arif, for example, identified as a refugee of the
Naksa. She and her family were originally from Gaza and her father was active in the
Palestinian resistance until the war between the PLO and Jordanian military in 1970. Their
displacement began in 1967.
90

I came to Amman, to a refugee camp. I used to live in a camp called Schlinner .
As of April 24, I will have been living in Jordan for 38 years. Of course, my
father was a fedā’ī and, when Israel invaded [Gaza] on the 15th of [June] 1967,
my father and all of the fedā’iyyīn fled to Egypt. My father left Egypt for Jordan
because it was the only place that Palestinians could live in. I came here on April
24, 1967. I was in the third grade and [after the displacement], I studied in a tent.
We all lived in a tent. We lived for two years in a tent. A tent! In Gaza, we were
living in a house by the sea but we came here and lived in a tent.
In Jordan, she explained, Palestine was perceptibly near yet unreachable. She could see the
lights of Jerusalem from Amman and the eastern coast of the Dead Sea but could not cross the
border that divided Jordan from Israel. Displacement thus involved both the separation from
Palestine and the barriers that kept her from returning.
[Palestine] is my land but I cannot eat from it. Pain, pain! And we hope that the
barriers [that divide us from Palestine] are removed (tūzāl Al-‘Awā-iq). Palestine
is only half an hour from here and there are places you can see from here. This is
something very painful: you see your country but you can’t enter it, you smell its
scent but you can’t eat from its goodness. It’s your land and other people live in
it; you can’t live on your land!

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Schlinner is a local name used for the Hittīn camp. The word comes from the presence of a
local school established by a German man whose surname was Schlinner.
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Throughout our interview, Um ‘Arif described the pain of leaving Palestine and the tragic irony
of its close albeit inaccessible presence. For Um’Arif, neither her status with UNRWA nor life
in the camp established the basis of her self-understanding as a refugee. Indeed, she was one of
the few Palestinians able to leave the camp and secure a good-paying job at an UNRWA
vocational school. Whether in the camp or in the city, Um ‘Arif explained, she could not be
other than a refugee; her broken connection to Palestine and inability to restore that connection
through return left her in a persistent state of displacement as a refugee.
Leith, Um ‘Arif’s brother, still lived in the camp and was registered with UNRWA.
Unable to find sufficient income to rent or purchase a home outside of the camp, he had lived in
the camp since he fled Gaza at eighteen years of age. Like his sister, Leith also claimed to be a
refugee displaced from Gaza in 1967 (nazaht min Gaza fī saba’a wa sittīn). Leith and I met in
his home at the Hittīn camp. Although none of his children were directly displaced from
Palestine, he nevertheless explained how displacement scattered his children (kharajū)
throughout the region into Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Libya. Displacement, for him,
was a shared condition that his children now lived. Like his sister, Leith described refugeeness
as a state linked both to the displacement during Al-Naksa and the inability to return to Palestine.
I lost my country (wattanī). Everyone in the world has a country but I don’t have
a country. Everyone has a country but I don’t! I am living as a guest in Jordan
without a country of my own. Jordan is my second country (wattanī Ath-thānī)!
That is, any Arabic country is my second country.
When asked about his relationship to the camps, Leith described it as the consequence of being
homeless and nothing more. Whether in a camp in Jordan or another country, he claimed,
displacement would persist through an unending feeling of being out of Palestine and a desire to
return to it.

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Palestinians live in the camps because the Israelis kicked them out of Palestine. If
all the Palestinians left the camps, their feelings would still remain. They would
feel Palestinian: that he is Palestinian, the right of return is his. I will not forget
my feelings even if I lived in China. My feelings are that I want to return to
Palestine.
The Inheritance of Exile:
Michael:
Abu Yasīn:
Michael:
Abu Yasīn:
Michael:
Abu Yasīn:
Michael:
Abu Yasīn:
Michael:
Abu Yasīn:

Are you a refugee?
Refugee? That means that I used to live in Palestine and then was
kicked out?
‘Ala Rahtak (as you like). I want you to decide.
There are certain definitions of a refugee.
What would make you a refugee?
Well, because my father used to work in Palestine and he was
kicked out and had to leave.
What year was this? What year did he leave?
This was in 1948.
From where in Palestine, the West Bank, Gaza, or Nakba
Palestine?
No, we are originally from the West Bank but my father used to
work in Haifa, which is in Israel now. We were living in Haifa at
the time [of the war] and that’s when we moved back to the West
Bank. We were accustomed to living and working in the city, so
moving back to the West Bank and living in a village was difficult.
We stayed in the West Bank for about nine months and then
moved to Amman.

The excerpt above comes from an hour-long interview held at the home of Abu Yāsīn.
An educated and successful businessman, Abu Yāsīn lived in one of the more affluent areas of
Amman. He and I met through his son, Yāsīn, who was studying at a local private school where
I taught for one year. Yāsīn arranged the interview after expressing his desire to have an
anthropologist interested in Al-Qādhīyya Filastīnīyya (the Palestinian situation) come to his
home and interview his family. Knowing Yāsīn for almost a year before the invitation, I agreed
to the meeting. Before visiting his home, Yāsīn assured me that my wife and I would be
welcomed with a “traditional” Palestinian meal and an opportunity to view his luxurious
entertainment room filled with the latest in visual technology. The night of the interview, all

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promises were fulfilled. The meal included an assortment of “Palestinian” dishes including
imsākhen and mulukhīya and the entertainment room was well equipped with an impressive
arrangement of sight and sound technology. More importantly, Yāsīn’s father provided an
engaging interview that illustrated some important points about the meaning of refugee identity
among Palestinians from the city.
Well versed in the history of the Middle East and Palestine in particular, Abu Yāsīn
understood that the term “refugee” could mean a variety of things. Despite never living in a
refugee camp himself, he was aware that the term “refugee” was often used to designate those
Palestinians who lived in camps. This, he later explained, was a meaning linked to the specific
institutional setting of UNRWA. He was also aware that refugees were Palestinians who
received assistance from UNRWA regardless of where they lived. Palestinians could thus be
refugees without living in the camps. But as our exchange above illustrates, the fact that he
never lived in a camp nor received assistance from UNRWA did not preclude him from asserting
his claim to being a refugee. In his own words, Abu Yāsīn was a refugee because his “father
used to work in Palestine and he was kicked out and had to leave.”
Abu Yāsīn’s response highlights two important points about the meaning of refugee
identification for many Palestinians I met throughout the course of my research. First, his
attention to the existence of “certain definitions” indicated that the refugee category could have
an institutionalized meaning. According to Abu Yāsīn, Palestinians in the camps and/or
dependent upon UNRWA services are refugees; they meet the official definition of a refugee and
live that status in an institutional setting. Such an understanding often emerged among other
Palestinians living in the city. During numerous conversations concerning refugee identity, for
example, Palestinians could not ignore the institutionalized definition of a refugee linked to the

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camps and UNRWA. Living in the city, their lives were crafted in spaces external to the camps
and thus beyond the particular experience of exile and refugeeness represented by the camps.
Although “refugee” could mean many things, what it meant could not exclude the people who
lived under that specific status within the unique space of the camps. But while Palestinians in
the city couldn’t avoid associating refugeeness with the camps and UNRWA, they also didn’t
limit its meaning to an individual’s relationship to either. Thus during my discussion with
Ghāzī, who was born in the city to a father displaced in 1967, identifying as a refugee was linked
to his shared experience of displacement. Like refugees in the camps, he too grounded his claim
to a refugee identity within the historical context of the Naksa and his father’s displacement
during that event. In this sense, displacement established a common link between Palestinians in
the camps and cities. Put another way, through the common experience of displacement, refugee
identity could be claimed and maintained regardless of an individual’s location in the particular
space of the camp or city.
This raises the second point about Abu Yāsīn’s response to the question of refugee
identity. According to Abu Yāsīn, he was a refugee because his father was from Palestine and
“kicked out.” Being a refugee was, in this sense, an inheritance. As previously discussed,
Palestinians in both the camps and cities anchored their identification as a refugee in their direct
experiences of displacement. Thus whether an individual or family was forced from Palestine
into an UNRWA camp or an urban area of Amman, it was the displacement itself that enabled
their claim to being a refugee. But not all Palestinians in Jordan were displaced during the
Nakba and Naksa. Indeed, the majority of Palestinians in Jordan today were not directly
expelled from Palestine. Over 60 years since 1948 and 40 years since 1967, generations of
Palestinians have been born and raised in Jordan with little or no contact to what remains of

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Palestine. How then can Palestinians claim to be refugees if they were not themselves forced
from their lands in 1948 and/or 1967? Abu Yāsīn’s response is illustrative in this regard. What
made him a refugee was his father’s displacement from Palestine. Originally from Palestine, his
father used to live and work in Haifa but was expelled in 1948. Abu Yāsīn was therefore a
refugee because his father was a refugee. This response was not confined to Abu Yāsīn alone;
his son, Yāsīn, also claimed to be a refugee in virtue of his grandfather’s displacement.
Identifying as a refugee, in this sense, reflected an inherited condition through which Abu Yāsīn
and his son could both trace their origins to a specific place in Palestine and in time through the
Nakba displacement. Consider the following examples.
Imād and I met at the Wihdāt refugee camp in Amman. He was a Jordanian
citizen born in the camp in 1979. Imād described himself as an artist and
playwright. Theater was his passion, he said, but working at an Islamic
orphanage allowed him to carry out the Islamic principle of caring for the
orphans. It also kept him close to the people of the camp. Imād’s parents, he
informed me, were originally from the city of Jafa in Filastīn until their
displacement in 1948. Like many Palestinians, Imād had relatives displaced
throughout the region including Nablus in the Occupied West Bank, Syria, Iraq,
and Egypt. Some relatives lived in refugee camps and others didn’t, he said. Yet
all of his relatives, he explained, were refugees. When I asked Imād, “Are you a
refugee,” his response was “ana lāji’.” I then asked, “Are you registered with
UNRWA?” “la, ana mish musajjal ma’l UNRWA (no, I am not registered with
UNRWA).”
Asad and I originally met in the Wihdāt camp at the Markaz Itām, a religious
orphanage for boys. Although intimately connected to the Markaz and the people
of the camp, Asad lived in an area several kilometers outside of Wihdāt called the
Hāshmi Shamālī (North Hāshmī). Born in Amman, his parents were originally
from an area near 21 kilometers west of Al-Quds called ‘Ayn Karam. They were
displaced in 1948. Neither he nor his siblings ever lived in a camp nor received
UNRWA services. When I asked him if he was a refugee, Asad responded, “Yes,
I am from the refugees.”
Warda lived in a small rural area located on the outskirts of Amman. Her father
was a Palestinian physician employed in one of the camps. We met through her
father who welcomed me to his home for a Palestinian lunch and a chance to get
away from the city. Warda’s father and I attended to local masjid for the Friday
prayer. Shortly thereafter, we had a gratifying meal replete with fresh meat and
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vegetables from their garden. After lunch, we walked in the fields behind
Warda’s home. During our walk, Warda and her father offered an engaging
discussion about their family history and experiences. Warda described herself as
a lāji’a. She wasn’t sure if her family had the UNRWA card. Even if they did,
she explained, her family didn’t use it for any services. Born in Amman, she said
her family was originally from Beersheba in Palestine until their displacement in
1948.
Māzin and Hāfiz were two young men I met at the Wihdāt camp. Both were
students at the camp’s local UNRWA school. Hāfiz said he was raised in the
Jabal Al-Ashrafīyya area of east Amman. Māzin was from the Wihdāt camp.
Both teens claimed to be refugees. Hāfiz said he was a laji’ registered with
UNRWA. His parents were from Al-Ramla in Nakba Palestine. Māzin claimed
to be a lāji’ as well. He said his parents were originally from Gaza until their
displacement during the Nakba.
All four excerpts above come from fieldnotes taken during formal and informal
interviews with Palestinians from the camps and city. In each case, Palestinians born in (and
citizens of) Jordan claimed to be refugees. That is, these Palestinians identified as refugees even
though they did not themselves experience displacement from Palestinian territory. These brief
excerpts thus highlight an element common to my discussions with Palestinians about the
meaning of their refugee identification. When not directly displaced, Palestinians anchored their
refugee identification in terms of an inheritance extending from their connection to a specifically
male relative who was displaced from Palestine and the idea that they too longed for the
homeland. For these Palestinians, refugeeness was an inherited and thus relational category
established primarily through their patrilineal connection (a Palestinian) to a place of origin
(Palestine) and experience (exile). More specifically, the identification of a male relative as a
displaced Palestinian allowed Palestinians to assert a commonality that facilitated a claim of
membership or togetherness: we are all refugees (Brubaker and Cooper 2000). Displacement
thus represented an inherited status and shared condition (a commonality) and promoted what

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Weber called a sentiment of solidarity (Weber 2009). It served as an affective tie grounded in
lineage but expressive of a condition that transcended a mere relationship between kin.
Such articulations are important for understanding the meaning of refugee identifications
among Palestinians in two particular ways. First, they show how Palestinians conceptualize the
meaning of refugee “identity” and what enables one to claim it. For Palestinians, the claim to
being a refugee is located at the intersection of territory and kinship. As much as a Palestinian
can identify as a Palestinian through his or her connection to a relative from Palestine, a
Palestinian in Jordan can also identify as a refugee through the displacement of that relative. In
this case, it is not just that a Palestinian is displaced, but that a Palestinian’s displacement is
shared through the same bonds that connect him to his kin. Being a refugee, as is being a
Palestinian, is an identification grounded in the bonds of blood that tie people together through a
common lineage and experience. One inherits her identification as a refugee just as she inherits
her identification as a Palestinian and, as such, inherits the presumed ties to Palestine that make
possible the claim to being Palestinian.
Warda, for example, knew her origin in Palestine. She knew that her father and his
family were from Beersheba in south-central Palestine. But her father’s origin was not the sole
basis of her refugee identity. Rather, it was his displacement from Beersheba that constituted her
identity as a refugee. This identity, she explained, would be passed on to her children so as long
as they could not return to Palestine. Moreover, like Palestinians who were directly displaced
from their homeland, Warda also described a sense of refugeeness as an experience of being out
of place.
I don’t like to attach myself to a city that is not of my origins. I am originally
Palestinian and I used to think about Palestine a lot when I was younger. Jordan
is a good country to the Palestinians and it has offered [us] qaddamāt (provisions)
that no other country has offered the Palestinians. Nevertheless, I feel that I am
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Palestinian, not Jordanian because the [most important thing] is my origin.
Palestine is my origin and just like someone is comfortable when they are in their
own house and are happy there, so too is the same for me and Palestine. I want to
return to Palestine.
Warda did not directly experience displacement nor has she lived the exilic condition of the
camps or its concomitant dependency on UNRWA services. On the contrary, her father owned a
two-story home and sizable garden. He built an economic base through his work in the camps as
a physician employed by UNRWA but remained independent of its services. Yet Warda
nevertheless claimed to be a refugee like her father. Through her father’s displacement and the
inherited condition of exile—of not being in Palestine—she too was a refugee.
Like Abu Yāsīn above, Asad identified as a refugee through his father’s displacement
from Palestine. Following the pattern of patrilineal descent typical among many Palestinians,
Asad understood his identity as one tied to his father’s origins in Palestine and his displacement
from that location in 1948. Similarly, both Māzin and Hāfiz identified themselves as refugees
through their parents’ displacement from Palestine. Hāfiz did not live in the camp although he
received UNRWA services through his official status as a refugee. Māzin was also registered
but lived in the camp. Neither Hāfiz nor Māzin, however, suggested that their identification as
refugees reflected their connection to UNRWA. Instead, both participants linked themselves to
Palestine through their fathers’ origins and their self-understanding as refugees through their
families’ displacement. As Hāfiz explained, “we are refugees because our parents and grand
parents are Palestinians [displaced from Palestine] and we inherited that from them.” One’s
status as a refugee, in other words, was inherited through his or her families’ Palestinian origins.
Similarly, during an interview with an Imam from the Souf camp, he described himself as a
“refugee son, a child of refugees displaced in 1948 (min Al-Lāji’īn).” He and his children were
all registered with UNRWA and grew up in the camp. Nevertheless, the Imam explained that it
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was his father’s origin in ‘Ayn ‘Arīq, a town in the area of Ramallah, and his displacement in
1948 that grounded his identity as a refugee.
The significance of a Palestinian’s connection to the homeland via a displaced male
relative shows that the claim to a refugee identity is implicated in a much larger project than that
of patrilineal kinship ties alone. Transcending the boundaries of agnatic reproduction, refugee
identifications also indicate a distinctly ethno-national claim grounded in gendered assumptions
about the relationship between people and place. It is a claim functional within a nationalized
discourse of commonality constructed according to gendered conceptualizations of “national”
identity, “national” reproduction, and the “national” homeland. Claiming refugeeness, in other
words, is as much about asserting one’s ethno-national identification as a Palestinian and,
consequently, one’s connections to Palestine, as it is about one’s patrilineal connections. The
structure of these claims is not, however, a novel production. They reflect a well-established
nationalist logic in which gendered assumptions about people and territory enable a particular
national imagining.
Looking at one of the key documents of the Palestinian national movement of the PLO,
we find the basis of Palestinian national identity reflecting key ideas about the relationship
between gender, the nation, and its territory. According to Article 4 of the Palestinian National
Charter (1968), Palestinian identity is described as “a genuine, essential, and inherent
characteristic; it is transmitted from parents to children.” In this case, “national” identity is
transmitted through bilateral ties (from both parents to children) and therefore defies the
consequences of displacement from Palestine. Indeed, the article continues to explain that
neither “the Zionist occupation” nor “the dispersal of the Palestinian Arab people do not make
them lose their Palestinian identity” or “their membership in the Palestinian community.”

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Article 5, however, moves beyond the general claim to an inheritable Palestinian identity
and specifies the meaning of that identity in two ways. According to the article, “Palestinians
are those Arab nationals who, until 1947, normally resided in Palestine regardless of whether
they were evicted from it or have stayed there.” This first meaning of Palestinian identity
presents an inclusive approach in which both women and men can be Palestinian if they
“normally resided in Palestine.” According to this definition, territory functions as the basis of
identity: Palestinians are both men and women who “normally” resided in Palestine. It is enough
that an individual resided in Palestine that she is identified with and by that territory.
The idea that “national” identity reflects the connection between residence and territory,
however, is all but a neutral construction. On the contrary, its inclusiveness of both women and
men stems from the reproductive capacity of the territory itself, which is decidedly gendered. In
his analysis of Palestinian national discourse, Joseph Massad noted the ways in which gender
functioned within a pre- and post-Zionist conception of national reproduction (Massad, 1995).
Prior to the partition of Palestine, the land itself provided the basis of identity. According to this
logic, the land itself was conceived as the literal mother-land and the Palestinians were seen as
her/its children. Faced with the wide scale depopulation of the land and Zionist conquest
(“rape”) of Palestine, however, a new concept of national reproduction emerged in which the
mother-land/Palestine no longer played its fundamental role. This shift was adequately reflected
in the second definition of identity expressed in Article 5, which proceeds to define a less
inclusive concept of Palestinian identity linked to patrilineal kinship. Thus the article stipulates
that “anyone born, after that date, of a Palestinian father, whether inside or outside [of
Palestine], is also a Palestinian.” According to Massad, the shift from a territorial (female) to a
patrilineal (male) basis for “identity” reflects the nationalist concern over the Zionist conquest of

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Palestine, which disqualified the mother-land from her historic role in national reproduction. As
Massad notes:
It is being born to a Palestinian father that now [post-1947] functions as the
prerequisite for Palestinianness, a father, it is important to note, whose very
Palestinianness is established through his residence in the motherland before the
“rape”…while the land as mother was responsible for the reproduction of
Palestinians until 1947, the rape disqualified her from this role. It is now fathers
who reproduce the nation. Territory was replaced by paternity (Massad 1995,
472).
Massad’s analysis is illuminating for it offers a telling example of the nationalist logic through
which Palestinians identify as refugees. For Palestinians in both refugee camps and the city,
identifying as a refugee is grounded in the ethno-nationalist logic of reproduction in which
residence in Palestine provides the basis of a Palestinian identity that is carried by both women
and men but only transmittable through men after the conquest of Palestine and displacement of
its people. A Palestinian claims to be a refugee in the same manner as he/she claims to be a
Palestinian: through paternity linked to territory. Women who were displaced are, like the
mother-land itself, disqualified from reproducing the nation of refugees if they do not produce
children with a Palestinian male’s contribution.
Throughout my discussions and interviews with Palestinians in camps and in the city,
their identification as refugees reflected a broad conceptualization of refugeeness as an
inheritance. They described themselves as refugees through their father’s Palestinian origins and
experiences of displacement from the homeland. It also reflected the inherited condition of
exile: a sense of being out of place characterized by a longing for return and the restoration of
Palestine. Perhaps no other example illustrates this better than my conversations with a
Palestinian family living in a middle-class area of Amman. Rather than claiming to be refugees,
this family was explicit about the fact that they were not, indeed could not be, refugees. During

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their interview, it was the way they disidentified with the refugee category that revealed how
displacement, as an experience and an inheritance, constituted conceptualizations of the
Palestinian “refugees.”
Michael:

Are you a refugee or displaced person (hal intūm lājia’a aw
nāziha)?
Um Mahdi: I can’t say that I am laji’a and I can’t say that I am nāziha.
Amina:
Because our father lived in Ramallah and most of our family is still
living there, we can’t say that we are refugees.
Abu Bassaam: Let’s say that my mother left Palestine to work in the Gulf. She
leaves Palestine and goes to work in Kuwait. She is not a refugee.
Amina:
Lāji’a means one left her country by force and becomes a refugee
(lāji’) in another country. This is the meaning of a refugee.
Um Mahdi: We are not considered lāji’ or nāzih. We left Palestine to work. I
left because my husband found work at the time. My husband
worked abroad so it’s different for us.
Michael:
So when did you leave?
Amina:
I left twice. The first time I left was in 1952. The second time was
in 1954.
The excerpt above comes from an interview conducted at the Mahdi family home in the
Khālda neighborhood of Amman. Originally from the West Bank, the Mahdis were descendants
of a well known Palestinian patrilineage linked to the great historian and former mayor of
Jerusalem. I met Um Mahdi during my tenure as an instructor of English and Islamic History at
a private school where I taught both of her sons, Mahdi and Zain. Despite their noble lineage, I
would describe the Mahdis as an essentially hard-working, middle-class family living in west
Amman through combined parental income. Much of their wealth came from Abu Mahdi’s
migration to Kuwait during the oil boom years. Like of thousands of Palestinians, he spent a
considerable time in the Gulf sending remittances back to Amman and Palestine until the 1991
Gulf War and expulsion of Palestinians from the Gulf and Kuwait in particular. Since then, the
Mahdis have worked in Amman providing their sons with an upper-level education and a
comfortable living.

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In the selection above, two particular features of the Mahdi’s response underscores the
significance of displacement for understanding the meaning of refugee identity. First, both Um
Mahdi and Amina explain that they could not claim to be refugees because they were not forced
to leave Palestine. According to Amina, “Because our father lived in Ramallah and most of our
family is still living there, we can’t say that we are refugees.” In this sense, it is the absence of
displacement in the family that prevents them from claiming to be refugees. Second, the Mahdi
family could not claim to be refugees because of their ongoing connection to Palestine through
both property and relatives. Later in the interview and from numerous conversations I had with
Um Mahdi and Zain, in particular, I learned that they regularly visited the West Bank. They
would often spend holidays or vacations with their relatives in Ramallah and Nablus. Traveling
to and from the West Bank provided them with a practical link to both the people and place of
Palestine. For them, refugees could have no such connections.
On the surface, the Mahdi’s reluctance to identify as a refugee seems obvious: they were
not displaced and therefore cannot claim to be refugees. Moreover, their ability to travel to
Palestine and remain connected didn’t allow them to speak of loss in the way that other
Palestinians could. Put another way, for the Palestinians who did identify as refugees,
displacement was inextricably linked to the loss of home and the inability to connect to that
which was lost. In this sense, it was the absence of displacement and loss in the Mahdi’s lives
that precluded their claim to refugeeness typical of other Palestinians in Jordan. While this
underscores the idea that, for Palestinians in Amman, identifying as a refugee must be grounded
in the direct experience or inherited condition of displacement, it also indicates that the
displacement constitutive of refugee identity must be of a particular kind. According to the
concept of displacement referenced by Palestinians who did claim to be refugees, economic

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migration did not count. This had important consequences for the Mahdi family who, like many
other Palestinians, were not directly displaced but nevertheless left their homeland in search of
economic opportunities unavailable in the Occupied West Bank. Their movement to Amman
was directly connected to the deteriorating circumstances in the West Bank. Furthermore, when
Amina left for Kuwait to teach, it was not simply the choice of an economic migrant; the Gulf
was a point of migration precisely because the Israeli occupation had successfully strangled the
economy in the West Bank. Migration, in this sense, was less the consequence of choice than of
necessity.
Despite the hardships created by over 40 years of Israeli military occupation in the West
Bank including home demolitions, restricted mobility, imprisonment and torture, colonization,
and the implications of these practices for the development of social, political, and economic life
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in Palestine , the Mahdi family did not consider occupation the cause of displacement. Relying
on the Nakba and Naksa as official markers of displacement, they thus did not explain their
existence in Jordan or, more specifically, their non-existence in Palestine, as the effect of
displacement. They were neither lāji’īn nor nāzihīn. Yet the realities of the occupation and its
relevance for their lives in Amman were an important subtext to their discussions. During my
conversations with Zain, for example, he regularly expressed the difficulty of life in Palestine.
He explained that Amman offered a safer and more practical place to complete an education.
Whenever he visited Nablus, for instance, he was always angered by the routine closures of
school and work. Zain also expressed frustration with the daily challenges his relatives faced
living under occupation including checkpoints and Israeli home invasions. Um Mahdi also
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According to the World Bank, in 2003, nearly one-half of the entire Palestinian population in
the West Bank and Gaza Strip lived below the poverty line. More than half a million
Palestinians (16% of the population) could not
afford the basic necessities of life (World Bank 2004).
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described the violence of the occupation as an obstacle to family life and the establishment of a
secure economic base. “In Amman,” she explained, “finding a job and building a home was a
much easier project.” Life in Palestine, in other words, was an insecure and untenable
experiment with too many risks.
One can easily understand how the violence and general insecurity of life in the West
Bank, like in many parts of the world, could compel a family to pack up their bags and leave for
a safer place. Indeed, forced displacement need not take place through the barrel of a gun;
migrants all over the world have fled their homelands under conditions of duress imposed by
internal and external forces (Brettell 2003; Mandel 2008; Hing 2010; Robert Smith 2005;
Vertovec and Robin Cohen 1999). Yet by excluding these experiences from the meaning of
displacement, the Mahdi family could not establish a claim to refugee identity. No matter how
difficult life was in the West Bank, their choice to live in Amman and connection to Palestine
made them anything but refugees. They were Palestinians in Jordan who “chose” an alternative
existence and maintained a material and symbolic link to Palestine.
Al-Mukhayyamāt and The City:
The preceding section focused on the ways in which Palestinians conceptualized and
claimed refugee identity. In the camps, Palestinians understood the meaning of displacement in
ways not unlike those of Palestinians in the city. That is, both Palestinians in the camps and city
claimed to be refugees if (1) they were directly displaced from Palestine during 1948 and/or
1967 or (2) they were the descendant of a male relative who was directly displaced during 1948
and/or 1967. Understood this way, refugee identity served as an “essential” commonality
through which Palestinians could assert a common experience (displacement) and claim (exile)
regardless of their official status as refugees defined by UNRWA. Moreover, displacement was

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conceived as an ongoing event or process beginning with the removal from Palestine and
persisting through time as a condition of being out of place. Return, in this sense, not only
represented the physical movement back to Palestine but also the termination of a condition of
exile through the restoration of the Palestinian people to their “original” place in Palestine. In
the following section, I extend my analysis to consider the relationship between the meaning of
refugee “identity” and the space of the refugee camps. Although the shared experiences of
displacement and exile established an important link between Palestinians across space and time,
I argue that the material and symbolic boundaries between the city and the camps nevertheless
had significant consequences for what it meant to be a refugee living in both spaces. As I will
show below, Palestinian refugees in the city held particular views about the camp and its
residents that enabled a moral discourse about the Palestinian people grounded in the experience
and meaning of life in the camps.
Palestinians in both the camps and the city claimed to be refugees. In this sense, the
common experience of and link to displacement provided the basis of an important identification
across space and time. But the commonality of a displacement and its relation to one’s
identification as a refugee did not necessarily mean that all refugees were the same. On the
contrary, the link between identity and place played an important role in the construction of
distinct ideas about “refugeeness” grounded in the meaning of particular places. Whether one
was a refugee of the camps or the city had significant implications for the kind of refugee a
Palestinian could be. In the following section, I consider three specific ideas about the
relationship between identity and place among city and camp refugees. These ideas, I argue,
suggest significant areas of convergence and divergence between Palestinian refugees’
understandings of place and the construction of community.

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First, both Palestinians in the camps and city described the camps as “refugee spaces.”
Notwithstanding the presence of refugees throughout the city, the camps were thus
conceptualized as the authentic “home of the refugees.” That is, although the city was equally
comprised of Palestinians who claimed to be refugees, the camps were nevertheless
distinguishable as unique sites of refugee life. For Palestinians in the city, the specific character
of the camps as refugee spaces also gave them a particular value in the Palestinian struggle:
camps were the symbols of displacement and, as such, the basis of an historical injustice and
right to return. In the camps, Palestinians gave no similar importance to the meaning of their
living space. For them, the Palestinian refugee issue could be disentangled from the camps and
understood through displacement itself regardless of its particular consequences. Finally, the
material conditions of poverty in the camps emerged as an important marker of difference.
Among Palestinians in the city and the camps, poverty played an important role in the
construction of “the camps” as distinct social spaces. There was, however, an important
difference. In the city, Palestinian refugees understood poverty as much more than material
conditions. Rather, they described poverty as a constitutive feature of a particular “refugee
subjectivity” distinct from that of the refugees of the city; a subjectivity manifest in the culture
and behaviors of the camp refugees. For Palestinians in the camps, on the other hand, poverty
represented the material borders of a space, not community. Poverty, in other words, was the
challenge of life in the camps but not the productive force behind a social being.
“The Home of the Refugees”:
Over 40 years old, Jordan’s refugee camps are no longer the exclusive abode of refugees.
Throughout the last ten years, numerous non-Palestinian non-refugees have taken up residence
within the camps. Following the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, for example, an

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untold number of displaced Iraqis have begun renting homes in Amman camps. Unable to afford
the steep costs of legal residency permits or the increasing prices of rent, these poorer Iraqis have
moved into the meager dwellings of the camps rented out by Palestinian refugees trying to
enhance their income. In addition, it is not uncommon to find Egyptian laborers living within the
camps. Sending remittances back home to their families in Egypt, these workers have moved
into the camps because of their low wages and, more importantly, to maximize their savings. In
this sense, living patterns within the camps reflect broader trends in the city. Indeed, Iraqis and
Egyptians live throughout Amman in both the poorest and wealthiest parts of town. Despite the
increasing heterogeneity of the camps and city, Palestinians in both locales described the camps
as exclusively Palestinian spaces. Speaking from the context of the Hāshmī Shamālī, for
example, Asad described the camps as the “home of the laji’īn and nāzihīn.” “The camps are the
homes,” he explained, “of both [the Nakba and Naksa] generations.” In my discussions with
Leila, another Palestinian born in an urban area of east Amman, she also described the camps as
“the home of the refugees.”
Asad and Leila’s conception of the camps as refugee “homes” were significant for
several reasons. First, Asad was born and raised within the Hāshmī, an area widely known for its
Palestinian population. Most of these Palestinians were originally refugees and/or their
descendants. Indeed, Asad identified himself as a refugee in virtue of his father’s connection to
Palestine and displacement from the homeland. Despite this fact, he saw the camps as
specifically refugee spaces. Leila also claimed to be a refugee. During our interviews, she
introduced me to her mother, who was displaced from Khalīl in 1967. According to her, they
were all refugees. Leila also knew of the widespread presence of refugees throughout Amman.
Like many Palestinians, she referred to the Kingdom as a country “built by the Palestinian

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refugees.” Moreover, as an UNRWA employee, she was well aware of the growing diversity
within some of the camps. She knew, for example, that not all Palestinians in the camps were
originally camp dwellers. Indeed, Leila understood that the camps provided a safety net for poor
Palestinian families who could not survive in the cities. Nonetheless, she too represented the
camps as exilic spaces and the exclusive home of the refugees.
Abu ‘Imran, a Palestinian from the Baqa’a camp, also described the camps as the “home
of those originally from Palestine.” “They are the ones who live in the camps and the camps are
the ‘inwān (address) of the refugees.” Elaborating on the space of the camps, Abu ‘Imran
described them in the following way:
The camp is the ‘inwān of the refugee. The camp is an address for those who are
tashrīd (displaced); it is the address of displacement, defeat, and qahr (conquest).
It is also the address of the oppression that was inflicted upon the Palestinian
people. We did not choose to live in the camps; it was forced upon us against our
will. The camp is where our circumstances forced us.
In this example, the link between displacement and the camps is clearly drawn. The camp,
according to Abu ‘Imran, is the place through which Palestinian displacement is rendered visible.
Forced upon the Palestinians, it represents the conquest of Palestine and the oppression of the
Palestinians.
The use of the word “home” in the examples above was not without its significance. In
Arabic, the words “bayt” and “dār” can be used to refer to the word “home” implying both its
physical and sentimental character. During my conversations with Palestinians, both words were
used to refer to the camps. The camps, in this sense, were not merely the residence of the
refugees but were more fundamentally their homes; they were the geophysical and emotional
space of refugee dwelling constitutive of life displaced. For example, Laith distinguished the
camps from the city as the “home for the expelled.” “The camps are the homes of those

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Palestinians who were kicked out [of Palestine] by Israel.” Yūsuf echoed his uncle’s sentiments
describing the camps as the “place where Palestinians fled.” “They fled Palestine and their
homes and now they live in the camps,” he explained. More importantly, many refugees
described the camps as spaces of longing and estrangement. Hassan, a Palestinian in Baqa’a,
captured this idea best when he referred to “the feeling of the ghurba (exile) in the camps.”
Although Palestinian refugees lived throughout Amman, Hassan and others felt that the camps
were the sites of a particular sense of longing: ghurba. The camps were the spaces of
estrangement and thus the home of the refugees and experience of exile.
Strangely, the city received no similar descriptions. Even in areas primarily populated by
Palestinians displaced during the Nakba and Naksa including the Hāshmī Shamālī, Jabal
Ashrafīyyah, Tabarbūr, and Zarqā’, space was less constituted by the exilic condition of its
inhabitants. Instead, these areas were known as “ethnic” spaces; they were “Palestinian
neighborhoods.” Hāfiz, for example, described his mintiqa (area) as primarily Palestinian. “The
majority of people living in Ashrafīyyah are Palestinians.” “Our neighbors, for example, are
Palestinian. They came [from Palestine] with our family and they stayed in the area ever since.”
Similarly, the Hāshmī was widely known as a Palestinian area populated by refugee families in
both 1948 and 1967. Nevertheless, Hāshmī residents did not describe their area as a refugee
space. Rather, residents conceptualized their neighborhood as ethnic Palestinian. Thus while
certain areas could be claimed as Palestinian space, they were not necessarily claimed as refugee
space. For this, the camps enjoyed an exclusive privilege.
“Without the Camps, the Refugee Issue Will Disappear”:
Whereas Palestinian refugees shared a particular view of the camps as authentic spaces of
exile and the “homes” of the refugees, their ideas differed when it came to the significance of

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those spaces in the broader national ethos. Although camps symbolized homogenous spaces
constituted by an idealized link between identity and place (refugee camps as the “home” of the
refugees), their importance for the question of Palestinian displacement was markedly different
for city and camp Palestinians. Throughout my discussions in the city, the authenticity of
“refugeeness” associated with the camps was also expressed through ideas about the importance
of the camps for the Palestinian national struggle and refugee question in particular. While
displacement was a widespread experience reflected in the presence of refugees throughout the
Kingdom, it was nevertheless the specific space of the camps that served as a symbol of
displacement and the need for the right of return. Refugees in the city thus regularly referred to
the camps’ unique importance for the Palestinian issue. Speaking from the context of the city,
for example, Asad offered the following words on the importance of the camps:
The camps have to be present because they are the essence of the refugee issue
and the experience of the “friends of the land” (the true owners of Palestine). The
camps remind the people that there is something called “Palestinian laji’īn and
nāzihīn” that are present in Jordan. The camps remind people that the refugees
must return to their country.
Asad went further to add that the refugee issue was currently under threat due to international
efforts to close the camps. “In Amman, they are currently trying to erase the camps.” “They are
trying,” he said, “but in a slight and unnoticeable way so that they can get rid of the refugees and
the friends of the land.” According to Asad, efforts by international governments to give
Palestinians an alternative citizenship were essentially aimed at removing the camps and the
refugees not as a solution to displacement (or realization of refugees’ rights), but as the erasure
of the Palestinian story. Resettlement was seen as the abolition of Palestinians’ right to return.
Asad’s comments draw an explicit link between the camps and the refugee issue.
Without the camps, he feared that the displacement of refugees from Palestine would be

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forgotten. Thus someone had to stay in the camps if only to preserve the rights and cause of the
refugees, including the return to Palestine. Similarly, Fāris, a Palestinian friend who lived in east
Amman, also explained that, without the camps, the refugee issue would be forgotten. Despite
his own self-identification as a refugee, he and his family said that the camps were of particular
value for the broader Palestinian issue. The disappearance of the camps, for them, was
tantamount to the erasure of the Palestinian refugees.
Within the camps, however, the connection between the camps and the refugee issue was
of considerably less relevance. Imād, for example, volunteered the following comments
regarding the importance of the camps for the Palestinian issue:
There are many refugees living outside of the camps. We, the Palestinians, didn’t
consider ourselves as “refugees” nor did we classify our situation as that of
“refugees” or “internally displaced peoples.” Some people have a yellow card,
which allows them to visit Palestine. Others have the green card, which means
they have Palestinian nationality but are temporary residents in Jordan. And then
there are people like me who don’t have either card. The truth is that there is no
difference between the refugees in the camps and city because we are all part of
92
an afflicted nation .
Imād’s comments are particularly important. First, he clearly rejects the official designation of a
“refugee” as an imposed category. Instead, he prefers a more inclusive sense of the term that
includes all displaced Palestinians within its meaning. Palestinian refugees thus live “outside of
the camps.” This conceptualization of refugee identity was reflected throughout the city as they
too claimed to be refugees regardless of their official status vis-à-vis UNRWA. Second, Imād
saw the camps as being no more or less important to the refugee issue than the city. For him, it
was not that refugees were forced into camps that mattered; rather, it was the overall “affliction”
suffered by Palestinians wherever they are that sustained the refugee issue. For Imād,

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Emphasis mine.
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displacement was the basic element in the claim to refugeeness, not whether an individual lived
in a camp as a result of his or her displacement.
Not unlike Imād, Abu ‘Imran gave no particular importance to the connection between
the refugees’ plight and the camps. According to Abu ‘Imran, “there is no difference between
the refugees living within the camps or within the city, they are all still refugees.” “They remain
refugees whether they are inside of the camp or outside.” “Their feelings for Palestine,” he
explained, “are similar and their situation is the same.” When asked if the dissolution of the
camps would signal the end of the refugee issue, Abu ‘Imran responded:
The refugees will leave the camps. They do leave the camps. But he will
nevertheless yahāfadh (guard) the meaning of the camp. That is, even if he leaves
the camp, he will remain the address of the refugee issue and will work so that he
can contribute to the takhfīf (alleviation) of the suffering of the children of the
camp.
In this case, Abu ‘Imran saw the refugee issue as deeply rooted in the being of the refugee: “he
will remain the address of the refugee issue.” Thus, while significant for their contribution to
Palestinian suffering, the camps are not necessarily linked to the status of refugee rights and
return; it is in virtue of displacement and its role in the making of refugees that the refugee issue
will remain. Rāshid, another Palestinian from the camp, explained that “even if the people inside
of the camps leave, we’d be tied to our issue.” “Through displacement we learned and feel that
our land is occupied and imprisoned.” Just as displacement formed the basis of identification for
refugees in the city and camps, displacement also provided the foundation of the Palestinian
refugee issue. The reality of the camps, according to this view, is circumstantial at best.
Poverty and the Camps: Refugees and Camp Refugees:

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Figure Four: Jarash Refugee Camp

93

As previously discussed, material conditions in the camp provide a visible marker of
difference between the city and the camp. Although certain areas of Amman reflect comparable
poverty to that of the camps both in terms of income levels and infrastructure, the
overrepresentation of such conditions in the camps establishes a commonality between them
unlike that of other areas of Amman. The camps, in other words, are characteristically poor.
The fact of material poverty and deprivation within the refugee camps was a subject of
considerable importance to Palestinians in the camps and the city. It served as a material
boundary between the two and thus facilitated particular ideas about the relationship between
identity and place. From the city, poverty provided a link between displacement and refugeeness
93

Photo taken by author.
124

that enabled a symbolic boundary drawn within the community of refugees in Jordan. According
to this boundary, to be in the camp was to be of the camp; it was to be a particular kind of
refugee constituted by the material conditions of that space. Within the camps, however,
refugeeness was understood as a generalized condition accessible to any displaced Palestinian or
his descendants, not by camp poverty. For camp refugees, poverty described the conditions
under which they lived in the camp. In other words, although poverty presented important
challenges to the establishment of a healthier and more comfortable life in the camps, it did not
produce any particular forms of social being.

Figure Five: Jarash Refugee Camp

94

Photo taken by author.
125

94

Poverty is a fairly ambiguous term encompassing a wide range of meanings. It can, for
example, refer exclusively to the income level of residents within a particular area or, more
broadly, to the quality of life experienced by individuals within a particular income group or
place. Symbolically, poverty can also be used to suggest particular kinds of people or moral
communities as expressed by the terms “working poor.” In the context of my research, the
concept of poverty that emerged concerned two conditions: material and social. Regarding the
first, poverty was used as an economic boundary linked to specific material conditions that
distinguished the camps from other areas of Amman. Thus one of the most common descriptions
of the camps was as a physical space of poverty. Camps were homogenous spaces of poverty
marked by general “difficulties” including comparatively low incomes, overcrowding,
undeveloped infrastructure and inadequate services. For example, in several responses to
questions concerning the difference between the city and the camps, Palestinian refugees
emphasized material difficulties as a common issue. “In the camps, everything is difficult,” one
respondent explained. “In this sense, all of the camps are similar. Life in all of the camps is
difficult.” Similarly, another respondent from the camps described camp life as circumscribed
by “problems” absent in the city. “The biggest problems in the camps are the poverty and severe
overcrowding. All of the camps are poor and crowded.” “There is no money and there is no
space to move,” the respondent explained. “This is not like life outside of the camps.” Another
respondent described the camps as places with a “similar style.” “They’re all poor and have a
similar style; that is, they look poor. They are also very crowded with narrow streets.”

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Figure Six: Baqa’a Refugee Camp

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Having visited camps throughout Jordan, the idea of a camp “style” is not altogether off
the mark. Refugee camps such as Al-Hussein and Irbid have a distinctive look given the broader
cities in which they are located. In both camps, for example, the streets are extremely narrow,
barely able to accommodate a single vehicle. Also, camps dwellings are mostly undivided; that
is, housing units are linked into blocks with nothing more than a wall dividing one home from
the next. Finally, throughout the camps, it’s not uncommon to find a small drain carved into the
streets through which waste water regularly flows. Such features do facilitate the impression of a
unique urban architecture that, despite some differences, indicates a common structural setting
or, in the words of the respondent above, “style.”
During formal and informal interviews with refugees from the camps and the city,
responses were often similar to those above albeit more precise. Laith, for example, described
the camps as spaces marked by poverty. “Poverty,” he said, “is the way of the camp.” “We have

95

Photo taken by author.
127

few opportunities and it is difficult to make enough money for your family.” “This,” he
explained, “is why we live together crowded in the home.” Yūsuf and Yūnus, also explained
how the camps suffered from poverty. “There are no opportunities in the camps,” they
explained, “and there are too many people living here.” Speaking about the camps from the
context of the city, Asad described the camps this way:
The camps face many problems that we don’t in the city. But the biggest
problems are the services. That is, the municipal services are insufficient in the
camps. Sanitary services, healthcare services, road services, traffic lights, etc.
The camps have a lot of shortcomings. Another problem in the camps is the
overcrowding. There is no space between the people and the housing. This is
something important because everyone [in the camp] knows something about his
neighbor. In the camps, this is a bad thing.
Describing the differences between the camps and the city, Imād offered the following
explanation:
There is a definite difference between the camps and city. The first difference is
the services. If we [in the camps] face a problem with the sewage, it takes the
people in charge a very long time to fix it and, most of the time, the camp people
fix it themselves. You do not see that problem in other parts of Amman.
During my discussions with the Imam mentioned above, he offered the following account:
The conditions of the camp are bad because it is crowded. If someone committed
a crime outside of the camp and wanted to evade the authorities or get away from
his relatives, he can come to the camp and rent a home for 40JD a month. Also,
there is the problem of Egyptians and Iraqis who live in the camp and, you know,
life for singles is different from the family life. There is also a group of people
we call the Nawar or “gypsies.” The men don’t’ work and stay at home. They
also gamble while the women work in the night-clubs or hotels. This group
gathers and lives in the camps.
But most of the people live in the camps with poverty and difficult financial
situations. Life in the camp is overcrowded and the schools are crowded too. The
houses are small and there is insufficient room for the children to play. This is
why you see children playing in the streets. The streets are dangerous for children
because a car can hit them.

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The excerpts above represent the ideas of Palestinian refugees from the city and the camp.
Common to all three accounts is the issue of poverty linked to overcrowding and insufficient
services. Asad, for example, highlights the problems of services and space. Although Asad lives
in the city, he works in the Wihdāt camp. He thus spends most of his time within the camp with
its residents. Speaking from the position of the city, Asad sees the poverty of the camp through
the prism of poor infrastructure, inadequate social services including healthcare and education,
and congestion. Overcrowding, in his view, restricts the privacy of neighbors and compromises
the social lives of camp inhabitants. For Imād, services provide the dividing line between the
city and camp. His comments suggest a particular critique of the discriminate practices of the
Jordanian government vis-à-vis the camps. In Jordan, the state government is responsible for the
infrastructure in the camps. In this sense, the camps should reflect structural equality with other
areas of the city. Despite this, Imād states that the camps are neglected spaces receiving
inadequate attention when problems emerge.
The Imam echoed Asad and Imād’s comments by highlighting economic difficulties and
overcrowding. In his view, however, the overcrowding has greater consequences for the camps
than social congestion or the lack of privacy. According to the Imam, the density of camp
populations provides a context for criminals to “escape” or evade the authorities and their
families. Overcrowding in the camp thus facilitates a general anonymity in which unruly
elements can situate themselves within the Palestinian context undetected. More importantly, the
Imam’s comments articulate a moral line between the “inside” and the “outside.” In his view,
poverty expressed by the low cost of living in the camps has allowed outsiders like “Egyptians”
and “Iraqis” to move into the camps and lead a life that contradicts their (Palestinians’) moral
fabric. As single men, he suggested, they bring habits and desires that run counter to the family-

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oriented context of Palestinian social life. In addition, the Imam links the presence of gambling,
prostitution, and lazy men to the “Nawār.” During several interviews in the camps, the Nawār
were mentioned in relation to the social problems of the camps. Although no individual was
ever identified as a member of the Nawār, they were regularly referenced in conversations
concerning the crime and vices in the camps. Like other camp Palestinians, the Imam did not
deny the existence of particular social problems in the camp linked to material conditions of
poverty. He did, however, externalize the causes of these issues by associating them with the
presence of “outsiders” on the “inside” whose behaviors were contributing to the social
deterioration of the camps.

Figure Seven: Home in Baqa’a Refugee Camp

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The Imam’s idea that poverty, as a material condition, played a role in the production of
poverty, as a social condition, was a source of significant tension between Palestinians in the city
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Photo taken by author.
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and the camps. Whereas the Imam saw the poverty of social life within the camps as a
manifestation of nefarious external elements, Palestinian refugees in the city represented a
radically different picture. For them, the material and social poverty of the camps were
inextricably bound; poor material conditions were constitutive of a poor social being visible in
behaviors and beliefs absent within the city. Camp refugees were thus socially inferior to those
of the city both in terms of their material and social existence. For example, one respondent
described the difference between city and camp refugees in the following way: “There is a
difference between refugees that live in the camps and those that live outside of the camps: they
have different behaviors.” Similarly, another respondent claimed that “The people who live in
the camps are the Palestinians who did not keep up with modernization and development.” Both
excerpts highlight a common idea of the “camp refugee” as a less industrious and ill-mannered
individual recognizable through his or her undeveloped social existence and inferior habits.
Asad, for example, shared the following assessment of the material poverty in the camps
and its social implications for their residents:
In the camps, the traditions and bad practices can spread easily among the
refugees. Smoking among children is a very big problem. Actually, it is
widespread in the camps. It may be difficult to control your children because they
walk around the neighborhoods with other people and are influenced [in negative
ways]. This causes problems in raising the camp children; it impacts their
manners and the future society.
Asad’s comments suggest two important points expressed by Palestinians throughout the city.
First, Asad draws an implicit connection between the overcrowding in the camps and the
vulnerabilities of people living within that context. With too many people living in one social
space, in other words, “traditions and bad practices can spread easily” including “smoking
among children.” Second, Asad is particularly concerned with the “manners” (akhlāq) of camp
Palestinians and what he calls the “future society.” The material condition of overcrowding and
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the vulnerabilities of camp Palestinians to bad practices, in his view, can compromise the moral
fabric of the future generations. Camp poverty, in this sense, not only impacts the contemporary
lives of refugees but also threatens the character of future generations condemned by the camp to
a life of inferior sociality.

Figure Eight: Men Walking in Wihdāt Refugee Camp

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Asad also believed that the material conditions of the camp constituted a social being
marked by limited aspirations. Expanding on the problems of the camps and its residents, Asad
explained that:
Also, the camp refugees’ aspirations are limited. Perhaps he can become the
driver of a servīs (fixed-route taxi) or a taxi driver. Outside of the camp,
aspirations are bigger than this and maybe the [city] refugee has greater iltizām
(commitment) to his religion. But the majority of the residents of the camp, a
large segment of them anyways, their takfīrhum (thoughts and ideas) are always
what? Simple.

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Photo taken by author.
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In this example, Asad sees material poverty as the productive force behind a refugee existence
stricken by limited aspirations and less religious commitment. Conspicuous in this excerpt is
how the idea of “limited aspirations” allows him to juxtapose the social life of refugees in the
city and the camp. According to Asad, the camp, as a material space, is linked to the production
of a social being distinguishable from the city. Refugees in the city are more committed to their
religion and have greater ideas about the limits and possibilities of life than camp refugees. In
this case, it is not that the economic depravity of the camps actually limits the possibilities in the
camp and thus its residents’ aspirations; rather, it is that the camp produces a social existence in
which its residents don’t envision opportunities that they could otherwise achieve.
The idea that material conditions in the camp produced a refugee with limited economic
horizons and unrefined manners was common among Palestinian refugees in the city.
Resembling conservative ideas in the U.S. about the “undeserving poor” (Gans 1996) who bear
responsibility for their own social and economic circumstances, some refugees saw the camps as
spaces of weak, inferior beings unwilling to take control of their lives. Um ‘Arif’s discussion is
illustrative in this regard. Once a camp resident herself, she acquired a job through a contact in
UNRWA and earned enough money to leave the camp and relocate to the city. Reflecting on the
camp during our interview, she described its conditions and people in the following way:
In the camps, there is an unemployed person and the unemployed person, God
only knows, may be uneducated or maybe he has lost his mind—he’s mentally ill.
So the factors that were in the camp originally—the revolutionary spirit, the
intellectualism, the ‘aqā’idīyyeh (creed)—is now gone because [the revolution]
came to an end. And in place of that generation came another generation that is
irresponsible and indifferent. It is now on the inhīrāf (those on the crooked
path)…there are crooked ways made available to them. So [the new refugee]
goes on to support himself [through these crooked ways] and he may attack or rob
people and even kidnap. And sometimes you’ll see them sniffing glue. This is
the crookedness present in the camps.

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Like many Palestinians, Um ‘Arif draws a generational line between jīl Al-Thawra (Palestinian
generation of the revolution) and those of today. Prior to the 1970s and expulsion of the PLO
from Jordan, Palestinian camps in Jordan were the nucleus of national activity and mobilization.
For example, camps like the now abandoned Karama were legendary and of great symbolic
importance to the Palestinian national movement and resistance. In Karama, the PLO was
widely believed to have defeated the Israeli military in a cross-border assault despite the
invaluable contribution of Jordanian forces. The battle of Karama thus became an essential
popular memory building both the morale within the PLO commandos and inspiring countless
others to join ranks. Similarly, during my initial visit to the Wihdāt camp, a Palestinian friend
described it in terms reflecting its historical importance in the revolutionary period of the 1960s
and 1970s. He nostalgically recalled the time when Palestinians controlled entry into the camps
and when the PLO governed its affairs. It was the peak of Palestinian power in Jordan and, more
importantly, a time when the camps were symbols of rebirth and resistance.
Today, as Um ‘Arif explained, a new generation has emerged lacking both the spirit and
‘aqā’idīyyeh of the revolutionary generation. This generation is recognizable in its
“irresponsibility” and “indifference.” Moreover, she believed it is given to criminal ways and
helps explain the “crookedness” in the camps. During our interview, for example, Um ‘Arif also
believed that life in the camps had a transformative effect for its inhabitants.
Insha’Allah I will take you to the camp and you can see the way that people are
living. There are many differences: socially, materially, intellectually, etc. The
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person in the camp is transformed by the conditions …and there are differences
in the lifestyle too. Everything, everything in the camp is different! The ones in
the camp remain in the camp; they remain within the same environment and with
the same thoughts and ideas.

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Emphasis mine.
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According to Um ‘Arif, the material conditions of the camp transformed the social being of the
refugees. As a space, it circumscribed the existence of its inhabitants and was generative of a
particular from of social existence. For example, Um ‘Arif explained how the overcrowding
within the camps impacted families and reflected the refugees’ unwillingness to “take their
situation by the reins.”
The environment is cramped and the population is large. He, the camp dweller,
yattlūq le nafsuh Al-‘Anān akthar (doesn’t take his situation by the reins). So he
is in the house among five others at the minimum but can live with as many as ten
or twelve others. Sometimes, it is the grandfather, the uncle, the aunt, all of them
in an area of 100 square meters. They live on top of each other! So this is the life
of the camp dweller; he doesn’t have anything except for his desire to live. He
wants to eat, that’s it! And of course, the house is cramped and they will penalize
the girls and the boys. Even if the boy is out late at night, he will be punished.
Everyone in the camp is afraid for the boy because of the poor manners [he may
acquire]. They are afraid for his security or they are afraid of [the effects of the
camp on] his personal characteristics. But here, outside of the camps, no one
notices these things. [In the city], everyone is happy with the benefits they have
and the way they shape their own lives. Those who get out of the camp, they
change. Even their culture, it changes.
In the preceding excerpt, Um ‘Arif described how the population density of the camp was also
experienced within the home. Camp homes, she explained, were crowded spaces with people
living “on top of each other.” This, she believed, was not because of the lack of economic
mobility within the camps. Rather, it was because of the refugees’ unwillingness to take charge
of their lives. The material fact of limited economic mobility and space, in other words,
confined camp refugees to a living situation within the home that reflected the camp dweller’s
failure to “take control over [his] situation.” Furthermore, like other Palestinians I interviewed
within the city, Um ‘Arif saw material conditions of poverty like limited living space as
productive of a negative social life. For example, too many people in the home brought specific
anxieties to its members that were visible within the treatment of boys. Boys, according to her,
had limited freedom within the camps. As a space of poor sociality, camp families feared that
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their sons would acquire the “bad habits and manners” of the camp population at large. In this
sense, Um ‘Arif saw camp families as lacking a certain kind of agency; they were unable to
shape their own children’s lives and thus worried about the transformative effects of the camp’s
conditions upon them.
Interestingly, the example above suggests an important ambiguity within Um ‘Arif’s
account that was also present within representations of the camp by other refugees from the city.
At times, it seemed that camp conditions were understood as having a determinate effect upon its
inhabitants. In the excerpt above, for example, refugee families feared the impact of a degenerate
moral situation within the camp itself. Thus camp families tried to protect their sons from
conditions that could transform them into negative social beings. Other times, however, it was
the camp dwellers themselves who bore responsibility for the troubles in the camp. If they “took
control” over the situation in the camp and their lives, then the conditions of the camp would be
different. As Um ‘Arif explained above, once the revolutionary spirit was gone, then the new
generation “went crooked.” Marked by indifference and irresponsibility, she suggested that the
social condition of the refugee helped explain the conditions within the camp. In this sense, it
was the refugee who produced the conditions and not the other way around.
Um ‘Arif’s account above is also important for what it says about the city. Emphasizing
the relationship between material and social conditions, she described the camp as an almost
imprisoning place. Materially, overcrowding within the camp and home had confined
Palestinian refugees to a limited living space and bounded experience of social being. The
absence of physical space or “crowding” within the camps constituted the lack of social space
necessary for the proper cultivation of the individual, family, and community. In social terms,
camp refugees were also limited by their own indifference and unwillingness to change. The

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camp refugee was, in this sense, imprisoned by his or her own lethargy or generational weakness,
which precluded her from achieving a more productive and dignified social life.
When describing the city, however, it was thus unsurprising to find a sense of freedom
associated with conditions defined in opposition to those of the camp. If the camp was a material
and social prison, then the city was an “open” place reflecting sufficient physical and social
space to cultivate one’s life. According to Yi-Fu Tuan, freedom often implies space; it means
having the power and enough room in which to act (Tuan et al. 2001, 52). Um ‘Arif’s account of
the city implied just such an association; she idealized the city as a physical and moral space of
liberation. Unlike the imprisoning situation of the camps, it provided refugees with the
opportunity to “shape their own lives.” In the city, refugees were thus free to take control of
their situations and “change.” Moreover, she believed that the city was productive of a different
kind of social existence. She therefore explained how the city afforded refugees a chance to shed
both the effects of camp life and ways of the camp refugees by not only changing their
circumstances but also their very “culture.”
The examples above illustrate the common idea among city refugees that the camp
represented a bounded space marked by unique forms of material and social poverty. Moreover,
they understood these conditions as constitutive of a particular kind of being or refugeeness
distinguishable from that of refugees in the city. For Palestinians in the camps, however, the
implications of material poverty for the constitution of social life and identity were perceived
differently. Although they too conceptualized the camps as distinct physical spaces, they did not
see its boundaries as a dividing line between two separate groups within the community of
refugees. The material difficulties of camp life notwithstanding, Palestinian refugees were all
the same. Abu ‘Imran, for example, was clear about the difficulties surrounding Palestinians in

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the camps. For him, these challenges distinguished the camps from the city. In terms of
education and income, he knew that life in the camps was generally harder for refugees.
Of course there are differences between the Palestinians in the camps and the city.
Like any people, we have different segments or layers. There are people whose
financial situation is very good and there are people who are poor. There are
educated people and there are those who are less educated. Generally, the camps
are the areas with the least bit of luck in all aspects of life. That is, their
educational situation is difficult, their social situation is difficult, and their
material situation is difficult, for all. Definitely, these are the differences.
When asked about the relevance of these differences for the community of refugees in the camps
and in the city, however, Abu ‘Imran saw no difference; all were refugees.
But there are no differences between the refugees if they live inside of the camp
or outside: he is still a refugee. He remains a refugee whether he is inside or
outside. For the refugees on the outside, life is a little better. Their situation is
better. In the camp, the living conditions are difficult.
Moreover, as refugees, it was the experience of displacement that made them equals. Material
challenges were only specific factors of camp life that could be overcome through faith and will.
Life is difficult in the camps but we have faith and can overcome the difficulty.
The human being doesn’t choose his destiny. You did not choose to be Cuban or
Algerian, this is your destiny. So we live with destiny and with the hopes that we
can overcome it. The camp, its conditions are difficult, but we can overcome it.
Abu ‘Imran was not alone in his assessment; many camp refugees saw their circumstances as
merely “challenges” or “difficulties” caused by the displacement from Palestine and the loss of
their livelihoods in the homeland. Unlike the perspective of refugees from the city, camp
poverty was the material reflection of displacement and constitutive of a life in exile. It did not,
in other words, reflect the “character” of camp refugees.
Not all camp refugees saw their situations in negative terms. During my interviews with
camp refugees, several Palestinians described the camp as a “normal” place just like any other.
Hānī, for example, grew up in the camps and had little to complain about.

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Life in the camps is normal; like it is for all people. Some people tell me to leave
the camp and to go and live outside [in the city]. I don’t approve though. I live in
the camp and I know all of the areas in the camp. I know everyone here. At night,
there is security.
Hānī’s experience was not unusual among the youth. For his generation, the camps were simply
their neighborhoods and homes where ordinary social life takes place. Whereas as the older
generations lived in the camps through more momentous periods such as the 1970s, Hānī’s
generation has experienced little in the way of national mobilization. Their experience of camp
life thus reflects the more mundane rhythms of life linked to education, economic need, and the
other habits of a modern, globalized existence. Moreover, Hānī’s comments indicate a common
tendency among the camp youth to idealize the refugee camps as spaces of important social
value. Aware of the stereotypes of camp refugees, Hānī rejected the claim that the city has
something more to offer and instead emphasized the positive aspects of camp life. The facts of
limited physical space and overcrowding, for example, were inverted in Hānī’s response to
suggest an important social value: familiarity. Whereas for city refugees these conditions were
understood as imposing features of camp life that constrained social existence, Hānī saw them as
enabling a state of familiarity between refugees in which everyone “knows everyone.” In
addition, the congested space of the camps was used to highlight the familiarization of physical
space; in the camps, all places are known. Like other camp refugees, the narrow streets and
close proximity of living quarters facilitated a degree of familiarity that, in their view, was
unique to the camps.
Like Hānī, Hassan also emphasized the positive features of camp life. Born and raised in
the Baqa’a camp, Hassan was in his early 30s and never lived in the city. When asked about the
differences between camp and city life, he too described the material disadvantages in the camps.
Both in terms of luxuries and services, the camp was distinct from the city.
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For sure there is a difference between life in the camps and in the city. There is a
social difference…a difference in the, like how you say, in comfort and rafāhīyah
(luxury) and the khaddammāt (services).
Like Hānī, however, he did not associate the camps with a negative social life. On the contrary,
he believed that the camps offered a unique social “closeness” superior to the “distance” between
people and places in the city.
Socially, however, there is a disconnection in the city. Here, [in the camp], if you
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ask someone about me at the bus station or ask where Fulan’s house is, the
people [in the camp] will guide you to his house. People know one another in the
camps. But there, outside of the camps, the people are on their own. It’s not like
this here. That is, here the rawaabitt (social connections) are stronger. For
example, go and ask about someone in the most obscure part of the camp and
anyone will know about him and guide you there. They will give you a biography
of his life and tell you anything you want to know about him. The people in the
camps are familiar with one another.
In both Hānī and Hassan’s accounts, material conditions within the camp enabled positive social
forms. They, like many other camp refugees, did not believe that the difficulties of camp life
were enough to produce a group of refugees distinguishable from that of the city. Material
poverty, in other words, did not necessarily contribute to the formation of social poverty
represented by refugees living outside of the camps. More importantly, where camp refugees did
perceive a difference, it was represented through positive ideas about camp society. Hānī and
Hassan thus converted the negative features of physical overcrowding into a beneficial condition
of familiarity and closeness, if only as a counter-discourse. According to this idea, the difference
between the camps and the city was evident in the perceived relationship between physical space
and social being: intimacy vs. distance.
The discussion above reflects numerous interviews with Palestinian refugees throughout
the camps and the city. Interviews, however, were not the only opportunities to access the
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The name “Fulan” is used by Arabic speakers to refer to any “random” person. It is the
English equivalent of “Joe” in the U.S. context.
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complex construction of identity and place between refugees. In the final section of this chapter,
I turn to an ethnographic example that underscores the relationship between camp and city
refugees in a unique setting: marriage. Observed during the initial weeks of my fieldwork, it was
a case I repeatedly considered in light of subsequent experiences and discussions with
Palestinians in both contexts. In some sense, it became a framing event whose implications
became clearer only after meeting and interviewing Palestinian refugees about the meanings of
camps and the city in the formation of the community of refugees.
Marrying the Camp, Divorcing the Camp:
The significance of the refugee camps for the Palestinian community in Amman became
apparent early on in my research. Only days after settling into our apartment on the eastern side
of the city, my wife and I were invited by our close friend Fāris to join in his wedding
celebration with a local Palestinian woman from the Hussein camp

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. Introduced through a

mutual friend in 2005, Fāris was my first contact in Jordan. He initially helped me in my search
for an apartment during my Arabic studies at the University of Jordan. Ultimately, however, he
invited me to stay with him and his family for the full length of my program. During this period,
he and I developed a close friendship spending countless hours in his small shop on the central
strip in the HāshmīShamālī. When I returned to Jordan in 2006, Fāris offered his support a
second time helping me find a spacious apartment just two blocks from his own home. At the
time, I was delighted to live close to my friend and thrilled by the opportunity to celebrate his
marriage. Having arrived in Jordan just a few days earlier, the wedding seemed like a good
chance to loosen up and, more importantly, integrate into our new community in the Hāshmī. As
I later discovered, the wedding was all but a simple affair; the union ultimately failed for various

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I have changed the names of the people and camp to protect the identity of each participant.
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reasons that were explained in terms of the differences between Palestinians of the city and the
camps.
The following narrative is a composite of ethnographic fieldnotes reflecting key events in
the period preceding and following the wedding experience

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. As intimate friends of Fāris and

his family, I was able to participate in and observe important aspects of the marriage that
revealed common themes that were used by city refugees to distinguish themselves from
refugees from the camp. I will then proceed to offer a critical analysis of the events highlighting
their significance for the cultural construction of the place and identity.
I was excited by the news: Fāris was getting married. Just a few months ago, he
was an eligible bachelor seeking a suitable partner. Today, he’s engaged to be
married. Her name is Hoda. She’s a Palestinian from Al-Hussein, an official
refugee camp located in east Amman. According to Faaris, they met in the local
internet café in the Hāshmī. As a camp refugee, Fāris told us, Hoda made him
feel more Palestinian. She was “closer” to the issue, he said, and her family was
full of stories from the homeland. This excited Faaris who felt their marriage
would benefit his own sentiments as a Palestinian.
Things were moving fast and Fāris wanted us to meet Hoda as soon as possible.
He asked us to join him for a visit to the camp. Her brother, Hātim, was also
getting married and invited Fāris and his family to join them for the wedding
celebration. Fatima (my wife) and I were delighted by the opportunity to visit the
camp and meet Fāris’s prospective spouse. We agreed to join them for the party.
The weather couldn’t have been worse; Amman’s streets were flooded as the rain
poured down relentlessly. Fāris, accompanied by two of his brothers, his mom,
Fatima and I, all packed into a rental car and headed down the circuitous streets of
east Amman into the Hussein camp. The area was conspicuously different from
the Hāshmī. The houses were visibly poor; zinc roofs held by stones and debris
were common. The streets were narrow and the UN flag decorated several
buildings. Given the rain, the streets were empty. When we finally arrived, Fāris,
his brothers, and I were escorted into a large tent covering dozens of empty chairs
and two large speakers blasting Arabic music. Like the streets, the tent was also
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I have adapted these excerpts to fit the style and purpose of this section. Stylistically, I aim
to provide a more readable representation of my notes that avoids the ruptured structure of
thoughts and ideas written down in the field. In terms of my purpose, the adaptation aims to
provide an introduction and chronological order of the wedding events that offer a partial yet
“thick” description of what took place.
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empty. Set up to seat at least 50 men, just a few close friends showed up for
Hātim’s wedding. Fatima and Fāris’s mom were taken to Hoda’s home. There,
the women celebrated with music and henna.
After an hour of introductions and casual conversation in the tent, Hātim invited
us to join him at his home. Like the camp exterior, his home bore signs of
poverty. The rooms were small and tightly packed into a tiny apartment. It was
cold in the dwelling, which was heated by a small gas heater. The bathroom was
separated from the kitchen by a long burgundy curtain. Hātim was friendly and
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his family was very courteous. They cooked a “Palestinian” mensef
for the
guests. We sat for hours chatting about the U.S., Islam, and other worldly topics.
Hātim was fluent in English—more so than Fāris—and was quick to ask for
assistance getting a job in the U.S. He hoped I could help.
Today Fāris invited us for another pre-wedding social event. This time, however,
things were going to be a bit more intimate. He planned to travel south to the port
city of ‘Aqaba on the Red Sea with Hoda, her parents, and her sister. The trip was
meant to provide the couple with another opportunity to get to know each other
better within a more personal setting. Fatima and I agreed to join them; ‘Aqaba
was too attractive a destination to turn down. We met early in the morning in the
‘Abdalī station. Hoda was traveling with her sister, mother, and father. Fāris
traveled with us; none of his family joined him for the excursion. Māher, Fāris’s
friend and mediator between the two families, was supposed to meet us once we
arrived in ‘Aqaba.
The trip was plagued by complexities. The first problem was financial. Fāris
worked long hours to earn a modest income. He couldn’t afford the costs of a
hotel and thus rented tents along the shoreline of the Red Sea. It might have been
a romantic setting if the winds weren’t blowing so harshly. It was also cold and
cloudy; unusual for the hot, humid, and sunny weather in ‘Aqaba. There were
other issues. Fāris was troubled by several things concerning Hoda and her
family. He seemed to hold reservations about her father’s alleged mental illness.
No one, he told us, has been forthcoming about the fact that her father suffers
from something psychological.
Things started to fall apart after we returned to the Hāshmī. A controversy
emerged that forced a temporary but dramatic split between Fāris and his family.
Rumors were circulating that Hoda was too close to her brother-in-law. There
were questions about infidelity. Fāris initially defended his fiancé and left his
home when his mother and brothers suggested that Hoda was guilty of improper
behavior with her sister’s husband. We joined him in his shop the night he left
home. There was a dust storm that evening and the streets were empty and eerie;
blowing under the orange glow of the street lights, the dust appeared to have a life
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Mensef is a typical dish in Jordan prepared with rice, large chunks of lamb or chicken, and a
delicious yoghurt sauce.
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of its own blanketing the cars, streets, and buildings. We stayed with Fāris all
night until the fajr prayer at sunrise. He was torn by the division between Hoda
and his family. He said he had never disagreed with his mother before nor had he
received such little support from his brothers. They warned him of Hoda’s
behavior and wanted to call the whole thing off.
Fāris finally returned home today. Fatima and I were not surprised by his
decision but we didn’t expect what followed. Siding with his family, Fāris called
the wedding off. In the evening, he invited us over to join him, his family, and
Māher for a discussion. We agreed and met them shortly after the ‘isha prayer.
Fāris terminated the marriage. Originally torn between his family’s claims about
his fiancés’ transgressions and Hoda’s denials, things were apparently resolved.
The previous night, he told us, he had a dream. In the dream, a serpent slid up his
leg and bit him. According to Fāris, the serpent symbolized Hoda and the bite
represented her betrayal. “She can’t be trusted,” he said. For Fāris, the dream
was more than a dream; it was a vision. It revealed the truth of the situation. We
were stunned by the dream and its timing. I thought it was slightly disingenuous
but also felt that I was underestimating the power of dreams to explain and/or
guide an individual’s experiences. Fāris was an honest guy known for his
integrity and sincerity. Nonetheless, the wedding was off and Fāris was back with
his family. He was sorry for abandoning them and admitted being wrong. Māher
tried to work things out with Fāris. Without discounting the significance of the
dream, he attempted to find an amicable solution to the problem that avoided a
breakup. I could only imagine what this would mean for Hoda’s reputation. The
story was bound to be retold and I expect that many will see the break-up as her
fault; her social capital as a future spouse would surely diminish.
Tonight, as most nights, we spent hours drinking tea, playing chess, and
conversing with Fāris and his family. The subject of conversation, however, was
the break-up. In a remarkable shift of perspective, Fāris now blamed Hoda’s
behavior on her camp background. Whereas being a camp refugee was once a
good thing (good for his identity and connection to Palestine), Hoda’s camp
upbringing was now the root of her problems. Fāris’s mother, for example,
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recalled how Hoda’s mother wore bathroom slippers around the house . This,
she explained, revealed that they were a filthy family with poor hygiene. “Hoda
is a camp girl,” she said to Fāris. “Do you remember her brother’s wedding,” she
added. “Hoda’s mother was loud and brutish.” To Fāris’s mother, this behavior
was unbecoming of a woman and indicative of her camp origins. They are less
educated and poorly mannered. “The camp is a rowdy environment in which to
develop one’s manners,” she said. Fāris also described her as a bint min-almukhayyam (camp girl). Like his mother, he said that her dirty home in the camp
was a sign of their unrefined habits. She and her family’s behaviors, he
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In Jordan, many homes set aside a specific set of slippers for the bathroom. These are not
used in the house except for the bathroom, which is usually what Americans refer to as a “squat
and plop.”
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explained, were not like those of the refugees in the city. Whether he was being
sincere or not, I couldn’t help but notice that her camp background was being
used to explain everything. Tonight, it seemed, all things were clear. “Of course
the marriage didn’t work, she’s from the camp.” “Of course her habits are bad,
she’s from the camp.” “And of course you can’t trust her word, she’s from the
camp.” A sad ending indeed.
The wedding process was a short but intimate experience packed with romance,
controversy, and disappointment. Dissolved shortly after it began, it was a sincere attempt to
bring two individuals and their families together despite several cultural obstacles. In the
excerpts above, I have tried to render some of these cultural complications visible. Although
reflecting a limited composite of my fieldnotes and perhaps an even more limited account of all
that occurred, two particular aspects of the experience narrated above stand out for their
relevance to the question of the city and the camp. The first outstanding point concerns Fāris’s
original feelings about Hoda’s camp status. When Fāris told me that Hoda was from the camp,
he described it as a positive feature, at least insofar as it would enhance his own sense of being
Palestinian. Of course, having lived with Fāris and his family for several months, I was aware
that he had some negative opinions about Palestinians from the camp. On several occasions, for
example, Fāris and his family cautioned me about visiting the camps and engaging its residents.
During discussions about my research agenda, they warned me: “Dīr balak fīl mukhayyamāt
Michael” (Be careful in the camps Michael). According to them, the camps were shady places in
which criminals and violent youth lived. They spoke of the camp shabāb as unruly elements.
“They carry knives and will kill if they have to.”
Notwithstanding his stereotypical views of the camp and its people, when Fāris declared
his interest in Hoda and mentioned her status as a bint min Al-Mukhayyam (camp girl), there was
a clear sense of sincere appreciation. Throughout the summer of 2005, Fāris and I spent
countless nights playing chess and video games, driking tea, and watching scenes from Palestine
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on Al-Jazīra while discussing the fate of the Palestinians. Proud of his Palestinian roots and
people, his attention to Palestine was described as a “national duty;” their situation was his
situation and he owed it to them to remember their struggle. Moreover, Fāris was particularly
fond of Hamas and its “martyred” leadership. He often mentioned the day he met Hamas’
spiritual leader, Sheikh Amhed Yāsīn, in Amman. Yāsīn was in the city for medical treatment at
the Islamic hospital run by the Ikhwān Al-Muslimīn (Muslim Brethren or Brotherhood). Through
his ties to local Palestinian Muslims in the Hāshmī, Fāris traveled to the hospital to meet and
offer his respect to the popular leader. This was an important moment for Fāris who deeply
admired Yāsīn’s religiosity and Hamas’ willingness to resist Israeli occupation and die for the
liberation of Palestine. It was an important connection.
The chance to marry Hoda, Fāris believed, provided him with a way to establish a clearer
link to the Palestinian issue and experience since her origins in the camp spoke more forcefully
to the reality of Palestinian displacement in Jordan. Like other Palestinians, Fāris saw the camps
as the homes of the refugees and thus the “authentic spaces of exile.” Although critical of the
camps’ people, Fāris also shared the romantic idea that the refugee camps held a special place in
the Palestinian ethos. In symbolic terms, the camps were fragments of a Palestine lost and a
people waiting to return to their proper place. He believed that the disappearance of the camps
could only occur with the simultaneous reappearance of Palestine as it was in 1948. Marrying
Hoda, Fāris explained, offered him and his future children a more intimate connection to the
homeland. In his view, Hoda’s camp life constituted her existence as a unique being whose
knowledge and experience were more profoundly Palestinian than his. Despite the fact that both
Fāris and Hoda’s parents were born and, until their displacement, raised in Palestine, Fāris
believed that Hoda and her family could share an authenticity unavailable in the city. Living in a

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“refugee space,” in other words, Fāris believed that Hoda was shaped by displacement in ways
that he wasn’t. Like Hoda, he was a refugee, but unlike Hoda, he didn’t live the displacement in
the space of exile: the camp.
The second aspect of the wedding narrated above concerns the shift in Fāris’s feelings
about his fiancés’ background. Given the dual nature of the camps for city refugees like Fāris,
although marrying Hoda could be a source of great cultural pride, it was not without its dangers.
That is, despite Fāris’s initial excitement over his fiancé’s camp status, he could not avoid the
fact that the camps were dangerous spaces productive of “ill-mannered” and “unruly people.”
The force of this duality became clear during Fāris’s brief but significant quarrel with his family
over Hoda’s reputation. When rumors first emerged about Hoda’s relationship with her brotherin-law, Fāris defended his fiancé. Although troubled by the claims, he nevertheless stood up to
his own family in support of his and her honor believing that he selected a woman worthy of
trust and that her word was as trustworthy as his. Yet Fāris eventually broke down. Shortly after
the rumors began, he could no longer sustain his defense and Hoda’s camp status provided a
“reasonable” explanation for why. Returning to his family and asserting the validity of their
claims against Hoda, Fāris argued that a “camp girl” could not be trusted.
Coming to terms with the inescapable fact of “the camp” in his choice of a partner, he
believed Hoda was capable of improper relations and, more importantly, that she would lie to
cover it up. As he explained to his family, Māher, and I, his dream clarified the matter. Coming
between him and his family, Hoda was a serpent and her words were her venom. Only through
her poison could he turn against his family and only from the camp could this serpent emerge.
The dream, as it was told, revealed the truth about Hoda and the deceit of her ways. Reflecting
on the wedding experience in a new narrative form, Fāris and his family claimed that “the

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campness” was always there. It was visible in the filth of her home and her mother’s manners.
She was loud and uncalm, which were perceived as “typical” habits of camp dwellers. Later, the
camp emerged in the vague condition and speculations surrounding her father’s mental state He
was ill, they believed, but hiding it; they were all hiding it. Finally, Hoda’s “campness”
explained the potential of her improper conduct and untrustworthy words. Without the same
manners of refugees in the city, Hoda certainly could have behaved inappropriately with her
brother-in-law and was certainly capable of lying about it. Faced with such possibilities, Fāris
knew the marriage could not go on and that he had stepped beyond the security of the city.
Thus from the start, the marriage carried the seeds of a shaky cultural ambivalence. On
one hand, Hoda’s camp status was a source of authenticity and pride. Born and raised in the
camp, she represented the pure and authentic product of displacement and offered a city-born
refugee such as Fāris the opportunity to partake in that important cultural status. On the other
hand, Hoda’s camp status was also a source of danger and impurity (Malkki 1995). As became
evident in the final days of Fāris and Hoda’s potential union, her camp origins represented a
dangerous and threatening quality capable of contaminating the relationship.
Conclusion:
This chapter has focused on the local context of Amman emphasizing intra-Palestinian
identifications in the refugee camps and the city. Critically examining the meaning of
Palestinian identifications as “refugees,” I showed how the meaning of displacement and exile
constituted a fundamental commonality through which Palestinians could assert an identity as
“refugees.” The identification “refugee” was thus made by Palestinians in both the camps and
the urban areas of the city (non-camp neighborhoods). But the fact that Palestinians identified as
refugees was not as important as how they did it. To some extent, the term “refugee” reflected a

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well-established external identification (Brubaker and Cooper 2000, 15) crafted by UNRWA for
the purpose of addressing Palestinian displacement. As a formalized and institutionalized
category of practice used to facilitate the identification of Palestinians as refugees and
administration of services, Palestinians’ identification as “refugees” merely suggested the
significance of this category in their lived experience. Identifying as a refugee, in other words,
was a consequence of living that ascribed status within the institutional context of UNRWA
refugee camps and services.
But the use of this category among non-camp Palestinians and its meaning for those who
claimed it in both camp and city settings also showed that identifying as a refugee was about
much more than the external identification created by UNRWA. Rather, from the analysis above
we see how Palestinians put this category to use in ways that not only defied its institutionalized
settings—by claiming it beyond the institutional context of UNRWA—but also enabled a
particular stance as Palestinians. By identifying as refugees, Palestinians were sustaining a
critical sense of commonality that, on one hand, located all Palestinians within a common
narrative of displacement that tied them to Palestine and, on the other hand, created a key sense
of “difference” through which Palestinians could disidentify as “Jordanian.” In this sense,
Palestinians’ self-categorization as “refugees” in Jordan functioned within a larger claim to a
distinct Palestinian ethno-national status. As Brubaker et al. noted in their work on ethnicity in
Transylvania, ethnic categories are not always unambiguous: they can work through language,
race, and a multitude of other presumed attributes or experiences (Brubaker et al. 2008, 231).
Grounded in the “shared” experience of displacement and “being out of place,” refugeeness can
thus be seen as one category operative within a broader constellation of categories that together
formed the meaning of “Palestinian” ethno-national identity in Jordan.

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Yet the commonality claimed by Palestinians as “refugees” was complicated by the
cultural meanings assigned to that category in particular places. Although Palestinians idenfitied
as refugees in both the city and camps, Palestinians in the city nevertheless enacted a discourse
of difference in which one’s location within the camp marked her as a unique social person.
According to city refugees, camp refugees were a different category of people constituted within
the poor social and economic conditions of camp life. From the camps, however, Palestinian
refugees spoke in unsimilar terms. For them, camp conditions did not draw the same moral line
between “Palestinians;” all were thus equally refugees suffering from the general conditions of
displacement. Despite the camps’ poor conditions, in other words, refugees were all the same.
The disjuncture in the meaning of “refugee” (as a refugee from the camp vs. as a refugee
from the city) highlights the instability of group categories and how seemingly common
identifications do not necessarily result in “identities.” On the surface, the common
identification among Palestinians as refugees suggested a strong sense of “groupness” grounded
in some shared experience of displacement and its social consequences. But within the context
of the city and the camp, that identification had distinct meanings. The idea that Palestinians
were a “group” formed through their common refugee “identity,” in other words, became highly
problematic when seen from the perspective of thos who claimed it in particular places. In this
case, social and economic mobility played an important role in establishing boundaries between
Palestinians that made the very claim to a common identity difficult.
In the following chapters of this dissertation, I will expand my analysis to consider two
areas of Palestinian identification. The next two chapters will examine the meaning of
Palestinian identification within the national context of Jordan. Focusing on the role of
Transjordanian nationalist discourse and state policies in the production of a political field, I will

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show how Palestinian refugees articulated their ethno-national identifications in ways that reflect
two statuses: their status as refugee-citizens of Jordan and their status as members of the putative
Palestinian nation in exile. In the following two chapters, I will look at Palestinian ethnonational identifications vis-à-vis homeland representations. Located at the nexus of the local
Jordanian national context and the homeland politics of the Palestinian territories, I argue that the
meaning of Palestine as an “Islamic” space reveals two particular issues. First, the meaning of
the homeland shows how Palestinians engage with the homeland politics of Hamas, in particular,
and articulate claims of belonging and rights via religious national discourse. Second, I show
how symbolic representations of the homeland are “nationalizing” practices sensitive to and
constituted within the local national context of Jordan. Through the homeland, Palestinians can
be national in everyday life without being nationalist.

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Chapter Four:
Nationalizing States: Transjordanians, the State, and the Palestinians
What is at stake here is the power of imposing a vision of the social world through principles of
di-vision which, when they are imposed on a whole group, establish meaning and a unity of the
group, which creates the reality of the unity and the identity of the group.
Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power

This dissertation focuses on the ways in which Palestinian refugees articulate ethnic, religious,
and national identifications within the context of everyday life in Jordan. Central for
understanding what constitutes the “everyday” is the local social-political context of Jordan; that
is, Palestinian identifications of themselves and “Others” reflect key aspects of their location, or
subject position, within the field of Jordanian nationalism and state practice. In the next two
chapters, I focus on the ways in which Palestinian identifications as refugee-citizens underscore
their engagement within a field constituted by Transjordanian nationalism and the discriminatory
practices of the Hashemite-Jordanian state. This chapter outlines the history and key claims of
Transjordanian nationalists regarding Palestinian refugee-citizens. In addition, I also show how
particular forms of discrimination by the state have facilitated a process of “dePalestinianization.” For Palestinians, the exclusionary discourse of Transjordanian nationalists,
who believe Palestinians do not “belong” to Jordan as “nationals,” and the social and political
barriers erected by the Hashemite state, which reflect a “Jordan first” policy grounded in the
1970 Civil War, have reinforced the idea that one cannot be both “Jordanian” and “Palestinian;”
the two categories function as mutually exclusive “identities” of two distinct ethno-national
groups. This division permeates Palestinian identifications, which both legitimize and resist the
binary through assertions of ethnic commonality and national difference.
Introduction:

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During fieldwork, what might otherwise be a mundane or routine experience can often
offer critical insights into important issues long before the ethnographer is aware of them. In my
case, living in Jordan for two years afforded me numerous opportunities to see (and probably
miss) the significance of the ordinary. Through “informal” research experiences including daily
interaction with Palestinian refugees and Jordanians on the streets, in coffee shops and
restaurants, and in professional settings, I gained a profound appreciation for the importance of
the unexpected. Indeed, my experiences in Jordan taught me early on that what counts for the
ethnographic is often what happens long before the pen hits the page or the tape recorder begins
recording. For my purposes in this chapter, consider the following ethnographic example.
It was a warm summer day and my wife and I were scheduled for an introductory
meeting at one of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency’s (UNRWA) vocational schools
located in North West Amman. The meeting was arranged by Rānīā, a Palestinian administrator
at the institute and friend who wanted to facilitate my research contacts. Intrigued by my
research project, she believed the vocational center offered an important opportunity to meet
with young Palestinians who were preparing for the workforce. With its mostly Palestinian staff,
she also believed the center provided a chance to meet with some of the older, more educated
Palestinians working for UNRWA. When we arrived, the gate immediately opened and a staff
member escorted us directly to the chief administrator’s office. Unsurprisingly, the center was
not unlike other UNRWA facilities: a walled-in compound consisting of a series of short
concrete buildings painted white and blue. At the compound’s center, however, was something
unique: a large courtyard surrounded by several trees half-dressed in white paint. Offering shade
and the aesthetics of a small garden, the courtyard provided students with a cool and relaxing
place to congregate.

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After a brief wait in the lobby, the director welcomed us into his office. Introducing
himself as “Dr. Ahmed,” he offered us a customary cup of coffee and asked us to take a seat.
For the next few minutes, we ran through formal introductions. It was clear that Dr. Ahmed was
an educated man. Like most UNRWA administrators, he spoke fluent English and told us that he
completed his university education in the United States. Speaking carefully but confidently, Dr.
Ahmed then told us that he too was a Palestinian refugee and thus felt a personal interest in my
research. I then handed him a list of sample questions from my research questionnaire.
Glancing over the questions, he assured me that I was welcome at the center and that he would
do all he could to facilitate my research. At that point, Rānīā began to summarize my research
goals in her own words. She explained to Dr. Ahmed that I wanted to meet as many refugees as
possible and that I was interested in the question of Palestinian identity in Jordan. Then, Dr.
Ahmed looked up with a curious smile. “Of course,” he said. “This is an important issue for us
in Jordan. But we must remember, Jordan First (Al-Urdun Awalan).” Grinning, Dr. Ahmed
repeated himself, “Jordan First,” while Rānīā chuckled.

Figure Nine: “Jordan First” Ad

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From www.mahjoob.com
154

104

Initially, the comment seemed like an innocuous joke. I knew, for example, that “Jordan
105

First” was the official slogan for a national campaign launched by King ‘Abdullah II in 2002

.

I also knew that, although the campaign’s primary purpose was to promote economic
liberalization and democratization, it also set out to redefine the Kingdom’s regional role by
establishing an agenda that placed national needs above regional and international interests
(Ryan 2004). But even if I wasn’t familiar with the campaign’s policies, I would have at least
known that Jordan First was a popular national slogan. Throughout the city, there was no
shortage of Jordan First’s conspicuous artifacts: campaign posters decorated street signs, lamp
posts, billboards, and even taxi cabs. Indeed, by the time I arrived in Jordan in 2006, the Jordan
First campaign had achieved a physical presence in Amman second only to the King’s ubiquitous
portraits. It had become an inescapable idea whose symbolic representations were effectively
imposed upon the Jordanian urban landscape. After hearing the joke, I therefore concluded that
Dr. Ahmed’s reference must have been nothing more than a local commentary on the ubiquity of
the Jordan First campaign.
It wasn’t until months later that I realized the significance of Dr. Ahmed’s comment.
Innumerable encounters with Palestinians in a variety of formal and informal settings taught me
that Dr. Ahmed’s joke wasn’t unique. On the contrary, I learned that Palestinians referred to the
Jordan First campaign quite often, and not just when answering my research questions. I should
say that my realization did not mean that Dr. Ahmed’s reference gained any new particular
meaning. My initial interpretation was correct: Dr. Ahmed was merely joking about the national
slogan. Jordan First was everywhere and thus easy to joke about. But his comment did show me
105

For a discussion of the Jordan First campaign see Jordan First? Internal Politics and the
Approaching Iraq War by Rami G. Khoury
(http://www.brookings.edu/fp/saban/events/khouri.pdf) and “Jordan First”: Jordan’s Inter-Arab
Relations and Foreign Policy Under King Abdullah II by Curtis Ryan (2004).
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that the campaign achieved much more than its successful integration into the physical
landscape; it had become part of the social landscape as well. Jordan First was too conspicuous
to ignore and, for Palestinians in particular, joking about it was a meaningful way of expressing a
very political idea in daily social discourse. According to Dr. Ahmed and other Palestinians,
Jordan First meant that Palestine and the Palestinians were second. It was understood as a
national slogan that underscored their subordinate status vis-à-vis “Jordanians.” Moreover,
Jordan First confirmed that the Jordanian state did not have “Palestinian” interests at the
forefront of its policies. The campaign, in other words, meant that the state was firmly behind
the “national” interest. And, in the eyes of many Palestinians, the “national” interest did not
include “Palestinian” interests.
The anecdote discussed above provides a simple but appropriate introduction to this
chapter. First of all, it presents compelling evidence for the significance of the mundane. As Dr.
Ahmed’s comment illustrated above, the most common features of daily life can often provide
clues about much larger ethnographic issues. When considering the role of the ethnographer (or
at least this ethnographer), the example above demonstrates how and why details matter. Second
and relatedly, the specific instance of Dr. Ahmed’s passing reference to Jordan First showed how
national and state projects can be interpreted by ordinary people in ways that defy (or prove)
their original intents. To date, the Jordan First campaign includes too many projects to suggest a
cohesive policy. Human rights initiatives, legal workshops, and economic liberalization have all
counted as part of the Jordan First campaign. With such a diverse set of efforts, it is difficult to
ascertain exactly what initiatives reflect the campaign’s core principles. Moreover, the fact that
economic policies under Jordan First seem to reflect international interests as much as Jordanian
ones (Knowles 2005; Piro 1998) makes it difficult to say that the campaign is living up to its

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“national” promise. But regardless what the purpose of Jordan First actually is, what matters is
that ordinary people including Palestinian refugees interpreted it in ways that suggested that they
knew what its purpose might be. Palestinians, as I discovered, understood Jordan First as a
campaign designed exclusively for Transjordanians. They thus joked about it, talked about it, or
simply expressed the words: “Jordan First.” The slogan itself clarified their exclusion (perceived
and real) and, as a result, membership in a particular group. Put another way, the exclusionary
interpretation of Jordan First meant that there are Palestinians who are distinguishable from
Jordanians in very practical ways. Furthermore, the jokes showed that Palestinians were
engaged with the campaign in ways that said as much about their perceptions of the state as it did
about themselves. The subtle importance of Jordan First was that it revealed a way that
Palestinians could comment both on the practices of the state and their predicament in Jordan as
non-Jordanians.
Jordan First is not the only thing about the state or Transjordanian nationalism that
Palestinians comment on. From the annexation of Palestine under former King ‘Abdullah I to
the politics of the current King and his Palestinian wife, Queen Rānīā, Palestinians offer an
assortment of ideas and perceptions about their position in Jordan. The importance of the
anecdote above thus doesn’t necessarily depend on the specifics of the campaign. Rather, it
highlights the point that Palestinian social discourse is, among other things, engaged with
Jordanian politics. Dr. Ahmed’s comment provides an illuminating and useful opening for the
much larger issues that constitute the basis of this chapter and contribute, more generally, to the
argument of this dissertation.
In the next two chapters, I examine how Palestinians articulate their position in Jordan in
light of the exclusionary discourse and practice of Transjordanian nationalists and the Hashemite

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state. My aims in this chapter are twofold. First, this chapter seeks to provide a background on
two elements constitutive of the political field in which Palestinian nationhood takes place in
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Jordan

. The first element concerns the nationalist stance taken by Transjordanian

nationalists. Examining its historical background and contemporary expressions, I show how
these stances reflect an important contribution to the debate over nationality in Jordan that
centers, primarily, on the question of the nation and the state. Regarding the latter,
Transjordanians promote a nationalizing discourse in which the state is claimed as exclusively
theirs. As the “true” nation of Jordan, in other words, Transjordanians claim that the state
belongs exclusively to them. Regarding the question of the nation, Transjordanians claim to be
the “real” Jordanians. They thus represent Palestinians as a foreign presence on Jordanian soil.
Transjordanians, however, address the Palestinian question in Jordan in two ways: limited
inclusion and complete exclusion. In the first instance, Transjordanians say that Palestinian
refugees from 1948 can remain in Jordan as citizens but cannot participate in the state. That
right is the exclusive reserve of the Transjordanians. The more exclusionary approach says that
Palestinians can remain in Jordan as foreigners until they return to Palestine. According to this
logic, Palestinians should be stripped of their citizenship and treated as any other foreigners since
Jordan is for the Transjordanians and Palestinians belong in Palestine.
The second element I discuss concerns Jordanian state policies towards Palestinian
citizen-refugees and its importance for the meaning of Palestinian identity. According to
Anthony Marx, citizenship is a key institutional mechanism for establishing boundaries of
inclusion or exclusion in the nation-state (Marx 1998, 5). Through citizenship, Marx argues,

106

As noted by Brubaker, “nationalism is not engendered by nations. It is produced—or better,
it is induced—by political fields of particular kinds. Its dynamics are governed by the properties
of political fields, not by the properties of collectivities (Brubaker 1996, 17).”
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states can construct preferential policies or allocate resources in ways that not only reinforce a
sense of commonality and loyalty between those preferred but also strengthens identification
among those excluded. Similarly, Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis (1993) have moved
beyond definitions of ethnicity that rely on positive identifications such as language, religion,
and culture to include shared conditions of existence under the state. Ethnicity, according to
them, involves partaking of the social conditions of a group, which is positioned in a particular
way in terms of the social allocation of resources, within a context of difference to other groups,
as well as commonalities and differences within (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1993, 9). In the
Jordanian context, discriminatory treatment of Palestinian citizens of Jordan has not only
reinforced the idea that Palestinians and Jordanians represent distinct ethno-national
communities but has also given practical meaning to such distinctions in terms of access to
political and economic resources. The state has thus played a critical role in the establishment of
ethno-national boundaries that underscores Palestinians’ unequal status as citizens and reinforces
an important aspect of their shared condition as a group.
In this section, I therefore consider the function of the state in the production of what
Abu-Odeh has called the de-Palestinianization of Jordan (Abu-Odeh 1999a). Since the 1967
War and, in particular, following the 1970 Civil War, or Black September, Palestinians have
been systematically excluded from key areas of the public sphere through a variety of state
practices. Although these exclusions have not always reflected the convergence of
Transjordanian and Hashemite interests, their effects have nevertheless produced the impression
that the state does not see or treat Palestinians as equal citizens. Indeed, whether on behalf of
Transjordanian nationalists or not, the state has engaged in systematic forms of discrimination
and thereby given material meaning to the binary of Palestinian/Jordanian. This section attempts

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to show certain areas of discrimination that underscores the process of de-Palestinianization and
its implications for the meaning of “Palestinian” identity in Jordan.
In the next chapter, I focus on the impact of the Transjordanian political field upon the
meaning of Palestinian identity among refugees in Amman as expressed through ideas about
nationality and citizenship. Faced with the exclusionary politics of Transjordanian nationalists
and the discriminatory practices of the state, Palestinians engage in a tenuous form of ethnonational discourse. As citizen-refugees of Jordan confronting prolonged displacement and the
unlikelihood of any immediate return, Palestinians assert a universalist form of discourse that
seeks to normalize their presence in Jordan as Arabs and Muslims and challenge the exclusivist
claims of their Transjordanian peers. Through pan-Arab

107

and religious discourse, Palestinians

thus identify with Transjordanians and claim a legitimate right to belong in Jordan as Arabs and
Muslims. But Palestinians also promote a particularist claim to Palestine and Palestinian
nationhood. They thus assert a unique ethno-national identity as Palestinians that allows them to
disidentify with Jordan and claim a stronger sense of belonging to Palestine and the idea of a
Palestinian nation.
These two positions form an important part of the meaning of Palestinian nationhood in
Jordan. Together, they underscore the interactive stances Palestinians take within Jordan vis-àvis the state and Transjordanian nationalists. More importantly, they suggest the basic idea that
forms the central claim of this dissertation, namely that Palestinian nationhood in Jordan should
be understood not as something that is produced but rather induced by interacting factors in a
broader political field.

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According to Rashid Khalidi, Arab nationalism is the idea that Arabs are a people linked by
special bonds of language and history (and many would add religion), and that their political
organization should in somme way reflect this reality.
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Transjordanians Then:
When the first Transjordanian opposition movement emerged in the 1920s, it had as its
108

primary concern the question of the state
Hashemite King, ‘Abdullah bin Hussein

. At the time, British colonial authorities and the

109

, were busy with efforts to create a state structure that

could integrate regions within the emergent Transjordanian entity. Unlike most other
“nationalized states” (Brubaker 1996) whose formation was preceded by a nationalist movement
or a sense of national identity, plans for the state of Transjordan worked in the reverse: the
production of the state was essential for the creation of a “nation” (Massad 2001b, 27). Much to
the dismay of Transjordanian locals, these early efforts at state-building reflected a pattern of
exclusion in which non-Transjordanians were quickly filling the state apparatus. When King
‘Abdullah formed the cabinet of his first government in 1921, for example, he filled the posts
with individuals from areas outside of Transjordan including Syria, Palestine, and the Hijaz
(Betty S. Anderson 2005, 42). Reflecting a broader trend

110

of assigning government and

bureaucratic posts to non-Transjordanians, only one Transjordanian, ‘Ali Khulq al-Sharayri, was
assigned a position within the new government. To be sure, between 1921 and 1923, the
majority of posts within the emergent Transjordanian government were filled by Syrian, Iraqi,
Palestinian, and Hijazi immigrants (Betty S. Anderson 2005, 23).
108

For a historical examination of the Jordanian National Movement, see Nationalist Voices in
Jordan: The Street and the State by Betty S. Anderson (2005).
109
Originally offered a temporary position in Transjordan, the British made King ‘Abdullah the
permanent ruler of the State of Transjordan in 1923 (Betty S. Anderson 2005, 40).
110
As Kamal Salibi has noted, the King’s decision to include non-Transjordanians in the new
government reflected his broader aim to establish a Hashemite Kingdom in an area much larger
than the British had assigned him. According to Salibi, what ‘Abdullah had in mind at the time
was not a Transjordanian administration, but a nuclear pan-Arab government for the whole of
Syria based in the available territory of Transjordan, with elements representing the central Arab
government of King Hussein in the Hijaz (Salibi 1998a, 94).
161

The exclusionary nature of Transjordanian state-building drew the ire of many
Transjordanian locals. Supportive of the idea of a Transjordanian state, they were frustrated by
the few benefits available from a state ostensibly created in their name (Betty S. Anderson 2005,
42). It thus wasn’t long before key figures within the Transjordanian scene formed an organized
opposition movement with the King and his British supporters as its target. With “Transjordan
for the Transjordanians” as their rallying cry, regional leaders used a variety of tactics to try to
shift state-building practices in their favor. In May 1921, for example, the people of al-Kura, an
area within the district of ‘Ajlūn, refused to pay their taxes and revolted against the government
(Betty S. Anderson 2005, 44). Violently suppressed by the British Royal Air Force, the rebellion
nevertheless succeeded in setting off a series of small resistance campaigns throughout
Transjordan led by local tribes. In addition, the militant stance taken by Transjordanian tribes
paved the way for a broader-based opposition force to emerge from the urban and merchant class
against the Anglo-Hashemite regime (Betty S. Anderson 2005, 45).

162

Syria (French Mandate)

Iraq

Palestine

Transjordan

Saudi Arabia
British Mandate

Egypt

111

Figure Ten: Map of Transjordan in 1922

Using their skills as writers and poets, the new face of the opposition voiced their
concerns to the public through speeches and the press denouncing the British as imperialists and
the King as a traitor. Stirring patriotic passions characteristic of nationalist claims, figures such
as Mustafā Wahbah al-Tall championed the rights and entitlements of the “Transjordanian
people” and decried the theft of his country. According to Joseph Massad, it was al-Tall who
originally coined the slogan “Al-Urdun Lil Urdunīyyīn,” or “Jordan for the Jordanians,” as an
111

From http://www.bicom.org.uk/context/maps/pre-state-maps/1922--separation-of-transjordan
163

assertion of nativist rights against their usurpation by outsiders (Massad 2001b, 28). Moreover,
the exigencies of mounting an immediate response to the expanding Anglo-Hashemite state
compelled some Transjordanians to engage the political sphere. Calling for a constitutional
monarchy and an end to the British Mandate, groups like Hizb al-Sha’b (the People’s Party)
formed political opposition blocs meant to represent the Transjordanian people against foreign
control of their state. The Mu’tamar Watani ‘Am (General National Congress) went so far as to
issue its own Jordanian National Charter ( Al-Mithaq Al-Watanī Al-Urdunī) in which
Transjordan was claimed as “an independent sovereign Arab country” and forwarded their
demands to the League of Nations (Massad 2001b, 31).
Ultimately, the early Transjordanian movement failed to achieve its goals. Despite the
valiance of their struggle, the tribe-led resistance was no match for the strength and brutality of
the British Royal Air Force and an ambitious King. Commenting on the ‘Adwan revolt against
the British, Andrew Shryock described the collapse of tribal resistance this way:
The state of Transjordan was a political configuration quite unlike anything the
Balga tribes had seen before. It combined the moral authority of the Hashemites
[sic] –proponents of Arab nationalism and descendants of the Prophet – with the
military brawn of Christian Europe. The Balga tribes were unable, and many of
them were unwilling, to resist this new ideological and coercive partnership
(Shryock 1997, 88).
In addition, the popular appeal of Transjordanian politics was insufficient for challenging the
expanding power and influence of the Anglo-Hashemite state. Enacted in 1927, for example, the
Crime Prevention Law functioned to set new legal limits upon the political activities of local
opposition groups. The new law allowed the government to arrest anyone whom it considered a
security threat and was complemented by the Law of Collective Punishment and the Exile and
Deportation Law, which were systematically used to harass and repress national opposition
(Massad 2001b, 31). Furthermore, on February 20, 1928, despite considerable efforts by
164

Transjordanian groups to abolish the British Mandate and establish a constitutional monarchy
within the state, a formal agreement between Britain and King ‘Abdullah recognized the ultimate
authority of His Britannic Majesty in Jordan and asserted the King’s legitimate rule over any
government (Robins 2004, 37). The agreement was followed by the creation of a constitution, or
Organic Law, which, inter alia, cemented a governmental structure (a 21-member Legislative
Council) that was subordinate to executive control

112

.

Notwithstanding the demise of the Transjordanian movement discussed above, its stance
vis-à-vis the Anglo-Hashemite state during the 1920s is important for understanding
contemporary nationalist politics. Indeed, some of its core concerns articulated almost a century
ago reflect key issues that persist today within the more recent brand of Transjordanian
nationalism. Of particular importance is the question of the state. The early Transjordanian
movement believed that the emergent state “belonged” to the Transjordanians. Populating
government posts with non-Transjordanians thus represented a basic violation of the logic behind
the creation of the state. As the nationalists saw it, what legitimacy could a Transjordanian state
have if not representative of the very Transjordanian people for whom it was built? The second
issue for the Transjordanians was inextricably linked to the first, namely who was a
“Transjordanian.” By questioning the validity of non-Transjordanian dominance in the state,
nationalists were fundamentally articulating a concept of who was (and who wasn’t) a
Transjordanian. In his poetry, for example, al-Tall conceptualized the meaning of
“Transjordanian” in localized terms relying on the “distinctive characteristics” of both the people
and their environment (Betty S. Anderson 2005, 47). His vision of a Transjordanian “identity”

112

The new Council, for example, could be dissolved or prorogued on the whim of the Emir and
only the new Chief Minister had the power to introduce bills for consideration (Robins 2004, 3738).
165

thus encompassed local ideas about the Transjordanian “tribe” and its relationship to the land

113

.

It did not, consequently, include those identified as “outsiders” including Syrians and
Palestinians brought into the state apparatus by the British and ‘Abdullah.
Although genealogically distinct, the Transjordanian movement of the 1920s and
Transjordanian nationalists today share a fundamental preoccupation with the relationship
between the Transjordanian “people” and the state. In the following section, I will briefly
outline the nationalist stance of the contemporary Transjordanian movement

114

. Of particular

importance will be its position vis-à-vis the contemporary “Other” in Jordan: the Palestinians.
Today, the Transjordanian stance that “Jordan is for (Trans) Jordanians” and not, consequently,
for Palestinians, represents the persistence of what Rogers Brubaker has called “nationalizing
nationalism” in Jordan. According to Brubaker, nationalizing nationalisms involve claims made
in the name of a “core nation” or nationality, defined in ethnocultural terms, and sharply
distinguished from the citizenry as a whole

115

(Brubaker 1996, 5). One of the central claims

113

For discussions of tribal identity and national identity in Jordan, see Home and Homeland:
The Dialogics of Tribal and National Identities in Jordan by Linda L. Layne (1994) and
Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination: Oral History and Textual Authority in Tribal
Jordan by Andrew Shryock (1997).
114
As my research is primarily concerned with nationalizing discourse among Palestinian
refugees, my historical sketch of the Transjordanian movement will be just that: a sketch. For an
in-depth account of the Transjordanian national movement in the post-1970s context, see
Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan by Joseph Massad (2001), Chapter
5, Jordanians, Palestinians, and The Hashemite Kingdom in the Middle East Peace Process by
Adnan Abu-Odeh (1999), State Interests and Public Spheres: The International Politics of
Jordan’s Identity by Marc Lynch (1999), and Palestinians and Jordanians: A Crisis of Identity
by Laurie Brand (1995).
115
For Brubaker, nationalizing nationalisms are executed by new or newly independent states.
Thus it is the state that is “nationalizing” the public in terms of the idea of a homogenous core
nation. In Jordan, however, the presence of a Transjordanian majority within the government is
insufficient for identifying the state as “Transjordanian.” With the Hashemite monarchy at its
head, the state represents a dual institution in which “Transjordanian” and “Hashemite” do not
166

espoused by such nationalisms is that the core nation is the legitimate owner of the state. Thus
conceived, the state is understood as an institution exclusively of and for the core nation
(Brubaker 1996, 5). As will become clear below, Transjordanian nationalists articulate a stance
that identifies a Transjordanian core nation. They thus not only argue for the illegitimacy of
Palestinians as Jordanian nationals but also advocate state policies that seek to reinforce
Transjordanian dominance of the state and further marginalize Palestinians.
Transjordanians Now:
Writing for the July 2010 edition of The Independent, Robert Fisk offered an interesting
expose of what some Jordanians are calling the “New Jordanian National Movement.”
According to Fisk, the new national front represents a stiff brand of Transjordanianism that sees
Jordan as “occupied territory.” In a recent open letter addressed to the current Hashemite King,
‘Abdullah bin Hussein, an elite group of Transjordanians including Former General Ali
Habashneh, Colonel Beni Sahar, and Major General Mohamed Jamal Majali expressed their
growing dismay with the government’s weakness vis-à-vis Israel and the United States (Fisk
2010). They believe that the King’s failure to assert Jordanian national interests above external
interests has placed the entire country at risk. More importantly, the letter conveys the more
general fear among Transjordanian elites that Palestinians are slowly taking over the country.
According to one of Fisk’s interlocutors, the fact that the head of the senate is Palestinian, the
head of the judicial system is Palestinian, and that the head of the ‘Aqaba special economic zone
is Palestinian shows that the Jordanian state is quickly becoming non-Jordanian.

necessarily overlap. Much like the past, Transjordanian nationalists today thus espouse a
nationalizing nationalism that is meant to claim the state as its own and identify the Hashemite
King as the paternal leader representing Transjordanian interests. I thus use the terms
“nationalizing nationalism” to refer to the stance of Transjordanian nationalists that, although
often reflects state discourse, is not necessarily expressive of the state.
167

Although written in 2010, Fisk’s coverage of the New Jordanian National Movement
does not necessarily represent the emergence of anything new. On the contrary, since the 1970
Civil War in Jordan, Transjordanian nationalists have established a viable nationalist discourse
concerned with two key issues: the ongoing anxiety among Transjordanians over the national
identity of the state and the persistence of the “Palestinian question” in Jordan. In this sense, the
New Jordanian National Movement isn’t new at all; it represents yet another manifestation of a
national discourse and movement concerned with the relationship between the Transjordanian
nation and the state. More precisely, the new movement underscores the unresolved status of
Palestinians within a state conceived in exclusively Transjordanian national terms. In the
remainder of this section, I will present two key positions among Transjordanian nationalists.
Although not exhaustive of the ideas of Transjordanian nationalists, these two positions
nevertheless provide a general framework for understanding how the question of the state and the
Palestinians in Jordan is asked and answered. Furthermore, an exploration of these two positions
is essential for understanding my broader aim within this chapter, namely to identify an
important part of the political field in which Palestinian nationalizing discourse among refugees
has taken place.
Writing about the post-1970 resurgence of Transjordanian nationalism, ‘Adnan Abu116

Odeh identified two particular groups of nationalists in Jordan

. The first group consists of

former senior government officials and retired army officers and is primarily of middle to upper
class background. Having developed within the boundaries of the Transjordanian state, they
draw much of their support from the Transjordanian ruling elite and prominent businesspeople

116

Abu-Odeh actually identifies three groups of Transjordanian nationalism. For my purposes
here, however, I will confine my discussion to only two groups since they have achieved greater
public exposure and represent a more influential brand of nationalism within the state.
168

(Abu-Odeh 1999b, 241). One of the key features of this group concerns its approach to the
status of East Bank Palestinian refugees. Both before and after the legal and administrative
separation of the West and East Banks, Transjordanians of this brand of nationalism have
117

expressed their willingness to accept 1948 Palestinian refugees as Jordanian citizens

. The

unlikelihood of their return to Palestine, they argue, has established a basis for their continued
existence in Jordan. During a lecture concerning the future of Palestinian-Jordanian relations,
one of the chief proponents of this position, ‘Abdl-Hādi Al-Majāli, a former minister, chief of
staff to the military, ambassador, director general of public security, member of parliament, and
head of the Ahad party, articulated the issue this way:
[Our] party believes that our people [Transjordanians] should accept those 1948
refugees as full Jordanian citizens, because of the difficulty of having them return
to Israel…As for the West Bankers, wherever they are in the diaspora, they
should practice their political rights on Palestinian territory…He who chooses to
remain Jordanian, though it is preferable that he practices his political rights in his
country, Palestine, we shall find a solution for his case. He has to apply to
become Jordanian. In this way, the [Jordanian] identity and loyalty will be
reaffirmed [cited in (Abu-Odeh 1999a, 242)].
According to this formulation, Transjordanians like Al-Majāli are prepared to accept 1948
refugees on the East Bank as “full” Jordanian citizens. They can remain in Jordan within the
framework of citizenship which, according to Al-Majāli’s calculations, will reaffirm their
“identity” and “loyalty” to the state. Citizenship, in this case, is seen as a status expressive of
loyalty to the Jordanian state. It is not, however, productive of a “national” status capable of
providing Palestinians with equal access to the state. Indeed, one of the defining features of the
nationalist approach of Transjordanians including Al-Majāli is that the extension of citizenship to

117

This does not include 1967 refugees who, according to this group, are expected to return to
the Gaza Strip or West Bank upon the establishment of a Palestinian state.
169

Palestinian refugees does not entitle them to a position within the state (Brand 1995, 56). Thus
in the Jordanian Arabic daily, Al-Dustūr, Al-Majāli argued that:
We seek to distinguish between our Jordanian brothers of Palestinian origin who
belong to our joint political identity in the framework of the constitution and who
worked to establish and crystallize it in the framework of national unity…and
between those who are demanding a separate identity and a separate state…What
is between us is not defined by national (watani) unity, but by relations in a panArab (qawmi) framework…The Palestinian who lives among us and wishes to
maintain…his Palestinian political identity, has the right to live without
discrimination…he does not have the right to work in Jordan[ian] political
118
institution[s] [cited in (Brand 1995, 56)] .
Critical for understanding the nationalist platform espoused by Transjordanians such as
Al-Majāli is the distinction between citizenship and nation. According to al-Majāli, citizenship
is conceived in two ways: there is the citizenship of the national (Transjordanian) to whom the
state “belongs” and the citizenship of the “alien” (Palestinians) to whom it doesn’t. For
Transjordanian nationalists like Al-Majāli, the citizenship of a national is understood as a
bounded membership that is exclusive and unavailable to national outsiders (Bosniak 1998, 32).
For Palestinians, citizenship is limited by their “alien” status as non-Transjordanians. They have
“limited” rights that reflect their membership in an “Other” nation. Palestinians can thus live
within Jordan as citizens “without discrimination.” They are free, in other words, to exercise
certain rights while preserving their “political identity” as Palestinians. Palestinians cannot,
however, work within Jordanian political institutions. That right is the exclusive privilege of the
“core nation”: Transjordanians. As Al-Majāli explained during an interview with Abu-Odeh:
“We reject the premise that a Palestinian-Jordanian is Jordanian. We come from the premise that
a Palestinian-Jordanian is a Palestinian” (Abu-Odeh 1999b, 242).

118

Emphasis is mine.
170

The second group of Transjordanian nationalists developed within the tribal system and
119

military

. Although no specific political party represents this school, there are active

individuals who articulate its attitudes in the local press and others who are members of certain
political parties (Abu-Odeh 1999b, 243). One of the more vocal proponents of what Abu-Odeh
has called a “tribe-embedded version of Transjordanian nationalism” is Dr. ‘Abdullah Al‘Uwaydi Al-‘Abbadi, a tribal historian, former police officer, and member of parliament. In an
engaging in-depth discussion with Al-‘Abbadi, anthropologist Andrew Shryock elucidated
several principles underlying what Al-‘Abaddi has called “the new Jordanian national identity.”
The first and most divisive principle is the severance of all links to Palestine. According to
Shryock, Al-‘Abbadi understands Jordanian identity as distinct from Palestinians in virtue of two
factors that relate directly to their origins in Palestine: their status as peasants and impure blood
(lineage). These two conditions provide Al-‘Abaddi with sufficient cause to exclude Palestinians
from any considerations of membership within “Jordanian identity.” As Al-‘Abbadi explained:
“As for origins and descent….I do not concern myself with the mention of origins if they are
[traced to] any area that is not inside Jordan, since we are, in the end, Jordanians: one family and
one substance” [Al-‘Abbadi 1986, 17 cited in (Shryock 1997, 272)]. A second principle Shryock
identifies is that Jordan is an essentially tribal nation and that the tribe is essentially Jordanian.
The most authentically Jordanian citizens, according to Al-‘Abaddi, are thus those who can
plunge their roots deepest into Jordanian soil (Shryock 1997, 274). Palestinians, as immigrants
and refugees, do not (indeed cannot) have the genealogical continuity of the Jordanian tribes and
are thus beyond the parameters of the “new Jordanian national identity.”

119

For a discussion of the role of the military in the production of national identity among
Jordanian tribes, see Massad (2001), chapter 4 and 5.
171

The principles articulated above are not confined to the realm of “identity” alone. To be
sure, al-‘Abaddi has taken various positions regarding the status of Palestinians in Jordan that
have earned him significant attention and criticism. For example, Al-‘Abaddi protested the
government’s decision to issue five-year passports to Palestinian-Jordanians (whom Al-‘Abaddi
terms “Palestinians”) like those issued to Transjordanians (whom he calls “Jordanians”) (AbuOdeh 1999b, 244). In addition, Al-‘Abaddi has publicly decried the extension of benefits
including land, security, and identification cards to Palestinians who, he believes, have given
Jordan nothing in return. Promoting a “Transjordanian first” approach to the state and
Palestinians, Al-‘Abbadi has argued that:
“[G]overnment jobs should be confined to Jordanians and the priority in
everything should be given to them, such as a director, a minister, a scholarship,
etc. The crumbs should be given to the Palestinians. Besides, Jordanians are
entitled to a share of the Palestinian wealth, which they couldn’t have gained
without the Jordanian passport. This share should amount to 51 percent.
Palestinians should not have any political rights whether in the executive or
legislative branch…[I] believe in withdrawing Jordanian passports from the
Palestinians and giving them instead travel documents” [cited in (Abu-Odeh
1999b, 245)].
A similar view has been expressed by Nahid Hattar, a Transjordanian Christian
businessman and writer. According to Hattar, the meaning of “Jordanian” includes anyone
living within the former Ottoman protectorates that became Transjordan and was “Jordanized in
a natural manner and thus dissolved into [the] country’s flesh and greatness (Massad 2001b,
265).” Although Mattar’s conception of “Jordanian identity” doesn’t necessarily rely on the
tribal conception of purity espoused by Al-‘Abbadi, he nevertheless advocates a similar stance
regarding the post-1948 Palestinian population of Jordan. For Hattar, Palestinians who came to
Jordan after 1948 are much like the Zionists were in Palestine: colonizers. On this basis, Hattar
has argued for the establishment of a Palestinian state and right of return of all Palestinian

172

refugees and immigrants; return for Hattar means an end to the colonization of Jordan. This call
for the expulsion of post-1948 Palestinian Jordanians, Massad argues, is the core of Hattar’s
ideology of returning Jordan to a pre-Palestinian past and as a way of asserting the Jordanians’
“full and non-lacking sovereignty over their land (Massad 2001b, 265).” It also underscores the
fundamental claim that Palestinians are not and cannot be Jordanians. Indeed, like Al-‘Abaddi,
Hattar argues that the Jordanian, precisely, specifically, and exclusively, is the non-Palestinian
(Massad 2001b, 265).
The two groups of Transjordanian nationalists presented above do not necessarily
represent the only approaches to the Palestinian question in Jordan. Within Jordan, there are
other ways of articulating and addressing the question of Jordanian nationalism and the
Palestinians location within the country and state. For example, Pan-Arabist Jordanians see the
entire debate as meaningless. Rejecting the establishment of colonial borders between what they
see as a united Arab territory, they look at the division between Palestine and Jordan and,
consequently, Palestinians and Jordanians, as an artificial boundary best addressed through an
Arab nationalist framework. In their view, all Arab people constitute one Arab nation and
should belong to one Arab country with one Arab government (Nanes 2008a, 95). The question
of Palestinians in an Arab state such as Jordan is thus, in their perspective, moot. Tackling the
question of nationality from a civic perspective, Jordanian pluralists see a solution to the
Jordanian/Palestinian divide within the concept of citizenship. According to the pluralists,
citizenship and national identity need not be united in Jordan. ‘Oreib Rentawi, a prominent
journalist for the Arabic daily, Al-Dustūr, for example, has argued that what unifies Jordanians
(meaning both Palestinians and Transjordanians) is not a single national identity but their legal
status as Jordanian citizens (Nanes 2008a, 103). Thus the choice about the true Jordanian nation

173

need not entail a resolution of the Palestinian question; Palestinians can be both Palestinian and
Jordanian because their connection to Palestine does not necessarily undermine their loyalty to
Jordan.
Notwithstanding the variety of approaches to the Palestinian question in Jordan, the
Transjordanian nationalist perspectives shown above have been a major contributor to the
debate

120

. They have not only shaped the way many of their fellow Transjordanians think about

Palestinians’ position in Jordan, but they have also influenced critical state policies that have
marginalized Palestinians and given practical meaning to the idea that the state “belongs” to
Transjordanians. In turn, the persistence of Transjordanian national discourse and discriminatory
state practices has also affected the way Palestinians have understood their own location within
the Kingdom. In particular, the Transjordanian position has kept alive the idea among many
Palestinians that they represent a foreign nation within Jordan and that their future is clear:
Palestine is for the Palestinians and Jordan is for the Transjordanians. In the following section, I
will move on to discuss the role of the state

121

in the material production of the idea that

Transjordan is for Transjordanians. Addressing key state policies aimed at the promotion of
Transjordanian control within the state, this section will examine what has been called the “dePalestinianization” of Jordan (Abu-Odeh 1999b). As will become clear in the next chapter,
understanding discriminatory practices by the Jordanian state against Palestinians is important
for its impact upon the meaning of Palestinianness in Jordan. To be sure, it reveals an

120

For a discussion of the impact of Transjordanian nationalists upon state policy, see Lynch
1999.
121
Anthony Marx has described the state as a compulsory and continuous association claiming
control of society within a territory. Although states may differ over time and place in their
capacity to rule, all states seek to contain challenges or instability threatening order and growth
(Marx 1998, 5).
174

institutional basis for the idea that Palestinians do not belong in Jordan and, despite their
citizenship, are not true Jordanians.
Before proceeding to the next section, however, a few comments concerning the
distinction between Transjordanian nationalists and the Jordanian state are in order. One of the
key characteristics of nationalizing nationalisms such as that of the Transjordanians is the idea
that the core nation is in a weak position either culturally, economically, or demographically
122

within its territory

. This weak position is held to justify the “remedial” or “compensatory”

project of using state power to promote the specific (and previously inadequately served)
interests of the core nation (Brubaker 1996, 5). Of course, the core nation’s “weak position”
within the country need not be a fact “in reality;” it is sufficient that nationalists perceive their
position as weak for them to engage in a politics of compensation whereby the state is called
upon to address that weakness. In Jordan, where the state is government by a Transjordanian
majority that is nevertheless subordinate to the Hashemite King, state policy is not always
representative of Transjordanian nationalist interests. To be sure, throughout the Kingdom’s
history, Transjordanian nationalist and Hashemite interests have often clashed (Lynch 1999;
Robins 2004; Nevo and Pappé 1994b; Abu-Odeh 1999b; Betty S. Anderson 2005; Alon 2009).
The Jordanian state can thus be seen as vulnerable to but not necessarily an extension of
the Transjordanian nationalists who claim it

123

. Indeed, as evidenced by the New Jordanian

122

It may be that the nationalizing nationalist movement sees itself as occupying a weak
position in all three respects or any combination thereof.
123
This idea is adequately captured by Brubaker in his discussion of the nationalizing state.
According to him, we can think of the nationalizing state not in terms of a fixed policy
orientation or univocal set of policies or practices but rather in terms of a dynamically changing
field of differentiated and competitive positions or stances adopted by different organizations,
parties, movements, or individual figures within and around the state, competing to inflect state
175

National Movement and its predecessors, at the heart of the Transjordanian nationalists’ stance is
the idea that their position within the state has been weakened by internal (Palestinian) and
external (Israel and the U.S.) factors. They are thus arguing that the state must be “re-claimed”
by a nation-first approach that will “cleanse” the state of its toxic influences and, ultimately, save
the country from ruin. The Jordanian state must, in other words, be nationalized in terms of an
exclusively Transjordanian presence governing according to exclusively Transjordanian
interests: a “real” nation-state. The policies described below must therefore be seen in terms of
the dynamic interrelationship between the Hashemite King and Transjordanians. What matters
for my analysis, however, is not whether discriminatory practices towards Palestinians actually
reflect Transjordanian interests; rather, what matters is the fact that concrete practices of
discrimination exist and that Palestinians perceive those practices as expressions of
Transjordanian dominance within the state.
Unequal Partners: The De-Palestinianization of Jordan:
Writing about South Africa, the United States, and Brazil, Anthony Marx has examined
the role of the state in the formation of national identity. Moving his focus beyond the more
spontaneous forms of nationhood produced through processes of mass literacy and education,
Marx is interested in how state sanctioned forms of inclusion and exclusion facilitate ideas about
who is and who isn’t part of the nation. In situations such as the U.S. and South Africa, for
example, where the state formed before national forms of consciousness emerged, Marx argues
that the explicit efforts of the state to limit and encourage selective nationalism have been
particularly evident (Marx 1998, 5). According to Marx, preferential practices by the state
towards particular subjects within its territory can erect boundaries of inclusion and group

policy in a particular direction, and seeking, in various and often mutually antagonistic ways, to
make the state a “real” nation-state, the state of and for a particular nation (Brubaker 1996, 66).
176

formation that solidify loyalty among those officially included. In this sense, the state can be
seen as actively promoting specific forms of nationhood through the creation of formal
boundaries. One of the most conspicuous means for establishing these kinds of boundaries is
citizenship. As Marx notes:
Citizenship is a key institutional mechanism for establishing boundaries of
inclusion or exclusion in the nation-state. It selectively allocates distinct civil,
political, and economic rights, reinforcing a sense of commonality and loyalty
among those included. But by specifying to whom citizenship applies, states also
define those outside the community of citizens, who then live within the state as
objects of domination (Marx 1998, 5).
Marx’s discussion of the inclusionary and exclusionary function of citizenship is
significant for its attention to the state’s capacity to promote particular forms of group
identification through preferential policies. But whereas the extension of citizenship to select
members of the state population and denial to others provides an obvious form of boundarymaking, the effective status of citizenship experienced by subjects of the state can also reveal
important forms of identifications and inequalities. In Jordan, for example, where the majority
of Palestinian refugees and their descendants are citizens, one can extend Marx’s analysis to
consider how state policies toward specific segments of the population can facilitate group
identifications through the formation of two classes of citizenship: Jordanian citizenship and
Palestinian citizenship. As will become clear below, although Palestinians have long held
Jordanian citizenship and thus lived as ostensible equals among Transjordanians, the state’s
discriminatory practices toward Palestinians has compromised the idea of formal equality
through citizenship. Through its preferential treatment of Transjordanians, the state has given
practical meaning to the idea that Jordan belongs to Jordanians and has thereby created a dual
status of citizenship in which Palestinians have been effectively rendered second-class citizens.

177

Moreover, these official forms of discrimination have been complemented by social forms of
discrimination that have reinforced the distinction between Palestinians and Jordanians.
Discriminatory practices against Palestinians by the Jordanian state has a long and
discernible history (Mishal 1978b; Massad 2001b; Abu-Odeh 1999b; Salibi 1998a; Alon 2009).
As early as the annexation of central Palestine (West Bank) by King ‘Abdullah I in 1950, a
visible state of inequality has existed between Jordanians of Palestinian origin and
Transjordanians

124

. Following the unification of the West and East Banks, for example,

Palestinian merchants claimed that they were discriminated against in the issuance of import
licenses, “a complaint that seems quite reasonable given that two-thirds of the import licenses
were given to East Bank residents (Massad 2001b, 235).” In addition, government-imposed
restrictions on freedom of expression in the West Bank resulted in the closing of several
newspapers and the arrest of numerous journalists (Mishal 1978b, 38). The Palestinian
newspaper Filasteen, for instance, was temporarily shut down following the publication of an
article explicitly criticizing members of the House of Representatives. Moreover, before his
assassination by a Palestinian in Jerusalem, ‘Abdullah instituted several policies designed to
suppress any representations of Palestine as a distinct entity including its stamp and, more
significantly, to disrupt political organizing and the formation of opposition groups. Finally,
economic disparities emerged as a direct result of government policy aimed not only at
privileging development in the East Bank but also stifling it in the West Bank. As Jamīl Hilāl
noted:
124

Although discriminatory treatment of Palestinians is a relatively constant feature of the
state’s legacy, it is not necessarily indicative of a single policy within the Hashemite-led
government. On the contrary, the unique political circumstances facing each king have produced
an assortment of state practices with differing aims. Nonetheless, within the reign of each
Hashemite ruler, there are clear sets of policies that have produced and sustained an unequal
status among Palestinians and Transjordanians in key areas.
178

[T]he Jordanian government followed a specific economic policy based on
encouraging investment and the development of some industries only in the East
Bank, hoping in the meantime to weaken the productive base of the West
Bank…This regionalist/chauvanist (iqlimīyyah) policy manifested itself toward
the West Bank through specific practical procedures, the most important of which
was the concentration of large industrial projects in the East Bank of Jordan and
the placement of obstacles and difficulties in the way of the employment of
Palestinian capital in productive projects in the West Bank (Massad 2008, 235236).
125

Following the short-lived rule of King Talal bin ‘Abdullah

, King Hussein bin Talal

inherited a situation in which the exigencies of integration between the West and East Banks and
the transformation of Palestinians into Jordanians tempered the discriminatory policies of his
grandfather

126

. The institutionalization of a Jordanian/Palestinian binary and its concomitant

process of state-sanctioned discrimination, however, reemerged following the Six Day War in
1967 and became particularly robust in the wake of the 1970 Civil War (Sirriyeh 2000)

127

. Prior

to 1967, tensions between the Hashemite government and its Palestinian subjects primarily
concerned the question of representation. In particular, the rise of Arab nationalism espoused by
Gamal Abdel Nasser and the emergence of a Palestinian national movement presented Hussein
128

with a new set of challenges both internally and externally

. According to the King,

125

According to Abu Odeh, Talal was well known for his sympathy with the Palestinians. Thus
his accession ushered in a new, albeit brief, chapter in the Palestinians’ attitude toward the
state—certainly a favorable one (Abu-Odeh 1999a, 61).
126

For a discussion of the pre-1970 rule of King Hussein and the process of integration, see Lion of Jordan: The
Life of King Hussein in War and Peace by Avi Shlaim (2009), King Hussein of Jordan: A Political Life by Nigel
Ahston (2010), and From Abdullah to Hussein: Jordan in Transition by Robert Satloff (1994).

127

To date, no single treatment of the 1970 Civil War exists in the English language. However,
numerous texts have discussed the topic as an event within the history of Jordan and Palestine.
For an in-depth account of the Palestinian guerrilla’s role in the battle, see Armed Struggle and
The Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949-1993 by Yazid Sayigh (2000).
128
For an in-depth analysis of the challenges presented by the PLO and Nasser, see King
Hussein of Jordan: A Political Life by Nigel Ashton (2008), chapters 4-6, and State Interests and
Public Spheres: The International Politics of Jordan’s Identity by Marc Lynch (1999).
179

Palestinian citizens of Jordan owed their loyalty to the Jordanian state. Having “saved” the West
Bank and, more importantly, East Jerusalem, from Zionist conquest during the 1948 War,
Hussein believed the Jordanian government had a special claim to rule and represent Palestinians
within the Kingdom’s borders. More significantly, the fact that Jordan was the only Arab state to
extend its citizenship to the Palestinians was used to underscore the special relationship between
Jordan and the Palestinians and their Palestinians debt to the crown

129

. In the King’s view,

Palestinians were Jordanians too.
Both prior to and immediately after the Israeli occupation of the West Bank in 1967,
Palestinians began to see themselves and the West Bank in new terms. The growing popularity
of Nasser as the champion of Arab nationalism and the emergence of the PLO in 1964 led many
Palestinian on both sides of the Jordan River to offer their support and loyalty to the movements
(Cobban 1985). Their status as Jordanian citizens notwithstanding, Palestinians thus began to
see the autonomy of the West Bank as essential for the liberation of their homeland and
establishment of a future state. Furthermore, Palestinian identification with the nationalist
rhetoric of the PLO facilitated new cleavages between the Jordanian monarch and his Palestinian
subjects. These tensions only worsened after the Israeli occupation of the West Bank in 1967.
As Marc Lynch has noted, when Jordan lost the West Bank and East Jerusalem to Israel in 1967,
it found itself locked in a bitter struggle with the PLO over the right to sovereignty in those
lands—a struggle which culminated in the bloody and unforgotten "Black September" war of
1970 (Lynch 2004).

129

It is widely recognized among scholars that King ‘Abdullah’s annexation of Central Palestine
and the nationalization of Palestinians reflected his goals of establishing a Hashemite Kingdom
beyond the Mandate borders and not a humanitarian gesture (Satloff 1994; Milton-Edwards and
Hinchcliffe 2009; Massad 2001c).
180

Fought largely between Palestinian guerrillas and the Jordanian military, the war gave the
question of Palestine and the Palestinians particular salience

130

. Transjordanian nationalists saw

the war as evidence that the Palestinian population and Jordanian control over the West Bank
were a strategic liability. It also gave new meaning to the Transjordanian claim that Palestinians
could not be trusted as loyal Jordanians, an idea that extended beyond the West Bank to include
Palestinians on the East Bank as well. For many Palestinians, the war revealed the brutality of
the Jordanian regime and its willingness to suppress all forms of Palestinian national claims. It
underscored the idea that the Jordanian government had no intentions of relinquishing its control
over the West Bank or of supporting Palestinian independence

131

.

Following the eradication of the PLO in Jordan, the King pursued a variety of policies
designed to prevent any future conflicts and cement the Jordanian status of the West Bank and
the Palestinians. Such efforts ushered in a new period of discriminatory policies aimed at
establishing Transjordanian dominance within key state institutions including the military, the
internal security apparatus, and the political structure and remain visible until today. For some,
the discriminatory policies of the Jordanian state were not necessarily reflective of a single
policy aimed at excluding the Palestinians. According to Kamal Salibi, for example,
discriminatory practices towards the Palestinians following the war were less an indication of
Transjordanian chauvinism than they were a reflection of Jordanian society.
130

It should be noted that many Transjordanians joined Palestinian forces during the clashes
and, similarly, there were numerous Palestinians who offered their support to Jordanian forces.
Furthermore, although Palestinian guerrillas managed to gain widespread support among
refugees, in particular, many Palestinians did not support the war and refrained from taking
either side (Massad 2001b; Abu-Odeh 1999b).
131
The Jordanian claim over the West Bank and the Palestinians was made abundantly clear
following the war when, in 1972, Hussein launched a new political offensive against the PLO
announcing a plan for the creation of a ‘United Arab Kingdom’ linking the East and West Banks
under his crown (Cobban 1985, 52).
181

The fact that such discrimination did exist derived from the peculiar structure of
Jordanian society rather than from state policy. As far as the Hashemite
monarchy was concerned, all Jordanians were equal, regardless of origin. To
most Transjordanians, however, as to most Palestinians, the question of origin
remained politically important. With the Transjordanian dominating the army
and holding the key posts in the administration, the status of the Palestinians as
Jordanian citizens of full rank and standing was compromised in various ways,
especially in cases where their political loyalty was suspect (Salibi 1998b,
132
247) .
Other scholars, however, have taken the position that discrimination in the Kingdom then and
now reflects a concerted effort to purge the state of its Palestinian elements. ‘Adnan Abu-Odeh,
for example, has identified two flaws in Salibi’s position and has argued that discrimination is an
expression of state policy, not social structure. First, Abu-Odeh claims that Salibi failed to
recognize that Transjordanian dominance of the military was a policy (Abu-Odeh 1999a, 196).
Before the Civil War, for example, the Jordanian Arab Army was exclusively populated by
Transjordanians (Massad 2001c, 206). Moreover, when Palestinians did join the military, their
ranks remained low within the hierarchy. After the war, the government launched a major
campaign of recruitment that targeted Transjordanians and excluded Palestinian-Jordanians; this
included all branches of the military (Massad 2001c, 213). Second, Abu-Odeh argues that the
“key posts” Salibi mentions were, until 1971, occupied by Transjordanians and Palestinians.
According to Abu-Odeh, the status of Palestinians in the Kingdom today thus represents a long
process of de-Palestinianization within the public sector beginning more or less with the
Hashemite/PLO showdown in 1970-1971 but sustained by a consistent state policy (Abu-Odeh
1999a, 196).
Two notable examples of de-Palestinianization came shortly after the civil war in 1970.
In 1976, the proportion of Palestinians in the cabinet dropped from one half to one quarter, with

132

Emphasis is mine.
182

many Palestinian government personnel dismissed and replaced by Transjordanians (Massad
2001c, 258). Around the same time, Massad notes, Jordanian universities began an unofficial
quota system for employing Transjordanian professors that drastically transformed educational
demographics until today. This situation, which proceeded more belligerently after 1989 and to
the present, has resulted in emptying Jordan’s state universities of Palestinian faculty, as few if
any new positions go to Palestinian Jordanians (Massad 2001c, 258).
Another key area of discrimination has occurred within the state security apparatus.
Since 1970, the internal Jordanian security forces including the police and the General
Intelligence Department or, as it’s locally called, Al-Mukhābarāt, have been dominated by a
Transjordanian majority. According to Abu-Odeh, the Transjordanian nature of the state security
apparatus has had profound consequences for Palestinians that reaches beyond the mere question
of representation. When the security apparatus is controlled by one group in a society where
tribal kinship supersedes the rule of law, then the neutrality of repression, an essential factor for
intercommunal harmony, disappears (Abu-Odeh 1999a, 197). In this situation, the exclusion of
particular segments of the population from institutional power can facilitate a sense of groupness
(Brubaker 2002) grounded in their shared experience as victims of discrimination. Moreover,
the dominance of one particular group within the security apparatus can lead to the perception
that those excluded constitute an untrustworthy population. Put another way, if the security
apparatus is staffed almost exclusively by one group as it is in Jordan, then the message is
obvious: this group is loyal and the other isn’t (Abu-Odeh 1999a, 198). In Abu-Odeh’s
estimation, the de-Palestinianization of the Jordanian security forces has produced a self-

183

perpetuating divisiveness in which Transjordanians look on Palestinians as disloyal or, perhaps,
as permanent suspects and thus see no reason why they should be part of the state

Cabinet Ministers
Ambassadors
Key and senior posts
Members of
Parliament
(a) Lower House
(elected)
(b) Upper House
(appointed)

133

.

Transjordanians
18
39
80

Palestinians
6
6
20

% of Palestinians
25
13.3
20

67

13

16.25

33

7

17.5

Table Five: Palestinian/Jordanian Representation within Political Structure

134

In addition to the security forces, the process of de-Palestinianization has also manifested
itself within the political structure, especially following the disengagement from the West Bank
in 1988. As early as the 1974 Arab League Resolution (the Rabat Resolution) recognizing the
PLO as the “sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people,” King Hussein and his
Transjordanian supporters created new political structures designed for the reduction of
Palestinian influence within the government. In the Upper House of Parliament, for example, the
fact that members of the chamber are appointed, and not elected, has led to gross imbalances
between Palestinians and Transjordanians. According to Abu-Odeh, although Palestinians

133

Abu-Odeh’s concerns are not without empirical merit. Throughout my two-year residence in
Jordan, Palestinians routinely expressed their fear of the Jordanian mukhābarāt. They typically
described the institution as one set up against the Palestinians designed for the purpose of
controlling their activities and lives. On several occasions, Palestinians declined to speak on
certain topics for fear that the mukhābarāt would learn of their words and detain or arrest them.
134
Adapted from Abu-Odeh, 231.
184

constitute at least 50 percent of the population, they have accounted for only seven members out
of a total of 40 (Abu-Odeh 1999a, 231). In addition, following the disengagement in 1988 and
evident as late as 1997, Palestinian representation within various sectors of the political structure
was found to be strikingly low given their demographic presence within the country. The
following table provides an illuminating depiction of the differences in Palestinian-Jordanian
representation within the government:
This pattern of systematic political marginalization by the state against Palestinians
continues until today. According to recent data compiled by the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Palestinians remain underrepresented within various
political institutions despite their citizenship status. As recent as 2008, the UNHCR found that:
Although Palestinians constitute around half of the population, they remain vastly
under-represented in Jordanian government. Nine of the 55 Senators appointed by
the King are Palestinian, and in the 110-seat Chamber of Deputies, Palestinians
135
have only 18 seats. Of Jordan's 12 governates, none are led by Palestinians .
Identifying discriminatory practices against Palestinians within the employment and education
sector and, more concerning, within the enforcement of counter-terrorism measures, the report
adds:
Discrimination against Palestinians in private and state-sector employment
remains common and a quota system limits the number of university admissions
for Palestinian youth. Government security operations disproportionately target
Palestinians, especially operations conducted in the name of fighting terror.
Amnesty International reported in July 2006 that Jordanian security services were
more likely to torture detainees if they were Palestinian.
While the exclusion of Palestinians from key areas of government and security has
played an important role in the de-Palestinianization of the state and the enforcement of official

135

Minority Rights Group International, World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples
- Jordan: Palestinians, 2008, available at:
http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/49749cfcc.html [accessed 5 August 2010].
185

boundaries between Palestinian and Jordanian citizens, unofficial forms of discrimination have
also contributed to the hardening of social boundaries between the two categorical groups. In the
remaining section of this chapter, I will turn to some of the less visible forms of discrimination
and distinction within Jordanian society that have impacted the lives of Palestinians. My data in
this section is primarily ethnographic as it reflects my observations of interactions between
Palestinians and Jordanians in daily life and interviews with Palestinians concerning their
experiences with Jordanians. The encounters discussed below offer an important insight into the
meanings of difference (Caroline Nagel 2002) that sustain the idea of Palestinians and Jordanians
as two distinct communities. They not only reveal some of the cultural mechanisms for
distinguishing between Palestinians and Jordanians but also show how, for many Palestinians,
these discriminations suggest a larger effort by Jordanians to exclude, marginalize, and suppress
their community.
Discrimination and Difference:
One of my first encounters with the social tension between “Jordanian” and “Palestinian”
identities occurred serendipitously during a weekend trip to Petra. I had only been in the country
for a few weeks and decided to satisfy some of my touristic curiosities before engaging in
fieldwork. While riding camels at the ancient Nabataean site, I jokingly (and provocatively)
asked our guide about the origins of his long-necked animals. “Are these camels from Palestine
or Jordan,” I asked. His response was as dry as it was definitive. Pointing to my camel, he said:
“This camel is Baljīki (Belgian).” Puzzled by his response, I probed further to determine what he
meant. “The Belgians were the worst colonizers in Africa,” he explained. “Just like the
Belgians were in Africa, the Palestinians are in Jordan. They are colonizers and that camel is
Palestinian.”

186

This brief but compelling exchange with my Jordanian guide wasn’t the only time I heard
Jordanians describe Palestinians as Belgians. On several occasions after my trip to Petra, I heard
Jordanian taxi drivers, shop owners, and even friends refer to Palestinians as Belgians in the
same way as my Bedouin guide. For these self-described Jordanians, Palestinians were
colonizers responsible for the hardships and sufferings of the Jordanian people. It was the
Palestinians who brought Jordan to war with Israel. It was the Palestinians who tried to steal
their country during Black September. And it was the Palestinians who have stolen their
resources, jobs, and opportunities

136

.

There was, however, a different expression of the Belgian epithet. While working at a
local school in Amman, I would often hear Jordanian and Palestinian students argue over
national and regional politics. Although the usual topics included the U.S. war in Iraq and the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the discussions would sometimes slide into national debates over the
Palestinian presence in Jordan. During several of these disputes, I heard Jordanian students use
the Belgian epithet to insult Palestinian students; this usually occurred when a Jordanian wanted
to convey the idea that Palestinians were foreigners in Jordan and thus unwanted. In more
dramatic instances, these exchanges resulted in heated debates that could easily slip into physical
altercations. On one occasion, for example, a Palestinian student struck a Jordanian student after
being told to take his mulukhīyya

137

back across the (Jordan) river along with his Belgian boots.

136

More recently, however, the influx of Iraqi refugees has created a new source of resentment.
In this case, it seems that both Palestinians and Jordanians are participating in a newfound
solidarity in which Iraqi refugees are identified as the cause of myriad problems within the
Kingdom.
137
Mulukhīyya is a dish typically described as “Palestinian.” In Jordan, the subject of food is
often ethnicized in ways that link putative groups with particular foods. While mansaf, for
example, is often described as the national dish of Jordan and thus “Jordanian,” some
187

The two students were not known enemies and, not long after the fight, returned to being friends.
This incident, however, did illustrate the extremes to which the idea of difference could result in
serious conflicts.
Most of the time, however, these verbal affronts were nothing more than routine and
seemingly harmless teenage exchanges among close friends. Marwān and Qais, for example,
were both students of mine and also long-time friends. They knew each other since childhood
and both of them came from elite families. Throughout my time at the school, I would hear these
two students engage in passionate yet friendly debates over the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and its
impact on Jordan. During some of their more heated exchanges, Marwān, the Jordanian, would
call his Palestinian friend a Belgian, a terrorist, or a beggar, depending on the debate. Qais
would usually respond in kind by calling his best friend a backward Bedouin from the desert or
offer a list of all the cultural items Jordanians stole from the Palestinians including music, food,
and dance

138

. Heated or not, what was striking about these verbal duels was that both Marwān

and Qais had a cultural reservoir readily available for the fight. They knew what to say about the
“Other.” Marwān knew that Palestinians were the Belgians of Jordan; Qais knew that Jordanians
were backward Bedouin.
Intrigued by Marwān’s reference to Palestinians as Belgians, I decided to ask them about
the origin and meaning of this association. Marwān explained to me that the idea referred to the
events of Black September, during which Palestinian guerrillas fought against the Jordanian
Palestinians claim it as their own stating that they introduced it to Jordanians who used to eat it
with wheat, not rice.
138
Qais was not unique in his ideas about Jordanian Bedouin and their backwardness. I heard
several Palestinians refer to Jordanians as Bedouins in order to assert their inferiority as desert
people. This idea usually came along with a statement about how Palestinians are an urban
people and thus worldly, cultured, and superior to their Jordanian counterparts. Such attitudes
were also observed by Andrew Shryock in his study of Jordanian national identity. For
Shryock’s discussion of these ideas, see Shyrock (1997) pgs. 71-72.
188

military under the late King Hussein

139

. “During the fight,” the young man explained, “the

Palestinians wore military clothing made by the Belgians and carried Belgian weapons.
Jordanians, on the other hand, wore military clothing provided by the Americans and carried
American arms. Because of this, Palestinians are known as Belgians.”
Whatever the meaning behind the idea that Palestinians were Belgians in Jordan

140

, one

thing was clear: it was not a welcoming statement. In every instance in which it emerged,
labeling Palestinians as such functioned as an effective form of “difference” that defined the
Palestinians as external to the Jordanian nation and territory. As colonizers, for example,
Palestinians represented a foreign and imposing presence upon the Jordanian people and soil.
Like the “worst colonizers of Africa,” the Palestinians were said to have used Jordan’s land and
resources for their own aims and to the exclusion of Jordanian interests. The fact that they came
as refugees and that Jordan annexed a large chunk of Palestinian soil against the wishes of many
Palestinians seemed irrelevant to the matter; as in most cases, history could be ignored.
Similarly, the idea that Palestinians fought during the 1970 War wearing Belgian fatigues also
underscored their foreignness in Jordan. Dressed in Belgian military attire, the PLO represented
an external force seeking its own goals. Again, the fact that many Jordanians fought alongside of
their PLO comrades and that many Palestinians fought on behalf of the Jordanian military during
Black September also mattered little to either side. What did matter was the basic point that

139

Few sources have offered a comprehensive account of the events of Black September. The
one exception is Yazid Sayigh’s excellent book Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The
Palestinian National Movement, 1949-1993. (Yezid Sayigh 2000)
140
According to Joseph Massad, the most credible source for the epithet comes from the 1970
War described by the students above. Another version, however, includes the idea that, during
the war, Jordanians planned to expel the Palestinians to Belgium (a far-away country) (Massad
2001b, 253).
189

Palestinians and Jordanians could be distinguished as such according to particular markers
including a Belgian identity.
The fact that Marwān and Qais’s interactions took place in school was not of minor
significance. From my experiences as an instructor and from my frequent visits to the refugee
camps, I realized that an important feature of public and private schools and colleges and
universities was that they often provided one of the few contexts in which Palestinian camp
refugees and Jordanians could interact directly for prolonged periods of time. This is not to say
that Palestinians and Jordanians did not interact outside of schools. On the contrary, contact
between both communities could occur at work or in other social contexts including festivals and
other public events. But Amman is not a melting pot; its neighborhoods are ethnicized to the
extent that one can reasonably identify areas that are “Palestinian” and “Jordanian.” The refugee
camps, for example, are almost exclusively populated by Palestinian refugees and are identifiable
by key markers of difference including the institutional presence of UNRWA. As an institution
whose function is to serve only Palestinian refugees, UNRWA has become a clear symbol of
difference that sustains the distinction between Palestinians and Jordanians and marks the camps
as Palestinian ethnic spaces. Jordanians, as such, cannot attend UNRWA schools or receive
medical attention at the clinics in the camps. These services are for Palestinians alone. In
addition, in certain areas of East Amman including the Hāshmī Shamālī, Hāshmī Junūbī, Jabal
Ashrafīyya, and Tabarbūr, Palestinian refugees and their descendants constitute a sizable
demographic majority. Within these neighborhoods, the high concentration of Palestinians has
ensured that interactions occur primarily between Palestinians and that few opportunities or
reasons exist for engaging with Jordanians directly.

190

The significance of educational settings as contexts for Palestinian encounters with
Jordanians and questions of ethno-national identification was not only demonstrated during my
time at the school. During several interviews with Palestinian refugees from different camps,
those who were able to attend Jordanian public schools and/or private and state colleges and
universities suggested that their encounters with Jordanians in these institutions reinforced the
idea that Palestinians were discriminated against and strengthened their identification as
Palestinians. Yūnus, for example, was a Palestinian refugee from the Hittīn camp in East
Amman. Born and raised within Hittīn, Yūnus said he developed his self-understanding as a
Palestinian within the specific cultural milieu of the refugee camps. During our discussions, he
often emphasized features of camp life that shaped his understanding of what it meant to be a
Palestinian and that, he believed, distinguished him from Jordanians. In the camps, for example,
Yūnus explained that everyone was a refugee. His parents, his friends, his teachers, and even the
local Imams were all refugees. Nobody in the camps, he said, was “truly” from Jordan. The
commonality of displacement among camp inhabitants thus functioned as an important point of
identification for Yūnus that made a particular sense of Palestinianness possible. Consequently,
it also provided a key site of difference that served to distinguish himself from Jordanians who
were not refugees. In other words, because displacement was such a common and important
aspect of Palestinian identification, it created a sharp line of demarcation between Palestinians
and Jordanians who, unlike Palestinians, were not refugees.
Prior to attending the university, Yūnus explained, his contact with Jordanians was fairly
limited. His friends, for example, were primarily Palestinian refugees from the camp or
neighboring areas that attended the UNRWA school. After completing his secondary education
in the camp, however, Yūnus was able to engage with Jordanians more directly. Hoping to assist

191

his education, his family managed to save enough money to send him to one of the less
expensive local universities. According to Yūnus, it was during his time at the university that he
learned first-hand the difference between Palestinians and Jordanians. According to him, his
encounters with Jordanian students at the university showed him how Jordanians felt about
Palestinians and reinforced his own feelings that he, as a Palestinian, didn’t belong in Jordan.
The feelings I have inside of me are that khalās (that’s it), Palestine watanī (is my
country) and my land. Jordan is not my country. In Jordan, I don’t feel that I’m
inside of my country or with my people. At the university, for example, I feel the
difference between the Palestinians and the Jordanians. You can feel that there is
a difference because you are a Palestinian. You feel the difference even though
you have become used to [the idea that you’re different]; you feel it inside.
According to Yūnus, he did not develop his identification as a Palestinian from his experiences at
the university. On the contrary, he told me that he felt a strong sense of identification as a
Palestinian in the camps long before he enrolled in higher education. Instead, his experiences at
the university only “confirmed” two aspects of what he already knew. First, his interactions with
Jordanian students confirmed that he was a Palestinian and that this was distinct from being a
Jordanian. Yūnus, in this sense, came to the university with a conception of difference formed
primarily by his experiences in the camp among other Palestinian refugees. His selfunderstanding was thus framed according to particular identifications that functioned as markers
of difference and that were only reinforced by his contact with Jordanian students. Without
offering details of his encounters, Yūnus nevertheless suggested that these experiences reminded
him of his homeland and only strengthened his identification with Palestinians. Second, his
encounters with Jordanians underscored the idea that Jordanians make Palestinians feel like they
don’t belong in Jordan. At the university, where Palestinians like Yūnus and Jordanians could
interact more directly, Yūnus “felt” the difference between both “groups.” “You can feel that
there is a difference,” he explained, “because you are Palestinian.” For Yūnus, the differences he
192

felt between Palestinians and Jordanians were thus not only the result of his personal or internal
identification as a Palestinian but also the effect of an external identification or labeling by
Jordanians. In a sense, the very recognition of his status as a Palestinian by Jordanians
reinforced his feelings of belonging with Palestine and Palestinians and distance from Jordan and
Jordanians. As Yūnus concluded:
I don’t feel that Jordan is my country because there are differences. In terms of
employment and the economy, in terms of our position in the country, we are not
respected as citizens. We are not respected in this country. People say “you are
not from this country.” “Why are you here?” No one in Palestine will ask us this
question.
The importance of educational settings for the production of difference between
Palestinians and Jordanians was also captured by my interviews with Warda. The eldest
daughter of Palestinian refuges displaced from Bir As-Saba’, Warda attended both UNRWA
schools in the camp and private schools in Amman. Her father was a physician for UNRWA and
thus managed to gain enough income to send his children to local private schools in the city.
Initially, Warda explained, her father enrolled her in a more diverse school in which students
from a variety of backgrounds enrolled.
First, my father enrolled me in a private school in Jabal Amman. When I went to
school there, I never felt a difference between Jordanians and Palestinians. There
were Jordanian students, Palestinian students, Pakistanis, Indians, Americans,
Turks, etc. There was a huge mix of students from different national
backgrounds. In this school, I did not feel oppressed as a Palestinian.
Later, however, Warda’s father enrolled her in a new school in which nationalist lines were more
acutely drawn.
But then I changed schools. At the new school, there was a principal who was
Jordanian. She was Jordanian in a way that was very patriotic and nationalist.
She forced Jordanian nationalism on us; she wanted us to love Jordan and feel
membership against our will. In this school, sometimes, I wanted to cry. “The
King, God keep the King!” This is what she made us say. I felt that I was
obligated to love the King. When one obligates you to love someone, you will
193

feel the opposite way. You will hate him. You will not love a country against
your will.
According to Warda, the problem wasn’t just that her nationalist principal forced her to identify
with Jordan and the King. It was also that doing so entailed a suppression of her identification
with Palestine and the Palestinians.
I felt like it was forbidden for me to connect to Palestine. It was forbidden to talk
about Palestine or any subject related to Palestine. On Mother’s Day, for
example, it was forbidden to talk about the mothers of the martyrs unless they
were Jordanian. Even though it is common knowledge that many Jordanian
mothers sent their children to die for Palestine, we couldn’t talk about Palestine’s
martyrs. The principal would say that the tribes were the pure and generous ones
and that the Palestinians came and “dirtied” the country. Even though
Palestinians are doctors and teachers, she would say this.
For Warda, her experiences at school were critical for her understanding of difference and,
consequently, what she understood as discrimination. Like Yūnus, Warda was raised within a
refugee camp and attended UNRWA schools. Her family and friends were primarily Palestinian
refugees who shared, at the very least, the experiences of camp life defined by their status as
refugees. Warda thus knew that UNRWA schools and clinics were for Palestinians. She also
knew that her teachers, the administrators, and the students were all Palestinian refugees like her.
When she transferred to a private school, her identification as a Palestinian was left unchallenged
as most of the students came from different backgrounds. In this setting, she explained,
identifying as a Palestinian was no more or no less interesting than the fact that another student
identified as Pakistani or Turkish. It was only when she transferred to a “Jordanian” school that
her self-understanding as a Palestinian took on a particular meaning of difference linked to
discrimination.
First, Warda encountered as a Palestinian what for Jordanian students would be the
normal business of nationalization. Prior to her enrollment in the Jordanian private school,

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Warda never had to participate in the nationalizing practices of the Jordanian educational system.
While in the camps, for example, Warda said she was never obligated to declare her allegiance to
the King. Her administrators and instructors were Palestinian and they spoke about Palestine,
not the King. Thus her principal’s insistence upon her participation in practices designed for the
nationalization of Jordanian students represented an imposed identification and facilitated a
particular meaning of difference. Never having to declare her allegiance to the King in the
camps, Warda came to see such acts as important markers of distinction between Palestinians
and Jordanians. Pledging allegiance to the King, in her view, was what Jordanians did, not
Palestinians. Why else were such practices absent from the camps? Moreover, Warda learned
that identifying with Jordan required engaging in practices that not only reflected difference but
were constitutive of it. Forced to participate in practices designed for the nationalization of
students as “Jordanians,” Warda understood these enactments as “unnatural” ritual obligations;
that is, her unfamiliarity with such practices and the discomfort resulting from her forced
participation in them only confirmed that they really weren’t for Palestinians.
Second, the active suppression of anything Palestinian showed Warda that identification
with Jordan could only occur through the negation of her identification with Palestine. By
forbidding Warda from recognizing the mothers of the martyrs of Palestine, for example, the
principal was also reinforcing the exclusive nature of Jordanian nationalism. As Warda
explained, the fact that Jordanian mothers also “sent their children [off] to die for Palestine”
could not be mentioned because, by doing so, one was still mentioning Palestine. Assertions of
Jordanian nationalism thus reflected a basic distinction that not only necessitated the exclusion of
Palestine but also precluded potentially productive sites of mutual identification. Indeed, the
principal’s rejection of the shared participation of Jordanian and Palestinian mothers in the war

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for Palestine also rejected a key point of “shared” history in which Palestinians and Jordanians
struggled and suffered together. More importantly, the principal’s overt attacks on Palestinians
and, more specifically, their presence in Jordan served to strengthen Warda’s identification with
Palestine. Drawing on the more exclusive forms of nationalist discourse described above, for
example, the principal emphasized the urban/tribal dichotomy used by some Jordanians to
distinguish themselves from Palestinians. According to this idea, whereas Jordanians’ tribal
structure preserved their pure lineage, Palestinians’ urban and settled ways of life tainted theirs.
Such an idea was particularly offensive for Warda since, prior to their displacement, her family
claimed to live as rural tribal Bedouins from the southern deserts of Palestine. It was their
transformation into refugees, she said, that brought them into a sedentary and urban existence. In
addition, Warda felt (as many Palestinians do) that the Palestinians were an asset to Jordan, not a
burden. Like her father, she explained, many Palestinians were doctors or successful
entrepreneurs that helped turn Jordan into a “modern” country. Their urbanness, according to
Warda, did not weaken Jordan; rather, it played an essential role in the creation of modern
Jordan.
After describing her experiences at the school, Warda concluded by reaffirming her
identification with Palestine. In her view, being Palestinian in Jordan was a perpetual source of
tension that could only be resolved by a return to Palestine. As a Palestinian, she explained, she
naturally belonged among Palestinians in their homeland. A Palestinian, in other words, could
not be such in Jordan.
So all of these things around you, things that force you (against your will!) to love
Jordan, makes you want to return to your country. Because in Palestine, nobody
will ask you “why are you here?” “Why did you come here?” The Palestinian
will not ask the Palestinian why he came to Palestine.

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Conclusion:
In this chapter, I have highlighted two key dimensions of a broader political field in
which Palestinian ethno-national identifications are shaped and claimed. The first dimension
concerns what Brubaker has called the nationalizing discourse of Transjordanian nationalists
(Brubaker 1996). According to Brubaker, nationalizing discourses represent “nationalizing”
efforts by elites who promote a particular conception of “the core nation” that is understood as
the legitimate owner of the state. Defined in ethno-national terms, these discourses seek to draw
key distinctions between the citizenry in ways that promote the language, culture, demographic
position, economic flourishing, or political hegemony of the nominally state-bearing nation
(Brubaker 1996, 57). In Jordan, Transjordanian nationalists claim a distinct ethno-national status
that, they believe, underscores their legitimate rights to the state. Within this discourse,
Palestinians represent a foreign ethno-national community whose presence in the Kingdom
constitutes a significant threat to the homogeneity of the Transjordanian nation and the
“Jordanianness” of the state. In order to address this problem, Transjordanians advocate the
exclusion of Palestinians from the state and, in some cases, from the citizenry. Their status as
Palestinians, nationalists argue, should preclude them from the legitimate right to citizenship and
participation in the state, which belongs to the core Transjordanian nation.
The second dimension concerns the nationalizing practices of the Jordanian state and
their role in the institutionalization of difference and discrimination. As Anthony Marx has
noted, the state’s ability to allocate civil, political, and economic rights among particular
segments of the citizenry represents a key strategy in the process of nationalization. Specified
policies of inclusion, Marx claims, provide a crucial referent for demarcating those included (and
those excluded) within the nation. In such instances, group formation, identities, ideas, and

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social categories are shaped, manifested, and entrenched through the state in ways that promote
both national identification and loyalty (Marx 1998, 5). Preferential state policies, however, can
also serve to reinforce solidarities among excluded groups whose formal discrimination provides
an important point of commonality and identification. Subordinate to the Hashemite crown,
Jordanian state policies have played a critical role in the institutionalization of difference
between Jordanians and Palestinians through what has been called the de-Palestinianization of
Jordan (Abu-Odeh 1999a). As I have shown, since the 1970 Civil War between PLO guerillas
and the Jordanian military, the Hashemite state has engaged in a variety of selective and often
discriminatory practices designed to appease Transjordanian nationalists and promote the
supremacy of Transjordanians in particular state institutions including the military and security
services. In addition, state policies have also facilitated the political marginalization of
Palestinians within key areas of government through exclusionary rules of representation. As a
result, Transjordanians have come to represent a demographic majority both within particular
state institutions and governmental power. More importantly, however, the selective nature of
the state’s “nationalizing” practices has also reinforced the idea among Palestinian refugees that
Jordan is not their country. Their experiences with formal and informal discrimination by the
state and Jordanian population has strengthened their identification as Palestinians and the idea
that their rights and equality can only be realized in a state of their own, that is, in Palestine.
In the next chapter, I shift the focus to examine how Palestinians position themselves visà-vis Transjordanian nationalism and the discriminatory practices of the state. Critical to my
analysis are the discursive strategies Palestinians employ to negotiate the demands of what I see
as two basic needs. First, as Jordanian citizens, Palestinian refugees seek to normalize their
existence in Jordan in ways that resists their marginalization and sustains their legal status as

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Jordanian citizens. To address this need, Palestinians stress their connection to Jordan and
Jordanians as Arabs and Muslims. Using pan-Arab and religious discourse, Palestinians
challenge the exclusionary discourse of Transjordanian nationalists and claim a legitimate right
to citizenship and equality. Second, Palestinians strive to maintain their claim to membership in
a distinct ethno-national community and connection to a distant homeland. In this effort,
Palestinians accept the nationalist logic of Transjordanian nationalists: Palestinians are not
Jordanians. They thus assert a particular claim to belong to a Palestinian nation and a Palestinian
homeland. In so doing, however, Palestinians disidentify with Jordan as an alternative homeland
and nation and, consequently, reinforce the Transjordanian position that Jordan is for the
Jordanians.
Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of a field, Brubaker has argued that nationalism
or, more particularly, nationhood, should be understood not as something that develops but as an
“event” that happens within a broader relational setting. Understanding nationhood in this way
means thinking of the nation as a contingent, conjuncturally fluctuating, and precarious frame of
vision and basis for individual and collective action (Brubaker 1996, 19). It suggests the deeply
contextual occurrence of “the nation” not as a bounded group but as a categorical event; as a way
of seeing the world and a frame of reference for acting in it. Together, chapters four and five
reveal an essential feature of the political field in which Palestinian nationhood “happened”
during my fieldwork in 2006-2007. They constitute an important part of my overall argument
concerning the meaning of Palestinian identity among refugees in Jordan, namely that the
absence of a coherent nationalist movement in Palestine and the conditions of prolonged
displacement as refugees within host states has facilitated unique forms of nationhood among
Palestinians reflecting the intersections of local and trans-state factors. Rather than seeing

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Palestinian identity as a stable, shared feature of a putative group, I highlight in these chapters
and the ones that follow the constraints and possibilities (the field) of Palestinian identifications.

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Chapter Five:
Citizenship Without Nationality: The “Ins” and “Outs” of Palestinian Jordanians
Introduction:
For Palestinian refugees, articulating their relationship to Jordan must address two
important and often tenuous commitments. As Jordanian citizens, Palestinians must first find a
way to identify with Jordanians in a way that sustains their rights as citizens within the country.
As previously discussed, the status of Palestinians as Jordanian citizens has been a contentious
point in Jordanian national debates

141

. Many Transjordanian nationalists believe Palestinians

are not true members of the Jordanian nation and thus do not deserve the right of citizenship.
That privilege, they believe, is exclusively for Transjordanians. The “national order of things
142

(Malkki 1992),” in this case, is used to justify Palestinian denationalization

. If Palestinians

distance themselves too much from the Jordanian people, they run the risk of supporting the
Transjordanian nationalist argument that Palestinians are foreigners and should be stripped of
their citizenship. Consequently, Palestinians have to employ a variety of identifications that seek
to legitimize their position in Jordan as that of equals to their Jordanian co-nationals. This,
however, has to be carefully balanced with a second commitment: identifying Palestinian. In this
case, Palestinians must also disidentify with Jordan to the extent that their claim to
Palestinianness and connection to Palestine can be maintained. Palestinians must, in other
words, avoid becoming “Jordanians” as it threatens their claim to membership within the
Palestinian “nation” and, more importantly, the claim to their right to return to the Palestinian
homeland.
141

For discussions on Jordanian national debates and the Palestinians see Lynch, 1999;
Anderson, 2005; Massad, 2001; and Nanes, 2008.
142
Indeed, since 1967, the Jordanian government has denied refugees from Gaza access to
citizenship leaving approximately 120,000 Palestinians stateless.
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In the following section, I will demonstrate how Palestinians negotiate their need to
remain citizens in Jordan with their desire to maintain a distinct ethno-national identity as
Palestinians. Drawing on a variety of sources including oral histories, formal interviews, and the
ethnographic encounters of daily life in Amman, I present some of the “salient features”
(Handler, 1988) of Palestinian discourse vis-à-vis the Jordanian people and state. My analysis is
therefore confined to particular areas of thematic convergence within the data that provide a
conditional albeit critical account of ethno-national thought among Palestinians. As noted by
Richard Handler, speaking of salience, as opposed to fundamentals, suggests that features
selected for analysis are pragmatically forceful and persuasive, and that they engage active
interpreters (Handler 1988, 31). As will become clear, one of the key ways in which Palestinians
represent their position in Jordan and relationship to Jordanians is through pan-Arab and
religious discourse. According to these universalist discourses, Palestinians “belong” to Jordan
as Arabs and Muslims; their status as such affords them a legitimate right to live in Jordan as
citizens among their fellow Arabs and Muslims. But Palestinians are also not Jordanians.
According to the logic of ethno-nationalism, Palestinians also assert a particularistic claim to
Palestinian nationhood and belonging to their “natural” home in Palestine. Despite their
identification with Jordanians as Arabs and Muslims, Palestinians nevertheless claim a distinct
143

ethno-national identity

that not only distinguishes them from Jordanians but also locates them

within the broader idea of Palestinian nationhood.

143

I am drawing on Roger Brubaker’s approach to “ethnic” and “national” resources as “terms
of practical categories, cultural idioms, cognitive schemas, discursive frames, organizational
routines, institutional forms, political projects, and contingent events (Brubaker 2002, 167).”
According to Brubaker, thinking about ethnicity and national identity means thinking in terms of
ethnicization and nationalization.
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Debating “Palestinians” in Jordan: Exclusivism and Pluralism:
The debate in Jordan over the “Palestinian question” is not unique. In many ways, it
reflects a global problem concerning the relationship between nationhood, citizenship and the
state (Butenschn, Uri Davis, and Hassassian 2000; Shafir 1998; Ong 1999; Benhabib 2004;
Balibar 2003; Resnik 2009). At the heart of this problem is the question of citizenship and the
“Other.” In a world of territorially bounded states where citizenship has been understood in
national terms, that is, as a “nationally bounded” membership that is exclusive and unavailable to
those outside of the nation, the location of non-national citizens, or “citizen aliens,” within the
state raises an important question (Bosniak 1998, 32). If citizenship reflects the existence of a
political community defined nationally (i.e. as “the nation”), then exactly how might the rights of
non-national citizens be protected

144

? Moreover, according to what principle can a non-national

citizen claim access to a state defined as the exclusive privilege of the nation? Many immigrants
and refugees today, for example, are permanently located within secondary countries and often
carry the citizenship of states in which they do not identify (or are not identified) as members of
the “nation.” Their status as non-national citizens has thus led to a variety of exclusions from the
state and society that has produced their effective status as second-class citizens.
The Palestinians, in this regard, are no exception. Although legally branded as Jordanian
citizens in 1950, their contentious status as refugees and national “Others” (Nasser 2004) has
nevertheless facilitated an ongoing debate over the meaning of their citizenship and relationship
to the state. Recently, public discourse concerning the status of Palestinians in Jordan has
involved two particular approaches to the meaning of national citizenship: cultural and
contractual (Nanes, 2008). According to the cultural view, citizenship is the exclusive privilege
144

For a thorough discussion of this question, see The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and
Citizens by Seyla Benhabib (2004).
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of the “core nation” understood as an “organic” or “natural” collective. Membership is thus
beyond rational choice and the individual member cannot live beyond the grip of its solidarity
(Nanes 2008b, 96). Transjordanian nationalists espouse this idea of the nation and argue that
Palestinian refugees who came to Jordan in 1948 and 1967 are not “natural” members of the
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Jordanian nation

. Moreover, because these Palestinians came to Jordan involuntarily,

Transjordanians claim that their loyalty to the Jordanian state and people is always in question
(Nanes 2008b, 96).
The contractual approach to national citizenship, on the other hand, conceptualizes the
nation in terms of a choice, not nature. According to this view, it is the individual wills of
members that creates the nation and thus anyone who wishes to join the nation may do so if they
agree to submit to the laws agreed upon in the original compact (Nanes 2008b, 96). In the
Jordanian context, this is the position articulated by pluralists who argue that Palestinians can be
both loyal to Jordan as citizens and remain Palestinian

146

. Advocating a “hybrid” conception of

identity, they claim a bi-national status within Jordan: Palestinian in virtue of their origins and
Jordanian in virtue of their choice to be citizens

147

. Pluralists also believe that national-

citizenship is a question of rights and obligations. By choosing to be national-citizens in Jordan,
145

As Nanes (2008) and Abu-Odeh (1999) have pointed out, the Transjordanian position
maintains an irresolvable contradiction. On one hand, they demand that Palestinians abandon all
claims and attachments to Palestine in order to assimilate in Jordan and become Jordanian. On
the other hand, they also claim that it is impossible for Palestinians to assimilate because they are
not natural members of the nation.
146

Prominent pluralists today include ‘Oreib Rentawi, journalist for al-Dustūr and head of Al-Quds Center for
Political Studies, and Rami Khouri, previously a journalist for the Jordan Times, who now writes for the Daily Star
from Beirut. Outside of newspapers, pluralist ranks include Mustafā Hamarneh, head of the Center for Strategic
Studies, a prominent research center affiliated with the University of Jordan and Adnan Abu-Odeh, longtime public
servant in the Jordanian government, most recently as advisor to

King Abdullah (Nanes 2008b, 103).
147
Although many pluralists support the creation of a Palestinian state and the right of return for
refugees, they nevertheless see their position in Jordan as primary.
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pluralists argue that Palestinians can be Jordanian. Moreover, insofar as Palestinians comply
with the obligations of citizenship within the Jordanian state, they believe that the state must
ensure their equal status as Jordanian citizens within the Kingdom.
For Palestinian refugees, the pluralists have played an important role in defending their
legitimate rights as citizens against the exclusivism of Transjordanian discourse and the
discriminatory practices of the state. Indeed, their voice in the public sphere has presented an
articulate and compelling stance on the Palestinian question in Jordan. They have, for example,
publicly questioned the legality of King Hussein’s decision to denationalize Jordanian citizens
from the West Bank following the administrative separation between the East and West Banks in
1988. In addition, they continue to insist upon the importance of the law for defining nationality
in Jordan. This has presented an important challenge to Transjordanian nationalists whose
support for Palestinian denationalization contradicts Jordanian nationality laws. Finally, the elite
position of many pluralists has allowed them to influence key institutions and constituencies
within the Jordanian government. For example, prior to his forced resignation from public
service, Adnan Abu-Odeh, a Palestinian pluralist from Nablus, served as a key advisor to both
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King Hussein and King Abdullah II

. Throughout his tenure, he often clashed with

nationalists within the regime and promoted the idea that Palestinians and Transjordanians could
live together as equals. In addition, several key Palestinian officials I spoke with, including a
former minister and senator, confirmed their efforts to protect the rights and interests of
Palestinians within the Kingdom. As government officials, they claimed to have used the power
of their posts to promote the pluralist agenda and challenge Transjordanian elements within the
state.

148

See Nanes, 2008.
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Despite the political import of the pluralist position in Jordan, it is nevertheless an elite
discourse. It represents the voices of journalists, politicians, and mostly affluent Palestinians
with established social, economic, and political ties in the Kingdom. Their economic and
political position in Jordan has also afforded them a particular investment in the debate. To be
sure, if the Transjordanian nationalists have their way, it is these Palestinians that stand to lose
the most. In addition, their relatively successful integration into Jordanian society has placed
them beyond the socio-economic experience of many Palestinians living in Jordan under
radically different circumstances. Most Palestinian pluralists, for example, do not live in the
refugee camps nor do they depend on the services of UNRWA. Although they may readily
claim to be refugees (and very well may have been displaced), their status as such is not
experienced within the institutional settings that govern Palestinian refugee life within the
camps. For the approximately 400,000 Palestinians living in camps and the untold number living
outside of the camps but still dependent on UNRWA services, integration seems an unlikely
solution to their circumstances. Economically, politically, and socially marginalized, citizenship
in Jordan has offered these refugees fewer opportunities than hoped and the idea of an eventual
return to Palestine thus provides a promising alternative. Moreover, many Palestinians living
within the poorer areas of Amman also feel a strong affinity to Palestine and claim that they do
not necessarily want to be Jordanian. For these Palestinians, their citizenship status is important
only insofar as it provides certain benefits including easier travel and employment opportunities.
In the remaining section of this chapter, I will examine how Palestinian refugees
articulate their relationship to Jordan as Palestinians. My own research in the camps suggests
that Palestinian refugees do not employ a pluralist framework when representing their position as
Jordanian citizens or aspirations as Palestinians. On the contrary, my findings indicate that

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Palestinian camp refugees view their status in Jordan in terms that places greater emphasis on
their connection to Palestine and self-understanding

149

as an ethno-national community

(Brubaker and Cooper 2000, 17) . In this sense, many Palestinian refugees I met agreed with
Transjordanian nationalists: Palestinians belonged to Palestine, not Jordan. According to them,
Jordan was described as their temporary host to which they belonged as Arabs and Muslims, but
not Palestinians. Palestinians were “guests” in Jordan among their Jordanian “hosts.” But as
refugees living in camps, they strongly believed in their right of return and claimed an allegiance
to the Palestinian “nation.” Thus in contrast to the pluralist position that claims a “hybrid”
Palestinian-Jordanian identity, Palestinian refugees claimed an essentialized identity that
underscored their ethno-national differences and connection to Palestine.
Jordan is an Arab and Muslim Country:
One of the key claims among pluralists is that Palestinians can also be Jordanians.
According to this view, an individual’s status as a Palestinian is primarily defined in terms of his
or her ethnic origins (Anthony D. Smith 1991). That is, being Palestinian is grounded in an
individual’s identification with his or her genealogical connections to Palestine. Identification as
a Jordanian, on the other hand, reflects an individual’s legal status as a citizen of Jordan. The
fact that Palestinians were made Jordanian citizens in 1950 allows them to legitimately claim
membership in the Jordanian national body.
Among Palestinian refugees in the camps, the question of Palestinians’ status in Jordan
was understood in slightly different terms. It was enough that Jordan is an Arab and Muslim
country for them to claim a legitimate place within the Kingdom. In this sense, Palestinians

149

Here I am drawing on Brubaker and Cooper’s idea of self-understanding as “a dispositional term that designates
what might be called ``situated subjectivity'': one's sense of who one is, of one's social location, and of how (given
the first two) one is prepared to act.”

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could avoid identifying as Jordanian and instead maintain their primary identification as
Palestinians while emphasizing the significance of their secondary identifications as Arabs and
Muslims. During an interview with Līna, for example, the question of her relationship to Jordan
did not concern her legal status as a citizen. The fact that she was a Jordanian citizen did not
necessitate the claim to being Jordanian. Instead, she maintained a primary identification as a
Palestinian. “I am Palestinian first,” she said. “That is, my nationality is Palestinian. Then, I am
an Arab and Muslim.” Regarding her status in Jordan, Līna claimed that she had as much right
to be in Jordan as any other Arab country. “Any of the Arab countries is a home for the
Palestinian. We are all Arabs and Muslims and we are therefore among our brothers in their
countries.” Similarly, during my conversations with Rāshid, another Palestinian refugee from
the camps, he expressed the position of Palestinians in Jordan in the following way:
Of course, Palestine is part of the Arabic and Islamic world. Our issue, thank
God, is tied to the Arabic and Islamic world. But remember, the occupation and
colonialism are what divided the Arabic and Islamic nations into Jordan, Syria,
Iraq, etc. These were all one country before and even in the days of the
Ottomans, it was one country called bilād ash-shām (the Levant). So we belong
in Jordan as Arabs and Muslims, we are among our brothers. Praise God,
tajma’nā (what brings us together) is the ‘urūb (Arabness) and Islam as an Arab
Islamic country.
Like Līna, Rāshid also identified with Jordan and Jordanians as Arabs and Muslims. For him,
these two identifications underscored an important commonality with Jordanians and, more
importantly, sustained the idea that Palestinians “belonged” in Jordan.
Līna and Rāshid’s reliance on pan-Arab ideology allowed them to make two critical
assertions common among Palestinians in the camps. First, their ability to identify as Arabs
facilitated their claim against the Transjordanian argument that Palestinians do not belong in
Jordan. Whereas the pluralists claim it is their ability to be both Palestinian and Jordanian that
legitimizes their location in Jordan, Palestinians like Līna and Rāshid argue it is in virtue of their
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ethnic commonality as Arabs that they belong in Jordan. According to this view, Palestinians’
identification as Arabs is sufficient for establishing a connection to Jordan and Jordanians.
Indeed, the idea of pan-Arab unity espoused by most Palestinian refugees affords them the
ability to identify with Jordan as Arab Palestinians. This approach effectively shifts the burden
onto Jordanians to deny the significance of Palestinians’ identification as Arabs in favor of a
more exclusionary form of local Arab nationalism. Second, the idea that Jordanians and
Palestinians were united by their common ‘urūb (Arabness) allowed Palestinian refugees like
Līna to maintain their primary identification as Palestinian. In this case, Palestinians accepted
the Transjordanian claim that their genealogical origins in Palestine distinguished them from
Jordanians and precluded their ability to be truly Jordanian. The Palestinian refugees I met
didn’t want to be Jordanian. Instead, they wanted a legitimate place within Jordan until their
predicament as refugees was resolved through a return to Palestine.
But Palestinians like Līna and Rāshid did not exclusively rely on the idea of ethnic
commonality as Arabs; they also asserted a religious solidarity that underscored a fundamental
bond between Palestinians and Jordanians and, more importantly, legitimized their presence in
Jordan in religious terms. Like Līna and Rāshid, for example, Asad also believed that religion
established an important bond between Arabs. For him, like many Palestinian refugees, the fact
that many Arabs are also Muslims underscored their commonality and served to normalize the
Palestinian presence in Jordan.
We Palestinians and Jordanians are all Arabs and let us say that a large portion of
Arabs are, of course, Muslim. In ’97, there were findings, the results of a study,
and this is something that I am sure of; 97% of [all] Arabs were Muslims. What
unites us as [Arabs] is therefore our religion and language. We all speak the
Arabic language. In addition, our customs and our traditions are basically the
same. [Our] history as well, all of it is one united through the history [of]
colonialism and then independence. All of these things unite us.

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According to Asad, religious commonality constituted an important element of Arab solidarity.
Islam functioned as a categorical mode of identification through which Palestinians could
identify with Jordanians. In addition to history, language, and customs, the majority of Arabs
also shared a common religion: Islam. As Muslims, Palestinians and Jordanians thus possessed
an important point of identification and essential bond. During a discussion with Abu ‘Imrān,
another Palestinian refugee from the camps, the idea that religion provided the basis of an
important bond of solidarity between Palestinians and Jordanians was expressed in the following
way:
We are proud of Jordan as an Arabic and Islamic country. We are proud of Syria
and Iraq in the same way. We are proud when we are in the shade of our Arabic
and Islamic nations. I consider myself part of the Arabic and Islamic world. I am
a Muslim, an Arab, and a Palestinian. There is no contradiction between the
three.
For Abu ‘Imrān, Islam represented one of three points of identification in Jordan: Muslim, Arab,
and Palestinian. Each functioned to establish general and particular bonds within Jordan. As a
Muslim and Arab, he could identify with Jordanians as members of the “Arabic and Islamic
nations.” But as a Palestinian, he could also identify with his specific ethno-national community.
Being a Muslim did not negate the significance of his identification as a Palestinian in Jordan. It
was only one layer of three seemingly non-contradictory affiliations. Islam, in this sense,
allowed him to cut across national distinctions and assert a basic commonality with Jordanians
while simultaneously allowing him to maintain the importance of those distinctions in order to
remain Palestinian.
The idea that Islam established a bond between Palestinians and Jordanians was a
common sentiment in the camps that also served to externalize conflicts and temper any tensions
between the two putative groups. As Muslims, Palestinians claimed to share an essential bond

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with Jordanians that dispelled the idea that there was any conflict between them. Amīn, for
instance, offered the following comments regarding the Palestinian-Jordanian relationship: “mā
fī mushkila (there is no problem) in Jordan between Palestinians and Jordanians and mā fī farq
(there is no difference) between the Jordanian and the Palestinian. The Islamic identity is AlAsās (the foundation) [of both].” For Amīn, Islam provided a foundational identification for
both Palestinians and Jordanians. They were different communities united by a common faith
and ethnicity as Arabs. If there was any problem between Palestinians and Jordanians, he added,
it was one resulting from the foreign influence of colonialism. As Amīn explained, “The
problems between a Jordanian and a Palestinian or an Iraqi and a Syrian are a result of
colonialism.”
Here Amīn’s comments captured two important ideas expressed by many Palestinians
when describing the “problems” with Jordanians. First, Palestinians regularly used Islam to
convey the idea that religion precluded conflict. Indeed, Palestinians often claimed that their
status as Muslims compelled them not only to avoid conflict with Jordanians but also to defend
Jordan in the face of any foreign adversary. In this sense, Palestinians could claim to be loyal to
Jordan as Muslims committed to its preservation and defense according to the dictates of Islam,
not nationalism. Islam thus served as an important source of loyalty that superseded the idea of
secular loyalty to the nation-state. Second, Palestinians described the source of any divisions or
problems with Jordanians not as a result of conflicting nationalisms but as an extension of
colonial influences and the partition of a once integrated Arab homeland: bilād ash-shām.
Consider, for example, the following three examples. During a discussion with Rāmī concerning
the relationship between Jordanians and Palestinians, he provided the following account:
The problems between Jordanians, Palestinians, Iraqis, and Syrians, for example,
are all from colonialism. Our identities are rooted in religion because religion
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encompasses everything. Under all of these identities is our religion. If
something happened to Jordan, God forbid, I would defend it. Let’s say that the
Jews invaded Jordan or some other people attacked Jordan, then I would defend
it. I am obliged to defend it. I must care for Jordan because it is an Arabic and
Muslim country. I love all the Arabic countries and all of the Arabs. I love
Iraqis, for example. This is in my veins because of Islam. Islam teaches me that
his well being is important to me.
For Rāmī, national distinctions represented a colonial geography and external source of conflict.
Islam, on the other hand, was the foundation of solidarity. It underscored an important
commonality and set forth religious obligations to defend any Arab territory from foreign threats.
Loyalty, according to Rāmī, was decidedly religious. Similarly, Laith offered the following
ideas about the Palestinian-Jordanian relationship and the colonial roots of conflict:
Jordan is an Arab country and it was divided by colonialism. That is not our idea.
There was nothing called “Jordan” in the past; it was all one country: bilād ashshām. We are in Jordan among our brothers as Muslims and Arabs.
In another discussion within the camps, Warda described her relationship with Jordan and
Jordanians in the following way:
Jordan and Palestine are one; that is, they were originally one country.
Regardless of the divisions imposed by colonialism, they were one. I am living in
Jordan and I am living in Palestine. I have to protect the people. This is what our
religion teaches us. Originally, the two banks were united so I don’t see a
difference between Jordanians and Palestinians. So I am attached to Jordan as an
Arab and Muslim.
The excerpts above all suggest the significance of religion for Palestinian articulations of
commonality and identification with Jordanians. As Muslims, Palestinians could claim an
essential “sameness” with Jordanians that tempered the importance of national distinctions by
promoting a religious conception of loyalty. Loyalty to the Jordanian people and state thus
reflected the bonds of a religious relationship. It was not through a shared nationality that
Palestinians could maintain a legitimate place in and connection to Jordan; rather, it was through
their common ethno-religious identification as Arabs and Muslims. Citizenship, in this sense,
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could be disconnected from nationality and reconfigured as a religious obligation that assured
Palestinians’ commitment to Jordan as non-Jordanians. In addition, pan-Arab and religious
identifications were used to externalize the source of internal conflicts between Palestinians and
Jordanians. Echoing modern Muslim intellectuals including Sayyid Qutb
of organizations including the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas

150

and the discourse

151

, Palestinians located the

conflict between Arabs and Muslims within the history of colonial partition. According to this
logic, solidarity between Arabs existed throughout the region in an (imagined) united Arab
homeland, bilād ash-shām, until colonial authorities established the borders of the modern
Middle East

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. Palestinian and Jordanian conflicts, in this sense, were born not of local Arab

struggles over nationalist claims and the commitment to distinct Arab states but of the
disintegration of Arab and Muslim unity at the hands of the colonial powers.
On the surface, pan-Arab and religious discourse thus provided Palestinians with
powerful claims against the exclusivism of Transjordanian nationalists. It did this in two ways.
First, it challenged the link between nationality and citizenship by defining the relationship
between Palestinians and the state in terms of pan-Arab unity and according to the religious
principle of unity in faith. Palestinians could thus claim a legitimate place within Jordan as Arab
and Muslim citizens while maintaining an ethno-national attachment to Palestine as Palestinians.
Second, pan-Arab and religious discourse suggested that any conflict between Jordanians and

150

See Arab Nationalism: An Anthology by Sylvia Kedourie and Sylvia Haim (1974).

151

See Hamas: Political Thought and Practice by Khaled Hroub (2000) and The Society of
Muslim Brothers by Richard Mitchell (1993).
152
As Rashid Khalidi has noted, the basic premise of pan-Arabism is that the Arabs were a
single people with a single langague, history, and culture, divided not by centuries of separate
development of widely separated countries, but by the recent machinations of imperialism
(Khalidi 1998, 181).
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Palestinians—indeed, between all Arabs—was a consequence of colonial partition. Because the
boundaries between Arabs reflect the external imposition of a colonial architecture, any internal
conflicts could be explained away, or at least tempered. Such arguments placed Transjordanians
within the awkward position of claiming Jordanian nationalism at the expense of Arab unity.
Guests and Hosts:
The idea that Palestinians are “guests” in Jordan and that the Jordanian government and
people are their “hosts” has a discernible history grounded in events beginning in 1974. At the
Rabat Summit of 1974, the Arab League passed a historic resolution recognizing the PLO as the
“sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.” Much to the dismay of King Hussein,
the resolution signaled a critical shift in Palestinian national politics and had important
implications for his legitimacy as a representative of Palestinians in Jordan. Prior to the
resolution, the King argued that Palestinians in Jordan were fully integrated into the state (AbuOdeh 1999a, 209). He therefore believed that any attempts to recognize the PLO as the “sole
legitimate representative of the Palestinian people” would compromise his own legitimate
position as a representative of Palestinian citizens within his Kingdom. Despite his protests,
however, the resolution passed and the PLO became the “sole” representative of the Palestinian
people.
Upon returning from the Summit, the repercussions of the resolution were already visible
on the ground. For Transjordanian nationalists, the PLO’s new status was a major victory. In
their view, the resolution effectively resolved the question of representation by identifying
Palestinians in Jordan with the PLO, not the Jordanian state. Palestinians were thus nonJordanians and could no longer legitimately claim the right to participate in the Jordanian state as
nationals. Moreover, Transjordanians argued that the legitimization of the PLO also underscored

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the basic division between the East and West Banks. According to the resolution, the
Palestinians were afforded the right to establish an “independent national authority under the
command of the PLO…in any Palestinian territory that is liberated.” Consequently, the
Resolution effectively made the PLO, rather than Jordan, responsible for recovering the West
Bank from Israel (Salibi 1998b, 256). Given that the West Bank represented what was formerly
an area of central Palestine populated by Palestinians and, more importantly, was territory
identified as essential for the liberation of the Palestinian homeland, Transjordanians believed
that it was necessarily not Jordanian. For the Transjordanians, the King thus had no claim to the
West Bank or its population; the territory belonged to the Palestinians.
Transjordanians weren’t the only ones to receive the resolution positively. In Jordan,
many Palestinians celebrated the PLO’s new status by distributing candies on the street (AbuOdeh 1999a, 212). For Palestinian refugees, in particular, the resolution symbolized an
important shift in the national struggle. Having been expelled from Jordan following the 1970
War, many Palestinians lost hope in the PLO’s ability to liberate their homeland and, more
importantly, secure their return. Following the resolution, however, Palestinian morale and
confidence in the PLO received a serious jolt. In addition to the 1974 resolution, PLO chairman,
Yasser Arafat, was invited to address the United Nations General Assembly where he delivered
his historic speech on behalf of the Palestinian struggle. The General Assembly adopted the
Rabat Resolution and the PLO was subsequently given observer status at the United Nations. All
these developments gave hope to the Palestinians that the establishment of a Palestinian State
was not only possible, but imminent (Abu-Odeh 1999b, 212).
The Transjordanian and Palestinian response to the resolution was less than hopeful for
King Hussein. Indeed, their response revealed the King’s failure to soften the resolution’s

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impact in his own country and avoid future conflicts. Following the Summit in 1974, for
example, King Hussein addressed the Jordanian public reassuring Palestinians that Jordan was
their home if they wanted it. “Jordan,” he explained, “will not cease to be the homeland of every
Arab Palestinian who chooses to be one of its citizens, with all the rights and obligations of
citizenship without prejudicing his or her natural rights in Palestine (Abu-Odeh 1999a, 299).”
Appealing to Arab nationalist ideology, the speech underscored the idea that Jordan was an
essentially Arab territory. Palestinians thus had a legitimate place within the country and their
rights were secured through citizenship despite their “natural rights” in Palestine. During the
speech, the King also invoked religion to soothe any potential tensions. Drawing on terms
derived from the historical hijra (migration) of the Prophet Muhammad and the early Muslim
community from Mecca to Medina in 622 C.E., Hussein addressed the Palestinians as muhājirīn
(emigrants/migrants) and the Transjordanians as ansār (supporters). By casting the relationship
between the two in terms reflective of the early Muslim community, the King aimed to promote
a peaceful and supportive environment grounded in an idea of religious kinship. Any attempts to
divide the two would thus represent a gross violation of the sacred past marked by tolerance and
brotherhood and represent an affront to Islam.
Despite the King’s efforts, neither Arab nationalism nor Muslim history was sufficient
for avoiding Jordanian/Palestinian polarization. On the contrary, despite his calls for unity, the
very terms of his speech were interpreted in ways that exacerbated pre-existing tensions and
supported the idea that Palestinians were “guests” in Jordan and that the Jordanians were their
“hosts.” According to Abu-Odeh, for example, the King’s speech included three themes that
inadvertently nurtured the divisiveness he hoped to avoid (Abu-Odeh 1999a, 212). First the
speech reinforced the idea that Palestinians and Transjordanians were two distinct peoples. Thus

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despite the fact that many Palestinian elites did not embrace the PLO’s new status and were loyal
to the King and Jordanian state, the speech nevertheless suppressed points of similarity and
validated a critical idea of difference within the Palestinian/Transjordanian debate over identity
and loyalty. Coming from the King, it gave official meaning to the claim that Palestinians were
not Jordanians and that Jordan was not their home. Furthermore, the distinction legitimized
Transjordanian efforts to purge the state of its Palestinian presence since it did not rightfully
belong to them. The second effect of the speech was to emphasize the temporary nature of the
Palestinian presence in Jordan. Just as the muhājirīn “returned” to Mecca during the time of the
Prophet, so too would the Palestinians “return” to their home in Palestine. Finally, the idea that
Palestinians were guests in Jordan implied that the Jordanian State and people were doing
Palestinians a favor. All that Jordan had provided the Palestinians was thus seen as a display of
hospitality towards an essentially foreign visitor.
Today, over three decades after the passing of the Rabat Resolution, the terms “guest”
and “host” continue to resonate among Palestinians and Jordanians. Among refugees, these
terms and the discourses they rely on offer Palestinians a way of expressing their transient
presence in the Kingdom. Invoking the late King Hussein’s pan-Arab and Islamic discourse,
Palestinians use these terms in ways that reflect their efforts to assert both a universalist and
particularist claim to belong both in Jordan and Palestine. By identifying as guests, or muhājirīn,
Palestinians are effectively claiming a legitimate place within Jordan as a religious community of
migrants. Muhājirīn, in this sense, functions as a religious category of identification that links
them to Jordan as a special community of believers deserving of a special reception by their
fellow Muslims. At the same time, however, the category functions to underscore Palestinians’

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essential belonging to Palestine and the necessity of return. Consider, for example, the following
response by Abu ‘Imrān:
Look, the Arabic and Islamic brotherhood lightens our burden. But whatever
happens, whatever happens to us, it is like our Prophet, peace be upon him, when
he left Mecca and fled to Medina. He used to remember Mecca and he used to
miss Mecca. He was the muhājir and they [the people of Medina] were the ansār.
So we are the same, we [the Palestinians] are now the muhājirīn and they [the
Jordanians] are the ansār until we return to our country.
This idea was common among Palestinian refugees who believed that Jordan and its people were
fulfilling a religious duty by supporting them. As a displaced Muslim community comparable to
the original migrants of early Muslim history, the Meccans, Palestinians suggested that Jordan
owed them a particular kind of reception. Moreover, insofar as Jordan treated the Palestinians as
guests, that is, offered them the same treatment given to the Meccans by the people of Medina, it
was also meeting an important standard of religious conduct. Thus many Palestinians indicated
that their status as citizens of Jordan was less an act of generosity than a fulfillment of what
religion would require of any group that bears the status of ansār. It represented an extension of
the bonds shared between Palestinians and Jordanians as Muslims living out the significant status
of muhājirīn and ansār.
But Palestinians were also careful to stress the point that the Meccans returned to Mecca.
It was, in other words, necessary that Palestinians, like their Meccan predecessors, return to their
original homes in Palestine. As Warda explained:
I don’t attach myself to a city that is not of my origins. I am originally Palestinian.
Jordan has been a good host to the Palestinians: it has provided us with things that no
other country has offered us (qaddamāt). Nevertheless, I feel that I am Palestinian and
not Jordanian because the most important thing is our origins. In Palestine, everyone will
welcome me. No one will ask me “why are you here,” because I will no longer be a
guest. For example, like the muhājirīn, when we arrived here, the people asked us “why
are you here?” But in Palestine, no one can ask us this question or tell us to get out. We
will be at home, no longer guests.

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For Warda, the only way to end their status as muhājirīn required a termination of their stay in
Jordan. Like the Meccans, she believed, Palestinians must also return home to their origins. In
this way, the use of the term “muhājirīn” allowed Palestinians to disidentify with Jordan as their
home and, instead, assert a particular link to Palestine as their home. If in Jordan Palestinians
were among their brothers and sisters in faith, in Palestine Palestinians would be among their
brothers and sisters of origin.
The idea that Palestinians were “guests” in Jordan also functioned in a less sacred sense.
Many Palestinians, for example, represented their relationship to Jordanians in terms of a cultural
frame invoking the significance of the Arab principle of karam

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(hospitality) to sustain their

legitimacy in Jordan. As Haifa, a Palestinian refugee raised in Al-Wihdāt camp explained, “it is
customary for Arabs to treat their guests with honor. Jordan has been our host since the
occupation. For this we are grateful, as it is an Arab custom to treat one’s guest with honor.”
This, Haifa said, is not just an act of generosity; it is the duty of the Arabs especially towards
other Arabs.
It’s like if I go to my sister’s house, I am comfortable there but it’s still not my
house. And I must say that I love to stay in her house because I love my sister
very much, to a degree that is indescribable. But I love my house more. I am
comfortable within my house. I have all of my rights within my house and all of
the things that are pleasant. I can relax more at home than at my sister’s house
where I am a guest. You see, everyone is more comfortable in their own home.
Why? Because they are in their own home and can be a host, not a guest.
The above excerpt highlights an important cultural dimension of the principle of hospitality
invoked by Palestinians when describing their status as “guests” in Jordan. Writing about
hospitality among the Jordanian Bedouin of Balga, Andrew Shryock identified the potential
hazards inherent within the experience of playing host and guests. According to Shryock, hosts

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Karam may also mean kindness, generosity, and noble.
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must “fear” their guests because hospitality creates a momentary overlap of the inner and outer
dimensions of a “house” (a bayt or dār) (Shryock 2004, 36). Brought into the interior space of
the home, guests become intimate members of the house albeit provisionally. They are, as
Shryock describes, carefully invited into an ambivalent space defined by “privileged inclusion”
and “precise containment.”
Among Balgawis, guests are called "prisoners of the host" (usira al-mu'azzib).
They are boxed in by the etiquette of the visit. They are seated in special areas of
the house-on mattresses or overstuffed couches reserved for guests-and things are
brought to them. Guests do not move around the house, nor are they expected to
serve themselves. They are a privileged audience (Shryock 2004, 37).
In the excerpt above, Haifa translates the guest/host relationship experienced at the micro level
of the home to the macro level of the country. According to this logic, Palestinians are living out
the status of guests received by their hosts, the Jordanians, in their home, Jordan. As a guest, she
and the Palestinians are brought into the “interior” space of the home and are, in this sense,
“included” as members within Jordan. Haifa is careful to note, however, the “imprisonment”
described by Shryock above; she understands that her stay is provisional and that limits to her
“membership” are firmly in place. She is not equal in her status to her hosts—Jordanians—and
as such identifies Palestine as her home where “all of her rights” can be realized and where she
can “relax.” Comfort, in this regard, functions to illustrate the limitations placed upon the
Palestinians while in Jordan. But as Shryock notes, guests pose another potential threat to their
hosts: shame. Guests can tarnish the names of hosts who offend them (Shryock 2004, 36). In
her representation of the guest/host relationship, Haifa and the Palestinians can thus “damage”
their hosts by criticizing the quality of their hospitality. Instead, however, Haifa honors the
Jordanians describing them in terms of family (“my sister’s house”) and by recognizing their
generosity towards the Palestinians (“I am comfortable there”) while living among them.

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Many Palestinians offered a similar stance vis-à-vis their hosts. Recognizing the
conditions of Palestinian refugees in countries like Lebanon and Syria, where Palestinians are
denied citizenship, they often expressed a degree of gratitude towards the Jordanian government
even if they faced practical limits to the realization of full equality with Jordanians. To some
extent, however, it should be noted that a particular irony exists within the use of the guest/host
relationship to represent the Palestinian position in Jordan. If Palestinians are guests, as they
often claimed, then very little can be said to assert a right to full equality with Jordanians while
in Jordan. Guests, according to the cultural logic of hospitality, are precluded from full
integration into the host’s home. Thus although claiming “guesthood” in Jordan allows
Palestinians to maintain a transitory status that privileges their “origin” in Palestine (home), it
also suggests that Palestinians cannot really complain about inequalities enforced by nationalists.
As guests, Palestinians must be contained as they are not truly members of the household.
Either as the Muslim muhājirīn or as Arab guests among their family, Palestinians’
reliance on the guest/host relationship reflected the unresolved question of the Palestinian
presence in Jordan. It suggested that Palestinian refugees have yet to reconcile their prolonged
displacement as Palestinians with their extended residence in Jordan as Jordanian citizens. On
one hand, claiming “guesthood” served to further their own sense of displacement as it
privileged their “connection” to Palestine and reinforced the idea that they did not belong in
Jordan. Moreover, claiming guesthood precluded Palestinians’ status as “Jordanians” and
reinscribed the assumed dichotomy between both “groups.” Palestinian guests, in other words,
couldn’t be Jordanian among Jordanian hosts. The two identifications thus functioned as
mutually exclusive categories whereby claiming one negated the other. For how long can
Palestinians be “guests” within the only country many refugees really know? To some extent,

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this question cannot be fully answered until the Transjordanians reconcile their own desire for an
exclusively “Jordanian” nation-state with the fact that half (if not more) of their population does
not necessarily identify as such. Their own insistence on the idea of “Jordan for the Jordanians”
has only facilitated particular forms of difference whereby Palestinians cannot embrace their
Jordanian status nor see themselves as being “at home” in Jordan. In the next section, I plunge
deeper into the dichotomous relationship between Jordanian and Palestinian categories within the
context of citizenship among Palestinians. For reasons that will soon become clear, the meaning
of “Jordanian” and “Palestinian” for refugees prohibits the link between citizenship and ethnonational identification. Thus for Palestinian refugees, Jordanian citizenship did not transform
them into Jordanians.
Citizenship without Nationality:
Writing about nationalism and ethnicity among Hungarians in Transylvania, Brubaker et
al. discussed the distinct ways in which the terms “Hungarian” and “Romanian” function as
markers of ethno-national identification

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. In Transylvania, to identify oneself as a Hungarian

is to identify oneself in terms of ethnocultural nationality and, in implicitly comparative terms, as
Hungarian-and-not-Romanian (Brubaker et al. 2008, 213). In contrast, when an individual
identifies as a Romanian, she is identifying herself in terms of some mixture of ethnocultural
nationality, citizenship, and, in some cases, territory. The use of the term “Romanian” can thus
mean “Romanian citizen” or “ethnic Romanian,” depending on the context in which the term is
used. “Hungarian,” on the other hand, primarily functions as a marker of difference through
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Brubaker et al. is careful to note that by using the descriptive categories “Hungarian” and
“Romanian,” they are not suggesting the existence of two distinct groups. Rather, they are only
using the terms as categorical indications of how, given a particular context, an individual would
identify themselves by ethnic nationality. For a complete discussion of the use of categories in
everyday ethnicity, see Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town
(2006), especially chapter 7.
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which one distinguishes oneself from the taken-for-granted category “Romanian.” According to
Brubaker, the reason for the difference is that, in Transylvania, the category “Hungarian”
functions as a marked term while the category “Romanian” operates as an unmarked term.
Unmarked categories are the normal, default, taken-for-granted categories, while
marked categories are special, different, and “other.” Thus theorists of gender,
race, and sexuality have observed that “woman” is a marked category, “man”
unmarked; that “black” and to a lesser extent other nonwhite racial categories are
marked in America, while “white” is unmarked, and that “homosexual” is
marked, “heterosexual” unmarked (Brubaker et al. 2008, 212).
Although Palestinians are believed to constitute at least half of the population of Jordan,
and are therefore in a numerically “better” position vis-à-vis the position of Hungarians in
Romania described above, one can nevertheless see a similarity between the Jordanian and
Transylvanian contexts. In Jordan, the term “Jordanian” can designate a range of identifications
including an individual’s status as a Jordanian citizen (a person with Jordanian citizenship), an
individual’s ethno-national identification (an ethnic Jordanian), or an individual’s identification
with the country of Jordan as a fact of birth (a person born and raised in Jordan regardless of
their citizenship status). Thus much like “Romanian” in Romania, “Jordanian” in Jordan is the
unmarked term. “Palestinian,” however, often functions as the marked term. That is, identifying
oneself as a “Palestinian” tends to signify a specifically ethno-national category that
distinguishes oneself from “Jordanian” or, at the very least, qualifies it. To illustrate how these
terms function within public life in Amman, consider the routine events of riding a cab or bus.
Although an otherwise mundane encounter between a chauffeur and passenger in a cab or two
passengers on a long bus ride, the often ritualized discussions that take place provide an
interesting opportunity for observing the function of ethno-national identification.
Before purchasing a vehicle, I spent the first nine months of my fieldwork riding in cabs
and buses. More often than not, cab drivers or inquisitive bus passengers would start a
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discussion with a very typical question about my “origins.” “Min wain inta (Where are you
from),” they’d ask. By this they were effectively asking two questions: first, they were asking
about my country of residence and, second, they were interested in my ethno-national origins. If
I had enough energy to carry on the conversation, I’d usually answer the question (and any that
immediately followed) and then present my interlocutor with the same question, “min wain inta.”
If the individual responded with the category “Urdunī” (Jordanian), several possibilities for the
155

meaning of that term existed. By Urdunī, the individual could mean that he

was simply born

in Jordan. In this sense, the identification was primarily territorial and signified his location of
birth regardless of his ethno-national identification. This could, for example, refer to an
individual who, in some other context, might also identify with his Circassian “roots” and thus
say “Urdunī wa Sharkasī” (Jordanian and Circassian). Another possibility was that Urdunī
referred to an individual’s citizenship status. In this case, the category “Jordanian” didn’t
necessarily preclude the possibility that an individual might also identify as a “Palestinian” in
ethno-national terms. It only meant that his jinsīyya (citizenship) was Jordanian. A third
possibility was that the individual was identifying as a Jordanian in specifically ethno-national
terms. This usually meant that an individual was born in Jordan, was a citizen of Jordan, and
identified both ethnically and nationally as a Jordanian (Transjordanian). It also meant that the
individual was distinguishing himself as a non-Palestinian. The variety of responses
notwithstanding, one could safely assume that the use of the category “Jordanian” did not always
mean that an individual was not “Palestinian.” Even in the latter case, in which an individual’s
response meant that he was actually identifying as Jordanian-not-Palestinian, there was an

155

Throughout my two years of fieldwork in Jordan, I never saw a single female cab driver.
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additional effort needed by the respondent to make this distinction clear. Usually, this entailed a
doubling of the response: Urdunī Urdunī.
The function of “Jordanian” as an unmarked term encompassing such a broad range of
identifications meant that to identify oneself as a Palestinian offered much fewer possibilities.
For starters, the absence of a Palestinian state made any attempt to refer to Palestinian citizenship
futile; without a state a Palestinian could not be a Palestinian citizen. Thus one could not use the
category “Palestinian” to refer to jinsīyya or citizenship status. In addition, the fact that most
people who identified as Palestinians were born in Jordan also precluded the possibility that the
category “Palestinian” could refer to their birthplace. Consequently, the use of the category
“Palestinian” by refugees in Jordan typically referred to an individual’s ethno-national
identification. By using the category “Palestinian,” in other words, an individual was offering an
ethno-national identification that was distinct from the category “Jordanian.” But the limited
meaning of the category “Palestinian” also meant that, for Palestinian refugees, the term
“Jordanian” was also limited. That is, by identifying oneself as a Palestinian, one was
simultaneously limiting the meaning of the term “Jordanian.” For many Palestinian refugees,
then, the category “Jordanian” could only mean one of two things. First, “Jordanian” could
mean an individual’s status as a Jordanian citizen: his or her jinsīyya. In this case, a Palestinian
could identify as a “Jordanian” in virtue of his or her legal status as a Jordanian citizen. Second,
the category “Jordanian” could mean an ethno-national identification. For most Palestinians, this
category was off limits insofar as the categories “Palestinian” and “Jordanian” were mutually
exclusive. An individual was either Palestinian or Jordanian, but not both. The basic idea here
was that, although Palestinians could belong to Jordan as citizens, they did not believe that this
was enough to make them into Jordanians. To illustrate, consider the following three examples

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taken from discussions with Palestinians regarding their status as Jordanian citizens and ethnonational identifications.
Asad: I am a citizen of Jordan but I feel for Palestine like any other Palestinian.
Palestine is inside of me and there is no difference between me and any other
Palestinian. On the contrary, the difference is that, as a Jordanian citizen, I might
excel [other Palestinians] because my movement is easier. For example, it is
easier for me to travel to Mecca for hajj. I also might be better off financially
than the Palestinians on the inside. But I will use my benefits to help them
financially and with my prayers.
Faisal: Officially and formally, my citizenship makes me a Jordanian. I am
considered a Jordanian because of it. But deep down inside of my heart, I feel
that I am Palestinian and I will never forget that. If I have a chance to return, I
will leave it all behind in Jordan and return to Palestine.
Abu ‘Imrān: When Palestine returns, I will rip my Jordanian passport up into tiny
pieces. Yes, when Palestine returns, I will rip it up and take my passport. I miss
my country. When I say that I’ll rip up my passport, I don’t mean that I hate
Jordan. But I love Palestine and I am attached to Palestine and my
Palestinianness.
The three excerpts above all illustrate an important distinction between the meaning of
“Jordanian” as a category for citizenship and ethno-national identification. All three of the
individuals above understood the term “Jordanian” as a meaningful category of identification
that described their status as citizens of Jordan. Thus Faisal acknowledged his “official” status
as a “Jordanian” by virtue of his jinsīyya. Similarly, Asad used the category “Jordanian” to refer
to his citizenship. But the three individuals above also drew an explicit line between their status
as Jordanian citizens and their ethno-national identification. Although their citizenship allowed
them to identify as “Jordanians,” that identification was limited by their ethno-national
identification as “Palestinians.” By identifying as Palestinian, in other words, Palestinians
precluded the chance that their status as Jordanians could slip into an ethno-national category.
Although “Jordanian” could be an ethno-national category, their identification as “Palestinians”
prevented that meaning from taking hold. As Faisal explained, his feelings within were that of a
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Palestinian; “Palestinian” was an organic rather than official category of identification; it defined
some dimension of his being. To illustrate the significance of this identification, he used the idea
of return to show that he belonged to Palestine in a way that he didn’t to Jordan. For Faisal, the
strong desire to return to Palestine authenticated his connection to Palestine and underscored his
disidentification with Jordan. In a similar vein, Abu ‘Imrān said he would rip his passport and,
consequently, his status as a Jordanian, into pieces if he was able to return to Palestine.
Identifying as a Palestinian meant that he had a special relationship to Palestine that he did not
have with Jordan. His attachments to Palestine reflected his identification as a Palestinian and
thus limited any connections he might have with Jordan.
While the excerpts above suggest the limits Palestinians placed upon the categorical
meaning of “Jordanian,” they also reveal the practical importance of that category as an official
status. As Asad described above, his status as a Jordanian allowed him to “excel” as a
Palestinian since it afforded him particular privileges that were unavailable to Palestinians on the
inside (West Bank and Gaza). This idea was common among many Palestinian refugees, in
particular, whose Jordanian citizenship facilitated their ability to work and travel as
“Jordanians.” According to Jordanian labor laws, all foreign Arab residents are prohibited from
working within the public sphere. They cannot, for example, access any government jobs nor
can they work within the military. Moreover, a 1996 law stipulated that any non-citizens who
wanted to work in the private sector were required to obtain permits from the Ministry of Labor
and their employers were required to pay the cost of the permit. Despite their status as refugees,
Palestinians’ status as citizens affords them the right to work as Jordanians and avoids the legal
restrictions placed upon other foreign residents. As Hassan expressed during our discussions:
I am a citizen of Jordan but it doesn’t affect my identity as a Palestinian at all. It
does, however, make things easier for matters in Jordan and in life in general. For
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example, it makes things easier when dealing with the government. It also makes
travel easier because I have a passport and travel like a Jordanian. In terms of
work, I can find a job in some government circles because of my national
156
number .
Similarly, Mustafā described his status as a Jordanian citizen in terms of a practical advantage
important for satisfying his religious obligations. “My citizenship is important only because it
lets me travel easier,” he said. “I can make hajj or ‘umra. I can also visit Syria. This is what
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being a Jordanian means to me

.” For Mustafā, as for many Palestinian refugees, the category

“Jordanian” thus served as a practical one tied to specific practices that facilitated their
opportunities as Palestinians. That is, their ascribed status as Jordanians functioned to
distinguish them as Palestinians who, unlike other Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, or in
other Arab countries, could work and travel with less difficulty. In addition, by emphasizing the
practical nature of their “Jordanian” status, they were also disidentifying with the term’s
potential ethno-national meaning. Palestinians like Mustafā and Asad thus restricted the
meaning of Jordanian to a functional status while retaining their ethno-national identification as a
Palestinian. For a Palestinian, being “Jordanian” could only mean having a particular status that
allows for benefits like simpler travel and work opportunities.
The function of “Palestinian” as a marked term thus offered an important insight into the
way Palestinians understood their location in Jordan. For Palestinian refugees, their “Jordanian”
status as citizens did not reflect the ideological bond between a nation and a state. They were not
“Jordanian” in either ethnic or national terms. Rather, “Jordanian” represented a condition of
existence that afforded them particular civic privileges. It did not, in other words, mark one as

156

In Jordan, the raqam watanī (national number) is required by the government for
employment or any other national matters.
157
Emphasis mine.
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an ethno-national Jordanian. That identification was precluded by an individual’s identification
as a “Palestinian.”
Conclusion:
Central to this dissertation is the question of Palestinian identification in Jordan. In the
preceding and current chapter, I have therefore outlined a key element of the political field
(Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992) in which Palestinian identification took place in 2006-2007 or, as
Brubaker would claim, how Palestinian nationhood “happened” (Brubaker 1996). I focused,
first, on the development of Transjordanian nationalism and the positions taken within this
nationalizing discourse vis-à-vis the Palestinians. According to many Transjordanian
nationalists, Palestinians constitute an external population within the Jordanian nation-state.
They do not belong to Jordan nor do they deserve access to the state as it is the exclusive
province of the “true” Jordanians. Second, I examined the de-Palestinianization of the state as a
policy constitutive both of the “Jordanianziation” of Jordan and the “Palestinianization” of the
Palestinians. By privileging Transjordanians within the state apparatus, the Hashemite-ruled
government of Jordan also facilitated a process of de-Palestinianization. This process, in turn,
had two important effects upon Palestinian refugees. First, it hardened the presumed boundaries
between “Palestinians” and “Jordanians” by discriminating against Palestinians within particular
areas of the state. Second, the state reinforced the sense among Palestinians that they were not,
indeed could not, be Jordanian. De-Palestinianization, in this sense, served to promote a dual
process wherein the distinction between Jordanian and Palestinian identification could be
practically grounded in terms of access to the state.
In these chapters, I also outlined the ethno-national stance taken by Palestinians in Jordan
vis-à-vis Jordanians and the state. I argued that the nationalizing discourse of Transjordanian

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nationalists and the discriminatory practices of the state were an essential feature of Palestinian
ethno-national identification. Faced with Jordanian exclusivism, Palestinians engaged in a
complex form of identification in which pan-Arab and religious discourse were meant to
establish their legitimacy in Jordan as a community deserving of citizenship and equality. As
Arabs and Muslims, Palestinians claimed to belong to Jordan in cultural and religious terms.
Such a discourse allowed Palestinians to assert the particularities of their ethno-national
identification without necessarily compromising their necessary links to Jordan. Unlike the
articulations of Palestinian pluralists, however, the Palestinian refugees I discussed in this
chapter did not want to become Jordanians. Instead, they wanted to maintain a primary
identification as Palestinians inextricably linked to their place of origin, Palestine. Palestinians
thus disidentified with their Jordanian status as citizens in order to assert a particular ethnoidentification as Palestinians. They were “guests” whose status in Jordan was that of a
community among its hosts.
The idea that pan-Arabism and Islam could “solve” the question of Palestinians in Jordan
was not without its complications. By engaging in the universalizing discourses of pan-Arabism
and Islam, Palestinians were reinforcing the idea that their presence and contributions in Jordan
were insufficient for legitimizing their status in Jordan as Palestinians. Instead, they emphasized
their identification as Arabs and Muslims in ways that ostensibly resolved the questions of (1)
who they were in Jordan (ethnic Arab Muslim Palestinians), (2) what they were in Jordan
(guests), and (3) where they truly belonged (in Palestine). According to this logic, Palestinian
belonging in Jordan could be legitimized in terms of “identity” alone. In this sense, Palestinians
accepted a key claim among Transjordanian nationalists, namely that “Jordan is for Jordanians”
and Palestinians, as such, belong in Palestine. This poses several risks for Palestinians that are at

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the heart of the “problem” Palestinians hoped to resolve. In Jordan, all non-Palestinian Arabs are
treated as “foreign residents” and legally denied formal equality with Jordanian citizens. By
articulating their connections to Jordan in purely cultural (Arab) and religious (Islam) terms,
Palestinians were thus affirming that their status is, in some ways, no different from any other
Arab Muslim residents in Jordan. Consequently, the Transjordanians have a strong bit of support
in Palestinian refugee discourse for their hopes to denationalize Palestinians since, according to
Jordanian laws, neither Arabness nor Islam are sufficient for establishing equality.
In the next two chapters, I shift the analysis away from Jordanian nationalism and the
state to consider an important feature of Palestinian identification: the homeland. First, I
consider the meaning of the homeland for refugees within an origins discourse, or as a referentorigin. Within this discourse, the homeland emerges as a timeless, unchanging territory from
which Palestinians derive their essential identity, which, like their homeland, is also unchanging.
Thus for both the older and younger generations of refugees, the homeland “persists” despite the
vicissitudes of geopolitical realities. In addition, I examine how the homeland functions as a
symbolic means for being national without nationalism. Through the symbolic representation of
the homeland, I show how Palestinians can articulate national identifications in ways that defy
the Jordanian prohibition on being nationalist.
In the final chapter, I proceed to examine how Palestinians refugees engage with the
homeland nationalism of Hamas. Through the example of the “homeland,” I show how the
meaning of Palestine reflects key attention to the trans-border politics of the Palestinian national
arena in the West Bank and Gaza. Instead of passive spectators of homeland politics, I argue
that Palestinian refugees engage in homeland debates and position themselves within those
debates in ways that become visible through a central point of identification: the homeland.

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Nationalizing the homeland in religious terms thus reflects Palestinian refugees’ engagement
with the nationalist politics of home but also offers them an empowering discourse to promote
from an essentially marginalized position both in Jordan and in the Palestinian political arena.

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Chapter Six:
Homeland Matters
In the last two chapters, I examined the intersections between Jordanian nationalist discourse,
state practice, and ethno-national identifications among Palestinian refugees. I argued that the
discriminatory discourse and policies of Transjordanian nationalists and the state facilitated
particular forms of identification among Palestinians concerned with normalizing their status as
Jordanian citizens while maintaining a distinct ethno-national identity as Palestinians. In this
chapter, I consider a particular theme of Palestinian identification: the homeland. Throughout
the refugee camps, the homeland emerged as an important symbolic resource through which
Palestinians could articulate a claim to a particular “Palestinian identity” grounded in a discourse
of origins. This chapter situates the homeland within an identity discourse in which genealogy
and territory converge to constitute an important aspect of Palestinian identification among
refugees. I show how the idea of the homeland functioned to establish a trans-historical
connection between a certain imagined people and a certain imagined territory (Eastmond 1998;
Benedict Anderson 2006). In addition, this chapter examines how, through symbolic
representations in everyday contexts, the homeland allowed Palestinians to assert national
identifications without explicitly engaging in nationalist politics.
Introduction:
Interdisciplinary work on questions of ethnicity, nationalism, and diasporas has given
considerable attention to the significance of homelands for understanding the relationship
between people and place (Clifford 1994; Dufoix 2008; Robin Cohen 1997; Vertovec and Robin
Cohen 1999; Tölölyan 2007; Anthony D. Smith 2004; Anthony D. Smith 1991). For scholars of
ethnicity and nationalism such as Anthony Smith, the concept of the homeland is central to the
formation of both ethnies and nations. Ethnies, according to Smith, are named human
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communities connected to a homeland, possessing common myths of ancestry, shared memories,
one or more elements of shared culture, and a measure of solidarity, at least among the elites
(Anthony D. Smith 2002, 13). Concerning nationalism, Smith finds two particular functions of
the homeland. First, the concept of the homeland may act as a title-deed, a political claim to a
specified area of land and its resources, often in the teeth of opposition from rival claimants
(Anthony D. Smith 2002, 31). In this capacity, the homeland is inextricably linked to the
nation’s material well-being: its resources provide the economic foundation of the nation’s
growth and survival. Second, Smith believes that the homeland constitutes an historic or
ancestral land that not only provides the setting upon which the “nation’s” history is inscribed

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but, like the nation itself, takes on its own particular identity distinguishable in its landscapes
from “other” territories and histories. As Smith has argued, every nationalism seeks to cultivate
and preserve its own special values in its own manner and on a territory it considers a historic
homeland (Anthony Smith 1999, 333).
The homeland has also emerged at the center of transnational studies and has achieved
particular prominence among scholars of diasporas. Concerned with transnational cultural flows,
the mass movement of populations, and the increasing deterritorialization of peoples, Akhil
Gupta and James Ferguson described the homeland as one of the most powerful unifying
symbols for mobile and displaced peoples (Gupta and Ferguson 1992, 11). According to them,
attention to the “pulverized space of post-modernity” reveals that the meaning of “home” and
“homelands” no longer reflects the stable relationships anthropologists once assumed between
people and places. Instead, the situation of migrants, refugees, and stateless people underscores
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According to Smith, the homeland provides the “arena and indispensible setting for the great
men and women, and the turning points, in the nation’s history – battles, treaties, synods and
assemblies, the exploits of heroes and the shrines and schools of saints and sages (Anthony D.
Smith 2002, 32).”
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the ways in which home and homelands serve as symbolic anchors for dispersed communities
who use memories of place to imaginatively construct their new lived world (Gupta and
Ferguson 1992, 11). For scholars like Robin Cohen and William Safran, the homeland concept
is at the center of all diaspora communities in at least two ways: (1) as an idealized ancestral
territory grounded in collective memory and tied to a myth of return and (2) as a putative
ancestral home demanding a collective commitment to its maintenance, restoration, safety, and
prosperity (Robin Cohen 1996; Safran 1991; Robin Cohen 1997). Taking the Jewish diaspora as
the paradigmatic case, both Cohen and Safran understand the homeland as a key concept not
only for identifying diasporas but also for determining the kind of diasporas they might be:
victim, labor, trade, imperial, or cultural. In addition, more recent scholarship has emphasized
the role of the homeland and diasporas in the formation of ethno-national solidarity and conflict.
Noting the significance of diasporic communities to homeland nationalist programs, Yossi Shain,
for example, has described diasporas as key constituencies of concern for nationalist leaders,
their adversaries, and for international diplomatic activities (Shain 2002, 116). Concerned with
the security, prosperity, and, in some cases, realization of the putative homeland, diaspora
communities often serve as an important mobilizing force behind separatist or inter-state
conflicts whose conceptions of and commitments to the homeland can mean the difference
between prolonged war and sustainable peace.
More recently, critics have revealed several limitations within the idea that homeland
connections are sufficient for characterizing the relationship between people and place in
diasporic terms (Dufoix 2008; Brubaker 2005; Anthias 1998). By emphasizing the more general
idea of a connection to the homeland, these critics argue that diaspora scholars have often
ignored the complex meanings of that homeland for the various populations living in distinct

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circumstances. In so doing, scholars have precluded their ability to account for how the specific
local conditions affecting each population factor into the production of homeland connections
and, in some cases, politics. As Stephane Dufoix noted, studies of “diasporas” often fail to
present the workings of the thing they ought best describe: the relationship to a “referent-origin”
(Dufoix 2008, 2). Such inadequacies in diaspora accounts often result in a flattening of
difference whereby the concept of homeland remains unspecified and otherwise disparate
populations are forced into bounded categorical groups that need to be explained, not assumed
(Brubaker 2006). Moreover, Floya Anthias has argued that the application of the diaspora
category often reflects a failure to specify the distinct conditions under which populations
migrate and, more importantly, ignores the impact of local conditions upon these populations.
Putative diasporas have thus appeared in ways that suggest far more homogeneity than actually
exists and have essentialized the relationship between people and place. According to Anthias,
such populations are not homogenous for their movements may have taken place at different
historical periods and for different reasons (Anthias 1998, 564). In addition, the different
countries in which these populations reside often present different social conditions,
opportunities, and exclusions that can lead to distinct representations of the community and their
relationship to the homeland.
Within the field of Palestinian studies, discussions rarely escape the gravitational pull of
the homeland. Among scholars of the refugee crisis, the homeland constitutes the basis of
various key concerns including history and the Arab/Israeli wars (Morris 2009; Segev 2007;
Masalha 1992; Pappe 2007), statelessness and human rights (Akram 2002; Takkenberg 1998;
Perez 2010; Gabiam 2006), repatriation, return, and compensation (Fischbach 2003; Aruri 2001),
and identity (Masalha 2005; Yezid Sayigh 2000; Rosemary Sayigh 2008a; Staughton Lynd,

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Bahour, and Alice Lynd 1998). Notwithstanding the diversity of approaches to the homeland
within Palestinian studies, two particular approaches stand out for their distinct conclusions.
First, some have argued that the homeland represents the basis of a common identity grounded in
memories of the landscapes and lifeways of pre-Partition Palestine and memorialized in literature
and commemorations (Sa'di 2002; Staughton Lynd, Bahour, and Alice Lynd 1998; Sa'di and
Abu-Lughod 2007; Hammer 2005). Emphasizing the role of displacement and experience of
exile among mostly Palestinian refugees, these scholars rightfully note the importance of loss
and longing in the formation of a common identification for Palestinians living outside of their
former territories or born in countries as refugees. Second, there is the idea that the homeland
reflects disparate articulations of a population fragmented by the various effects and conditions
of displacement. Drawing on literary representations of “the Palestinians” and “Palestine,” this
approach is best seen in the work of Glenn Bowman who, in his essay, A Country of Words:
Conceiving the Palestinian Nation from the Position of Exile,” argues that:
[T]he “various and scattered...fate” of the Palestinians after the originary 1948
loss of their homeland has resulted…in the construction of a number of different
‘Palestines’ corresponding to the different experiences of Palestinians in the
places of their exile. The nation-building process which Darwish refers to in the
final lines of his poem is, I contend, made difficult by the different senses of what
it means to be Palestinian engendered by more than forty years of dislocation and
dispersion (Bowman 1994, 138).
According to Bowman, the idea of a “Palestinian community” and “homeland” are complicated
by the specific conditions Palestinians experience in their diverse circumstances. Through a
careful examination of community and homeland representations by the Palestinian journalist
and author, Fawaz Turki, the Palestinian intellectual, Edward Said, and the Palestinian novelist,
Raja Shehadeh, Bowman highlights the importance of “dissonance and distinction” within
putative national groups. In the Palestinian situation, he concludes, where the national

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community is spread all over the world in a number of relatively autonomous enclaves, the
nebulousness of the term “Palestinian” renders it incapable of providing any sense of the
distinguishing characteristics which would allow Palestinians to recognize their situation as
“like” that of other Palestinians in different situations (Bowman 1994, 148).
This chapter takes Bowman’s analysis above to consider the discourse of refugees in the
camps of Jordan. In so doing, I am not rejecting previous studies that indicate a commonality of
meaning within the idea of a Palestinian homeland among refugees in the Middle East. On the
contrary, I think my own research reveals certain themes that are consistent with other homeland
conceptions among Palestinian refugee communities in other locales. However, I also believe
that there are certain differences in the meaning of the homeland that are specific to the local
contexts of each community. These differences reflect what Bowman described as “dissonance
and distinction” and underscore the fact that, while people may “imagine” (Benedict Anderson
2006) the same things—a homeland or a nation—, their imaginations need not be the same.
Indeed, as Joane Nagel has suggested, cultural construction and reconstruction are ongoing taks
in which new and renovated cultural symbols, activities, and materials are continually being
added to and removed from existing cultural repertoires (Joane Nagel 1994, 162). Thus my
analysis seeks to specify the meaning of the homeland as an imagined cultural symbol among
Palestinian refugees in Amman.
In this chapter, I examine the meaning of the Palestinian homeland for refugees in Jordan
and consider its significance for understanding how Palestinians identify in ethnic, religious, and
national terms. This chapter shows that, for Palestinian refugees in Amman, the homeland
matters: it is a central point of identification and important aspect of what Palestinians believe
makes them uniquely Palestinian. Divided into four sections, this chapter aims to elucidate

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several features of the Palestinian homeland as conceived by camp refugees. In the first section,
I begin with a brief history of the colonial and post-colonial geography of Palestine giving
particular attention to its shifting territorial borders and location within the regional context.
Because it is the Palestine of the British Mandate that refugees consistently refer to as their
homeland, my aim in this section is to provide a sketch of that territory and the changes that have
occurred since the partition of Palestine in 1947.
The next section considers how descriptions of the homeland among two particular
categories of refugees—those born in Palestine and those born in Jordan—reflected the
widespread idea of an unchanging Palestinian geography. Despite their location within distinct
generational groups, both articulated a similar conception of the homeland rooted in the colonial
borders of the British Mandate. That is, despite the post-colonial realities of the 1948 War, the
1967 occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, and the contemporary division between the Hamasruled Gaza Strip and PA-ruled West Bank, Palestinian refugees of both generations described
their homeland as a timeless territory extant prior to the colonial demarcations of the British. I
suggest that the common conceptualization of Palestine among Palestinians reflects the
continuing significance of the Nakba and Naksa generations for the younger generations.
Having “known” Palestine as a united territory, their knowledge and experience functions as an
invaluable resource for the younger generations who have never visited the homeland.
The third section of this chapter considers the significance of the homeland for
understanding the meaning of Palestinian ethno-national identifications. As I will show, for
Palestinian refugees, identifying the homeland was no trivial matter. It not only indicated a
commitment to preserving a connection to a particular territory but also reflected a common will
to resist the ongoing erasure (Piterberg 2001) of that place by a population claiming the land as

239

its own. For the Palestinians I interviewed in Jordan, the meaning of the homeland was thus
essential for maintaining their connections to that territory and asserting a particular kind of
ethno-national identity in the process. Identifying Palestine was, in other words, an important
strategy for claiming an ethno-national Palestinian identity and a right to return. To illustrate this
point, I examine how the homeland formed the basis of a distinct ethno-national identity rooted
in a discourse of “origins.” It emerged as a powerful referent-origin that provided the foundation
for constructing and managing the idea of a Palestinian community living beyond the territorial
borders of Palestine (Dufoix 2008). More specifically, the idea of Palestine enabled a distinct
ethnic identification grounded in genealogical ties (Ho 2002) and reflecting a claim to what
Anthony Smith described as a “common community of descent.” According to this idea,
whether an individual is within her community or has emigrated to another, she remains
ineluctably and organically a member of the community of her birth and is forever stamped by it
(Anthony D. Smith 1993, 11). The idea of Palestine thus offered a conceptual point of
identification through which Palestinians displaced from their homeland and their descendants in
Amman could link themselves to a particular territory and people and distinguish themselves in
terms of a unique ethno-national identity.
In the fourth and final section of this chapter, I consider symbolic representations of the
homeland within the context of everyday life among Palestinian refugees. In the spirit of Eric
Hobsbawm’s call for analyzing nationalism “from below,” I offer an ethnographic account of
Palestinian nationhood in Jordan as expressed through homeland representations (Hobsbawm
1992). Looked at ethnographically, I show how symbolic representations of the homeland
reflect what Jon Fox and Cynthia Miller-Idriss have called “everyday nationhood” (Fox and
Miller-Idriss 2008). According to them, understanding how the nation is produced and

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reproduced in the specific contexts of ordinary people engaged in ordinary life reveals important
insights into the meaning of nationhood beyond those expressed in the discourse and practice of
nationalist elites. In Jordan, where public expressions of Palestinian nationalism are strictly
monitored and controlled, I argue that representations of the homeland offer refugees an
important opportunity to symbolically engage in the practice of nationhood. As Dale Eickelman
and James Piscatori noted in their examination of Muslim politics, symbols acquire focal
political significance in ways that are not always predictable: the symbolic is not a residual
dimension of purportedly real poltics; still less is it an insubstantial screed upon which real issues
are cast in pale and passive form; the symbolic is real politics, articulated in a special and often
most powerful way (Eickelman and Piscatori 2004, 10). In this sense, I suggest that material
expressions of the homeland are important symbols of ethno-national identification that allow
Palestinians to be “national” in everyday life without earning the suspicions of the Jordanians by
being explicitly “nationalist.”
Palestine: A Brief History of Borders:
The geographic borders of modern Palestine reflect the colonial architecture of two
particular documents: the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration. Completed in
October 1916, the Sykes-Picot Agreement divided former Ottoman provinces into two distinct
spheres of influence: British and French. The agreement assigned France direct influence over
what was then Greater Syria, which included southwestern Turkey in the north and Lebanon in
the west, and areas of northern Iraq (Kamrava 2005, 40). The British, on the other hand, gained
control over the remaining areas of Iraq, the Arabian Peninsula, and what was then Tranjsordan.
Palestine was designated an international zone and thus ostensibly free from the dictates of any
single colonial power. In November 1917, however, the status of Palestine as a uniquely British

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colony became clear when the Foreign Secretary, Lord Arthur James Balfour, declared his
government’s commitment to the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine (Pappe 2006,
67). Expressed in the form of a letter to Baron Rothschild, a leading Zionist leader of the British
Jewish community, the Declaration did not specify the borders of Palestine nor of the proposed
Jewish state. It did, however, function within the framework of the British Mandate, which
included two territories: Mandate Palestine and what is today the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
Not until the termination of the British Mandate in Palestine in 1947 would the
geographic identity of modern Palestine fully emerge, if only to be shattered again. Exhausted
by the war in Europe, the British decided to turn over the responsibility for the mandate in
Palestine to the United Nations (Kamrava 2005, 79). Against the objections of the Arab states
and, more importantly, at the expense of the rights and interests of Palestine’s indigenous Arab
population, the U.N. General Assembly adopted Resolution 181 calling for the partition of
Palestine into two distinct states. Although representing approximately 33% of the population
and owning only 7% of the land, the Jewish community was offered 55% of Palestine while the
Arabs, constituting the remaining 67% of the population, were assigned 45% of the land
(Kamrava 2005; Pappe 2006; Masalha 1992; Segev 2001; Khalidi 2007). Moreover, the plan left
a substantial segment of the Arab population within areas designated Jewish territory. Unable to
resolve the question of Jerusalem, the resolution placed the city under international auspices.
Despite its putative purpose as a solution to the ongoing territorial dispute between
Palestinian Arabs and mostly European Jewish immigrants, the Partition Plan failed to establish
an equitable framework for resolving the conflict and ultimately brought on the very thing it was
supposed to prevent: war. Not long after the British began withdrawing from Palestine, Zionist
forces, Palestinian Arabs and, later, several units from surrounding Arab States, engaged in all-

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out war resulting in dramatic territorial and political changes. By 1950, almost 75% of Mandate
Palestine was firmly under the control of Zionist forces and approximately 850,000 of Palestine’s
Arabs were refugees living in Gaza (200,000), Lebanon (105,000), Syria (80,000), and Jordan
(460,000

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). The unconquered areas of central Palestine were officially annexed by what

became the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and the tiny coastal strip of Gaza fell under Egyptian
administrative control. Not until 1967 would the regional map shift again when Israeli forces
conquered the Jordanian West Bank, Syrian Golan Heights, the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula and
Gaza Strip. The results of the war seemed to obliterate any trace of Mandate Palestine as Israel
now occupied territory belonging to three Arab States. The situation changed again in 1973
when Egyptian and Syrian forces briefly reclaimed their territories occupied by Israel in 1967.
Although neither the occupied West Bank nor the Gaza Strip were freed from Israeli control, the
war and subsequent peace agreement between Israel and Egypt known as the Camp David
Accords reestablished the Sinai Peninsula as Egyptian territory and normalized Egyptian-Israeli
relations. Moreover, the agreement returned a substantial portion of the geography of the Middle
East to the 1948 status quo.
Long after the conclusion of the1973 War, two particular events restored the question of
Palestine to its proper place within the borders of Mandate Palestine. First, in 1988, the late
King Hussein announced the administrative and legal severance of the West Bank from Jordan.
According to the plan, the West Bank would be officially recognized as territory subject to
negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). It was thus
no longer part of the Hashemite Kingdom and all of its inhabitants were stripped of their
Jordanian citizenship. The second event was the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 between

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This figure includes refugees displaced into what became the West Bank of Jordan.
243

PLO chairman, Yasser Arafat, and Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin. Despite the fact that
the accords did not address the question of borders, control over the Gaza Strip and West Bank
and the fate of their populations were nevertheless the primary matters under consideration. The
agreement, in other words, reflected the implicit question of Palestine by focusing on territories
formerly under the British Mandate. After more than 40 years of geopolitical shifts, the
territorial conflict over Palestine returned to its original geographic location, albeit with new
internal parameters.
Locating the Homeland: Min Al-Bahar ilāl Nahar (From the Sea to the River):
Within the Palestinian refugee camps of Jordan, at least four generational groups can be
identified. First, it is still possible to meet individuals from jīl Al-Nakba (the Nakba generation)
who lived in Palestine until the 1948 war. For this generation, the idea of Palestine reflects their
lived experiences either as children or adolescents born and raised within what was in 1948
called Mandate Palestine. Second, there are those Palestinians who were displaced during the
1967 war. Known as jīl Al-Naksa (the “Setback” generation), this category of Palestinians
captures two distinct experiences: (1) non-refugee Palestinians who were born and raised in
either Gaza or the West Bank that became refugees in 1967 as a result of the Six Day War or (2)
refugee Palestinians originally displaced in 1948 who were again displaced in 1967 from either
Gaza or the West Bank. In both cases, these Palestinians lived in Palestine for some portion of
their lives and thus developed a tangible sense of what the homeland was like from their lived
experience

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. The third generation I wish to identify includes those Palestinians who were born

160

This is not to suggest that because Palestinians lived in “the homeland” until 1948 or 1967,
that their conception of or life in that homeland were the same. It is to suggest, however, that
their ability to speak from an experience within the homeland affords them a certain authenticity
that is apparent in the fact that Palestinians themselves call these “generations” connected to their
displacements during the Nakba and Naksa.
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on the East Bank of Jordan either to refugee parents from jīl Al-Nakba or jīl Al-Naksa. For this
group, Palestine was the land of their ancestors known to them mostly through the memories
communicated by their parents and other relatives who once lived in Palestine. Some of these
Palestinians, however, may have actually visited parts of Palestine in the West Bank before 1967
when Jordan still controlled the area or, to a lesser extent, after 1967 when the Israelis occupied
the territory. Finally, there are the grandchildren of jīl Al-Nakba and jīl Al-Naksa who were also
born and raised on the East Bank after the Jordanian government severed its administrative links
with the West Bank and Palestinian Authority assumed limited responsibility for the territory.
The generational categories listed above do not contain Palestinians. Within each
category, there are a variety of distinctions one can consider in order to expand or contract my
generational assignments. For example, one could distinguish between Palestinians displaced
during the 1948 war according to their geographic location (Haifa or Ramla), their socioeconomic status, or the conditions under which they were displaced (expelled or fled). The
Nakba generation, in other words, is a categorical designation that does not represent a real
category of persons defined in some essential way. It is, however, a category used by
Palestinians themselves to locate individuals within categories of experience titled, in this case,
Al-Nakba and Al-Naksa. For my purposes here, the categories above are analytical and only
mean to highlight two important points about the homeland that reflect generational factors: (1)
the idealization of the homeland and (2) the significance of one generation for the other in that
process.

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Figure Eleven: Mandate Palestine

161

161

From
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_Jewish_settlements_in_Palestine_in_1947.png
246

In her study of Palestinians born in exile who “returned” to Palestine following the Oslo
Peace Accords, Julianne Hammer identified a key distinction between several Palestinian
generations and their connections to the homeland. According to Hammer, Palestinians could
be identified in terms of three categories that helped elucidate their connections to Palestine: the
1948 generation who were born in Palestine, a generation of Palestinians born in outside of
Palestine but who nevertheless visited it, and a generation born in exile who had never visited
Palestine. For this last generation, Hammer described the homeland as an “imagined” or
“idealized” place reflecting memories, pictures, stories, and the media (Hammer 2005, 67-68).
Raised within Palestinian minority communities, their idea of and attachment to Palestine was
formed within the exiled community who could speak about the homeland from personal
experience and whose sentimental connections reflected the trauma of their displacement and
ongoing desire to return. Among the Palestinian children and grandchildren of the Nakba and
Naksa generations I interviewed in the camps, the meaning of the homeland reflected a similar
inter-generational exchange as that described by Hammer. For them, Palestine was an idealized
space unchangeable in its fundamental constitution. That is, Palestine was an indivisible
territory that defied the territorial changes of the modern period. As imagined, “Palestine” was
and always would be.
Yūnus, for example, lived in the Hittīn refugee camp known locally as “mukhayyam
Shneller” after the German rehabilitation center extant prior to the establishment of the camp.
His parents were both Naksa refugees displaced during the 1967 war. Raised within Gaza before
the Israeli occupation, Yūnus’s mother and father lived in Palestinian territory and could describe
their country through memories formed during their childhood and early adolescent years.
Unlike his parents, Yūnus was born in the Hittīn camp and never visited Gaza or any other

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Palestinian territory. Thus for him, an important dimension of the meaning of Palestine reflected
the accounts offered by his parents, relatives, and other refugees who once lived in the territory.
Given the geopolitical changes that occurred since his parents’ displacement from Palestinian
territory, I wanted to understand how Yūnus conceptualized the homeland. In particular, I
wanted to know where Palestine was in both time and space. When I asked him about the
location of Palestine, about the Palestine to which he referred to as his homeland, Yūnus’s
response was precise: “Palestine is the land between Al-Bahar wal-Nahar (the sea and the
river).” For Yūnus, the partition of Palestine was not a geographic fact. Rather, it represented a
transitory change that did not alter the fundamental location of the homeland, which still existed
within the geological borders of “the sea” and “the river.”
As I pursued this question among many refugees whose parents were born in Palestine
and lived there long enough to have developed some memories of their lives back home, I soon
learned that Yūnus’s answer was not unique. Many young Palestinians who had never visited
the territory identified their homeland in terms of the pre-Partition borders. In particular, my
discussions of the homeland with refugees in the camps revealed a common refrain that captured
the imagined quality of Palestine: Filastīn min Al-Bahar ilāl-Nahar (Palestine is the land
between the sea and the river). Yūsuf, for example, was another Palestinian refugee born in the
Hittīn camp. Unlike Yūnus, Yūsuf’s parents were born in the refugee camps of Jordan. His
grandparents, however, were displaced from Palestine in 1948 and were thus referred to as jīl AlNakba. According to Yūsuf, it was his grandparents who taught him about the homeland. When
I asked him to describe the territory to which he referred, Yūsuf offered the following answer:
“Palestine [is] geographically the dawlah (country) that comes to the shores of the Mediterranean

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Sea. To the east of it is the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. To the north of it is Lebanon and to
the south of it is Egypt and the Arabian Gulf, which is the Red Sea.”
Māzin was another young Palestinian born in Jordan within the camps. I met him
through the director at an Islamic orphanage, who allowed me to observe the activities at the
center. Māzin volunteered at the orphanage as it reflected his religious duty to care for the
orphans. Māzin’s parents were both Nakba refugees and, although he was older than both Yūnus
and Yūsuf, like them, he never visited any Palestinian territory. According to Māzin, most of his
ideas of Palestine were learned from his parents and relatives who once lived in Palestine. When
I asked him to identify the place he called home, Māzin responded with a curious grin.
“Palestine is Palestine,” he said. “Khalīl, Arīhā (Jericho), and Haifa, they’re all Palestine.” For
Māzin, the status of Palestine was clear and unchanging. Despite his family’s displacement and
the establishment of Israel, the territorial constitution of the homeland remained the same.
“Where else can Palestine be,” he asked. Hānī, another Jordan-born Palestinian whose
grandparents were from the Nakba generation, described the wattan (homeland) as the land
between two waters. During our discussions, he emphasized that his grandparents played a
critical role in his idea of the homeland. From them, he said “he learned about himself.”
Interested in his conception of the homeland, I also asked him about Palestine. In response, Hānī
offered the following words: “Min Al-bahar ilāl Nahar.” “Min Lubnān fīl shamāl ilāl Masar fīl
junūb (From Lebanon in the north to Egypt in the south).” “Kulha Filastīn (All of it is
Palestine),” he said.
Thus conceived, the location of the Palestinian homeland in time and space had several
important implications for the meaning of the past, present, and future. For the past, the
unchanging character of the homeland meant that the events following the 1948 war did not alter

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the fundamental composition of Palestine. Accordingly, for the younger generation of Jordanborn Palestinian refugees, the establishment of the State of Israel represented a foreign
occupying presence on what was essentially still Palestine. Like the British occupation, the
Israeli occupation of Palestine was perceived as an impermanent event that would also reach its
end. For both the present and future, this generations’ conception of the homeland also offered a
basic rejection of any attempts by either the PLO or the international community to establish a
Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza. Amjad, for example, a young Palestinian from the
Hussein camp whose grandparents were both displaced during the Nakba, rejected the idea that
the Palestinian homeland was anywhere but between the sea and the river. The Palestinian
homeland, he claimed, was the pre-Partition Palestine of his grandparents’ time. Consequently,
the idea that Israel had successfully replaced Palestine was unacceptable:
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Palestine is Israel . Palestine is Israel! From the sea to the river, Palestine
baladnā (is our country). Our rights were shattered in 1948. The rights of my
father and his father were shattered. But Palestine is Palestine. I don’t consider
the West Bank Palestine because Palestine is the whole country. If Palestine were
established on Gaza and the West Bank, that would not be my country! All of it
is Palestine!
For Amjad, a political settlement in which a Palestinian state would be established in the
West Bank and Gaza Strip could not legitimately be described as Palestine. In his view, like the
view of his parents and their parents, the homeland could not be divided. Similarly, Omar, an
Imam from the Wihdāt camp whose parents were of the Naksa generation rejected the claim that
Palestine was now Israel. For Omar, Palestine was the Palestine that belonged to his parents.
This, he explained, was something that he learned from his parents and would teach to his own
children and any other generation to come.
162

By the phrase “Palestine is Israel,” Amjad meant that what is currently known as Israel is
really Palestine. When an individual looks at Israel, he explained, one is actually seeing
Palestine.
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First of all, I don’t accept that there is an Israeli state. There is no “West Bank.”
All of it is Palestine. If the West Bank is Palestine, does that mean that the people
of the West Bank have Palestine and we don’t because we fled in 1948? Being a
citizen in another country doesn’t delete our rights in Palestine. Palestine means
all of Palestine. There is no Jewish right [over even] a grain of sand. It’s true that
some were living in Palestine before the 1948 War but that doesn’t mean that
gives them the right to take all of this land. We have all of Palestine from the east
to the west and from the north to the south.
According to Omar, the past represented an historic injustice in which the rights of Palestinians
to their homeland were stolen. Like Amjad, the establishment of the Israeli state thus
represented a violation of Palestinians’ right to Palestine but not the erasure of Palestine. Israeli
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claims to Palestine as an exclusively Jewish homeland by the Likud Party

, for example, were

thus inadmissible. Palestine could not be partitioned nor could it be negotiated. Moreover,
Omar explicitly rejected the idea that a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza could be
called Palestine. The homeland was either all of the pre-Partition territory or none of it.
The idea among Jordan-born Palestinians that Palestine remained a territorial homeland
unchanged (and unchangeable) was not necessarily of their own making. For some, it reflected
the knowledge and sentiments shared by their parents, relatives, and the older Palestinian
generations in general. As many younger Palestinians explained to me, the jīl Al-Nakba and the
jīl Al-Naksa played an essential role in shaping their understanding and knowledge of the
homeland and their attachments to it. According to the youth, Palestine was and would always
be the Palestine of their parents or grandparents. Although borders might change, one
Palestinian said, the integrity of Palestine as a place between “the sea” and “the river” was
everlasting. Moreover, the older generations were claimed as an essential link to their homeland
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According to the Likud Party Platform, settlements represent the right of Jews to the land of
Israel including the West Bank and Gaza. In the platform, it states that “the Jewish communities
in Judea, Samaria [West Bank] and Gaza are the realization of Zionist values. Settlement of the
land is a clear expression of the unassailable right of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel and
constitutes an important asset in the defense of the vital interests of the State of Israel.
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and considered responsible for preserving this connection through their unique knowledge and
experience. Having lived in the territory as an undivided country, their stories about Palestine
and descriptions of its local features and lifestyles before the dispossession offered a unique
insight into the history of the homeland. Without them, many Palestinians would have few
opportunities for learning about the intimate features of Palestinian life before 1948. Indeed,
their experiences were located at the center of a generational exchange of rights and duties
between those who knew Palestine and those who didn’t. As Rochelle Davis noted in her
examination or memory books, the older generation is understood as having the duty and the
responsibility to undertake memory projects whereas the younger generations possess the right
and responsibility to want to know this information (Rochelle Davis 2010, 54). For the younger
generation born in Jordan, The Nakba and Naksa generations’ first-hand accounts of Palestinian
life in Palestine provided an oral history of a people no longer united and a territory no longer in
place. More importantly, the older generation offered the young a sentimental account of the
past communicated through stories of displacement, loss, and the violence of war. More than the
transmission of abstract information, the displaced generations of 1948 instilled in the young an
emotional connection to Palestine built of their own longing to return and the ongoing challenges
of life in exile.
To understand the significance of the Nakba and Naksa generations for younger
Palestinians, consider the example of Um Fādī. Um Fādī was a Palestinian from the Nakba
generation living as a widow in the Wihdāt camp. Unlike most of my interviews, our meeting
was unsolicited. It was at the request of several young Palestinian refugees that she and I met
and decided to conduct an interview. I had just finished a few interviews and an afternoon of
observations at a local Islamic center when Um Fādī entered the room. Two of the younger

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Palestinians at the center fetched her from her home. According to them, I “needed” to meet Um
Fādī since she, like many others from the Nakba and Naksa generations in the camps, provided
the younger generation with vital information about the homeland.
Um Fādī, or hajja

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, couldn’t tell me her exact age but appeared to be in her 80s.

Brought from her home, she arrived dressed in what was described as the clothing of the fellahīn
(rural Palestinian peasants): a long black ‘abāya

165

decorated with intricate patterns in red,

green, yellow, and white. She told me that she was born and lived in Palestine under the British
occupation and was displaced in 1948 during the war. Um Fādī spoke in a distinguishable
accent. Her dialect reflected the specific words and tones of her original village Sūbā in
Palestine, not Jordan. During an hour-long interview, she shared various details about the life
she lost in 1948. She spoke nostalgically, for example, of the pristine landscapes and exceptional
quality of Palestinian fruits and vegetables. Portrayed as a Garden of Eden in which the rich
productivity of the land and its unique produce reflected the “natural order of things” when
Palestinians lived in Palestine, Um Fādī conjured nostalgic and idealized recollections of home
and the homeland (Bardenstein 1999, 151). “The water was sweet and one could taste its
sweetness in the fruits we grew,” she explained. Contrasting her Palestinian existence to the
exilic condition of life in Jordan, Um Fādī spoke about the “ancient olive groves” producing the
“richest” oil in the region. “The fruits were sweeter than those you find in Jordan,” she
explained. Charged with emotional appeals to Palestinian leaders, the Jordanian King, and God,

164

Hajja, as used in this context, is a term of respect offered to an older Arab woman. In literal
terms, the word identifies an individual as one who has completed the Muslim pilgrimage to
Mecca known as hajj.
165
An ‘abāya is a long robe-like garment covering most of the body except for the hands and
feet.
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she longed for the home of her fathers and decried the theft of her homeland by Al-Yahūd (the
Jews).
For the younger Palestinians in the room, she was revered as the embodiment of an
esoteric truth. Her life and words represented an invaluable account of Palestine before the
partition and occupation. Moreover, Um Fādī’s knowledge and experiences underscored the
importance of the struggle to reclaim the stolen homeland and restore Palestine to its forgotten
owners. Um Fādī, I was told, was a Palestinian from Palestine. “Her experiences are wisdom to
us,” one Palestinian said. The youth listened closely to every word she shared. “Ya ba yay,
Filastīn bilādī (oh dear God, Palestine is my country),” she exclaimed. “Palestine is our home.”
“When I was born I knew I was Palestinian and Palestine, all of it, was ours.” When asked about
the future, Um Fādī immediately spoke of return. According to her, the homeland was what she
knew when she was in Palestine. Back then, she said, there was no West Bank or Gaza; it was
all Palestine. Thus returning to anything but the Palestine she knew, Um Fādī explained, was a
meaningless new migration.
Although Um Fādī’s importance for the young extended from her location within a
generational group (the Nakba generation), her status as a woman of that generation was of
specific value linked reflecting ideas about biological and social reproduction. On one hand, Um
Fādī was a biological reproducer of the nation: her marriage to a Palestinian man and the
children they shared together represented the fulfillment of her commitments both as a woman to
her family and as a woman to her “nation.” Constituted within a nationalist paradigm, Um
Fādī’s role as a mother served as the completion of a national duty: she helped ensure the
existence of the nation through the reproduction of the new generation. On the other hand, Um
Fādī’s knowledge of Palestine allowed her to fulfill the nationalist mission of cultural

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reproduction. Having produced children already, Um Fādī’s stories represented much more than
the experiences of an individual from Palestine; within the logic of nationalism, her life
represented the basis of national reproduction via cultural history. Functioning within an ethnonational framework, Um Fādī’s life was reconfigured as a story about “the Palestinians.”
Beyond her biological role in national reproduction, in other words, Um Fādī was now
participating in the ideological reproduction of the collectivity as a transmitter of its “history”
and “culture” (Yuval-Davis, Anthias, and Campling 1989).
The preceding discussion demonstrates that Palestinians born in Jordan who have never
visited any Palestinian territory depend to a significant degree upon the experience of the older
generations for their conception of the homeland. Accordingly, their idea of Palestine reflects an
idealization formed primarily through the experiences, memories, stories, and nostalgic
representations of the Nakba and Naksa generations. Palestine was and is the bounded territory
from which their parents and/or grandparents came: Mandate Palestine. Interestingly enough,
the Palestinians I met did not describe the homeland in terms of the mandate period even though
the borders they identified reflected the colonial period. Palestinians thus fixed the boundaries of
the homeland within time but only to articulate a place that transcended time. Within the
territorial imagination of Palestinians born in Jordan, the homeland emerged as it once was, if
only for a short time: as the land between the sea and the river, south of Lebanon and north of
Egypt. In this sense, the homeland represented a territorial continuity that, like the Palestinian
people, defied fragmentation. Just as the Palestinian people could remain a united people despite
their displacement, so too could Palestine remain a united country in the face of partition,
conquest, and colonization. In both cases, a sense of continuity and stability was imagined and
projected onto the land and people so that a homeland and its people could remain united.

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In this section, I chose to focus on the territorial conception of Palestine since it provides
a starting point for understanding what the homeland is or, more precisely, where it is. In the
next section, I therefore proceed to offer a deeper account of the homeland for Palestinian
refugees.
Palestinians and Palestine: An Original Community:
Concerned with the “origins” of nations, Anthony Smith distinguished between what he
called Western and non-Western models of the nation. According to Smith, Western models of
nations were seen as cultural communities whose members were united, if not made
homogeneous, by common historical memories, myths, symbols and traditions (Anthony D.
Smith 1993, 11). Stressing the idea that within Western nations one could choose to belong,
Smith defined non-Western nations in “ethnic” terms in which choice was not an option. In the
non-Western ethnic nation, whether an individual stayed in her community or emigrated to
another, she nevertheless remained ineluctably and organically a member of the community of
her birth. Thus ethnic nations were, according to Smith, first and foremost communities of
common descent (Anthony D. Smith 1993, 11). In this formulation, Smith emphasized the
genealogical over the territorial. Indeed, Smith likened the bonds of ethnic nations to the bonds
of kinship in which descent, not land, mattered most. The point here, Smith argued, is that,
within this conception, the nation can trace its roots to an imputed common ancestry and that
therefore its members are brothers and sisters, or at least cousins, differentiated by family ties
from outsiders (Anthony D. Smith 1993, 12).
Despite the distinction between ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ nations described above, Smith
nevertheless claimed that both dimensions are blended into contemporary nation forms. In this
sense, a nation could presumably articulate territorial claims reflecting the rights of “the people”

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to their “ancestral homelands” and, at other times, emphasize its genealogical ties. To illustrate
the point, Smith explained how, under the Jacobins, French nationalism reflected an essentially
civic and territorial idea; it preached the unity of the republic patrie and the fraternity of its
citizens in a political-legal community (Anthony D. Smith 1993, 13). Yet in the early 19th
century, French nationalism took a decidedly cultural turn in which the clerical-monarchist
Right, for example, held onto a genealogical conception of the “French” organic nation. From
the French case we can thus see that, despite the conceptual distinction between civic and ethnic
nations, certain fundamental assumptions nevertheless underscore their commonality: both
models rely on common ideas about what particular beliefs can constitute a nation. For Smith, it
is this very multidimensionality that has made national identity such a flexible and persistent
force in modern life and politics and has allowed it to combine effectively with other powerful
ideologies and movements without losing its character (Anthony D. Smith 1993, 15).
Although not without its complications

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, Smith’s attention to the genealogical

dimensions of ethnic and national identification are important for understanding two key issues
about the homeland within the Palestinian context I describe below. First, Palestinian refugees
overwhelmingly identify in genealogical terms. Reflecting Smith’s conception of a community
of common descent, Palestinians routinely identify through a genealogical discourse of origins
that not only constructs organic boundaries of inclusion but also provides the parameters of
exclusion through which Palestinians disidentify with Jordanians. Palestinians thus identify in
terms of an interminable and, to borrow Smith’s term, ineluctable genealogy that maintains their
status as Palestinians despite their location in Jordan.

166

For alternative approaches to the question of nations and nationalism, see (Brubaker 1996;
Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008; Billig 1995; Chatterjee 1993a)
257

Second, Palestinians’ genealogical articulations go beyond the mere claim to a common
ancestry to include a common origin in a particular territory: Palestine. In this sense, it is not just
that Palestinians can identify a common ancestor that matters; rather, it is the fact of that
ancestor’s lived experience in the homeland that makes the genealogical tie of particular
importance. Thus whereas Smith sees the ethnic nation as one grounded in genealogical ties, the
case of the Palestinians I describe below shows that genealogy is not so easily disentangled from
territory and thus ethno-national identifications can reflect an inseparable link between descent
and place. A community of common descent, in other words, matters precisely because of the
location of that lineage within a particular territory. More specifically, it is that an individual can
identify an ancestor’s birth in Palestine that enables their particular claim to being Palestinian.
This idea is adequately captured in Engseng Ho’s account of the relationship between naming
and nations when he states that names identify persons and groups beyond the sphere of
biological and cultural reproduction to include territory (Ho 2002, 215). Although in my account
it isn’t that specific names are genealogically Palestinian in virtue of their link to Palestine
(although without a doubt, some names are marked as “Palestinian”), Ho’s considerations of the
connection between genealogies and territory nevertheless speaks to the critical link between
descent and territory for Palestinian refugees.

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Figure Twelve: Aerial View of Baqa’a Refugee Camp

167

Walking through the Baqa’a refugee camp is much like walking through any other camp
in Amman. Its mostly unpainted walls and monotonous structures create an atmosphere of
anonymity. From the streets, for example, mosques are often indiscernible from the surrounding
buildings. Trapped within the suffocating streets of the camp, finding a minaret can be a
challenging endeavor. In addition, most of the homes are nothing more than box-like dwellings
crammed into an already confining space. On the outside, their concrete walls bear few signs of
distinction and often blend seamlessly into an undivided block of several other homes. With
poverty an obvious fact of the camp, a painted home is an unusual sign of luxury. Unnamed and
poorly paved, the camp streets run parallel to open sewage drains where children often play.
Barely able to accommodate one vehicle, some of the streets seem too narrow to meet the most

167

Photo taken by author.
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basic standard of function. Much like the future of its inhabitants, the Baqa’a camp is a bleak
urban landscape.

Figure Thirteen: Baq’a Refugee Camp

168

Within a landscape marked by monotony, one must search for signs of distinction. In
Baqa’a, this requires a local’s perspective. On the surface, for instance, no particular number of
visits is likely to reveal the fact that the names of camp mosques reflect the origins of its
surrounding inhabitants. The Nablus mosque is thus located within an indiscernible enclave of
Palestinians originally from the Palestinian city of the same name. This fact eluded me for
weeks. I had visited the camp numerous times but, on the surface, the connections between
physical space and refugees’ origins remained invisible. Indeed, it wasn’t until I met Um Mahdi
that I learned of the reasoning behind the name. “Masjid Al-Quds,” she explained, “is where you
will find the Palestinians from Quds.” It was, as she explained, a sign of their origins. A Naksa
refugee herself, Um Mahdi claimed that the spatial configuration of the camps were meant to
168

Photo taken by author.
260

preserve its residents’ origins

169

. Everyone knew where everyone else was from if they lived

together, Um Mahdi claimed. “This way, Palestinians from Quds can marry other Palestinians
from Quds.” “Our neighborhoods here,” she said, “reflect our origins there.” Walking through
the streets of the camp, Um Mahdi also pointed to the graffiti on the walls (Figure 13). “Allah,”
“Palestine,” and “Al-Quds” decorated the exterior of a home in her neighborhood. “You see, our
origins are never behind us. We can never forget.”

Figure Fourteen: Graffiti on Wall in Baqa’a Refugee Camp

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Um Mahdi’s explications of the relationship between origins and camp space were
complemented by her ideas about another kind of relationship: genealogy and identity. In her
interview, she explained that Palestine was not only within the camp; it was also within the
people. The homeland was the territorial source of her genealogical identity as a Palestinian.
“My [paternal] grandfather is Palestinian,” she said. “My whole family on his side is
169

For an in-depth account of the relationship between camp spaces and their connections to
spaces of pre-Partition Palestine, see (Peteet 2009a; Rosemary Sayigh 1994a; Sa'di and AbuLughod 2007).
170
Photo taken by author.
261

Palestinian.” All of them! They were all born in Palestine.” Referring to her family’s
resettlement in Jordan, she queried: “How can I say that I am Jordanian and no longer
Palestinian? No! I am Palestinian. Palestine is inside us.” Like Palestinian refugees who
rejected the idea that their Jordanian status as citizens made them “Jordanian,” Um Mahdi
rejected the idea that her territorial origin in Jordan made her “Jordanian.” Whether born in
Jordan or any other territory, Um Mahdi, like many Palestinian refugees, believed that her
descent led to Palestine and Palestine made her Palestinian. She was part of a community of
common descent.
The idea that descent and territory were the basis of Palestinian identification was a
significant feature of Palestinian discourse. Throughout the camps, Palestine was described as a
territorial space through which descent was made Palestinian. In this sense, whether one’s
“origins” could be traced to a location beyond Palestine’s imagined borders did not challenge
their claim to being Palestinians since, once in the territory, the lineage itself was transformed.
For example, my discussions with Palestinians in Baqa’a led me to the home of Um ‘Arif. Born
in Gaza, she and her family fled their homes during the war of 1967. Despite living most of her
life in Jordan, Um ‘Arif nevertheless felt a strong connection to Palestine and described it as the
source of her territorial and genealogical origins.
My origins as a person are from Mecca and can be traced to sayyidnā Ali bin Abi
171
Talib . But I say that I am a Palestinian because I am Palestinian: me, my
origins, my parents and grandparents, my ancestors, all of them are from Palestine
and I am from them. So I am Palestinian in regards to mawlid wa Al-Nasha’ (my
birth and upbringing) and my ‘irq (roots) and dam (blood). In everything, I am
Palestinian. Palestine is my country and I am proud to be Palestinian. I love
Palestine.

171

Ali bin Abi Talib was the Prophet Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law.
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Two particular ideas are significant within the account above. First, although Um ‘Arif identifies
a historical connection to the noble family of the Prophet Muhammad in Mecca, she nevertheless
privileged her more immediate genealogical roots in Palestine. In her account, she “stopped” the
motion of her genealogy within the territorial borders of Palestine (Ho 2002, 216). The
movement of her lineage through time in what came before (Mecca) and what came after
(Jordan) were thus unable to defy the specific location of Palestine. It is within Palestine, in
other words, that her genealogical tree struck a root and established a true “origin” (Ho 2002,
216). Second, the meaning of Palestine in her account reflected an important convergence
between the ideas of territory and genealogy. According to Um ‘Arif, her Palestinianness
stemmed both from her territorial (‘irq) and genealogical (dam) roots in the territory.
Genealogically speaking, she was a child of the ancestors located in Palestine and, more
significantly, a relative of Palestine itself. Palestine, more than a birth-place, was thus a
constitutive dimension of her being. Within her veins ran Palestinian blood: the blood of her
ancestors and the land itself. Her idea of the homeland represented a relation to territory similar
to the idea of an individual relation to kin. By describing her blood as Palestinian, Um ‘Arif was
effectively identifying a genealogical connection with her homeland.
Um ‘Arif was not alone in her genealogical relationship to territory. Throughout my
discussions with Palestinians, Palestine was often described in terms reflecting an idiom of birth
and kinship. Many Palestinians, for example, explained how the homeland was a territorial site
but also constitutive of an essential part of their identity. Wherever a Palestinian is found, they
would say, so too is Palestine found within them. Mahdi, for example, a young Palestinian
refugee born in Jordan, described Palestine as an inextricable part of Palestinians’ beings
wherever they may be. “Our fathers and grandfathers,” he said, “who now live in Iraq, Syria,

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Lebanon, the Gulf, or even Cuba, were all displaced from Palestine.” “They were forced to leave
their homeland.” “But wherever they may be,” he emphasized, “they cannot forget their
homeland, Palestine; it is within them.” Like Um ‘Arif and Mahdi, many Palestinians linked
their territorial and genealogical origins in ways that underscored an essential Palestinian
identity. While speaking with Māzin about Palestine, for example, he described his homeland in
terms much like those of Um ‘Arif. “Palestine is in my blood,” he said. “It runs deep within me
and my ancestors’ veins.” During my interview with Maryam, a young Palestinian woman from
the Baqa’a camp, she also described Palestine in a way that blended her territorial and
genealogical roots. Palestine, for Maryam, was the territorial origin of her ancestors who passed
on their connection to the homeland as one would pass on his or her genes. “We are originally
Palestinian,” she said. “Our grandparents, all of them, were born in Palestine and it has remained
within us. It’s as if [Palestine] was planted within us. Ajdādnā (our ancestors) are all from
Palestine so we too are Palestinians and [we] came to Jordan as Palestinian refugees.” For
Maryam, although displacement brought her family to Jordan physically, their genealogical
relationship to Palestine remained unchanged.
The idea of Palestine as the source of one’s origins also reflected an ethnicization
(Brubaker 2006) of identity grounded in shared cultural practices. According to this idea of the
homeland, Palestine was the source of a unique way of life that gave meaning to a Palestinian
ethnicity distinguishable from other Arabs and Jordanians in particular. During a focus group
interview with several Palestinian women at an Islamic center, for example, the homeland was
described in terms of two kinds of origins. At times, Palestine was simply the location of one’s
ancestors. Hind, for example, described Palestine as the land of her parents, grandparents, and
ancestors. “Palestine,” she explained, “is the land of ajdādnā.” “Our connection to Palestine is

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derived from their connection to Palestine.” Just as she was connected to her parents
genealogically, Hind explained, she was also connected to her homeland, Palestine. At other
times, however, Palestine was more than the territorial origin of the ancestors. Adding to Hind’s
account, for example, Na’īma explained that Palestine was not simply the location of her origins.
Palestine, she explained, was also constitutive of an ethnicity that was distinguishably
Palestinian.
“Where we are born is not the only thing that defines us. It does not limit us.
Look at us, we were born in Jordan but are all Palestinians regardless of where we
[were] born because it is not just about our birth place. It’s also about turāthnā
(our heritage). I have never seen Palestine myself but my heritage is Palestinian.
All people have a heritage. We too have a heritage that is Palestinian. We have
our clothing, our cultural habits and manners, our traditions, etc. All of these are
originally from Palestine and are sources of our identity.”
Na’īma’s account above was illustrative of a common idea about the homeland among many of
the Palestinians I interviewed. First, it reflected the idea of an essential Palestinian culture
defined primarily in relation to the idea of a distinct Jordanian culture. Palestine, it was said, had
its own unique cultural traditions that gave meaning to a distinct Palestinian culture. Hanān, for
example, described Palestinian cultures as diverse but united. Despite their differences, in other
words, they nevertheless constituted an encompassing Palestinian culture.
“Palestinian cultures are numerous but they are one. For example, look at our
clothing. The shāsheh and the embroidered gown known as the thobe are
different but unique. In terms of our cuisine, we also have many traditional dishes
that are similar across the region. In our customs too, we are the same. We are
hospitable toward our guests. We also have marriage traditions that are
Palestinian. These traditions are rooted in us and la nattkhallah (we don’t discard
them). We inherit these cultural habits from our generations and insha’Allah they
will remain with us for the length of our lives so as long as we teach our children
and our children teach their children, and so on.”
Interestingly enough, Hanān’s account admits a tension grounded in the idea that Palestinian
ethnicity is both essential but perishable. As an essential quality of Palestinians, traditions reflect

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a commonality among Palestinians across space and time. It is, in other words, a permanent
feature of “the Palestinians” capable of defying local circumstances. Yet the effects of
displacement threaten its essential quality. Thus, although “rooted” within them, Palestinians
must nevertheless “teach” their children (ethnicize them) how to be ethnically Palestinian.
More than a positive affirmation of a unique Palestinian ethnicity, the idea that
Palestinians had their own unique foods, clothing, and manners was often used to distinguish
themselves from Jordanians. Ranā, for example, suggested that Palestinian customs were visible
within their homes, which were different from Jordanian homes. “If you enter a house, you will
know that it is a Palestinian house,” she said. “You can tell if the home is a Jordanian or
Circassian home by its style or organization. You will know if it’s Palestinian by its owner too.
Turāthnā are different from others.” According to Ranā, Palestinian homes were reflective of
Palestinian ethnicity. For example, Ranā claimed that a “Palestinian” home was cleaner since
Palestinians had more “culture” than many Jordanians. Palestinians’ urban and “cultured” status
was distinct from the more rural and Bedouin culture of the Jordanians. In addition, Palestinian
homes were more “authentic” than other homes. This, she explained, was visible in the
originality of Palestinian cultural artifacts including the traditional “Palestinian” textiles and
even foods.
For many refugees, the idea of a Palestinian heritage also reflected an effort to resist what
they called the Judaization of Palestine and its culture. According to many Palestinians I met,
the loss of Palestine not only meant the destruction of their homeland but also the appropriation
of its culture by Israelis as Jewish. During my interview with Marwa, for example, she
explained how Palestinians struggled to preserve their traditions against Israeli claims that it
belonged to them. “The Jews jarradū (stripped) the Palestinians of everything we had! Even on

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the level of our culture, they tried to take that too. Now you hear the Jews saying that humus is
“Israeli” and even that the thobe we embroider is theirs.” Marwa also believed that Jordanians
were trying to steal Palestinian culture. According to her, the lack of an “authentic” Jordanian
culture meant that the Jordanians wanted to take Palestinian culture and claim it as their own.
For example, many refugees described how Jordanians appropriated Palestinian clothing for
themselves claiming it as a distinctive “Jordanian” tradition. The fellāhi thobe, I was told, was
stolen by Jordanians and claimed as their own. “It is as if the Palestinians never came to Jordan
or aren’t in Jordan today,” one Palestinian expressed. “What we brought was taken without any
credit.” Rather than seeing Jordanian culture as an expression of Palestinian and Transjordanian
traditions, Palestinians claimed that what might be described as cultural “mixing” reflected a sort
of theft. Thus Palestinians believed they faced the dual threat of the colonization of their culture
by Israel and Jordan.
“When the Palestinians came to Jordan, endajammū (we mixed) with the
Jordanian people. Then they began to say that our heritage was theirs. Yes, our
heritage was stolen by the Jordanians too. The thobe that is sold in Britain and
America is sold as if it were a part of Jordanian heritage. My husband, he
traveled to America and saw a woman wearing a thobe. He asked her where she
bought it and do you know what she said? “I bought it in Israel.” “It is an Israeli
thobe,” she said. She referred to it as Israeli dress!”
Nadā expressed a similar idea. “Even at the level of our clothing,” she explained, “the Jews want
to steal Palestine.” “They want to claim everything [Palestinian] as their own. Our heritage, our
culture, our land, everything, they want to take it from us!” Faced with the imminent threat of
cultural colonization, Hanān described how she taught her daughter and children about their
heritage.
“We teach our daughters how to sew. I have a daughter in the fourth grade and I
tell her “mama, come on and I’ll teach you the Palestinian embroidery.” Every
day she learns more and once we teach our children these things, it is impossible
for them to forget. It’s impossible to lose because it sticks with them. I teach my
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children and I know that they will teach their children. I make sure that we hold
on to our heritage. And we hold on to our culture, our habits, our traditions. And
insha’Allah, these will be inherited by each successive generation. Palestine and
its culture will not be forgotten.”
Hanān’s comments underscored the importance of maintaining Palestinian culture beyond the
mere promotion of an identity. For Hanān, as for many Palestinians, the maintenance of
Palestinian culture was imperative; it represented an effort to affirm the distinctiveness of the
Palestinian people and to resist the threat of erasure posed by the Judaization of Palestine and the
promotion of Jordanian national culture to the exclusion of Palestinian contributions.

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Figure Fifteen: Palestinian Displaying a “Palestinian” Abaya

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Photo taken by author.
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In this sense, the idea that the homeland constituted an essential ethnicization of
Palestinians in Jordan not only reflected the claim to being ethnic but also revealed a common
anxiety among refugees concerning their displacement from Palestine and the establishment and
expansion of Israel in their absence. Their awareness of the creation of Israel and the
concomitant process of “Judaization” compelled a narrative of resistance in which the
preservation of “Palestinian culture” represented much more than the reproduction of a heritage;
it suggested an attempt to preserve the very nature of the homeland itself. The failure to
“reproduce” Palestinian culture threatened both the survival of Palestine and the Palestinians.
The fear that Palestine was under threat by the promotion of Jewish national culture in
Israel was not without its merit. For years scholars have described how the creation of Israel has
been inextricably linked both ideologically and practically to the “erasure” of Palestine
(Piterberg 2001). For example, Aron Shai (Shai 2006) has noted the historical roles of the Israel
Land Administration (ILA) and the Israel Archaeological Survey Society (IASS) in the
destruction of Palestinian homes in territories conquered in 1948 and 1967. According to Shai,
both institutions have been critical to the formation of a non-Palestinian Israel in which all things
deemed non-Jewish represent an aberration of the “real” past. Thus the IASS has played an
essential role in the “clearing” of any “abandoned Arab villages” through systematic demolitions
meant to reclaim the “original” land and past. Moreover, Nadia Abu El-Hajj (2006) has
described the function of archaeology within the production of a national culture grounded in the
erasure of anything Palestinian. In Israel, Abu El-Haj explained that archaeology was not just a
scientific endeavor but, more importantly, a national cultural one (Abu El-Haj 2006). Hence the
demolition of Palestinian property in Palestine has been framed by the Zionist belief that the
“clearing” of Palestine is inextricably linked to the “restoration” of a mythical Jewish past

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covered by the dross accumulated during Jews exilic period. Seen this way, the claim to an
original Palestinian culture rooted in Palestine underscored the specific situation of displaced
Palestinians, whose marginal position vis-à-vis the land and conflict meant that an “ethnic”
homeland was much more than an idea: it was a strategy of survival.
Being National Without Nationalism: Materializing the Homeland in Everyday Life:
Nations, wrote Eric Hobsbawm, are dual phenomenon constructed essentially from
above, but which cannot be understood unless analyzed from below, that is, in terms of the
assumptions, hopes, needs, longings and interests of ordinary people, which are not necessarily
national and still less nationalist (Hobsbawm 1992, 10). Drawing our attention to the “ground”
of nationalism, Hobsbawm challenged scholars to look beyond the study of nations as a study of
the elite to include the ordinary people for whom nationalists claim to speak. This view from
below, argued Hobsbawm, is a view of nations seen not from the vantage point of governments
and nationalists, but rather by the ordinary persons who are the objects of national action and
propaganda (Hobsbawm 1992, 11). Answering Hobsbawm’s call for the study of nationalism
from below, Jon Fox and Cynthia Miller-Idriss developed an analytical framework for examining
what they called “everyday nationhood.” Nationhood, according to Fox and Miller-Idriss, is
negotiated and reproduced in everyday life in ways that reveal people’s attachments to “nations”
and how they have become a part of the taken-for-granted landscape of things (Fox and MillerIdriss 2008, 537). By considering the everyday lives of ordinary people in which particular
forms of nationhood, not nationalism, are enacted, both Fox and Miller-Idriss believed scholars
could access some of the less visible albeit significant ways in which nationalism finds its
expressions on the ground. Rather than “deducing the quotidian meaning and salience of
nationalism from its political and cultural privileging, the study of everyday nationhood

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examines the actual practices through which ordinary people engage and enact nationhood and
nationalism in the varied contexts of their everyday lives

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(Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008).”

In the following section, I examine material representations of the homeland within the
politics of ethno-national identification among Palestinian refugees in Jordan. As I will show,
the homeland and its various sites are important symbols for Palestinian identity and nationhood
that offer refugees an opportunity to enact national practices without being explicitly nationalist.
Through the homeland, Palestinians produce and reproduce the “nation” in ways that not only
promote the maintenance of national identification in the context of displacement but also avoid
provoking Transjordanian nationalists.
Traveling through Jordan, a country heavily populated by Palestinian refugees and their
descendants, one is struck by the invisibility of Palestinian national symbols. This is a curious
fact considering that many of Jordan’s Palestinians have relatives living across the border in the
West Bank and, to a lesser extent, in Gaza. In addition, one would think that the economic and
social links between Palestinians living in the East and West Banks would translate into some
sort of assertion of Palestinian national identification on the streets of Jordan. Despite this, very
little about the public sphere seems to indicate the presence of Palestinian politics or nationalism
in the lives of Palestinians in Jordan. In cities like Amman, for example, where Palestinians are
believed to constitute a significant “demographic majority,” one would expect to encounter some
signs of Palestinian nationalism. Instead, however, the opposite is the case; what one sees is that
anything Palestinian is conspicuously absent. Neither flags nor nationalist posters are visible on
the walls or streets of Amman. The refugee camps are not very different in this respect.
Throughout my research, I visited several different refugee camps throughout Jordan. Save for

173

Emphasis is mine.
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the occasional graffiti on the walls, nothing obviously Palestinian was displayed in public. This
was particularly surprising to me given that my arrival in early January nearly coincided with the
Palestinian national elections. Although Palestinians in Jordan were prevented from
participating in the elections, I expected to find some public indication of Palestinian
involvement in the elections, symbolic or otherwise. Yet the elections came and went and
nothing explicitly nationalist could be seen.
The invisibility of Palestinian nationalism on the streets of Jordan was not, as I learned,
an indication of Palestinian indifference to nationalism. On the contrary, it reflected a calculated
response to a well-established policy of prohibiting Palestinian forms of nationalist expression in
Jordan beginning after the war of Black September. Prior to the war, Palestinian organizations
exercised significant autonomy within the Kingdom. As a result, public displays of Palestinian
nationalism in daily life were a regular feature of the Jordanian landscape. But with the growing
popularity of Palestinian nationalists and the expansion and recklessness of guerilla forces, King
Hussein and his loyalists began to fear for the future of Hashemite rule. Thus in 1970,
Palestinian guerillas and Hashemite loyalists engaged in a bloody battle ending with the
expulsion of the guerillas and a concerted effort by the King to prevent any future threats to his
rule. Accordingly, Palestinian nationalism was no longer tolerated. But the logic of Black
September has facilitated an indefinite policy of control in which any forms of Palestinian
nationalism represents a threat to the “security” of the Kingdom. Thus, until today, Jordanian
authorities have treated Palestinian nationalism as an affront to the integrity of the Hashemite
Crown and the Jordanian people. In 1988, for example, when approximately 150 Palestinians
demonstrated against Israeli repression in the Occupied Territories, Jordanian authorities reacted
violently. In addition to police attacks, Jordanian authorities arrested at least 23 members of the

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Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)

174

. Similarly, following the outbreak of

the second Intifada in the Occupied Palestinian Territories in 2001, the Jordanian government
reinstated its ban on public demonstrations. According to local papers, the measure reflected the
idea that "marches pose a threat to security and stability and hamper the people's interests”

175

.

This is not to say that Palestinians cannot express any identification with Palestine in
Jordan. Some demonstrations, for example, are permissible if approved by the authorities in
advance

176

. Moreover, Palestinians are permitted to organize “cultural” events that can function

as symbolic representations of Palestinian national identification. Thus during my research, I
attended a small exhibit in the upper-class neighborhood of Shmaisānī celebrating Palestinian
“identity” through music, food, and a variety of Palestinian artifacts. In addition to ceramic art
and an assortment of Palestinian textiles, a number of artistic posters and photos populated the
scene. Prominent within the exhibit was Naji Al-Ali’s well-known cartoon character, Handala,
who decorated the work of several local artists. Notwithstanding the few images of Handala,
olive trees, and several colorful depictions of Palestinian peasants, the entire event seemed
slightly out of touch with the contemporary context. Given the intensity of Palestinian politics
across the border, I was struck by the anachronistic representations of “Palestinian art.” For
example, several of the displays incorporated revolutionary imagery typical of the 1970s and
1980s including the face of Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Superimposed on a Palestinian flag, Che’s
face served to locate the Palestinian struggle within the bygone period of socialist revolution and

174
175

See (Rice 1988).
See (Hunaydi 2010)

176

Organizing a protest, however, may come with certain risks given that displays of Palestinian
interest in Palestine can be easily interpreted as disloyalty to Jordan. In such circumstances,
Palestinians are less likely to organize any public protests.
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Third World Nationalism. In this case, symbols of Palestinian identity were blended with more
generic icons of “revolution” and anti-imperial art. In addition, contemporary forms of
nationalistic expression such as martyr posters or the propaganda art of Palestinian political
organizations like Fatah and Hamas were also missing. Strangely enough, neither PLO
Chairman, Yasser Arafat, nor Hamas leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yasīn, were anywhere to be found
despite their prominence in Palestinian politics and recent deaths.
The suppression of Palestinian nationalism in Jordan was particularly apparent during
two critical events that occurred during my fieldwork. First, there was Hamas’s electoral victory
in January 2006 and its ascent to power in the Gaza Strip in 2007. Although Palestinians in
Jordan could not vote in the elections, the event was of great significance to Palestinians on the
street. Many of the Palestinians I knew were glued to their television sets waiting for the impact
of the Islamic organization’s victory over Fatah. Pleased by the Islamic movement’s success, for
example, a close Palestinian friend of mine spoke about his visits to the late Ahmed Yasīn during
his hospitalization in Amman. Offering both his support and admiration for the militant Islamic
movement in Palestine, Muhammad believed that Hamas would change the course of Palestinian
politics and the future of refugees in Jordan. Like other Palestinians I knew, he was excited by
Hamas’s victory and seemed hopeful about the years to come. The excitement, however, quickly
vanished when, in 2007, Hamas and Fatah engaged in a bloody battle in Gaza representing an
unprecedented breakdown of Palestinian unity. Within the private spaces of Palestinian homes
and centers, the conflict was the subject of intense debates in Jordan. Palestinian families and
friends were engulfed by a conflict perceived as having important implications for the future of
Palestinians in Jordan and the world. In the camps, little could be said without returning to the
subject of the Palestinian divide. Asad, for example, the Palestinian director of an Islamic

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charity associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, expressed his hopes for a successful Hamas
takeover. “They won the vote,” he explained, “and that gives them the right to rule.” Whether in
support of Hamas or Fatah, one thing was clear: beyond the silence of the streets, Palestinians
were deeply involved in the politics of Palestine.
The second event of importance was the Israel/Hizbullah War in the summer of 2006.
Despite the significance of the conflict for the region, no visible signs of support (or
condemnation) of Hizbullah could be seen on the streets of Amman. Indeed, nothing seemed to
be happening at all. Viewed from the street, it was as if there was no war. Yet many of the
Palestinians I met said they wanted to demonstrate their support for Hizbullah. Described as the
newest front in the ongoing conflict between Israel and “the Arabs,” refugees in camps and cities
staked their claim on the Lebanese side of the struggle. Even among Palestinians I knew who
were staunchly anti-Shiite, Hizbullah was widely perceived as a courageous force fighting on the
Palestinians’ side. In private, for example, Palestinians bragged about the strength of Hizbullah
fighters and the cowardice of the Arab governments. Not since the war of 1973, a Palestinian
acquaintance said, had the Arabs seen such resilience. One Palestinian I knew said that, for the
duration of the war, he would suspend his attitude towards Shiites and pray for their victory over
the Israelis. Although his friend had given him a video lecture explaining the “deceit of the
Shiites,” he decided to leave it aside until the war was over and the outcome was clear. The
silence within Jordan became even clearer as I traveled across the border to Syria. In Damascus,
scarcely a space in the old city could be found without a public display of Syrian support for
Hizbullah. Flags, t-shirts, audio cassettes of Hassan Nasrallah, and an assortment of Hizbullahrelated products crowded the courtyard outside of the Umayyad mosque. On the surface, at least,
Hizbullah was at the center of public attention and expression.

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Suffice it to say that Palestinians have few opportunities for expressing national
identifications in Jordan. Fearful of provoking civil war sensitivities among Transjordanian
nationalists or raising suspicions among Jordan’s security force, the mukhābarāt, many
Palestinians avoid any conspicuous expressions of Palestinian national politics in public life. But
the absence of explicit forms of Palestinian nationalism from the streets of Jordan does not
necessarily mean that Palestinians do not engage in the practice of national representations. On
the contrary, within both the public and private spheres of Palestinian social life, assertions of
Palestinian national identification are visible albeit in less conspicuous forms.

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Figure Sixteen: Framed Image
– The text on the top reads “The Return,” on the
bottom reads “Jerusalem is Ours,” and in the center reads “Palestine”
Among refugees, two particular symbols of national identification are common: Al-Quds
and Palestine. According to Geertz, symbols are cultural ciphers through which meanings are
assigned to phenomena and attachments made between people and things (Geertz 1977, 216). In

177

Photo taken by author in home in Baqa’a refugee camp.
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the context of nationalism, symbols such as flags, anthems, and statues offer individuals an
important opportunity to not only use objects to represent the nation to which they claim
membership but also to represent their solidarities within that nation with their co-nationals.
Bearing a flag thus communicates the dual message that one identifies with a particular nation
and evokes her solidarity with others who share that identification. As Fox and Miller-Idriss
have observed, public spaces adorned with symbolic accoutrements of the nation provide
explicitly national parameters to facilitate the organization of experience of national solidarities
(Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008, 545).

Figure Seventeen: Image of The Dome of the Rock (left), Al-Aqsā Mosque (Right),
178
and patterns of the “Palestinian”Kafīya (background)

Within the public and private spaces of Palestinian life, one of the most ubiquitous
national symbols is that of Al-Quds. When riding a bus, for example, it is not uncommon to find
images of Masjid Al-Aqsā (the Aqsa Mosque) or Masjid Qubbat As-Sakhra (the Dome of the
178

Photo taken by author of postcard hung on interior space of Islamic center.
277

Rock) in the form of a sticker decorating the passenger wall or as a cut-out dangling from a
rearview mirror. In shops as well, large framed images of Qubbat As-Sakhra can be found
hanging conspicuously above the counter. These images are particular to Palestinians; their
absence can often mean that the driver or shop owner is not Palestinian. As such, they
functioned as a multivocal symbol (Turner 1970a) and an important marker of difference in two
senses. First, they distinguished individuals as “Palestinian” since the symbols of Jerusalem
came to represent an attachment to Palestine. Jerusalem, in this sense, came to stand for all of
Palestine and its people. By displaying it, an individual conveyed the idea that Jerusalem
mattered and it mattered because she was a Palestinian. The homeland and its people thus
converged within the image of Jerusalem. Second, these symbols identified the kind of
relationship an individual had with Palestine and the Palestinians. For example, throughout the
refugee camps I found images of Al-Quds bearing particular phrases such as “Al-Quds Lanā”
(Our Jerusalem or Jerusalem is Ours) or “Al-Hulum” (the Dream). For Palestinians, the captions
were essential: they moved beyond the general connection to Al-Quds as a religious site for
Muslims (and Christians), a connection that Jordanians could also potentially assert, and
established a more specific relationship to Palestine as a Palestinian national homeland. In this
sense, “the dream” gave the symbol of Al-Quds a multivocal quality signifying both the specific
desire to return Jerusalem and the Palestinians to Palestine and resist Israeli nationalist claims to
that territory. Moreover, the captions nationalized Jerusalem by articulating a position vis-à-vis
the status of Jerusalem as an occupied territory. The claim that Jerusalem is “ours,” in other
words, represented an explicit nationalist challenge to the Israeli claim that Jerusalem is “theirs.”

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Figure Eighteen: Image of Al-Aqsā Mosque and “The Dream”

179

Beyond the public realm, the interior spaces of the home and private institutional settings
also contained important national symbols. One of the most common material representations of
Palestine I noticed during my research was the map. As Peter Jackson has noted, maps codify
knowledge and represent it in symbolic terms. They project a preferred reading of the material
world mirrored in the depiction of social space (Jackson 1989, 186). The maps I observed
among Palestinian refugees were no exception in this regard. They represented a symbolic effort
to sustain the national composition of a people displaced and a homeland destroyed. Because the
space of Palestine depicted in the maps no longer existed, these representations of Palestine
reflected an attempt to transmit knowledge of a place no longer knowable through experience to
a people no longer united in space. In so doing, the maps depicted an odd configuration of time
and space. They represented an image of the past that paradoxically has yet to be realized: the
nation-state of Palestine.

179

Photo taken by author at Baqa’a refugee camp.
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Depicting Palestine as the geographic territory of the British Mandate, several variations
of the pre-Partition map were noteworthy. One of the more common maps depicted the entire
territory under the mandate period and included a complete list of Palestinian villages and cities,
many of which were depopulated and destroyed by Zionist forces or the Israeli state during or
after the 1948 war or Nakba. The effort to document these sites served three purposes. First,
identifying the specific location of Palestinian villages, towns, and cities reflected an effort to
preserve the geographic sites of what were originally Palestinian spaces despite their historic
fate. For Palestinians, these spaces still existed albeit in a transient state. They were at once the
former homes of Palestinian refugees and the present and future spaces of the eventual return of
their original inhabitants and restoration of what previously existed. Second, the identification of
these spaces allowed the younger generation to develop a cohesive concept of Palestine in which
all sites remain located within the historic territory. The maps ensured, in other words, that
Palestine was and is despite historical events and contemporary realities. On a more basic level,
Palestinians also suggested that there was no other way to depict the homeland. Without these
sites, what else could Palestine be? Third, the maps reinforced the convergence of land and
people in a way that reinforced a particular nation form, one rooted in the pre-Partition period.
Palestine, as the homeland of the Palestinian nation, could only be such if the nation was in its
proper place, which consisted of the entirety of Mandate Palestine. The maps thus served to
underscore the indivisibility of Palestine and the Palestinians.
A second variation of the map of Palestine depicted the homeland and the aftermath of
post-partition events. At a small youth club in the center of the Baqa’a refugee camp, for
example, I saw a map depicting the routes taken by refugees who fled their natal villages in 1948
to locations in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and what remained of Palestine after the war. The center

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provided a large indoor space where Palestinian youth could engage in table tennis and other
athletic activities. Placed within such centers, the maps functioned to nationalize space by
symbolically incorporating “the nation’s” history in an otherwise non-national context. Engaged
in everyday activities, the youth became active spectators submerged in a national space
symbolically representing “their” location within the Palestinian past as refugees. Performing
the rituals of everyday life “here” in Jordan as refugees, the maps revealed the story behind their
non-presence “there” in Palestine. Put another way, the maps not only offered knowledge about
what Palestine was before the partition but also showed, in geographic terms, how Palestinians
became part of a fractured geography in the region.

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Figure Nineteen: “Palestine” by Ismā’īl Shamūt

180

Photo taken by author.
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Few maps represented the post-Partition geography of Palestine reflected in
contemporary cartographic depictions of the region. Thus neither the West Bank nor Gaza Strip
was identified as a distinct region within the territorial space of the maps. Instead, Gaza was
depicted in its pre-1948 form as any other region within the country. The West Bank, on the
other hand, was simply non-existent. Another important aspect of the maps was their refusal to
accept the geography of the present. In as much as current maps of Israel erase any traces of
Palestine, so too did the maps of Palestine I saw erase Israel. Where Israel was depicted, it was
only to emphasize the historic colonization of the homeland by Jewish populations and the
dismal prospects of a Palestinian future. For example, one map included a series of panels
reflecting four periods in the colonization of Palestine. In each panel, the map indicated how
much land was lost to Israeli control culminating in the contemporary period in which
Palestinian land reflected less than 10% of the entire historic territory. In either case, the maps
were clear: Palestine remained an undivided territory defined according to the pre-partition
period threatened by the specter of erasure and Israeli colonization.
On several occasions, Palestinians gave me extra copies of their maps as a way of sharing
and preserving the historic character of the homeland. According to some Palestinians, the maps
would ensure that the Palestine they know will never be forgotten. In private institutions such as
Markaz Itām Al-Islāmī (The Islamic Orphan Center) in the Zaytūna camp, depictions of the
Palestinian homeland went even further to include explicitly nationalist symbols

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. The lobby,

for example, displayed a large map of pre-partition Palestine. Hung immediately above a row of
three chairs facing the offices, the map reflected a pedagogical purpose as much as a national
one. When I asked the director about the map, he informed me that it, like other maps in the
181

I have used a pseudonym for the camp and location in order to protect the identity of
participants and the institution of which they are members.
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center, was used to teach the children about their homeland and nation. “The children must not
forget their homeland or the fact that they have brothers and sisters back home,” he said.
In addition to the maps, most of the office desks and walls were decorated with images of
Jerusalem or small wooden items depicting Palestine. On the desk of one of the center’s
instructors stood a small free-standing Palestine carved out of an olive tree. According to him, it
was made of an olive tree because the trees are part of Palestine. “Our lives in Palestine were
dependent on the olive trees and our homeland is nothing without them,” he explained. In a
more telling example of nationalist commitment, the markaz walls were decorated with a
conspicuous assortment of stickers bearing the images of Hamas leaders including the
movement’s spiritual founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yasīn, and its former spokesman in Gaza, Dr.
Abdel Azīz Ar-Rantīsī. Both figures were assassinated by the Israeli military in 2004 and are
widely seen as Palestinian martyrs. The images were striking for their reverence; both Yasīn and
Rantisi were often shown from angles that gave them iconic qualities. In one image, Rantisi was
shown offering a kiss on Yasīn’s forehead as if to demonstrate the sheikh’s paternal authority
and saintly status. The stickers were also remarkable for their visibility. Until then, I had not
seen any display of support for Palestinian organizations or leaders.
Particular symbols of Palestine were also brought into larger contexts in ways that
nationalized space without explicitly challenging the centrality of Jordanian nationalism. In the
summer of 2007, for example, I visited an UNRWA facility on the outskirts of Amman for a
large festival celebrating the end of the summer camp program for refugees. The event was well
attended and included administrative figures from UNRWA and representatives from private
organizations that assisted with the camp. To open the ceremony, a group of Palestinian children
surrounded a large flag pole and jointly raised the Jordanian flag. Shortly thereafter, the children

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marched together in single file line toward a large space with dozens of seats for an audience and
a stage for the speakers and performers. Behind the seating area hung an immense banner with
an image of Al-Aqsā mosque on the upper left hand corner. At the center of the banner was an
outline of the Dome of the Rock. On the left ran two stripes (one red, one green) that crossed at
the bottom and were outlined by white. Finally, on the upper right hand corner was a faded
image of the “Palestinian” hatta or kafīya.
Several features of the event highlight the ways in which Palestinians, even within the
denationalized presence of UNRWA, can engage in nationalizing practices without being
nationalist. First, by opening the event with the raising of a Jordanian flag, the organizers paid
tribute to Jordan through the most important of nationalist symbols: the Jordanian flag. Yet the
flag did not dominate the visual space of the event. On the contrary, the stage and seats were
organized in a large open space well beyond the presence of the flagpole. Thus the flag hung
high above the event in a space invisible to its participants. The second feature of the event
concerned the banner. Much like the symbolic representations of the homeland seen in the
camps, the banner also promoted a sense of Palestinian solidarity without necessarily challenging
the limits of Jordanian tolerance. Yet this banner came closer than most symbols in two ways.
First, by including the colors of the Palestinian flag—black, red, green, and white—, the banner
represented a key symbol of nationalism without actually displaying they symbol itself; the
colors stood for the flag.

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Figure Twenty: Dome of the Rock (center), Al-Aqsā (top left corner), and pattern of
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“Palestinian” Kafīya (top right corner)
Second, the image of the kafīyā represented an important symbol of Palestinian
identification that has particular meaning in Jordan. For many Palestinians, the red and white
kafīyā worn by many Jordanians is seen as a symbol of “Jordanian identity.” Thus wearing the
black and white kafīyā has come to signify one’s identification as a Palestinian. By including the
kafīyā in the banner, Palestinians were effectively identifying in terms that not only suggested
their symbolic commonality as Palestinians but also their commonality as “not Jordanians.” The
third feature concerned an act performed by the children during the march. Walking in a single
file line, the children (at one point) raised their hands together and used their index and middle
fingers to form a “V.” The V, in this context, was of no minor importance. This was routinely
used by the late Yasser Arafat during and after the Intifāda to mean “victory” against the Israelis.
By raising their hands at this otherwise non-national event celebrating a summer camp among

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Photo taken by author.
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refugees, the V came to symbolize an important national act specific to Palestinians and the
Palestinian resistance against Israel. Symbolically, the V enacted a simple but important form of
national identification specific to Palestinians.

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Figure Twenty-One: Children Raising Arms and Forming “V” with Hands

Much like the Islamic center described above, Palestinian homes also contained a variety
of nationalizing symbols. For example, several homes I visited were decorated with framed
portraits of the late Fatah leader, Yaser Arafat. Within other homes, including Abu ‘Imrān’s, the
walls bore nationalist symbols of Hamas. When I asked him about the symbols, he offered the
following response: “Palestinians care about Hamas. We chose them as our leaders.” Support
for Hamas was particularly popular among the younger generation who often placed stickers in
their rooms on furniture or their school notebooks. In Warda’s room, for example, a young
Palestinian who lived in southeast Amman, the wardrobe unit was covered with nationalist
stickers including images of both Fatah and Hamas members, flags, and Intifada-related imagery.
She also showed me bracelets she made bearing the colors of the Palestinian flag. During
several interviews with families of higher economic standing, my Palestinian hosts would point
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Photo taken by author.
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to a variety of items reflective of their attachments to Palestine. Photographs, coffee cups, and
unused cooking items were all presented as symbols of Palestine demonstrating a family’s
origins and attachment to the nation. Depending on the income of the family, the scale and
quality of items could range from the simple possession of a map to an extravagant collection of
clothing and furniture. One home was particularly remarkable for its elaborate assortment of
items representing the family’s origins in Khalīl (Hebron). Hand-woven pillows, sheets, and
framed textile patterns decorated the guest room while a small depiction of pre-Partition
Palestine carved from the wood of an olive tree was prominently displayed in the center of the
room. Khalīl was one of the cities marked on the carving. All of these items, I was told, were
distinctly Khalīlī (of Hebron) and symbolized their specific roots in Palestine.

Figure Twenty-Two: Wood Carving of “Nakba Palestine” with Palestinian Flag
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Colors and Image of “Refugee”
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Photo taken by author in home in Baqa’a refugee camp.
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The variety of items notwithstanding, it was clear that representing the homeland either
through material depictions of pre-partition Palestine or through nationalist symbols of affiliation
including the Palestinian flag or images of Yaser Arafat and Sheikh Ahmed Yāsīn was a
common and important feature of Palestinian space. For many Palestinians, these
representations provided an essential reminder of their origins in Palestine and specific
connections to a village or city. “The human always searches for his or her roots,” Asad
explained. “My mother and father are from a village in Al-Quds called ‘Ayn Karam. We must
know this because the Palestinian issue is a problem for an entire country. The Palestinian, in
particular, needs [to know] his identity because, without it, he is nothing. He will lose
everything.” For Asad, as for many Palestinians, maps and other material expressions of
Palestine and Palestinianness were important for identifying one’s origin and ongoing connection
to Palestine. In this sense, maps of pre-partition Palestine represented much more than the
memory of Palestine before the war of 1948; they also represented the very existence of its
people and their enduring claim to belong. Moreover, the images gave Palestinians an
opportunity to display their “national” attachments through symbols that could avoid the
limitations set by Jordanian nationalism. Through Jerusalem in public or though a map in
private, Palestinian refugees could use symbols to assert an important identification as a “nation”
connected to a homeland.

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Figure Twenty-Three: Woven Palestinian Flag in Home in Baq’a Camp

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In addition, nationalist imagery functioned as a symbolic representation of an individual’s
participation in homeland politics. Through the images of political figures such as Sheikh
Ahmed Yāsīn, Palestinians could articulate their interest and connection to contemporary debates
in Palestinian national politics. Stickers of Hamas could thus represent one’s support for the
organization’s recent electoral victory over the hitherto dominant political party, Fatah.
Similarly, combining images of Hamas and Fatah could represent one’s allegiance to both parties
and join the broader call for national unity. Thus Warda displayed stickers of both Arafat and
Yasīn on her furniture. The two images, she said, showed her support for a national unity
government and desire to end the split between both organizations. “We are all Palestinians,”
she said. “We cannot be divided.”

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Photo taken by author.
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Figure Twenty-Four: Large Armoire Displaying Images of Hamas Leaders and Fatah
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Leader, Yasser Arafat
Conclusion:
The positioning and repositioning of Caribbean cultural identities, wrote Stuart Hall, can
be related to at least three presences, one of which is the Presence Africaine, or the presence of
Africa (Hall 2003, 240). According to Hall, the presence of Africa was so important to
Caribbean peoples that everyone, regardless of ethnic or racial background, would have to “look
it in the face” and “speak its name.” Yet Hall was careful to note the instability of “Africa” as a
source of “identities” since, like the African diaspora, it too experienced four hundred years of
displacement and dismemberment. “The original “Africa” is no longer there. It too has been
transformed (Hall 2003, 241).” Drawing on the work of Edward Said, Hall described the African
presence as one constituted within an imaginative geography and history, which helps the mind

186

Photo taken by author in home in Wihdāt refugee camp.
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to intensify its own sense of itself by dramatizing the difference between what is close to it and
what is far away [Said cited in (Hall 2003, 241)].
A similar consideration of the Palestinian refugee context in Jordan reveals what might
be described as the “presence of Palestine.” As a “source” of one’s origin, Palestine remains an
inextricable presence without which certain imaginings of the “Palestinians” in Jordan cannot
take place. In this chapter, I’ve examined the meaning of this presence as an imagined homeland
within a discourse of identity grounded in ideas about genealogical and territorial origins.
Among refugees, the idea of Palestine reflects a timeless territorial space paradoxically rooted in
the British colonial imaginary called “Mandate Palestine.” According to this idea, the very
borders that facilitated Palestine’s partition were represented as the “essential” borders of the
homeland that transcended time and space. Thus despite the partition of Palestine and
displacement of the Palestinians, the homeland emerged as a fundamentally intact albeit
occupied space awaiting the return of its population.
The presence of Palestine I described also underscored the significance of the Nakba and
Naksa generations in the meaning of the homeland for their Jordan-born relatives. Born in the
refugee camps of Amman, I argued that the imagined homeland among the youth reflected the
imaginings of the displaced generations that once lived in Palestine. Fashioned within the
memories of the “original refugees,” Palestine was transmitted to the youth in ways that ensured
the existence of a certain “Palestine” and the claim to return. Moreover, the presence of
Palestine emerged within the genealogical claims of a people rooted in place. As a community
of common descent linked to a particular territory, Palestinians could deny the facts of their birth
and lives in Jordan by articulating an interminable genealogical presence in Palestine and the
fundamental presence of Palestine in them.

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Finally, this chapter considered the function of the homeland within the practice of
everyday nationhood. Moving beyond the analysis of nationalism ‘from above,’ I examined the
ways in which ordinary people engaged in nationalizing practices without becoming nationalist.
As Fox and Miller-Idriss noted, national symbols – flags, anthems, statues and landmarks – are
neatly packaged distillations of the nation: they are the linchpins that connect people to the
nation (Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008, 545). In Jordan, where Palestinian nationalism is strictly
controlled, I argued that refugees asserted their national identifications in less conspicuous
means. It was through symbolic representations of the homeland manifested in maps, carvings,
or depictions of specific sites such as (the) Al-Aqsā mosque that Palestinians could assert
national identifications and promote certain solidarities. Yet these practices were not the usual
productions of national elites; rather, they were the mundane enactments of nationhood that
suggest the importance of the everyday in the meaning and experience of “nation.” Again, as
Fox and Miller-Idriss noted:
This is nationhood as it is meaningfully embodied, expressed and sometimes
performed in the routine contexts of everyday life. The nation as a discursive
construct is reproduced not only through direct discursive engagement, but also as
it is implicated tangentially through talk and interaction. It is the practical
accomplishment of ordinary people talking about themselves and their
surroundings in ways that implicate and reproduce a national view of the world.
These are the micro-settings for the invocation and reproduction of nationhood in
everyday life (Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008, 542).
From the analysis above, two particular conclusions can be drawn regarding refugee
conceptions of the homeland and Palestinian identification. First, the Palestine “imagined” by
refugees is highly idealized both by the displaced generation of the Nakba and Naksa and by the
Jordan-born youth. For the Nakba and Naksa generation, the homeland is often described in
terms that distinguish it from Jordan. Thus the landscapes, fruits, and vegetables of Palestine are
juxtaposed with those of Jordan. In this sense, the homeland signifies less an actual place than it
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does a desired time when the displaced generations of ’48 and ‘67 were living in Palestine.
Jordan represents the consequence of displacement, which can only ever be less than the full
experience of life before the dislocation. For the younger generations born in Jordan, the
homeland is also idealized albeit in slightly different terms. For them, Palestine represents not
what was so much as what is hoped to be: the mythical space of return in which all things will be
“normal again.” Faced with the hardships of life as a refugee in Jordan, the younger generations
have internalized the idealizations of the older generations not only as the idea of a place and
being in the past but also as the projection of the future, or the return. Together, these idealized
conceptions of the homeland offer Palestinians an important sense of commonality grounded in
their shared sense of what Palestine means: a past unchanged, an impermanent present, and an
inevitable future.
The second conclusion extends from the first and is elucidated more clearly in the
following chapter, namely that the homeland is a multivocal symbol through which Palestinian
identification becomes possible in particular ways. Thus as I show in chapter six below, it would
be a mistake to assume that the homeland is idealized according to the nostalgic longings of the
Nakba and Naksa generation alone. On the contrary, the inclusion of religion in Palestinian
national discourse has reconfigured the meaning of the homeland in new ways that transcend the
nostalgia of the Nakba and Naksa generation. Whereas the Nakba and Naksa generation
emphasized its pre-Partition past as the natural home of the Palestinians, many Palestinian
refugees imagine the homeland as a religious space sacred to Palestinians in particular and
Muslims in general. In this sense, representations of Palestine as a Muslim territory seen in the
next chapter underscore Maurice Halbwach’s point that the image of the past shared by a
population is strongly shaped by the needs of the present (Halbwachs 1992). As will become

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clear below, the idea of Muslim Palestine represents much more than the imaginings of a
generation tied to the past; it suggests the hopes and aspirations of a population firmly
entrenched in the present.

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Chapter Seven:
Muslim Palestine: Homeland, National Politics, and the Islamic Nation of Palestine
In the following discussion, I examine the significance of religious nationalism for Palestinian
refugees in Jordan. In particular, I explore how the religious nationalist discourse of Hamas in
the Palestinian context of the West Bank and Gaza Strip has been adopted by Palestinian
refugees in Jordan and is reflected in local identifications of the Palestinian people, homeland
and struggle. I argue that national identifications among Palestinian refugees in Jordan not only
reflect the influence of Hamas in the camps but also the willful engagement of Palestinians with
homeland politics. Despite their marginal status as refugees living beyond the center of
Palestinian national politics, Palestinians are not passive spectators of homeland nationalism.
Rather, they stake meaningful claims within homeland politics from afar in ways that
underscores the significance of national politics for their specific situation in Jordan. Thus for
Palestinian refugees in Jordan, the terms of religious nationalism allowed Palestinians to claim a
place, and take a stance, within Palestinian national politics (to participate in nationhood) and to
assert their eternal bonds to the homeland and its people.
Introduction:
The Markaz Itām Al-Islāmī (The Islamic Orphan Center) sat in the center of the Zaytuna
camp at the top of Jabal Al-Sharaf

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. Connected to one of the many mosques scattered

throughout the camp, it was also adjacent to the UNRWA compound where the camp’s primary
and secondary schools were located. Like the U.N. compound, the Markaz was a peculiarly
bland and unnoticeable place. The exterior was flat and white with little aesthetic value. The
building itself was a small, three-story box with no distinguishing marks except for the layers of

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I have used a pseudonym for the camp and location in order to protect the identity of
participants and the institution of which they are members.
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paint pealing off the lower walls and the sign featuring a child in a white thobe sitting crosslegged while reading the Qur’an. Neither inviting nor un-inviting, it stood there alongside the
typical U.N. compound that, like most U.N. compounds, reminded you that you were in a typical
refugee camp.
The Markaz was also a brief walk from the camp’s central market. Packed with local
vendors and shoppers from the camp and surrounding area, the streets were crowded and noisy.
Cars and buses jammed the narrow streets as parents shopped and children played. Years ago,
the commercial zone belonged to the PLO and served as their main offices in Jordan. Instead of
the plethora of small-scale retail stores found today, the center housed scores of PLO facilities
including clinics and training centers. After the PLO’s expulsion in 1970, Jordanian authorities
stripped the center down and abolished all political and military activity. They also erected their
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own police station on the west entrance of the camp

. Today, the commercial center was still

the center of gravity for the camp albeit for social and economic reasons. With the mosque and
U.N. compound to the east, the market was a public space where children played, Muslims
prayed, and consumers shopped. It was without a doubt still the nucleus of the camp.
My first visit to the Markaz was only my second visit to the camp. Accustomed to the
more spacious and recognizable surroundings of the Hāshmī Shamālī, I couldn’t help but feel the
mark of my inexperienced presence in an area where life moved at an unfamiliar pace. A
sprawling urban slum, the Zaytuna camp was immense and crowded. Its homes were tightly
woven together along the sides of narrow, bumpy streets. Barely a car squeezed by through most
of the camp’s passages and even the sun fought its way through the encroaching concrete
landscape. Like most areas of East Amman, Zaytuna was crowded and bustling with activity. In

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I also saw police stations within four other official UNRWA refugee camps.
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the camp, however, the limited space gave the impression of an innumerable crowd of people
aggressively moving past one another as they carved a path within the dense stream of bodies.
Even in the spacious center, cars, carts, and donkeys carrying burdensome loads of produce
forced their way through the massive crowds shopping or conversing in the plaza. But the camp
was an intimate and exciting place. The physical density of the landscape and people produced a
vibrant social life where congregation was an inevitable result of daily life. Walking through the
camp, I noticed the routine engagement of its residents whose close living experience produced a
social familiarity and clear sense of an “inside.” People knew and noticed one another; strangers
were also noticed.
The Markaz was designed for orphan boys and young men. Only a few blocks away was
its sister branch for orphan girls and widowed women. Both institutions were private and run
under a broader network of Islamic charities called jam’īya Al-Markaz Al-Islāmī Al-Khayrīya
(Association of The Islamic Charitable Centers). Funding came from private donors in Jordan,
the region, and beyond. As the director of the women’s orphanage, Um Hāzim, explained, “We
even used to receive support from individuals in the United States.” “After September 11, the
money stopped coming.” Neither facility had any connection to the United Nations and thus ran
its own independent curriculum and activities including religious instruction and fieldtrips. Most
of the young men and women who worked in the Marākaz

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lived in the camps. As one

volunteer explained to me, the Qur’an places great emphasis on the care of orphans.
Participating in the orphanages was thus a good way to promote the principles of his religion and
support the young boys and girls who needed the attention. The staff worked closely with the

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Marākaz is the Arabic plural for markaz and means “centers” in English.
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children and teens on a range of activities including sports, theater, and religious learning. The
orphans also traveled to various sites including the holy city of Mecca for Al-‘Umra

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.

Located on the second and third floors of the building, the Markaz was wide and
spacious. It held numerous offices, a large activities area containing a small theatrical stage,
volleyball net, and a large inflatable for the younger children. The Markaz also had a large
kitchen and several classrooms overlooking the UN compound below. Decorating the walls
were a variety of stickers and pictures of the two main Palestinian Muslim holy sites in Al-Quds:
Masjid Al-Aqsā and Masjid Qubbat As-Sakhra. In addition to the religious national symbols of
the homeland, several maps of pre-Partition Palestine were prominently placed within the lobby.
The maps displayed the names of hundreds of Palestinian villages and city centers. Finally, the
Markaz’s walls were decorated with a conspicuous assortment of stickers bearing the images of
Hamas leaders including the movement’s spiritual founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yāsīn, and its former
spokesman in Gaza, Dr. Abdel Azīz Al-Rantīsī. The stickers were remarkable for their visibility.
Until then, I had not seen any public display of support for Palestinian organizations like Hamas,
Islamic Jihad, or its leaders. To be sure, shop owners and even bus drivers decorated their walls
and windows with pictures of the homeland including the holy sites of Jerusalem. But those
images were less explicitly nationalist than these

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. The Markaz broke this pattern by

displaying the stickers in conspicuous areas throughout the building.
The mudīr (director) of the Markaz provided a warm and cordial reception. Fluent in
both English and Arabic, he listened intently as I described my research interests in both
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Al-‘Umra is a pilgrimage Muslims can take to Mecca at any time of the year. While it is
highly regarded as desirable, Al-‘Umra does not substitute the mandatory Hajj pilgrimage, which
every able-bodied Muslim must complete in her or his lifetime, economic circumstances
permitting.
191
See preceding chapter for discussion of these images.
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languages. Although not a camp resident himself, he had worked for the Markaz for a
considerable amount of time and expressed deep satisfaction with his work. He agreed to an
interview and offered me a tour of the Markaz. We walked throughout the center as he described
the daily routine of activities. After school, he explained, the children would come to the center
for religious classes and general activities including sports and games. The staff would also help
them with creative activities including plays and songs. As we toured the center, the mudīr also
introduced me to many of the children with the terms “Muslim Amrīkī” (American Muslim). The
children were excited to meet me and were generally friendly and inquisitive. After touring the
facilities and discussing the purpose and structure of the Markaz, the mudīr invited me to return
for a full day of interviews with him and other staff members. He also offered to bring local
volunteers from the camp for a broader interview pool. I agreed and returned the following day.

Figure Twenty-Five: Symbol on Markaz Brochure (left) and Symbol of Hamas (right)

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Over the course of the next two weeks, I returned to the Markaz several times for formal
and informal interviews and participant observation. Meeting first with the mudīr, subsequent
visits offered me numerous opportunities to speak with staff, local volunteers, and the children as
well. I also frequented the women’s branch of the orphanage nearby. Throughout my visits, it
became clear that a distinct pattern of religious-national identification was slowly emerging.
Woven into discussions about the Palestinian people, Palestine, and the national cause were key

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Photo taken by author of brochure. Hamas symbol from
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/2d/Small_hamas_logo.gif
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religious terms like “Islam” and “Muslims.” Palestine, for example, was often described as a
“Muslim land” of sacred value that could not be divided by “negotiations.” Upon first glance, I
thought the significance of religion for ethno-national claims and the meaning of the homeland
was directly linked to the religious nature of the Markaz itself. Where else would religion matter
if not in an Islamic institution? But as my research progressed and participant pool expanded,
the question of religion remained central in many ways. As I later discovered, the religious
national discourse of Hamas reflected in the idea of “Muslim Palestine” and the “Islamic”
struggle for its liberation were ubiquitous; whether during my discussions with a local Imam in
the Wihdāt camp, during focus group interviews at a women’s center, or during interviews with
refugees in their homes throughout the various camps of Amman, Islam was intimately
connected with particular ideas about the Palestinian “nation,” homeland, and struggle. As such,
it functioned as an important categorical mode of identification in which religion represented a
fundamental commonality between some Palestinians (certainly not all) and enabled particular
claims about the meaning and rights of the Palestinian “nation.”
In this chapter, I examine the meaning of Palestine as a Muslim homeland among
refugees and argue that the sacred conception of Palestine as a Muslim territory reflects two
points about Palestinian ethno-national identifications. First, the religious conception of
Palestine as a Muslim homeland underscores the influence and importance of the religious
nationalist movement, Hamas, to Palestinians in Jordan. Although marginalized from the center
of Palestinian national politics in the West Bank and Gaza, the religious meaning of Palestine
articulated by refugees in Jordan shows that they are nonetheless engaged in national debates of
the homeland: they take a stance vis-à-vis homeland nationalist agendas and claim its relevance
through particular discourses. In this sense, national articulations of the homeland among

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Palestinian refugees indicate the importance of thinking about nationhood as a contingent event.
According to Rogers Brubaker, nationhood or nationness is something that happens; it is a
contingent, conjuncturally fluctuating, and precarious frame of vision that suddenly crystallizes
rather than develops (Brubaker 1996, 19). Located within the context of Hamas’s electoral
victory, I believe that Palestinian discourse about the homeland as a religious space speaks not
necessarily to the development of religious nationalism among refugees but to the “moment” in
which that discourse took place. It was within the context of Hamas’s ascent to power within the
national institutions of the quasi-state in Palestine that refugees engaged in religious national
discourse, it “crystallized”. The moment of the elections and victory was a nationalizing event
that transformed interpretive frames, perceptions, and evaluations among refugees (Brubaker
1996, 20). If it ever was before, in 2006-2007 Palestine became a Muslim homeland and
Palestinians became a Muslim nation within the context of Hamas’s victory.
Second, this chapter emphasizes the local importance of religious nationalism for
Palestinian refugees seeking to challenge their marginal status within the arena of homeland
politics and within the conflict with Israel more generally. As I will show, religious national
identifications of the “Palestinians” and “Palestine” provided refugees with a powerful discourse
in which to frame their connection to the homeland and the legitimacy of the struggle for its
liberation from Zionist colonization. On one hand, the religious construction of Muslim
Palestine allowed Palestinians to assert their claims to the homeland in terms that transcended the
realities of time and space. According to this idea, Palestine was the eternal homeland of
Palestinian Muslims despite their prolonged displacement and the creation of the State of Israel.
Religious national discourse, in this sense, was an empowering discourse in which Palestinians
could assert an eternal claim to Palestine and their ineluctable membership within a sacred

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community (Anthony D. Smith 2004). On the other hand, religious nationalism allowed
Palestinians to locate their struggle within a broader arena that implicated all Muslims. Insofar as
Palestine constituted part of the broader Islamic homeland, Palestinian Muslims and Muslims in
general had a “duty” to defend the territory from occupation or colonization by any foreign force.
Consequently, the logic of this discourse meant that the fight against Zionism represented the
realization of an Islamic obligation upon all Muslims to protect Palestine from Zionist conquest
and restore the territory to its rightful place within an imagined Islamic geography.
In this sense, the religious meaning of Palestine articulated by Palestinians in Amman
reflected many of the basic claims asserted by Hamas. By identifying the Palestinian homeland
as a distinctly Muslim territory, for example, Palestinians were participating in Hamas’s effort to
reframe the national conflict with Zionism as a fundamentally religious one with implications for
the entire Muslim world

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. Palestine was thus the local site of a broader struggle between

Muslims and imperial forces and Jews over the legitimate control of an essentially religious
territory. But the idea of Muslim Palestine offered by the Palestinians I interviewed cannot be
understood exclusively in terms of Hamas’s religious nationalist agenda. Indeed, as refugees
marginalized from the center of the conflict over Palestine, the meaning of Palestine as a sacred
Muslim territory had specific value beyond that of a religious struggle. For the Palestinians in
Amman, the idea of Muslim Palestine reflected their rejection of the consequences of partition

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It is true that Hamas is an explicitly nationalist movement defined by the struggle against
Zionism in the specific territory of Palestine. However, Hamas nevertheless conceptualizes its
form of nationalism as religious. That is, notwithstanding its nationalist agenda in Palestine,
Hamas sees the struggle for Palestine within a broader framework of a Muslim struggle against
foreign invasion and rule. According to the movement, all Muslims have an obligation to defend
Palestine even though Palestinians have a specific role in virtue of their residence in the
homeland. Hamas thus represents a religious nationalist organization with both national and
transnational dimensions.
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and displacement and, more importantly, underscored the importance of their claim to an eternal
right to return to their homeland.
Divided into four sections, this chapter begins with a brief contextualization of my arrival
in the field and the democratic victory of Hamas. The next section offers a background to
Jordan’s political relations with Hamas. Then, I locate the idea of Palestine as a territory of
Islamic importance within nationalist history. Finally, in the last section, I explore several
elements within Palestinian discourse among refugees from several refugee camps. Within this
discourse, I emphasize the ways in which Palestine is constructed as a land of religious
significance to Muslims, in particular.
Hamas and The Democratic Landslide:
Less than two weeks after I arrived in the Jordanian capital, Amman, a democratic
revolution rocked the Palestinian political landscape. On January 25, 2006, The Islamic
Resistance Movement, Hamas

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, won a sweeping electoral victory claiming 72 seats in the

Palestinian National Authority’s (PA) 132-member parliament

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. Much to the surprise of the

United States, who pushed for the elections as a condition for restarting the so-called peace
process, the favored Palestinian party, Fatah, suffered a dramatic defeat. Winning only 45 seats,
the hitherto unchallenged party not only failed to maintain its control over the PA but also lost its
exclusive mandate to represent the Palestinian national movement. By all accounts, Hamas’s
triumph signaled the beginning of a new era in Palestinian politics and nationalism in which
religion would play a decisive role (Usher 2006, 20).
194

Hamas is the acronym for Harakat Al-Muqāwwama Al-Islāmīyyah. Hamas also means
“enthusiasm” or “zeal.”
195
The PNA is the quasi-government of the Palestinian Occupied Territories including the West
Bank and Gaza Strip. Established in 1994 according to the Oslo Accords, the PA functions as an
“interim administrative body” within select areas of the occupied territories.
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Despite international disbelief, Hamas’s victory was neither a surprise nor a shock to
most of the region; indeed, its victory was long in the making. Having played a critical role in
the renewed effort to resist Israel’s 40-year occupation and colonization of the West Bank and
Gaza Strip known as the Al-Aqsā Intifāda, Hamas’s popularity had grown dramatically over the
last few years. Although widely known for its resistance activities including “martyr operations”
or suicide attacks, the movement gained significant credibility among the Palestinian public
through its distinguished yet humble leadership

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, extensive network of social services, and

distinct brand of religious national politics (Khalili 2009; Lybarger 2007; Chehab 2008; Mishal
and Sela 2006; Hroub 2000; Milton-Edwards and Farrell 2010). Moreover, Hamas came to
represent a compelling alternative to the ineffective peace-making and corrupt practices of the
dominant Palestinian party, Fatah (Usher 2006). As Khaled Hroub noted:
At a time of unprecedented hardship, humiliation, and despair, as Palestinians
s[aw] that all they ha[d] gotten for the historic concessions made by their
leadership [wa]s massive destruction and the dismemberment of their remaining
lands, Hamas [wa]s seen as the voice of Palestinian dignity and the symbol of
defense of Palestinian rights (Hroub 2004, 22).
The importance of Hamas’s ascent to political power notwithstanding, I was in Jordan, not
Palestine. Although a dramatic event in Palestine, the victory primarily represented a shift in the
domestic politics of the Palestinian territories and Israel. More importantly, Hamas won a
“national” election in which only Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and West Bank could vote;
Palestinians in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon were excluded from participating. Thus while I was
certain that the elections were paramount for Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, I was

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Hamas’s spiritual founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yāsīn, was a Palestinian refugee who lived most
of his life in the squalid refugee camps of Gaza. Similarly, ‘Abdel Aziz Al-Rantīsi was also a
Palestinian refugee who spent most of his life in the refugee camps of Gaza. Despite their
leadership roles and, in Al-Rantisī’s case, his educational achievements, both figures were
perceived as uncorrupted by the elitism characteristic of many Fatah members.
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unsure of its importance for Palestinians in Jordan. I didn’t know what, if any, significance the
change in Palestinian government would have for the Jordanian context. As I later learned,
however, the shift was critical.
Shortly after the electoral dust began to settle, the ramifications of Hamas’s victory in
Jordan began to emerge. Within the first few months of my research, the Jordanian press
produced several articles covering the elections and their implications for Palestinian national
politics. Joining international speculation about the rise of Muslim politics

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, commentators in

Jordan and throughout the Middle East discussed and debated the significance of the elections
for both the Palestinian and regional context. Beyond the press, the elections sent a clear
message to Muslim political actors who swiftly claimed Hamas’s democratic success as their
own. Emboldened by the Palestinian elections, for example, the political wing of the Muslim
Brotherhood in Jordan, the Islamic Action Front

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(IAF), prepared for its own electoral

challenges with a renewed optimism in the “Islamic option.” As Hazam Al-Huneidi, leader of
the Muslim political bloc in Jordan’s parliament declared, “All over the Arab world, the Islamists
have the majority in the street (Cambanis 2006).”
Perhaps the most significant reaction I observed came from the Jordanian government,
whose close but troubled relations with Hamas long preceded the movement’s electoral success.
Faced with domestic, regional, and international pressure, the Kingdom accused the organization
of a treacherous scheme to attack Jordanian institutions and thus maintained its almost decadelong policy of political separation. As dramatic as the government’s reaction was, however, it

197

Drawing on the work of Dale Eickelman and James Piscatori, I use the terms “Muslim
politics” instead of the more common terms “political Islam” or “Islamism” (Eickelman and
Piscatori 2004).
198
The Islamic Action Front is the English translation for Jabhat Al-‘Aml Al-Islamīyyah.
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nevertheless reflected an established tradition of calculated distance with the Muslim movement.
Indeed, since the organization’s formation in 1987 during the Intifada, the Jordanian government
has maintained a frigid and suspicious relationship with Hamas. In order to understand why, a
brief historical digression will help.
Hamas and the Hashemite Kingdom:
With roots deep within the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas has always maintained close ties
with the organization’s branches in Egypt and Jordan. As Ziad Abu-Amr noted, since its
inception, Hamas has been closely interconnected with the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan, which
has provided it with a wide range of doctrinal, political, moral, and material support (Abu-Amr
1993, 16). Through most of its early years, Hamas thus kept a relatively low profile refraining
from activities that could compromise its important links to the Jordanian Brotherhood and
avoiding any altercations with the monarchy.
Tensions between Hamas and the Jordanian regime began in the 1990s. According to
Khaled Hroub, Hamas’s relations with the Jordanian government underwent several particularly
strenuous moments grounded in the organization’s resistance activities in the Occupied
Territories (Hroub 2000, 167). Relations were first strained in April 1994, when two Palestinian
citizens of Jordan—both Hamas members—were stripped of their passports for publicly
declaring their attacks in the “heartland of Palestine.” Similarly, in 1995, Hamas-led attacks in
the Occupied Territories led the Israeli government to pressure the Jordanians to act against the
movement. Jordanian authorities subsequently expelled two of Hamas’s members from the
Kingdom. The third and most serious episode occurred in March 1996, when a series of suicide
attacks in Jerusalem, ‘Asqalan, and Tel Aviv led the Jordanian authorities to arrest several
Hamas activists and severely tightened the organization’s activities (Hroub 2000, 167). In

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September 1997, tensions reemerged when the Jordanian government arrested Hamas’s
spokesman at the time, Ibrahim Ghosheh. Days after Ghosheh’s detention, Hamas-Jordan
relations were tested again when Jordanian authorities foiled an attempt by Israeli Mossad agents
to assassinate Hamas’s political chief in Amman, Khāled Mesh’al. By that time, Hamas had
earned itself the status of a terrorist organization for its role in attacks on Israeli soldiers and,
occasionally, civilians. Given its political branch in Amman, the Israelis sought to attack
Hamas’s leadership by poisoning Mesh’al in contravention of its treaty with Jordan

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.

Following the capture of both agents, the late King Hussein demanded that the Israelis
immediately provide the antidote and release Hamas’s imprisoned spiritual leader, Sheikh
Ahmed Yāsīn, in exchange for its own agents. Despite its swift resolution, the fiasco was of
considerable significance; it not only threatened the viability of Jordan’s 1994 peace treaty with
Israel but also compromised the continued presence of Hamas in Jordan.
In 1999, relations reached a critical turning point when Jordanian authorities accused
Hamas of covert paramilitary training and supporting local Muslim political parties against the
Hashemite monarchy. Until then, Hamas’s problems with the monarchy were framed within a
Palestinian context: it was Hamas’s activities in the Occupied Territories that threatened their
relations with the Kingdom. This time, however, the Jordanians accused Hamas of attempting to
undermine the Jordanian regime itself. After a three-month standoff and under U.S. and Israeli
pressure, the recently appointed King ‘Abdullah II expelled four of Hamas’s political leaders and
ordered all Hamas offices to close and cease activities (Muslih 1999; Orme 1999).

199

Article 4 of the treaty states that “[b]oth Parties, acknowledging that mutual understanding
and cooperation in security-related matters will form a significant part of their relations and will
further enhance the security of the region, take upon themselves to base their security relations
on mutual trust, advancement of joint interests and co-operation, and to aim towards a regional
framework of partnership in peace.”
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After expelling Hamas’s leadership in 1999, the Jordanians had few incentives for
reconsidering their relationship with the organization. For starters, the Israelis and U.S. were
extremely critical of Jordan’s hospitality towards Hamas. The organization’s blunt opposition to
the Oslo Accords and its willingness to challenge the ongoing occupation through violence made
it difficult for the Jordanians to host Hamas and still declare its support for the peace process.
Moreover, Hamas represented the PA’s chief competitor in the Occupied Territories. Allowing
the organization to maintain a stable base in the Kingdom brought significant pressure from
Yasser Arafat, who was busy suppressing Hamas in Palestine. Suffice it to say that the Kingdom
had few good reasons for allowing Hamas to continue its activities within its borders and thus
avoided the question altogether for as long as it could.
In 2006, the collapse of the peace process and Hamas’s electoral victory facilitated
Jordan’s renewed interest in the organization. One reason was domestic: the Jordanians feared
that Hamas’s successful performance in the Palestinian context could galvanize local support for
its own Muslim political opposition party, the IAF. To be sure, the government perceived the
possibility of a Hamas-style victory for the IAF in the coming 2007 parliamentary elections as
particularly troubling. Moreover, the Jordanians had worked long and hard to normalize their
relations with the PLO. For years King Hussein struggled with the “sole legitimate
representative of the Palestinian people” to reach an agreement on their approach to Israel and
matters of Palestinian statehood. Confronting a new political actor—one that saw political
negotiations as useless and held an openly hostile stance towards the occupying Israeli
government—during one of the most tumultuous periods in the region’s history suggested
serious problems for the Kingdom’s ability to promote peace and control its domestic politics.
Finally, the U.S.-led war on terror had dramatically altered the Jordanians’ position in the

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international arena. Waging two wars in predominantly Muslim countries in the name of a war
against terror, the U.S. drew a clear line between who was and who wasn’t an ally. According to
the logic of the Bush administration, Hamas was certainly not a friend. Primarily dependent
upon the U.S. for economic and political support, the Jordanians understood that embracing
Hamas could prove a difficult task with significant risks.
About three months after the elections, the Jordanian government took its position. On
April 2006, Jordanian authorities arrested almost twenty Hamas members accusing the
organization of smuggling arms into the Kingdom in order to launch internal attacks against
Jordanian institutions. The Jordanians immediately canceled a visit scheduled with senior Hamas
leader and new Palestinian foreign minister, Mahmoud Zahar. The first of its kind in almost a
decade, Zahar’s visit was widely perceived as an opportunity to warm relations between Hamas
and the Jordanian regime. Hamas officials immediately denied the allegations stating that the
arrests and arms were nothing short of a political ploy designed to satisfy U.S. and Israeli
pressure. Whatever the facts of the case, the entire scenario offered the Jordanians an easy way
out of a difficult situation. By accusing Hamas of threatening the Kingdom’s domestic security,
the Jordanians managed to kill several birds with one stone. First, the episode allowed Jordan to
keep a safe distance from Hamas without compromising its relationships with Israel, the PLO,
and the United States. Second and relatedly, the affair allowed Jordan to blame Hamas for its
own marginalization. This facilitated the idea that the Jordanians were only reacting to the
organization’s activities and not participating in the growing international effort to isolate it.
Finally, the episode allowed Jordan to suggest that Hamas was an internal threat to the Jordanian
nation and state. Following the 2005 suicide attacks in Amman, this allegation had a particular

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resonance among Jordanians—Palestinians and Transjordanians alike—who saw any threats to
the Kingdom’s security as particularly troublesome (Fattah and Slackman 2005).
The preceding discussion is not without its significance for the purposes of my
ethnographic exposition. It provides an essential background for understanding the relevance of
Hamas and the importance of its victory in the Palestinian elections on a major albeit neglected
segment of the Palestinian population: Palestinian refugees. Although Hamas’s victory produced
a wide range of reactions in both the regional and international context, little attention was given
to its meaning and consequences for millions of Palestinians throughout the region who were
precluded from participating in the national elections of their homeland. More importantly,
while Hamas’s role in the West Bank and Gaza Strip were well documented throughout the AlAqsā Intifāda, their connection to and influence among displaced Palestinian communities of
countries like Jordan was largely unseen. Despite this, Hamas’s activities and its distinctive
blend of secular and religious politics have reached the eyes and ears of Palestinians throughout
the region. Whether as citizens of Jordan or stateless refugees in Lebanon, the elections and
subsequent split in the Palestinian political and national movement has been of great interest and
importance to Palestinians living beyond the Ocupied Territories. In countries like Jordan,
where many Palestinians are registered refugees awaiting a permanent resolution to their
displacement, the rise of Hamas and its successful performance in the elections were of
particular importance: a difference in the Palestinian government could mean the difference
between the realization of their rights or prolonged marginalization.
Muslim Palestine:
The idea of Palestine as a land of religious importance to Palestinian nationalists has a
long historical record. Rahsid Khalidi, for example, citing the work of Alexander Scholch,

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described the religious connotations of Palestine expressed in the Fadā’il Al-Quds literature of
the 19th century, which offered pilgrims and visitors information about Jerusalem and holy sites
throughout historic Palestine (Khalidi 1998, 29). Extending beyond bayt Al-Maqdas (the holy
city – Jerusalem) to include the cities of Hebron, Jericho, Bethlehem, Nablus, Al-Ramla, Safad,
Ascalon, Acre, Gaza, and Nazareth, the Fadā’il Al-Quds literature suggested the special and
sacred character of Palestine as an expansive geographic space of religious significance.
According to Khalidi, this literature reinforced the sense in which, for Muslims and Christians,
Palestine was a unique sacred entity (Khalidi 1998, 151). In addition, before the populist revolt
of the 1930s and continuing until the Partition in 1948, Palestinian notables and guerrillas
employed various forms of discourse in which Palestine emerged as a space saturated with
religious meaning and with sacred value (Johnson 1983; Swedenburg 2003). Calling for jihād
against the British and Zionists, for example, ‘Izz Al-Dīn Al-Qassām, a local preacher in the
Palestinian city of Haifa, worked among poor and peasant Palestinians to advance the liberation
of Palestine from foreign rule and settlement. Much like the Muslim Brotherhood of today, AlQassām’s message promoted an Islamic reformation of society in which literacy and morality
went hand-in-hand; through religious education, Palestinians could cleanse their communities of
gambling, drinking, and prostitution and prepare for the broader struggle for the liberation of the
homeland (Johnson 1983, 40). Likening the struggle for Palestine against the British and
Zionists to the 12th century struggle of Salah Al-Dīn against the Crusaders, Al-Qassām
understood his mission in religious terms and invoked the Islamic significance of Palestine as an
integral feature of the broader Muslim world. Before his death in 1935 at the hands of British
police forces, Al-Qassām’s final words were: “this is the jihād for God and the homeland”
(Johnson 1983, 44).

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More recently, however, the particular idea of Palestine as a uniquely Muslim territory
has gained significant traction among Palestinian Muslims. To a large extent, the increasing
popularity of what has been called “Muslim Palestine” (Nusse 1998) can be attributed to the
Islamic Resistance Movement known as Hamas. Playing a critical role in organizing both social
welfare and resistance activities within the Occupied Territories during the Intifāda, their distinct
brand of religious nationalism has become a viable discourse for Palestinians seeking an
alternative to secular politics and fresh approach to the conflict with Zionism. Echoing historical
conceptions of Palestine as an integral component of the larger Islamic homeland, the idea of
Muslim Palestine articulated by Hamas stands as one of the most precise and popular offered by
any Palestinian national movement. According to Article 11 of its charter, for example:
“The Islamic Resistance Movement [firmly] believes that the land of Palestine is
an Islamic Waqf [Trust] upon all Muslim generations till the day of Resurrection.
It is not right to give it up nor any part of it. Neither a single Arab state nor all of
the Arab states, neither a King nor a leader, nor all the kings or leaders, nor any
organization—Palestinian or Arab—have such authority because the land of
Palestine is an Islamic Trust upon all Muslim generations until the day of
Resurrection. And who has the true spokesmanship for all the Muslim
generations till the day of Resurrection (Maqdsi 1993, 125)?”
Palestine’s unique Islamic character is further articulated in Article 14, where the homeland is
described as an “Islamic land accommodating the first Qibla, the third Holy Sanctuary, [and] the
place where the ascent of the Messenger took place (Maqdsi 1993, 126).”
Such articulations come in sharp contrast to the secular nationalism espoused by several
Palestinian organizations. Drafted by the PLO, for example, the Palestinian National Charter of
1968 offers no similar reference to the homeland; neither Islam nor Muslims appear as elements
of the Palestinian call for liberation or the character of the homeland. This, according to Loren
Lybarger, reflected the PLO’s commitment to a type of secular nationalism that subordinated
religious notions of collectivity (e.g. the Islamic conception of the umma) to a common ethnic312

national identity spanning regional, religious, and clan-based solidarities (Lybarger 2007, 34).
Preferring a more inclusive brand of nationalism, one that could cut across religious and socioeconomic lines, the PLO promoted a vision of a nation that integrated existing solidarities among
Palestinians into one overarching identity. Thus within the Charter we find a generic articulation
of Palestinian identity including anyone who had a “material, spiritual, and historical connection
with Palestine.” Moreover, the Charter promotes an expansive sense of Arab nationalism linking
Palestine and the Palestinians to the broader territorial concept of the Arab people and homeland.
Article 1 of the Charter, for example, states that “Palestine is the homeland of the Arab
Palestinian people; it is an indivisible part of the Arab homeland, and the Palestinian people are
an integral part of the Arab nation.”
Islam, Nationalism, and the Homeland:
Speaking with Mark Juergensmeyer in 1989, the former spiritual leader of Hamas, Sheikh
Ahmed Yāsīn, described the idea of a secular state as profoundly misguided since there “is no
such thing…in Islam.” During the same interview, Yāsīn also claimed that there is “no clear
distinction between religion and politics.” In these statements, Yāsīn revealed three important
points about the meaning of religious nationalism. First, Yāsīn’s comments underscored his
position as a religious nationalist. Religious nationalists, according to Juergensmeyer, are
individuals with both religious and political interests who are distinguishable from secular
nationalists in that they are responding to a political situation in a religious way (Juergensmeyer
1994, 6). Responding to the problem of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, Yāsīn saw Islam as
the only solution. Second, his comments reflected a key claim among religious nationalists
throughout the world: in the modern world, it is the secular state that has failed. As
Juergensmeyer noted, religious nationalists see the Western model of nationhood—both

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democratic and socialist—as having failed, and they view religion as a hopeful alternative, a base
for criticism and change (Juergensmeyer 1994, 2). Third, Yāsīn did not imply that religion and
the state were incompatible. On the contrary, according to religious nationalists such as Yāsīn,
religion and the state are not only compatible but are best when united. Although religious
nationalists reject secular ideas, Juergensmeyer adds that nationalists do not necessarily reject
200

secular politics, including the political apparatus of the modern nation-state

(Juergensmeyer

1994, 6).
In the context of Palestine, Yāsīn’s brand of religious nationalism integrated religion into
the framework of Palestinian secular nationalism in ways that enabled two sets of claims. First,
Yāsīn promoted the idea that Palestine was (and is) a territorially bounded geographic space that
needed to be liberated in order to return the Palestinian people to their proper place and establish
a Palestinian Islamic state. In this sense, Yāsīn relied on the secular idea of a sovereign nationstate but altered it by describing its political structure as “Islamic.” Second, although Yāsīn
claimed that Palestine was of importance to the entire Muslim umma, he nevertheless promoted
the idea that Palestine was of particular value to Palestinians. Here Yāsīn was careful to avoid
fully endorsing the secular idea of a Palestinian nation. Thus his claim was not that Palestine
was a “Palestinian” issue alone; it was a matter of importance to all Muslims. Yet he was not
willing to dissolve the particularism of Palestinian nationalism altogether by articulating a
broader Islamic agenda in which all Muslims were equally invested in the conflict. Not unlike
his PLO predecessors, Yāsīn thus struggled to articulate an essentially national problem in
transnational terms. Whereas the PLO wrestled with the question of Palestine as both an Arab
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A similar approach is offered by Anthony Smith, who identifies religious nationalism as a
nationalism that is specifically religious in form and content. Smith goes on to add that religious
nationalists are unique in that they vehemently oppose the secular state and its nationalisms
(Anthony D. Smith 2004, 14).
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and Palestinian issue, Yāsīn struggled with the question of Palestine as both a Muslim and
Palestinian issue.
Notwithstanding these tensions, Yāsīn and Hamas managed to construct a viable religious
national discourse that has achieved considerable standing within the Palestinian political arena.
One of the most important effects of this discourse has been to reconstitute the meaning of
Palestine and the Palestinians in religious terms. As Helena Schulz noted in her study of
Palestinian nationalism, Hamas has succeeded in placing Islam at the center of Palestinian
identification in ways that privileged the status of Muslim Palestinians and, consequently, the
homeland’s value to Muslims (Schulz 2000, 128). This was clearly visible among Palestinians I
met in the refugee camps following Hamas’s electoral victory in 2006. Indeed, for the next two
years, my observations and conversations with Palestinian refugees underscored the centrality of
Islam to Palestinian national discourse. One of the principal ideas articulated by refugees I
interviewed, for example, was that Palestine was an exclusively Muslim territory. Because
Palestine has sacred Muslim sites including the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsā mosque, and was
the location of the Prophet Muhammad’s ascension to heaven known as Al-Mi’rāj, Palestine was
said to be of particular importance to the Muslims

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.

Rāshid, for example, believed Palestine was a primarily Muslim land. Introduced by my
friend, a Palestinian journalist who worked for a local religious paper, Rāshid was a refugee
living in the Baqa’a camp. Displaced as a child during the 1967 War, he and his family lived
modestly within a small corner dwelling that was walking distance from his cell phone shop.
Rāshid identified himself as a Shiite Muslim. He and three other families were the only

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These are not the only sites or events related to Palestine that give it its religious
significance. For a more thorough discussion of the religious significance of Palestine to
Palestinians, see (Bazian 2006).
315

Palestinian Shiites I met during my research in Jordan. Nevertheless, Rāshid claimed that
Palestine was of equal religious value to him as it was to all Palestinian Muslims. “Alhamdulillah
(Praise to God),” he said during our discussion, “Palestine is our land and is an Islamic land.”
“It is like a creed and (the) Al-Aqsā mosque is our sanctuary. Palestine will thus be defended
with our blood.” During my discussion with Rīma, a Palestinian woman at an Islamic women’s
center in the Nāsr camp, a similar idea was conveyed. According to her, Palestine was a
religious land with a specific connection to Muslims. “All Muslims have a right in Palestine,”
she said, “because Al-Aqsā mosque is there; it ties us [Muslims] all to Palestine.” “There are
mūqaddassāt (holy sites) in Palestine that makes it our Islamic land.”
In a visit with Abu ‘Imrān in the Baqa’a camp, I asked him about the status of Palestine
for the refugees. “What,” I asked, “is the significance of Palestine for you as a Palestinian and
for the Palestinians in Jordan?” Emphasizing his homeland’s religious value as a Muslim
territory, he responded with the following words:
“You are a Muslim (Michael) and you are my brother in Islam. And the country
of Islam is for all Muslims. And Palestine is for all the Muslims in the world.
Palestine is for all the Muslims and the Palestinian issue is [fundamentally] an
Islamic issue. So this is more important than my existence as a Palestinian. But
this does not negate [the importance it has for a Palestinian]. We say that
Palestine is not for the Palestinians alone. Palestine is for the Muslims. And we
do not…we will not forget Palestine. We did not and will not forget Palestine and
we will remember it for the rest of our lives and we will work for the sake of its
return to its people –the legitimate people—in all the permissible (observable, in
religious terms) ways. And Palestine has to do with the Arabic and Islamic
umma.
The above excerpts represent a common theme among Palestinians reflecting a key claim within
Hamas’s national discourse, namely that the Palestinian homeland was a Muslim territory with
relevance to the entire Muslim umma. In these representations, both the struggle for the
liberation of Palestine and the sufferings of its people were considered of direct importance to

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Muslims throughout the world. In as much as Palestine was a Muslim territory, Muslims were
obligated to join in the Palestinian national struggle against the Israeli colonization and
occupation of Palestine. Moreover, by constructing the conflict in religious terms, Palestinians
were also attempting to legitimize their struggle (and all of its tactics) as an “Islamic” jihād for a
“national” cause. In this way, the uniqueness of Palestinian religious nationalism became readily
apparent. By nationalizing “Islam,” Palestinians could claim the religious validity of their
struggle despite its secular national character

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. As Andrea Nusse noted:

On the question of nationalism, Hamas makes an even more innovative
unorthodox move away from Islamic thought of the past. The Palestinian
fundamentalists discarded the old incompatibility between Islam based on
ideological grounds and the Western idea of the nation-state, which is based on
territorial claims: “Fatherland (watan) and nationalism (watanīyya)…are part of
the Islamic creed” (Nusse 1998, 49-50).
The status of Palestine as a Muslim territory raised an important question about its
relationship to Christian Palestinians. Like the Muslims, Christian Palestinians have also
suffered the pains of war, displacement, and occupation. Moreover, Palestinian Christians have
played an essential role in the formation of resistance organizations including the PLO and they
continue to struggle against the occupation today. During my interviews with Muslim
Palestinians, I therefore asked about the relationship between Christians and Muslims and the
status of their claims to Palestine. The most common response concerned the idea that both
religious communities shared the same origin and goals in Palestine. “Both Christians and
Muslims,” Rīma said, “suffered the same and thus felt the same about their homeland.”
Similarly, Asad, a Palestinian refugee who worked at an Islamic orphanage, described the

202

Whereas others have argued that groups like Hamas and their discourse “Islamicize”
nationalism (Litvak 1998), I see religious nationalism in the Palestinian mileu as a vacillation
between nationalizing Islam and Islamicizing nationalism. For a more in depth discussion of this
debate, see Hroub, 2000 (especially chapter 2).
317

differences between the two communities as “trivial.” For him, both shared a commonality of
experience and, more importantly, a common goal: the liberation of Palestine and the realization
of the right to return to the homeland.
“The Muslim and Christian Palestinian share the same foundation and goal.
There are no differences in our goals. We are from the same country and share
the same struggle. Just as in Palestine, during the holidays, we still visit each
other and share everything. There is no conflict between us.”
Regarding the more specific issue of Christian Palestinian rights to Palestine, however,
Palestinian Muslims offered an important qualification. As an Islamic territory, Palestine
belonged to the Muslims and it could only be ruled by a Muslim government. Christians, as ahlAl-Kitāb (people of the book), had rights to their holy sites and, as Palestinians, had rights to live
in their homeland. They did not, however, have the right to rule over Muslims. During her
discussion of the homeland, for example, I asked Amal, a young Palestinian from the Wihdāt
camp, what she believed regarding the rights of Christians in Palestine. In a clear and assertive
response, she said:
“Regardless of whether one is Christian or Muslim, they all have a right to their
holy sites in Palestine. There is no conflict between the religions. In terms of the
Palestinians in the diaspora spread throughout the world including Europe, even if
he has British or American citizenship, he carries in his veins [his Palestinianness]
and in his dialect [he expresses his connection to Palestine]. He is therefore a
Palestinian and has his rights in his homeland. But Palestine belongs to the
203
Muslims. Since ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab
fatah Al-Quds (“opened” Jerusalem), it
has belonged to the Muslims”
For Amal, an individual’s origin in Palestine was sufficient for establishing her rights in the
territory. Christian Palestinians thus had as much right to Palestine as Muslim Palestinians. But
that right was restricted in religious national terms. As her comments illustrate above, insofar as
Christians are Palestinian, they had a right to live in Palestine. Moreover, because they are

203

‘Umar ibn al-Khattab was the second caliph of the Muslim ummah.
318

Christians, they also had a right to their holy sights within Palestine. They did not, however,
have the right to rule as an authority over the territory. That right was the exclusive privilege of
“the Muslims” extending from the Caliph ‘Umar’s conquest of Jerusaelm. Abu ‘Imrān offered a
similar answer to the question of Christian Palestinians. Although Palestine was a Muslim
territory, he said, Islam did not preclude the rights of Christians or even Jews in Palestine. “They
could live in Muslim Palestine without fear.”
“First, the Christians are our brothers in humanity. They are our brothers as
members of the human family and Islam compels cooperation between all
humans. Islam yukarram (bestows one with generosity) and honors the person. It
honors the person because they are a human with dignity. And in the book of
God, the holy Qur’an, God says walaqad karrāmnā bani Adam (and we bestow
generosity upon the children of Adam) regardless of his religion, regardless of his
color, regardless of sex, regardless of anything. Islam straightens the conduct of
the people and fixes the conditions of humankind. We are thus prepared to
coexist with the Christians and even the Jews without wars, without the assault of
one group on another. And in our country, there can be a Muslim and there can
be a Christian, and there can also be a Jew, for sure, there can even be an atheist!
They are all welcome. In Islamic history Christians used to live within the
Islamic dawlah (nation) and their poor used to take from the Muslim treasury
without occupation.”
Abu ‘Imrān’s comments above indicate several common and important ideas about the
identification of Palestine as a Muslim homeland. First, his vision of Palestine as a Muslim
territory did not, in his view, necessarily negate the rights of non-Muslim Palestinians to live
within it. Christians thus had rights within Palestine both because of their religious status as
people of the book and as Palestinians displaced from the homeland. Moreover, many
Palestinians did not see the presence of Jews in Palestine as a necessary source of conflict.
Rather, it was the idea of an exclusivist Jewish state in Palestine that contradicted the idea of
Muslim Palestine. As Abu ‘Imrān stressed, Christians, Jews, and even atheists were welcome to
live in Palestine but under Muslim rule. A second and related point concerned the idea of
Muslim authority in Palestine. Most Palestinians believed that only through a return to Islam
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could Palestine be liberated. Consequently, Palestine’s liberation at the hands of the Muslims
would bring about Muslim rule in the territory. Hamas, as the leading Palestinian national
movement, reflected the closest approximation of an Islamic authority and their success in the
Palestinian national elections served to underscore the idea that only through Islam could
Palestine be freed from Israeli control. Interestingly, the Palestinians I met did not discuss the
possibility of future elections in which, at least potentially, non-Muslim parties could emerge
victorious. The elections only surfaced in light of Hamas’s success, thus leaving the question of
an open democratic future unanswered. Finally, Palestinians conceptualized Muslim Palestine as
a utopian ideal in which both Christians and Jews could live in peace and as relative equals, yet
suboridante to the Muslims. Insofar as the idea of Muslim Palestine did not represent the
exclusivism of the Zionist idea of Jewish Israel—that is, the idea that Israel exists only for the
Jews—, the homeland was seen as a progressive ideal and solution to the conflict in general.
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Islam, in other words, was the solution

.

Interestingly enough, such articulations reflected a critical irony. The idea of Palestine as
a definitively and exclusively “Islamic” territory mirrored key ideas offered by religious Zionists
who claim that Israel is, and always has been, an exclusively “Jewish” space. Much like the
master narrative of Zionism, in which ancient Israel represents the eternal homeland of the
Jewish people manifested today in the expanding geography of the State of Israel (Piterberg
2001), representations of Palestine as a Muslim homeland for the Palestinians constructed a
similar narrative. Accordingly, the modern configuration of Palestine seen during the Mandate
period came to represent an ancient territory belonging to the Muslims since the time of the
second Muslim Caliph, ‘Umar ibn Al-Khattāb. Like “Israel” and its relationship to the Jews,
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For a detailed exposition of Hamas’s official and practical position on Christian Palestinians,
see Hroub, 2000 (especially chapter 3, pgs. 139).
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“Palestine” was once the sacred homeland of the Palestinians. Within this claim, however, we
see the tension between the universal idea of Palestine as a “Muslim” territory and the particular
idea of Palestine as a “national” territory. Whereas the Zionist narrative promotes a vision of
“Israel” as the eternal homeland of the Jewish people, who are conceived as a religious nation,
the religious national discourse of Palestinian refugees did not necessarily claim Palestine as the
eternal homeland for the Muslim umma. Instead, Palestine represented a primarily “Palestinian”
space that was of value to all Muslims but was not necessarily their homeland. In this sense,
while the liberation of Palestine represented a meaningful issue for the entire umma, Palestine
was nevertheless the specific homeland of the Palestinians.
Understood as a Muslim territory, the idea of Muslim Palestine among refugees also
reflected the claim that no authority could legitimately partition the homeland. Embracing the
religious national discourse of Hamas, Palestine was widely described as an Islamic waqf

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that

could not be divided by any secular political authority. Consequently, political negotiations
based on the partition of Palestine in 1947 represented a violation of the basic unity of Palestine
as a distinct territory but also as an integral component of the broader Islamic homeland.
According to Rāshid, for example, the status of Palestine as an Islamic land meant that it could
not be negotiated. As he stated, “Palestine is an Islamic land.” “There is no person anywhere in
the world, whether Mahmūd Abbas or otherwise that can reject this fact. Maybe a man under
pressure can say that Palestine is the land of Gaza or some parts of the West Bank. But Palestine
is from the river to the sea.” Echoing Rāshid’s ideas, ‘Aqil, another Palestinian refugee from the
Hittīn camp, rejected any attempts by the Palestinian Authority to negotiate a settlement with
Israel that did not include the totality of Muslim Palestine. “Palestine,” he explained, “is an

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In Arabic, the term “waqf” can mean a religious endowment and/or unalienable property.
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Islamic land.” “It is not Jewish nor was it divided in 1947. Maybe the politicians speak this way
but we know that this is not true. Palestine cannot be divided.”
More fundamentally, the indivisibility of Palestine meant that Jewish rule in the territory
was essentially illegitimate and the struggle against Israel was an Islamic duty. The Israeli State,
in other words, could not legitimately assert its authority in Palestine since its rule was contrary
to Muslim rights in the territory. As Shādi expressed during our interview in the Wihdāt camp,
“the Jews do not have the right to control or occupy our land even if we are not there.” “We
reject their occupation and anyone who says that the Jews have rights over our country,
well…why don’t they give them a piece of their own land? Palestine is part of the Islamic lands.
Why did they come and expel the people from Palestine and steal our homes and homeland?”
The illegitimacy of Israeli rule in the homeland also underscored the legitimacy of armed
struggle to liberate Palestine. In terms similar to those expressed by Hamas, Ghassān, for
example, stated that:
“The land of Palestine is an Islamic land. Bighadh Al-Basar (shame upon those)
to those that describe Palestine as a divided Arabic land! Palestine will not be
returned by or through negotiations. Palestine will be returned by the power of
arms just as it was taken. la taqūm Al-Sā’a (The Day of Judgment) will not come
until the Jews understand the right of the Palestinian people to their land. And
this is a central point. Every Palestinian in the shatāt (diaspora) knows this. And
even the Jews know that Palestine will be returned to the Muslims.”
Referring to the struggle for Palestine, Yūnus also suggested the futility of negotiations. In his
view, the liberation of Palestine could not be solved through a political process.
“The issue of Palestine is not just an issue of land and displacement. It’s an issue
for the Muslim umma. The Jews took our land and treated us like we were
nothing. It is known that Palestine, whoever owns it, [they] will have control over
the whole world. During the days that the Muslims controlled Palestine, we ruled
most of the world. So today, the issue of Palestine will not be solved through
peace negotiations. Peace and all of this political talk is empty.”

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According to Yūnus, Israeli rule in Palestine could not be negotiated. The only solution was the
return of Palestine to the Muslims. Nādia, a Muslim Palestinian from a women’s center in
Wihdāt, also framed the struggle for Palestine in religious terms. Palestine, she affirmed, is an
Islamic land and will be returned to its “rightful” owners.
“100% of the ahadith (sayings of the Prophet Muhammad) say that Palestine will
be returned to us. Even if not during our generation or the next generation, or
even the generation after that, Palestine will return to the following generation of
Palestinians. There will be a generation [of Palestinians] to whom the God of all
worlds will return Palestine. By the will of God, we will struggle (jāhid) for
Palestine and it will return to us.”
As a struggle for the liberation of a Muslim territory, the Palestinian resistance was
understood to afford fighters a particular religious status. Specifically, insofar as the fight for
Palestine was a religiously sanctioned struggle, its mujāhidīn (fighters in the jihad) were granted
the status of martyrs

206

. Nādia, for example, described the Palestinian resistance movement as a

divinely guided struggle of religious significance. To die for the cause of Muslim Palestine thus
meant that one died as a martyr.
“Our goal [to liberate Palestine] is biamar Allah ta’Allah (by the will of God). It
is ākharawī (pertaining to the day of judgment): it is religious. Our end is by the
will of God almighty because the Prophet said that Palestine is for the Muslims
and he who dies without his country is a martyr. And the Prophet said that he
who dies without his family is also a martyr. We are without Palestine, our
homeland. If we die fighting for our homeland or die without our homeland, then
we are all martyrs. Whether with Palestine or without it, our struggle means we
are the winners by God.”
The idea that death in the struggle for Palestine earns one the status of martyrdom has
been a fairly consistent theme within the religious national discourse of Hamas and Islamic Jihād
since the first Intifāda (Abu-Amr 1994; Abu-Amr 1993; Hroub 2000; Abufarha 2009). In the
First Communiqué of Hamas, for example, the theme of martyrdom emerged several times in
206

The status of martyrs has been thoroughly discussed in several works including (Allen 2006;
Abufarha 2009; Khalili 2009).
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connection to the Palestinian resistance. Released at the beginning of the Intifāda in 1987, the
message offered a framework for understanding Palestinian resistance and sacrifice in religious
terms. In the opening paragraph, the Communiqué reads: “Indeed, during one week, hundreds of
wounded and tens of martyrs offered their lives in the path of God to uphold their nation’s glory
and honor, to restore our rights in our homeland, and the elevate God’s banner in the land (Hroub
2000, 265).” Referring to the “criminal occupation” of “the Jews,” Hamas warned Israel that
“their policy of violence shall beget naught but a more powerful counter policy by our sons and
youths who love the eternal life in heaven more than the enemies love this life.” Later, the
Communiqué warned Israeli settlers that “[o]ur people know the way of sacrifice and martyrdom
and are generous in this regard; their military and settlement policies shall avail them nothing
(Hroub 2000, 266).”
The religious meaning of the national struggle for Palestine and the status of “those who
struggle fīl sabīl-illah (in the path of God)” as martyrs articulated above was also visible within
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the da’wa

activities of young Palestinians within the refugee camps. Several students I met

who attended a college in Zarqā’ said they promoted the message of Islam among Palestinians in
order to “remind” them of their duty as Muslims in the national cause. Concerned about the
Jordanian authorities and the idea that their work represented “extremism,” these Palestinians
often relied on more anonymous methods of communication including the distribution of audio
cassettes and multi-media cds. For example, one of the students I met, Fahad

207

208

, provided me

In Arabic, the word “da’wa” means to call, appeal, request or summons. Within the context
of the activities I refer to, students described da’wa as their efforts to “remind” other Palestinians
about the message of Islam and to call upon them to “return” to the teachings of Islam.
208
Fahad is a pseudonym.
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with one of the cds his organization distributed among Palestinians

209

. On the cd were a variety

of multimedia options including audio lectures by Hamas leaders, recitations of Qur’anic verses
and key verses for thikr

210

211

, anāshīd

, photographs of the resistance in Palestine, and position

points of the organization. One of the more striking features of the disc concerned its attempt to
blend the national struggle of Palestine with a larger imagined “Islamic” struggle against
“invaders,” “colonizers,” and “infidels.”
For example, in the organization’s position points shown below, the group articulated a
call for a “return to Islam” and promoted the vision of a pan-Islamic struggle in which Palestine
was but one site of a larger Muslim battle. Titled “thawābatnā n’alnahā lakum” (Our Positions
Clarified for You

212

), the page begins with the idea that deviation from Islam has limited

Muslims’ ability to deal effectively with “their” issues. It then proceeds to underscore the
importance of intīmā’, or attachment to the “homeland,” which according to them, is a
foundational brick in the unity of Arab Muslims (Al-Wahda Al-‘Arabīya Al-Islāmīya). In this
sense, the liberation of particular homelands represented a duty necessary for the realization of a
broader goal of restoring the integrity of the united Arab-Islamic peoples. Although the idea of a
united “Arab-Islamic” people is suggested, the page goes on to describe the conditions of nonArab countries including Chechnya and Afghanistan as “bleeding wounds” that Muslims must

209

The cd mentioned no particular group or organization. Rather, it referred to “Al-Ittijāha AlIslāmiī, Jām’iat Al-Zarqā’ Al-Ahlīya” (The Islamic Position of the Civil University of Zarqā’).
210
Thikr, in this context, refers to particular words and/or phrases (such as Allahu Akbar, or
“God is great”) or key selections from the Quran meant for promoting the “remembrance of
God” through religious invocations.
211
Anāshīd, in Arabic, literally means “songs.” However, anāshīd is commonly used to refer to
songs that do not include particular instruments and thus do not violate what some Muslims
believe is a prohibition on music.
212
This is a rough translation by the author.
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“remember (be aware of) and/or defend.” The position points conclude by stating that
“activism” on the part of the students is necessary for the completion of a “balanced personality.”

Figure Twenty-Sic: Position Page of the CD translated as “Our Positions Clarified for
You”
Whereas in the position page the students promoted a more generic vision of a panIslamic struggle in which the liberation of Palestine constituted an integral albeit particular
effort, the menu page (and following pages) offered a much clearer appeal to Palestinians
regarding the relevance of Palestine as an “Islamic” national struggle and the importance of
martyrdom. For example, in the menu page shown below, titled “qādatnā shahdā’” (our
martyred leaders), only two “Palestinian martyrs” are represented: Abdl Azīz Al-Rantīsī and
Ahmed Yāsīn. In addition, while the figure depicted in the lower right-hand corner could be any
“Muslim” fighter, it is clear that the image is that of a Hamas fighter

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, which again emphasizes

the “Palestinian” dimension of the struggle. Moreover, the first option in the menu (top left-hand
icon) specifically concerns the martyrdom of Al-Rantīsī and Yāsīn. Within this feature, the cd
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Hamas fighters are known for their black hoods and green bandanas bearing the Muslim
testament of faith, “there is no God but God and Muhammad is God’s messenger.”
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provides an in-depth account of the two Palestinian leaders and their dedication and sacrifice
(martyrdom) for the struggle. In the top center icon, titled “good morning my country” (“sabāh
Al-Khair yā bilādī”), and the bottom right-hand icon, titled “the voice of the homeland” (“sawt
Al-Watan”), Palestine again emerges as a prominent feature of the organization’s da’wa. In both
cases, “country” and “homeland” refer specifically to Palestine and thus further emphasize the
centrality of the Palestinian national Islamic struggle in the pan-Islamic battle.

Figure Twenty-Seven: Menu Page from Multimedia CD titled “Our Martyred
Leaders”
Another feature the cd included was a song exclusively about martyrdom. In the opening
line, the singer asks the question (twice), “min yabghā Al-Shahāda, min yabghā Al-Shahāda,
mukhlisan wa lahā tamannā (who wants martyrdom, who wants martyrdom, sincerely and
desired).” Proposing the question of martyrdom within the contemporary period, the song
proceeds to list various Muslim martyrs of the past including Zayd, Mus’ab, Hamza, Ja'far, AlBarā', Al-Ghāfaqī, and Ibn Rawāhah, and several historical Muslim battles of importance
including Hittīn. Although the song was sung in a conspicuously Saudi dialect (of Riyadh) and
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is a popular online feature available with its own video, its presence in the cd nevertheless gave it
“local” meaning among a population who felt connected to a homeland and its people’s battle
with a particular “enemy.” Its use within the da’wa effort to “raise Islamic awareness” among
Palestinians in the camps thus had the effect of legitimizing the “Islamic” resistance in Palestine
in terms of an imagined pan-Islamic struggle. Within the context of a disc replete with
Palestinian references, it linked the contemporary resistance of Hamas via “martyrs” like Rantīsī
and Yāsīn to a tradition of Muslim struggle in the past and thus raised a national struggle to the
status of a religious one.

Figure Twenty-Eight: Photographs of Hams Fighter (Compare with Fighter Depicted in
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Menu Page Above)
The representation of the Palestinian struggle as a religious national cause also emerged
in more standardized cultural expressions. Palestinian refugees I met also expressed ideas about
the homeland and struggle through artistic oral expressions including poetry. During my time at
the Wihdāt camp, for example, I organized several meetings with a local Imam named Omar.
Omar was a short, soft-spoken man in his early thirties. Born and raised in the camp, he was
studying at a local university to acquire his degree in Islamic studies with a focus on shari’a
(Muslim jurisprudence). Omar spent considerable time interacting with the youth. Attached to
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See http://gimmetruth.wordpress.com/2006/10/07/hamas-photo-essay/ .
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an orphanage, his mosque was well attended for most prayers. After the prayers, Omar would
often sit with young Palestinians to discuss religious topics or any issues that he might be able to
comment on from a “religious perspective.” Recently, Omar joined a group of Palestinian youth
on a trip to the Wādī Mūjib, a spectacular gorge in western Jordan near the Dead Sea. While
discussing the trip, Omar informed me that he would recite poetry with the youth the he learned
as a child. Concerned with the homeland and struggle for liberation, the poems represented a
codified artistic expression through which Omar could teach the youth about Palestine. During
our discussions, Omar shared several of the poems he recited on the excursion. Below is one
example.
“The wound is deep and the night is too long, but the wound is the candle.
Because we believe that Al-Quds is our address and identity, we declared war on
the arrogant Jews.”
O brothers, I want to tell you a story.
Allah is one and has no partners.
This story is about a woman who lived a long time ago. Once upon a time, this
woman had four children: Muhammad, Ahmed, Ghassan, and the youngest,
‘Adnan.
After they grew up [became men], they witnessed the cunning of the pigs. And so
they asked their mother, “O mother! Why don’t we have a yard? And where is
our father? You told us he would return. Why do we live in tents unlike our
neighbors?”
Their mother replied, “O dear sons.” “We used to have the most beautiful yards.
Your father ploughed them with his own hands and planted grapevines and
pomegranates. It was full of water and shade. It was full of green and peace.
Beside it was a hill whose breeze healed the [sick]. Beside it was an orchard
yard where we grew citrus and sweet fruits. At the orchard, there were wells that
your father dug for those who were thirsty. Opposite the wells was a long street
that led directly to [the village of] Bisaam. On the side of the street, many flowers
grew and bloomed: roses, Arabian jasmine, and daisies. To the west we built a
house in front of our home. In front of the house was a yard and in it was a place
to keep the horses [a stable]. Your father’s horse was a great horse and he was a
great knight. In the house, we had coffee and cardamom. We used to tell stories
and we used to spend the nights together while the moon above was watching us.
Our world was secure. You were small children and you used to go to the
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orchards. You could pick whatever fruits you desired and played within the
bushes.”
“O my children, time passed and the grapes and pomegranates grew. But the
tyrant, my dear, was deceitful and disloyal. The enemies attacked us and killed
the children in front of the women’s eyes. Your father, my children, was killed
while defending the orchard. Some were martyred while the rest of the people
fled. Today, you have grown and matured. You have become brave men.
Palestine is waiting, is waiting for all of its knights. O children, we want you to
release us, release us from the oppression.”
Ahmed and ‘Adnan volunteered. Muhammad and Ghassan followed them. They
all went to Palestine and headed to the orchard yard. At the yard’s borders, the
moon sent its shining rays.
They were all martyred during the raid. They couldn’t see the yard.
At the tent’s door, the mother stood up. Um Ahmed, the mother of the brave men
said, “Thanks to God, I cannot thank anyone but you my Lord. My husband and
children are for Palestine: the land and the faith [Islam]. I will cry and weep.
Oh my God, I am still happy.”
The above poem is rich with a variety of important ideas concerning the homeland.
However, several particular themes about the homeland and the Palestinian national struggle are
worth considering. First, the poem provides several detailed descriptions of the homeland that
resonate with ideas about heaven in the Qur’an and Islamic traditions such as ahadith. The
prominence of the orchard as a place of peace and bounty, for example reflects much of the
imagery associate with heaven in the Qur’an. The Qur’an, regularly refers to heaven as a place
for the righteous in which gardens are plenty, rivers flow, and fruits are bountiful

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. In

addition, the poem suggests important ideas about the gendered aspects of the “nation” and its
struggle for Palestine. Throughout the song, it is the men that emerge as the noble defenders of
the “land and faith.” The father, for example, is described as a knight with a “great horse.”
Later, he is killed in battle defending his home and homeland and achieves that status of a

215

See, for example, chapter 55, verses 46-76.
330

“martyr.” Similarly, his sons are told the story of their lands and their father’s sacrifice. As he
died fighting for the liberation of their homeland, so too are his sons expected to join the noble
struggle for Palestine. Thus the four sons travel to their homeland and, like their father, are slain
by the enemy. For their sacrifice, they are rewarded with the religious status of martyrs.
The account above reveals an important distinction between the meaning of nationalist
agency for men and women. For men, represented by both the father and his sons, struggle
suggests a key site for enacting a specifically masculine form of national commitment rooted in
the idea of liberating Palestine as the (feminized) mother-land from its conquest by the
(masculinized) Zionist invaders. As Massad has shown in his examination of Palestinian
nationalist discourse (1999), the Palestinian homeland represents a feminine space violated
(“raped”) by Zionist forces during the war and partition in 1947-8. The partition of Palestine, in
this sense, represents both the masculinization of Zionism, whose forces conquered the land, and
the emasculation of the Palestinians, who failed to come to its defense. According to this logic,
liberation of the land through violent struggle not only represents salvation for the conquered
woman/mother of the Palestinian nation but also the remasculinization of Palestinian men. As
warriors fighting for the homeland, Palestinian men enact a specifically masculine agency aimed
at restoring the dignity of Palestine (as the mother-land) through its liberation and the
remasculinization of Palestinian men as its liberators. For those who die in the struggle, their
status as martyrs also functions to reestablish their masculinity albeit through sacrifice. As
Minoo Moallem has described in Iran, by sacrificing his life to the community and showing his
commitment and responsibility, the “warrior brother” and martyr remasculinizes the Muslim man
both as a nationalist reclaiming the homeland and as a Muslim reasserting Islam (Moallem 1999,

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331). Although he may have failed to reconstitute his masculinity as the liberator of Palestine,
he nevertheless restores his masculinity through the ultimate sacrifice for the homeland: his life.
Women in this poem emerge as a different set of actors with a distinct sense of “national”
duty. Initially, women are depicted as witnesses to the suffering of their people. They are the
passive spectators who see the brutality of the “invaders” and the emasculation of the men. “The
enemies attacked us and killed the children in front of the women’s eyes,” the mother explains.
Women are not involved in the resistance and do not die as martyrs. Their status remains equal
to that of the land itself, which suffers the violation of the colonizers who conquered Palestine.
Women have to “watch” as mothers and wives as the masculine conquerors capture the land and
murder their children and husbands.
In the next section of the poem, women’s roles are transformed by the post-conquest
period. Reconstituted by the ideology of national liberation, women become agents of struggle
albeit within the limited role of “mother.” Here nationalism reconfigures women’s agency in
terms of their biological functions, specifically their ability to reproduce the nation. Expressed in
the poem by the willingness to send her sons off to the struggle, the nationalist conception of
reproduction as national agency is adequately captured by the Hamas Charter, which in Article
17, identifies the role of Muslim women as that of a “manufacturers of men” and “guides for the
new generation.” By birthing and raising four sons, the mother’s role is transformed from that of
social reproduction to national resistance: by birthing the nation she is fulfilling her national duty
(Kanaaneh, 2002). Her agency is thus defined by her biological role as the “producer” of men
who are sent off to liberate the conquered homeland. “Nurturing” hers sons with the story of
Palestine and their father’s honorable struggle and death, she prepares them for their own fates as

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victors or martyrs in the cause of liberation and realizes her bio-social role as national producer.
Again, these ideas are also reflected within the Hamas Charter, which in Article 18 states that:
“The women in the house and the family of jihād fighters, whether they are
mothers or sisters, carry out the most important duty of caring for the home and
raising the children upon the moral concepts and values which derive from Islam;
and of educating their sons to observe the religious injunctions in preparation for
the duty of jihad awaiting them (Maqdsi 1993, 128).”
Finally, the poem offers a compelling view into the meaning of the struggle for Palestine in two
respects. First, the song highlights the dual nature of the fight for Muslim Palestine: the struggle
is both for the liberation of a homeland and defense of a faith. To be sure, the lyrics give
particular attention to the specific meaning of Palestine for its original inhabitants. The
homeland thus emerges through the lens of a particular family and the aesthetics of their homelife prior to the dispossession. The unique significance of the homeland to this individual family
notwithstanding, it is nevertheless the struggle for liberation that underscores Palestine’s broader
value. By defending their land and faith, the four boys earn their righteous status as martyrs. As
such, Palestine can be seen as a sacred place constitutive of a righteous struggle in which the
216

path to liberation earns one the status of mujāhid

and, if killed, the status of shahīd (martyr).

The second meaning of the struggle for Palestine that emerges is deeply sentimental and
reveals a complex ambivalence over the idea and experience of loss. In the song, the four sons
learn from their mother about the beauty of their homeland and the loss of their father who
defended it with his life. In the end, the mother encourages her boys to join the fight for
Palestine. If successful, they will liberate the homeland and free its people from oppression. If
they fail, they will join their father and the untold number of martyrs who died defending their
land and faith. Two of the sons volunteer to join the struggle and the remaining two sons follow.

216

Mujāhid is the singular Arabic word for mujāhidīn (ones who engage in jihad).
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All four sons are killed “at the yard’s border.” After learning of their death, the mother offers an
interesting expression of mixed sadness and joy. “Thanks to God,” she says, “I cannot thank
anyone but my Lord.” “My husband and children are for Palestine: the land and the faith. I will
cry and weep. Oh my God, I am still happy.”
The poem above suggests a similar problematic concerning the struggle for Palestine.
Fighting for the homeland is both a righteous and noble cause. Indeed, what higher status can
one achieve but that of a martyr fighting in the path of God? At the same time, what sadder fate
can a mother confront than the loss of her husband and children? The liberation of the homeland
thus presents serious risks that martyrdom cannot neatly resolve. Although the achieved status
of martyrdom indicates the nobility and honor of the cause, the sadness of death is nevertheless
inescapable. Contrary to popular ideas that Palestinians “love death more than life

217

,” the

mother’s words above thus indicate a complex ambiguity. She can rejoice in her sons’ sacrifice,
but also mourns their death.
Conclusion:
The foregoing discussion underscores how ideas about the homeland among Palestinian
refugees in Amman reveal the deepening relationship between religious and national
identifications of the “Palestinians” and “Palestine”. The various selections provided above all
point to the common idea among refugees that Palestine, as the homeland, is a distinctly
“Muslim space.” Furthermore, they suggest that the status of Palestine as a national yet Muslim
territory is achieved through the assertion of two fundamental claims. The first claim is that the
Palestine is a Muslim homeland in virtue of the presence of specific holy sites such as the holy
city of Al-Quds and Al-Haram Al-Sharīf (the Noble Sanctuary). The second claim is that
217

See, for example, accounts offered by Jihad Watch or The Middle East Media Research
Institute, especially work by Steven Stalinsky.
334

Palestine’s Islamic status reflects its historical location within a broader Muslim territorial
geography. Palestine, in this sense, is not only a Muslim country but also an integral component
of an imagined Muslim homeland. The dissolution of Palestine as part of that homeland thus
threatens both the specific situation of Palestinian Muslims and the broader Muslim umma.
Consequently, the status of Palestine as an Islamic territory or, in the words of Hamas, as an
Islamic waqf, precludes the possibility of its division or rule by any non-Muslim authority. The
homeland is thus secured as both an individual country for Muslim Palestinians and an integral
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component of a Muslim homeland

with specific value derived from the importance of its holy

sites.
The idea of Muslim Palestine articulated above also suggests the influence of religious
nationalism and, in particular, the religious nationalist discourse of Hamas, in the Jordanian
context. To be sure, many Palestinians I interviewed expressed their support for Hamas and
identified the organization as the “true leaders” of the national movement. Islam, they believed,
was the proper framework for (1) understanding the value of Palestine, (2) conceptualizing the
resistance in Palestine, and (3) believing in the eventual liberation of the homeland. But support
for Hamas and the use of religious nationalist discourse should not be read as a mere
endorsement of religious politics. Instead, reliance on the religious nationalist discourse of
Hamas should also be seen within the specific context of displacement in which Palestinian
refugees lived. The appeal of the idea of Muslim Palestine, in other words, cannot be divorced
from the growing marginalization of refugees from the Palestinian political process in general
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According to Anthony Smith, “[an] ‘historic land’ is one where terrain and people have
exerted mutual, and beneficial, influence over several generations. The homeland becomes a
repository of historic memories and associations, the place where ‘our’ sages, saints, and heroes
lived, worked, prayed and fought. All this makes the homeland unique (Anthony D. Smith 1993,
9).” It is this sense that the idea of an “Islamic homeland” emerges as a meaningful and arguably
stable idea.
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and the larger conflict with Israel in particular. As a population divorced from the center of
Palestinian national politics and as citizen-refugees living in Jordan, I believe that the appeal of
religious nationalist discourse not only reflected the growing influence of Hamas among
Palestinians but also the marginalization of Palestinians as refugees and their position vis-à-vis
Jordan, the Palestinian Authority, and Israel. More than the secular idea of Arab Palestine, the
meaning of “Muslim Palestine” had strategic importance for the homeland’s displaced
community.
As refugees, Palestinians occupy a liminal position (Turner 1970b) both within Jordan
and the Palestinian political arena. In Jordan, Palestinians have suffered systematic policies of
political and economic marginalization in a process ‘Adnan Abu-Odeh has called dePalestinianization (Abu-Odeh 1999b). One of the most obvious forms of discrimination has
occurred within the state security forces where Palestinians have been excluded in order to
maintain a Transjordanians majority. According to Abu-Odeh, the effect of such practices has
been to trigger a self-perpetuating divisiveness in which Jordanians look at PalestinianJordanians as disloyal suspects (Abu-Odeh 1999b, 198). Economically, Palestinians have also
been excluded from employment in the public sector including the military and public service
work. Unable to access public jobs, many Palestinians have been forced into the uncertainties of
menial work within the private sector.
In addition, as refugees with Jordanian citizenship, Palestinians have also been
marginalized from the Palestinian national arena. Since the signing of the Olso Accords and the
establishment of the Palestinian Authority in the Occupied Territories, the exigencies of statebuilding have led to a serious neglect of refugee rights. In particular, given Israel’s resistance to
confronting the question of the refugees and the PA’s focus on ending the occupation of the West

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Bank and Gaza Strip, resolving the status of refugees has become a marginal issue. Most
recently, the marginalization of Palestinian refugees from the center of national-decision making
was reflected in their exclusion from the 2006 national elections. By excluding refugees in
Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, from participating in the elections, both the Palestinian Authority
and Israel were sending the strong message that refugees were not part of the Palestinian political
process. Rather, the refugees were an “issue” to be resolved from the “inside,” namely the West
Bank and Gaza.
Given their marginal status, there are several reasons why Palestinian refugees have
adopted the framework of religious nationalism for their homeland and cause. One of the most
important reasons for claiming the religious status of Palestine is that it allowed Palestinians to
assert a religious connection to their homeland. This, in turn, had several important implications.
Unlike the secular framework of Arab nationalism, the Islamic quality of Palestine provided a
more powerful claim over the indivisibility of the land and its status among Muslims. Such an
idea could not come at a more critical time. Within the last decade, Palestinian refugees have
seen few signs of any resolution to their displacement coming from the PLO and, in particular,
the PA. Indeed, many Palestinians explained to me how the PLO’s acceptance of a two-state
solution was a tacit negation of the right of return. Their rights, many Palestinians said, were
meaningless to a secular world that only recognized “Jewish rights.” As a Muslim territory,
however, Palestine had a special value. Despite their marginalization from the PLO, Islam
assured them that their rights in Palestine were secure. This was powerfully demonstrated by
Hamas, who has consistently insisted upon the Palestinian refugees’ right to return to their
homes in 1948. Although willing to establish a long-term truce with the Israeli state, Hamas has

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nevertheless maintained the position that the Palestinians have a religious right to their land and
must be permitted to return.
Similarly, asserting the religious status of Palestine also presented a compelling counterclaim to the Zionist idea of Palestine (Israel) as an exclusively Jewish homeland. As expressed
above, many Palestinians rejected the idea that Jews have a religious claim to Palestine as their
exclusive territory. Recognizing that the idea of an Arab right in Palestine had achieved nothing
in the confrontation with the “Jews,” the idea of a Muslim homeland reset the terms of the
conflict in ways that did not—indeed, could not—compromise their rights. Finally, the status of
Palestine as a Muslim territory helped to broaden the scope of the national conflict to include the
Muslim umma. To be sure, the occupation and colonization of Palestine has always appealed to
the sensibilities of Muslims throughout the world. Since the emergence of the PLO in 1964,
however, the liberation movement has been primarily led by secular organizations. Their claims
and resistance was thus grounded in the secular world of national rights.
With the rise of Islamic Jihād and Hamas during the first Intifada, the terms of the
conflict dramatically changed. Drawing on the inspiration of the Iranian Revolution and
reflecting a broader shift towards Muslim politics throughout the region, Palestinian religious
nationalists have effectively reframed the conflict in religious terms facilitating a new approach
219

and creating a new resonance within the Muslim world

. As Palestinians described above, the

issue is a Muslim issue and thus can only be solved through Islam. Any agreement developed
according to secular terms is therefore illegitimate unless consistent with the sacred rights of
Palestinians and Muslims to Palestine.

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For more on the rise of Palestinian religious politics, see (Milton-Edwards and Farrell 2010;
Lybarger 2007; Abu-Amr 1993; Mishal and Sela 2006; Hroub 2004; Hroub 2000).
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Chapter Eight:
Conclusions
This dissertation is a study of the “politics of identification” among Palestinian refugees
in Jordan. As such, it is concerned with understanding how the idioms of ethnicity, religion, and
nationhood were used in the claim to a distinct “Palestinian identity” in Jordan. The chapters in
the dissertation have thus examined the myriad ways in which ethnic, religious, and national
forms of identification were deployed within the overall attempt to articulate a distinct
“Palestinian identity.” In the following discussion, I will present some of my key findings within
my chapters and discuss their significance for understanding issues that transcend the specific
case of Palestinian refugees in Jordan.
Displacement and the Politics of Identity:
In the opening data chapter of this dissertation, I examined how Palestinians identified as
refugees in both refugee camps and urban areas of Amman. Guided by the work of scholars
interested in the relationship between displacement, refugee status, and what Liisa Malkki called
“the national order of things”(Malkki, 1994; Daniel and Knudsen, 1995; Eastmond, 1998; Van
Hear, 1998), I was interested in understanding how, after 60 years of displacement, Palestinian
refugees and their descendants thought about their experience and what significance it had (if
any) for their identity as Palestinian citizens of Jordan. What I discovered was that identifying as
a refugee mattered in several ways that revealed critical aspects about the meaning of that
identification for Palestinians and the relationship between people and place more generally.
One of my key findings in this chapter was that the possession of Jordanian citizenship
did not resolve the issue of displacement for Palestinians or end their claim to being refugees.
On the contrary, for both Palestinians in camps and the city (whether official refugees or not),
identifying as a refugee remained a widespread contemporary practice. For Palestinians living in
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the camps, at least one reason was abundantly clear: their legal status as Jordanian citizens did
very little to mitigate the disastrous effects of displacement. Forced from their homes,
properties, and livelihoods in 1948 and/or 1967, these Palestinians and their descendants
remained landless and generally poor living within the destitute conditions of refugee camps
scattered throughout the country. As the less fortunate of Jordan’s Palestinian refugees, their
lives were circumscribed by the structures of aid established and operated by UNRWA following
the wars of Palestine. Thus unlike other Jordanian citizens, Palestinian refugees’ housing,
healthcare, and education were provided not by the Jordanian state, but by an international aid
agency designed to “temporarily” alleviate the consequences of displacement. In this sense,
dislocation and its ongoing consequences complicated the meaning of Jordanian citizenship for
these Palestinians; their official status as refugees and its concomitant entitlements undermined
the significance of citizenship as a lived experience.
The practical effects of displacement lived by Palestinian camp refugees was not the only
reason Jordanian citizenship failed to weaken their identification as refugees. As my data shows,
identifying as a refugee went beyond the question of camp life and official status. Indeed, camp
Palestinians often ignored the significance of their official refugee status and their camp
existence when claiming a refugee identity. Like Palestinians in the city, they identified as
refugees in terms of (1) their direct experience of displacement or (2) their genealogical
connection to someone who was displaced from Palestine in the past. In the first case,
Palestinians understood refugee identity both as a result of displacement and an inability to
return. Thus whether an individual was forced into a camp or was able to secure a livelihood in
one of Amman’s urban neighborhoods, identifying as a refugee was less the result of an official

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status than it was the result of an identity and existence grounded in the experience of
displacement.
For Palestinians who were neither displaced or living in camps, their identification as
refugees reflected the patrilineal logic of kinship: they were refugees in virtue of their connection
to a male relative who was displaced from Palestine in 1948 and/or 1967. This “inheritance of
exile,” as I called it, could be understood in two ways. On one hand, it suggested that refugee
identity referred to an experiential commonality that facilitated “group” identification and
solidarity. Either as refugees displaced from Palestine or as their descendants born in Jordan,
Palestinians claimed a common experience and memory of displacement and inherited its
fundamental condition of being out of place. Whether born in Palestine or Jordan, being a
refugee underscored a Palestinians’ claim to belonging to, and in, Palestine. On the other hand,
the inheritance of exile also functioned within a broader identification as a distinct ethno-national
community. Identifying as a refugee was “nationalized” to the extent that it functioned both as a
key marker of sameness that cut across social distinctions among Palestinians and as a source of
difference that established ethno-national categorical borders between Palestinians and
Jordanians. Identifying as a refugee was always also identifying as a Palestinian and not as a
Jordanian. Refugeeness, in this sense, was inextricably linked to Palestinianness.
Beyond the question of citizenship and refugee status, my findings in this chapter also
revealed an important complication within the shared identification among Palestinians as
refugees. Indeed, the sentiment of solidarity (Weber 2009) among Palestinians as refugees
described above was not without its internal complications. Contrasting ideas about the meaning
of refugee “identity” among Palestinians in the city and the camps showed a critical limitation to
the presumed sameness of that identity grounded in distinct cultural perceptions of place. For

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Palestinians living in the city, the distinction between life in the camps and the city was essential
for understanding the kind of refugee an individual could be. In particular, city refugees
identified camp refugees with a unique sense of cultural ambivalence: camp refugees were of
them but not like them. According to this logic, the camp refugee was identifiable as a unique
social type distinguishable by the impact of camp life; the social and material conditions of the
camps resulted in a distinct form of personhood unlike the personhood found in the cities. Camp
refugees were thus socially inferior beings constituted by the extreme and polluting conditions of
camp life. From the camps, however, Palestinian refugees spoke in no similar terms. For them,
camp conditions did not draw the same social line between Palestinians; all were equally
refugees suffering from the general conditions of displacement, not life in the camps or city.
Despite the camps’ poor conditions, in other words, refugees were identified as all the same.
Within the scope of refugee studies, the case of Palestinian refugees in Jordan discussed
in this dissertation highlights at least two important general points. First, we see that the idea of
citizenship and resettlement as solutions to displacement has serious limitations. According to
the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol, solving the predicament of refugees can
include some form of return (repatriation) to a home country, resettlement via local integration,
or resettlement in a third country. Common to all three approaches is the necessity of
reestablishing the national status of refugees as citizens either in their original country of
citizenship or a second/third country. For Palestinians in Jordan, this much has already occurred:
although the result of a policy of forced integration through the Jordanian annexation of central
Palestine, Palestinian refugees (and, for some time, natives of the West Bank) became citizens of
Jordan over 50 years ago and (most of them) remain such today. Yet these citizen refugees

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remain significantly concerned with the latter term of their status. In their view, citizenship has
not solved their predicament and the idea that they are refugees in need of a solution lingers on.
The fact that many Palestinian refugees remain in refugee camps is certainly relevant
here. For these Palestinians, citizenship has failed to resolve displacement in the basic sense that
it has failed to terminate their refugee existence in camps and dependency on international aid.
This fact, however, only underscores the point that citizenship, on its own, is an insufficient
solution for displacement. It shows that the extension of citizenship must go hand-in-hand with
efforts capable of making that status meaningful in everyday life. In the camps of Jordan, the
practical limitations of citizenship have only served to reinforce the idea among many
Palestinians that the solution to their plight lies not in “naturalization” in Jordan but in
repatriation to Palestine since it is only “there” that they believe true naturalization and an end to
their exile can occur.
A second point about the Palestinian refugees of Jordan concerns the meaning of refugee
identity. Among Palestinian refugees of the camps and cities of Jordan, we find that the statuses
ascribed to them—their identifications—by institutions such as UNRWA are not limited to the
practical functions these statuses were meant to facilitate. Rather, the identifications expressed
by Palestinians in Jordan show that these statuses take on lives of their own: they become
socially meaningful in ways that transcend their official meanings and are subjected to the
cultural logics of their bearers. Thus identifying as a refugee has become a socially meaningful
claim that not only asserts a commonality of experience for Palestinians but also provides the
basis of an important boundary between Palestinians of “the camps” and “the city.”

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The Politics of Ethno-National Identity in Jordan:
At the core of this dissertation is the question of Palestinian identity in Jordan. Among a
population of refugee-citizens and their descendants, I sought to understand what the possibilities
and limits were to the meaning of “Palestinian” as a category of identification. Thus, in many
ways, chapters four and five of my dissertation constitute a critical section of my research. They
reflected not only my interest in examining the meaning of Palestinian “identity” as Palestinians
claimed it but, more importantly, how their social location within Jordan impacted the
production of that meaning. These two chapters thus explored how the meaning of Palestinian
identity was constituted within the local national conditions of life in Jordan.
One of my key findings in these two chapters concerned the workings of ethnicity and
nationhood among Jordanians and Palestinians. In particular, I discovered that, to a large extent,
understanding the meaning of Palestinian identity in Jordan required an understanding of
Jordanian identity in Jordan. Grasping the nexus between these two identifications, that were at
once ethnic and national, revealed several critical ideas about the meaning of each and how the
presumed dichotomy between Palestinians and Jordanians could be sustained both at the level of
discourse and practice.
First, my research examined how two important factors in Jordan facilitated the
distinction between Jordanian and Palestinian “identities:” the discourse of Transjordanian
nationalists and the policies of the Hashemite state. Far from the framework of a pluralistic or
civic nationalism, I showed how Transjordanian nationalists promoted an exclusive vision of
nationhood in which Palestinians represented an external ethno-national community undeserving
of equal citizenship or access to the state. Historically, this discourse developed within the postwar period in which British colonialists and the Hashemite family proceeded to establish a state

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on territory never before integrated as a bounded entity. Frustrated by the imposition of rule by
foreign influences including British colonial administrators and the soon-to-be Hashemite King
Abdallah I, and the appointment of non-indigenous figures from areas in Syria and Palestine to
government posts, local forces developed an ultimately unsuccessful opposition premised on a
“Transjordanian” claim to the state in virtue of their native presence on the territory. This
discourse continued and crystallized in a new form after the influx of Palestinian refugees in
1948, who overwhelmed the local population as part of an expanded Jordanian territory and
became the new “other” in Jordan until today.
Much as before, the contemporary meaning of a Transjordanian identity grounded in a
pre-colonial indigeneity continues to dominate the thinking of various elements in Jordan that
see Palestinians as a distinct ethno-national community. As such, Transjordanian nationalists
promote a discourse in which Palestinians represent an external threat to the national character of
the territory and state. In order for Jordan to remain a truly Jordanian state, Transjordanian
nationalists believe that Palestinians must be prevented from accessing key sites of state power.
Accordingly, both the rights of citizenship and access to state institutions must be exclusively
held by Transjordanians, who represent the “true” nation of Jordan. Palestinian citizens of
Jordan are thus perceived as non-Jordanians belonging not in Jordan but in their proper place in
the national order of things, namely Palestine.
Although Transjordanian nationalists do not yet represent the dominant position in
Jordan, their impact on state policies, in addition to the Hashemites’ historically contentious
position with the Palestinian leadership and the Palestinians, have given practical meaning to the
idea that Palestinians are not Jordanian and that Jordan is not their country. On one hand, the
fact that the Hashemites themselves are not indigenous to the country and once cooperated with

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British colonial authorities has led both the late King Hussein and his heir, King Abdallah II, at
different times, to appease Transjordanian nationalists by promoting policies supportive of a
Transjordanian exclusivism. On the other hand, the conflict between King Hussein and the PLO
in 1970, which threatened the very existence of the state as a Hashemite entity, produced lasting
tendencies of institutional discrimination. Described by Abu-Odeh as the de-Palestinianization
of Jordan, these policies have privileged Transjordanians over Palestinians and resulted in longlasting feelings of discrimination among Palestinians, who see their status in Jordan as
subordinate to their Transjordanian co-nationals. Moreover, the categorical discrimination of
Palestinians has served to reinforce the very idea that two mutually exclusive groups populate the
Kingdom and that these distinct peoples cannot share a state created for Jordanians.
Within this political context, Palestinians articulate a range of identifications that
underscore the importance of two often contentious positions: normalizing their status as citizens
and maintaining their “identity” as an ethno-national community connected to Palestine.
Concerning their legal status as Jordanian citizens, Palestinians employ the discourse of panArabism and religion to claim an essential commonality with Jordanians. As ethnic Arabs with a
common history, culture, language, and religion (Islam), Palestinians claim a “rightful” place in
Jordan. Moreover, as Muslims in a Muslim-majority country, Palestinian refugees assert a
religious commonality with Jordanians that subordinates national distinctions while privileging
divine connections grounded in faith. In one telling example of this logic (one often invoked by
the late King Hussein), Palestinians equated their status in Jordan with that of the historical
muhājirīn displaced from Mecca to the city of Medina. Much as their Muslim predecessors,
Palestinians claimed that they deserve a sacred status as “temporary” refugees until their return
to Palestine becomes possible. Thus the discriminatory treatment of Palestinians by Jordanian

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nationalists and the state is characterized as a violation of both Arab ethno-nationalism and the
obligations of Muslims toward other Muslims in need of assistance.
Although Palestinians promote the universalizing claims of pan-Arab and religious
discourse, they nevertheless stop short of abandoning the particular claims of Palestinian national
discourse. Indeed, Palestinians identify in ways that underscores their interest in “preserving” an
identity that is ethnically and nationally distinct from Transjordanian identity. Thus while
Palestinians identify with Jordanians as Arabs and Muslims, they also disidentify with
Jordanians and claim a unique ethno-national identity distinguishable in terms of their
connections to Palestine and a distinct ethnicity and nationhood. According to this logic, the fact
that Palestinians draw on ethnic categories for establishing their commonality with Jordanians
does not mean that they do not also claim a unique ethnic identity distinct from that of
Jordanians. Despite their birth in Jordan and inability to visit Palestine, for example, many
Palestinian refugees believe they have unique “traditions” expressive of their origins in Palestine
and that differentiate them from Jordanians. Thus one can distinguish between “Palestinian”
dress and “Jordanian” dress and the “Palestinian” dialect and the “Jordanian” dialect of Arabic.
These ethnic markers serve to underscore the differences between both communities and
preserve cultural boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. Although Palestinians are Arabs, in
other words, they are nonetheless Palestinian Arabs who belong to Palestine, not Jordan.
Constitutive of what I have called the politics of identification, the above data is
significant for understanding the workings of ethnicity and nationhood in Jordan in several ways.
We see, for example, that the meaning of ethnicity and nationhood for Palestinians does not
simply reflect an effort to maintain a positive identification as a distinct ethno-national
community. Instead, by examining Transjordanian national discourse and state policies, we find

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that the meaning of Palestinian identifications is a reflection of several intersecting factors
including (1) their exclusion from Jordanian nationalism, (2) their practical exclusion from the
state (de-Palestinianization), and (3) their own desire to identify with an imagined (Anderson
2006) ethnic-nation and its homeland. To use Roger Brubaker’s terms, the meaning of
Palestinian ethnic and national claims in Jordan can be understood as “positions” within a
political field constituted by the “nationalizing-nationalism” of Transjordanians, the Hashemiteruled state, and the long-distance nationalism (Anderson, 1992) of Palestinian refugees wishing
to maintain their connection to the Palestinian nation and homeland.
Understanding ethnicity and nationhood this way offers a compelling alternative to the
idea that ethnicity, grounded in primordial ties, presents a challenge to the possibility of
nationhood. Clifford Geertz, for example, was once troubled by the significance of primordial
attachments including religion and ethnicity. He saw them as direct threats to the modern bonds
of nationhood in the post-colonial world that could potentially undermine the weaker bonds of a
nascent civic nationalism. In his estimation, the newly emergent states of the developing world
were “abnormally susceptible to serious disaffection based on primordial attachments” including
race, language, and culture (Geertz 1963, 110-111).
Looking at the context of Jordan, Geertz was not altogether wrong: presumed ethnic
commonalities have, at different times, presented serious threats to the stability of Jordan as a
Hashemite state ruling over Jordanians and Palestinians. Thus the idea that Palestinians and
Jordanians represent distinct ethno-national communities has created significant challenges for
the possibility of an integrated, multi-ethnic Jordanian state united under the Hashemite crown.
Yet the very “primordialness” of ethnicity cannot be taken for granted. As we’ve seen above, the
meaning of ethnicity is always constituted within specific situations. As Paul Brass has claimed:

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The very sense of being a member of a coherent and clearly demarcated group is
not simply given by tradition but raised in certain contexts—especially when
there are either tensions with other groups or efforts by leaders to mobilize
followers on the basis of that collective identity (Calhoun 1997, 32).
Thus the meaning of ethnicity and nationhood must be seen not as stable inherited bonds but as
ambivalent categories of identification capable reflecting a diverse set of ideas about
commonalities grounded in religion, language, and culture at different times and under different
circumstances. For example, ethnic identifications among Palestinians can, on one hand, invoke
the Arabic language as a commonality underscoring a fundamental sameness between
themselves and Jordanians and, on the other hand, identify “their” Arabic as a mark of critical
difference between themselves and Jordanians. Arabic, in other words, matters as much as a
point of unity between Palestinians and Jordanians as an important point of distinction. Such
configurations emerge not as a result of any primordial demands but as a direct reflection of a
contemporary tension concerning the rise of Transjordanian exclusivism and Palestinians’ own
national affiliations.
Thus we must understand that, although ethno-national identifications may include
supposed primordial commonalities such as language, religion, and culture, it is often the
workings of power that make such identifications meaningful. As Anthias and Yuval-Davis have
shown, ethnic identifications cannot solely be understood as positive identifications; they must
be expanded to include shared conditions of existence under the state. Ethnic and national
identifications, in this sense, can involve the “partaking of the social conditions of a group,
which is positioned in a particular way in terms of the social allocation of resources, within a
context of difference to other groups, as well as commonalities and differences within” (Anthias
and Yuva-Davis 1993, 9). Such positioning can include one’s access to political, social, and
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economic resources or, as in the Palestinians’ case, an individual’s status as a citizen. As
Anthony Marx has noted, citizenship is a key institutional mechanism for establishing
boundaries of inclusion or exclusion in the nation-state (Marx 1998, 5). Thus, as in Jordan, ideas
about ethnic and/or national differences can underscore the inequalities of citizenship by
“groups” positioned as such and identified through presumed ethno-national markers of
similarity and difference.
In this sense, the function of ethnic and national identifications among Palestinian
refugees also serves to underscore an important issue about citizenship. As in most states, the
politics of nationalism in Jordan center on citizenship as the link between the putative nation and
the state. Thus Transjordanians claim that citizenship is the glue that binds them to the Jordanian
state. Seen from the perspective of Transjordanian nationalists, expanding the boundaries of
citizenship to include Palestinians not only weakens the meaning of an ethnic Jordanian nation—
a nation grounded in a common ethnicity—but also undermines their relationship to the state,
which they believe is their exclusive privilege. Citizenship, in other words, is understood as a
national right, that is, a right of the nation to the state. Palestinians endorse a similar conception
of ethnicity and nationhood. Identifying primarily as Palestinians in terms of a presumed ethnic
commonality, they claim a “natural” connection to Palestine. Consequently, they too identify
Jordan as a territory belonging to its own ethnic-nation of Jordanians. Yet Palestinians do not
see citizenship as the link between a nation and a state. For them, citizenship can be severed
from the “nation” and function as a non-national set of rights grounded in a universal ethnicity
(as Arabs) and religion (as Muslims). It can serve as a temporary privilege offered toward nonnational residents sharing just enough to be legal equals but not enough to “nationalize” them as
Jordanians.

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The difference between Transjordanian and Palestinian ideas about citizenship highlights
the contemporary challenge of a world conceived in terms of nations with states. Both
Palestinians and Jordanians accept the ideology of nationalism in which distinct nations belong
to, and in, their proper place in the world. Thus the very idea of being Palestinian necessitates a
Palestine to which they belong and from which their Palestinianness becomes possible. Ditto for
Jordanians. But the trouble here is not necessarily that Palestinians and Jordanians engage in the
ideology of nationalism but how they do so. One can therefore see the wisdom in the pluralist
approach in Jordan by Palestinians seeking to dislodge ethno-national identity from citizenship
and promote the idea that being Jordanian can be limited to one’s status as a citizen. In this
configuration, Transjordanians and Palestinians can coexist as Jordanians within the framework
of civic nationalism. In other words, two “peoples,” one state.
Identifying the Homeland: Diaspora, Diasporization, and Nationhood:
In an effort to specify the meaning and application of the term “diaspora,” William
Safran developed a typological approach centered on several features that distinguished diasporic
peoples from other displaced or migrant populations. For Safran, six particular features had to
be in place for a migrant community to count as a diaspora: dispersal from a center (home
territory) to two or more places, a collective mythology of the homeland, partial alienation from
the host society, a commitment to the maintenance (and sometimes creation) and prosperity of
the homeland, an idealization of return to an original homeland, and a derivation of collective
consciousness and solidarity from a relationship with the homeland (Safran 1991, 83). Drawing
on the work of Safran, Robin Cohen elaborated the typology to include two particular features
reflecting attention to the function of ethnicity in diasporic formations. According to Cohen,
diasporas could also be distinguished by (1) a strong ethnic group consciousness based on a

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sense of distinctiveness, a common history, and belief in a common fate and (2) a sense of
empathy and solidarity with co-ethnic members in other countries of settlement (Cohen, 1997).
In addition to the features offered above, Cohen provided a further system of
classification meant both to identify a group as a diaspora and to distinguish between groups as
particular kinds of diasporas. Grounding his categories in the specific causes of dispersal, Cohen
identified five categories of diasporas including labor diasporas, trade diasporas, imperial
diasporas, cultural diasporas, and victim diasporas (Cohen 1997). Using the Jewish diaspora as
the paradigmatic case, Cohen gave considerable attention to the circumstances of victim
diasporas whose categorization as such included four particular features. First, victim diasporas
had to be the direct result of a forced, and often traumatic dispersal from an original homeland to
two or more regions. Second, they had to bear a collective memory or myth about the location,
history, and achievements of their former homeland. The third feature of a victim diaspora
concerned the meaning of the homeland. According to Cohen, victim diasporas also shared an
idealization of the homeland and a collective commitment to its maintenance, restoration, and
prosperity. Fourth, victim diasporas were unique for their emphasis on a collective return often
expressed through a widespread movement. Finally, victim diasporas were distinct for their
shared sense of group consciousness across generations and geographic locations based on a
sense of distinctiveness, a common history, and common destiny (Cohen 1997).
Drawing on the work of Safran and Cohen, Kim Butler (2001) emphasized the
significance of the temporal-historical component in developing the diaspora concept.
According to Butler, in order for a community to exist as a diaspora, it must be multigenerational: diasporic peoples must combine the individual migration experience with the
collective history of group dispersal and regenesis of communities abroad (Butler 2001, 192).

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Butler’s point was significant for its attention to the issue of prolonged displacement. In her
view, one could not assume that the ethnic status of a migrant community across generations
alone would suffice for establishing its identity as diasporic. As Tololyan noted, it may be that,
after several generations, the descendants of the first generation of emigrants cease to be a
“segment” of the homeland’s population in any meaningful sense (Tololyan 2007, 649). Thus
examining the mechanisms by which individuals promote a sense of commonality across
generations becomes essential for distinguishing between migrants and diasporas. Again, as
Tololyan noted:
The community endures as a distinct diaspora, not because its members
individually remember grandma or the village, but thanks to the collective work
of memory commemoration, the performance of difference, the cultivation of
ideologies of identity, and the institutionalization of practices of connection to the
homeland (Tololyan 2007, 650).
The typological approaches listed above are not without their problems. Indeed, both
Butler and Tololyan were keenly aware of some of the dangers inherent in treating diasporas as
“groups” bearing particular “features.” Thus both Butler and Tololyan emphasized the
importance of looking not at diasporas but instead examining the processes of what they called
diasporization. For Butler, scholars of diaspora should shift their focus away from identifying
which groups actually are diasporas and instead considering “diaspora” as a framework for the
study of particular processes and expressions of community formation (Butler 2001, 194).
Echoing Butler’s attention to process, Tololyan called for an approach capable of examining how
displaced peoples erect boundaries of similarity and difference in the formation of communities.
Thus Tololyan argued that “it may be best to think of diasporas not as the name of a fixed
concept and social formation but as a process of collective identification and form of identity,
marked by ever-changing differences that chart the shifting boundaries of certain communities

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hierarchically embedded as enclaves with porous boundaries within other, larger communities
(Tololyan 2007, 650).”
For some critics of diaspora studies, the typological approach not only incorrectly
assumed a givenness of diasporas but also failed in important methodological ways. For
example, Stephane Dufoix criticized studies of “diasporas” for their failure to present the
workings of the key features they ought best describe: the relationship to a homeland or
“referent-origin” (Dufoix 2). According to Roger Brubaker, such inadequacies often lead to a
flattening of difference whereby the concept of homeland remains unspecified and otherwise
disparate populations are forced into bounded categorical groups that need to be explained, not
assumed (Brubaker 2006). Similarly, Floya Anthias argued that the application of the diaspora
category also reflects a failure to specify the distinct conditions under which populations migrate
and, more importantly, ignores the impact of local conditions upon these populations. In her
view, diasporas have thus appeared in ways that suggest far more homogeneity than actually
exists and have essentialized the relationship between people and place. According to Anthias,
such populations are not homogenous for their movements may have taken place at different
historical periods and for different reasons (Anthias 1998). In addition, the different countries in
which these populations reside often present different social conditions, opportunities, and
exclusions that can lead to distinct representations of the community and their relationship to the
homeland.
The preceding discussion provides an important background for chapters six and seven of
my dissertation. In these two chapters, I considered these theoretical issues when examining the
specific question of the Palestinian homeland among Palestinian refugees in Jordan. I did so for
two reasons. First, the idea that Palestinians constitute a diaspora community is now a well-

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established idea within the field of Palestinian studies (Hammer 2005, Schulz and Hammer
2003). Thus many scholars regularly refer to a Palestinian diaspora noting, in particular, the
trauma of displacement, the importance of the homeland in the lives of refugees, and
Palestinians’ emphasis on the right of return enshrined in United Nations General Assembly
Resolution 194. Moreover, it is also common to hear Palestinians refer to their situation as
uniquely diasporic. Thus throughout my research period, I often heard Palestinians refer to
themselves as members of Al-Shattāt Al-Filastīnī, or The Palestinian Diaspora.
Drawing on the typologies offered by the work of Safran and Cohen—in particular
Cohen’s notion of a victim diaspora—it would have been easy to “authenticate” Palestinians’
diaspora status by identifying the necessary features of a diaspora group among Palestinian
refugees. Indeed, Palestinians’ accounts of displacement and their identifications of and with
Palestine suggested that Palestinians were, according to Safran and Cohen, a clear-cut diaspora.
Such an approach, however, would have limited my analysis since examining the meaning of the
homeland for Palestinians would have mattered less than simply determining whether the
homeland was a common multi-generational topic for Palestinians when identifying as an ethnonational community. In other words, my analysis would have illustrated one of the key
weaknesses of the typological analysis of diasporas: it would have emphasized the question of
who is (or isn’t) a diaspora at the expense of determining how the scattered members of a distant
place diasporized, if at all, in particular ways. In this sense, my analysis attempted to incorporate
Butler and Tololyan’s emphasis on the processes by which the Palestinian homeland became a
meaningful concept for a displaced people across generations. I considered their insights
important since they compelled me to consider the mechanisms by which Palestinians identified
through, and as, a diaspora. If one of the key features of a community identifying as a diaspora

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concerns the homeland, then it was my task to sift through the meanings of that homeland as an
idealized place of significance to Palestinian refugees living “abroad.” To return to Dufoix and
Brubaker’s concerns with the meaning of the homeland, I was interested in the possibility of a
Palestinian diaspora and/or the process of diasporization and thus explored the very idea of the
homeland and its implications for the construction of social boundaries of inclusion/exclusion
that may or may not be unique to Palestinians in Jordan.
By examining both the meaning of the Palestinian homeland and its role in the
constitution of ethnic, religious, and national identifications among Palestinians, I discovered
that what are often termed diasporic configurations of “identity” are not as clear cut as scholars
would like. Specifically, my research underscored the importance of understanding how the
idealization of a homeland across generations can function in a variety of ways that do not
necessarily result in a distinguishably diasporic formation of “community.” For example, while
many scholars have pointed to the common effort by displaced peoples to idealize their places of
origin, few have offered critical examinations of exactly what it means to “idealize” the
homeland. Thus one of my key interests in chapters six and seven was determining what
Palestinians meant by the idea of Palestine. What, I asked, was the Palestine to which refugees
referred? In most cases, the concept of Palestine identified by Palestinians was captured within
the common refrain, “min Al-Nahar ilal Bahar” [from the (Jordan) river to the (Mediterranean)
sea]. For refugees and their descendants, the idealization of the Palestinian homeland was thus
articulated through an unchanging geography grounded in the colonial imaginary of Palestine
under the British Mandate. According to image of the homeland represented by Palestinian
refugees, the colonial boundaries of Palestine under the British Mandate (1917-1948) were
extracted from time and space and idealized as pre-colonial borders distinguishing a unique

356

space within the region that was essentially Palestinian. Moreover, these borders were
transcendent insofar as they not only preceded the colonial period but also defied the postcolonial Zionist conquest and establishment of Israel. In this sense, much as Jewish Zionists
claimed Israel, Palestinians claimed Palestine as a timeless and permanent homeland unchanged
by the realities of history or the present.
Beyond the geographic idealization of the homeland, my findings also revealed the
critical function of that homeland in the identifications of Palestinians as a distinct ethno-national
community. In particular, the idea of Palestine articulated by Palestinians enabled the claim to a
distinct ethno-national identity grounded in genealogical ties rooted in Palestine and reflecting a
claim to what Anthony Smith described as a common community of descent. According to this
idea, whether an individual is within his/her community or has emigrated to another, she/he
remains ineluctably and organically a member of the community and is forever stamped by it
(Smith 1993). The idea of Palestine thus offered a conceptual point of identification through
which Palestinians displaced from their homeland and their descendants could link themselves to
a particular people and territory and distinguish themselves in terms of a unique ethno-national
identity. This was visible in two ways. First, Palestinian refugees overwhelmingly identified in
genealogical terms; that is, they identified through a genealogical discourse of “origins” claiming
a primary identification as Palestinian rooted in a common ancestry. These genealogical claims
functioned both to reinforce the idea that being Palestinian was an essential “identity”
transmitted by blood and to stiffen the borders between themselves and Jordanians. Through the
logic of genealogy, in other words, Palestinians not only constructed organic boundaries of
inclusion within an ethno-national community but also provided the parameters of exclusion
through which Palestinians could disidentify with Jordanians. Through the framework of

357

descent, Palestinians identified in terms of an interminable and, to borrow Smith’s terms,
ineluctable genealogy that maintained their status as Palestinians despite their location in Jordan.
Second, Palestinians’ genealogical articulations went beyond the mere claim to a
common ancestry to include a common origin in a particular territory: Palestine. In this sense, it
was not just that Palestinians could identify a common ancestor that mattered; rather, it was the
fact of that ancestor’s lived experience in the homeland that made the genealogical tie of
particular importance. It was through a territorialized genealogy that Palestinians could identify
as a distinct community linked both to Palestine and the Palestinians. Thus whereas Smith saw
the ethnic nation as one grounded in genealogical ties, the case of the Palestinians I described
showed that genealogy was not so easily disentangled from territory and thus ethno-national
identifications can reflect an inseparable link between descent and place. A community of
common descent, in other words, matters precisely because of the location of that lineage within
a particular territory. More specifically, it was that an individual could identify an ancestor’s
birth in Palestine that enabled her particular claim to being Palestinian. This idea is adequately
captured in Engseng Ho’s account of the relationship between naming and nations when he states
that names identify persons and groups beyond the sphere of biological and cultural reproduction
to include territory (Ho 2002, 215). Although in my account it isn’t that specific names were
genealogically Palestinian in virtue of their link to Palestine (although without a doubt, some
names are marked as “Palestinian”), Ho’s considerations of the connection between genealogies
and territory nevertheless speaks to the critical link between descent and territory for Palestinian
refugees.
In addition to examining the idealization of the homeland in discourse, my analysis
considered the function of the idealized and materialized homeland in everyday life. In

358

particular, my research showed how the homeland, as a symbolic artifact of everyday life
represented in maps, artwork, and through images of Jerusalem, articulated an important national
distinction in Jordan. Essential for understanding how symbolic representations of the homeland
functioned within what Jon Fox and Cynthia Miller-Idriss called “everyday nationhood” was the
historic context in which such representations took place. Whereas one could have easily
identified these homeland materializations as mere expressions of diasporic longing, I showed
how these representations were intimately linked to the suppression of Palestinian nationalism in
Jordan. Because the civil war of 1970 between Hashemite loyalists and Palestinian guerillas
facilitated a political context in which manifestations of Palestinian national affiliations have
been interpreted as affronts to Jordanian nationalism, I argued that the typical symbols of
nationalism, such as flags or images of nationalist leaders, have been prohibited from public
display. Yet the suppression of Palestinian nationalism did not eradicate everyday forms of
national identification. In particular, my research showed that material representations of the
homeland allowed Palestinians to assert national identifications in ways that were not explicitly
nationalist. Thus images of Jerusalem including the Dome of the Rock functioned as multi-vocal
symbols of the homeland that represented both religious and national ties to Palestine. Much
more than expressions of diasporic attachments to a homeland, images of Jerusalem and artistic
carvings of Nakba Palestine expressed national identifications among Palestinians that subtly
challenged the idea that Jordan was an exclusively “Jordanian” national context.
Finally, my examination of the homeland revealed important insights into the way
Palestinians’ idealizations of the homeland not only reflected the local national context of Jordan
but also underscored the significance of homeland national politics for Palestinians living as
refugees in Jordan. In particular, I argued that the sacred conception of Palestine as a Muslim

359

territory articulated by Palestinians suggested two points about Palestinian ethno-national
identifications. First, the religious conception of Palestine as a Muslim homeland revealed the
influence and importance of the religious nationalist movement, Hamas, to Palestinians in
Jordan. Although marginalized from the center of Palestinian national politics in the West Bank
and Gaza, the religious meaning of Palestine articulated by refugees in Jordan showed that they
are nonetheless engaged in national debates of the homeland: they take a stance vis-à-vis
homeland nationalist agendas and claim its relevance through particular discourses. In this
sense, national articulations of the homeland among Palestinian refugees indicated the
importance of thinking about nationhood as a contingent event. According to Rogers Brubaker,
nationhood or nationness is something that happens; it is a contingent, conjuncturally fluctuating,
and precarious frame of vision that suddenly crystallizes rather than develops (Brubaker 1996,
19). Located within the context of Hamas’s electoral victory, I believe that Palestinian discourse
about the homeland as a religious space spoke not necessarily to the development of religious
nationalism among refugees but to the “moment” in which that discourse took place. It was
within the context of Hamas’s ascent to power within the national institutions of the quasi-state
in Palestine that refugees engaged in religious national discourse, it “crystallized”. The moment
of the elections and victory was a nationalizing event that transformed interpretive frames,
perceptions, and evaluations among refugees (Brubaker 1996, 20). If it ever was before, in
2006-2007 Palestine became a Muslim homeland and Palestinians became a Muslim nation
within the context of Hamas’s victory.
Second, my analysis emphasized the local importance of religious nationalism for
Palestinian refugees seeking to challenge their marginal status within the arena of homeland
politics and within the conflict with Israel more generally. As I showed, religious national

360

identifications of the “Palestinians” and “Palestine” provided refugees with a powerful discourse
in which to frame their connection to the homeland and the legitimacy of the struggle for its
liberation from Zionist colonization. On one hand, the religious construction of Muslim
Palestine allowed Palestinians to assert their claims to the homeland in terms that transcended the
realities of time and space. According to this idea, Palestine was the eternal homeland of
Palestinian Muslims despite their prolonged displacement and the creation of the State of Israel.
Religious national discourse, in this sense, was an empowering discourse in which Palestinians
could assert an eternal claim to Palestine and their ineluctable membership within a sacred
community (Smith, 2004). On the other hand, religious nationalism allowed Palestinians to
locate their struggle within a broader arena that implicated all Muslims. Insofar as Palestine
constituted part of the broader Islamic homeland, Palestinian Muslims and Muslims in general
had a “duty” to defend the territory from occupation or colonization by any foreign force.
Consequently, the logic of this discourse meant that the fight against Zionism represented the
realization of an Islamic obligation upon all Muslims to protect Palestine from Zionist conquest
and restore the territory to its rightful place within an imagined Islamic geography.
Conclusions:
The chapters in the dissertation have examined the myriad ways in which ethnic,
religious, and national forms of identification were deployed within the overall attempt to
articulate a distinct “Palestinian identity.” At times, my research showed how Palestinians
claimed ethnic and religious forms of belonging in ways that reflected the politics of their
location in Jordan as citizen-refugees. Thus Palestinians resisted the exclusionary discourse of
Transjordanian nationalists and the discrimination of the Hashemite-Jordanian state by asserting
their commonality with Jordanians as Arabs and Muslims. At other times, my research showed

361

how ethnic and religious identifications functioned to promote the distinctiveness of Palestinian
“identity” and reflected Palestinians’ engagement with the homeland politics of Palestine, not
Jordan. With a common “origin” in the homeland, Palestinians claimed a unique Palestinian
ethno-national identity distinguishable both genealogically and culturally from Jordan and the
Jordanian people. Moreover, through the framework of religious nationalism espoused by
Hamas in Palestine, Palestinian refugees asserted a sacred connection to the “homeland” and
Palestinian “nation” in Jordan. Through religious forms of identification, Palestinians thus
claimed an interminable belonging to Palestine and enacted a national form of politics without
engaging in nationalism or being nationalist.
In my examination, I also considered how Palestinian identifications as “refugees”
functioned within the local context as an important boundary of both inclusion and exclusion.
For Palestinians, refugee status was expanded beyond its official meanings to provide an
essential point of commonality through which Palestinians could claim membership in a larger
community in exile. Grounded in claims to a common experience of displacement and exile,
both Palestinians living in UNRWA refugee camps and Palestinians living throughout urban
areas of Amman identified as “refugees.” In this case, displacement was conceived as an
ongoing event and process beginning with the removal from Palestine and inherited across
generations as a condition of being out of place. The idea of return thus not only represented the
physical movement back to Palestine but also the termination of a condition of exile through the
restoration of the Palestinian people to their rightful place in Palestine. Although the claim to a
common refugee identity rooted in the experiences of displacement and exile established an
important link between Palestinians across space and time, my research also showed that
material and symbolic boundaries between the city and the camps nevertheless had significant

362

consequences for what it meant to be a refugee living in both spaces. Palestinian refugees in the
city thus held particular views about the camp and its residents that enabled a moral discourse
about the Palestinian community grounded in the experience and meaning of life in the camps.
My dissertation has focused on the specific case of refugees in Jordan, but the issues
raised in my research speak to larger question regarding the meaning of ethno-national politics as
seen from the context of everyday life. Regarding the question of ethno-national politics, the
case of Palestinian refugees in Jordan highlights at least two important points. First, my research
provides an important example of how ethnicity and nationhood reflect not the essential and/or
enduring qualities of bounded “groups” but rather categories of practice used in the formation of
“groupness” in particular settings. In this sense, my study breaks with traditional studies of
ethnicity and nation that treat individuals as members of “ethno-national groups” and instead
emphasizes what people do with ethnic and national categories in the claim to group belonging
(or distancing). As Brubaker et al. noted, the analytical study of categories invites us to think
about how ethnic and national categories function from above –how they are proposed,
propagated, imposed, institutionalized, discursively articulated, and organizationally entrenched
–and from below –how categories are appropriated, internalized, subverted, evaded, or
tarnnsormed (Brubaker et al. 2008, 12). In this sense, my research is less a study of “the
Palestinians” in Jordan as it is a study of how the meaning of “Palestinian” is articulated through
ethno-national categories in the social-political context of Jordan.
Second, the data in this dissertation reveals the importance of understanding how ethnonational politics occur not in the lives of elites, but in the everyday claims of “ordinary” people
living in marginal political spaces. To be sure, the Palestinian refugees I examined in this study
are not nationalists; they have no formal national movement representing their “interests” in

363

Jordan nor do they engage in national debates as “Palestinians.” This, however, does not mean
that Palestinians are not national. On the contrary, the Palestinians I researched engaged in
everyday nationalizing discourses and practices that underscored the salience of nationalism in
their lives. Illustrating what Jon Fox and Cynthia Miller-Idriss called “talking the nation,”
Palestinians were national without being nationalist.
People talk about [the nation] and they make discursive claims for, about, and in
the name of the nation. As Craig Calhoun points out, ‘nations are constituted
largely by these claims themselves, by the way of talking and thinking and acting
that relies on these sorts of claims to produce collective identity, to mobilize
people for collective projects, to evaluate peoples and practices.’ The nation, in
this view, is a discursive construct. (Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008, 538).
Thus as a study of the “everyday,” my research contributed to a growing literature concerned
with the study of ethno-national politics from below. Like Marita Eastmond’s attention to the
situation of Bosnian refugees in Switzerland, my study focused on how nationalist ideologies
were perceived from the vantage point of local life, where identities and boundaries were
negotiated in everyday interaction and in relation to other social identities (Eastmond 1998, 162163).

364

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