RE-THINK THE MIDDLE EAST

[Note: The views expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not represent the views of Re-Think the Middle East.]

Michael Lame, posted August 31, 2009

Two facts are incontrovertible, for the time being: 1) Hamas rules Gaza; and 2) Hamas is one of the two strongest Palestinian political parties. Two other current facts may not be facts for long: 3) the United States refuses to officially recognize or talk directly with Hamas; and 4) Israel refuses too.

The U.S., the E.U., the U.N., and Russia, as well as Israel, all demand that Hamas fulfill three pre-conditions for dealing with the international community. As President Obama re-stated the conditions in his Cairo speech, “Hamas must put an end to violence, recognize past agreements, and recognize Israel’s right to exist.”

Hamas respectfully declines to meet these terms, countering that it is unclear which Israel it is being asked to recognize (pre- or post-’67), that Fatah’s recognition of Israel has not produced results for the Palestinians, that Hamas will accept all prior agreements that serve the Palestinian people, that Israel has not renounced violence, and that the Palestinians, as a people living under occupation, have the inherent right to resist by whatever means necessary. In short, there is no meeting of the minds on the three pre-conditions, and consequently there are no direct talks.

The absence of official dialogue, however, has not prevented Israel and Hamas from engaging in indirect negotiations through the Egyptians on terms for the release of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, held by Hamas or a Hamas affiliate since June 2006. Nor is the U.S. position devoid of flexibility. In recent months, several Americans with close ties to the Obama Administration have met with Hamas officials. So, one can say that channels of communication among the various players are open and utilized.

Hamas clearly wants recognition from and dialogue with the United States, but is it interested in direct negotiations with Israel? I heard a Palestinian scholar recently state that there is no Islamic bar to speaking with one’s enemies and therefore Hamas could choose to have its representatives sit down with Israeli officials. We know that Hamas has set its own pre-conditions for a long-term hudna or truce with the Israelis: complete withdrawal to the ’67 borders, acceptance of the right of return, and release of all Palestinian prisoners. This constitutes a non-starter for the Israelis, and Hamas must know that. Is there a moral/political calculus that prevents Hamas leaders from talking directly with Israeli leaders? We don’t really know, and we may not know unless Israel makes the first move.

Should the United States deal directly and officially with Hamas? Should Israel?

Communication is crucial to peace-making. One could say that communication is a necessary condition for conflict resolution, though not a sufficient one. That doesn’t mean that everyone needs to talk to everyone else or that requests for dialogue should always be accepted.

Non-communication is Communication
People frequently forget that one fundamental and legitimate form of communication is non-communication. Silence speaks volumes. The refusal to talk with someone unless or until that person fulfills certain conditions is a common human practice. We might stop talking to former friends because they have offended us in some way. We might refuse to sit at the same table with a particular party until they have apologized or explained themselves, retracted a statement or changed their behavior. Sometimes we’ve simply heard enough, and if there is nothing new to be added, there is no point in continuing the conversation. We stop talking. We stop listening.

No one has an inherent right to be listened to, and no one has an inherent obligation to listen. The world is certainly a more pleasant place when we are willing to listen and speak to others, but shunning is a very old social practice, and it can be a useful one.

The United States government and the Israeli government are not obligated to speak with Hamas simply because Hamas represents a significant portion of the Palestinian population. But we can ask the questions: Is it currently more beneficial for the U.S. to dialogue with Hamas or to refrain from such dialogue? Is it constructive at this time for Israel to talk with Hamas? Would it be more constructive to wait until certain changes occur – in Hamas’s language or actions, in its status, in its relations with Fatah? These are practical political questions.

For some, these are also moral questions, One can ask: If Americans care at all about the people of Gaza, who are experiencing severe deprivation, then how can the U.S. refuse to speak with the only de facto (if not also de jure) political authority in the Gaza Strip, i.e., Hamas? If the Americans truly value democracy, how can they refuse to sit down with the undisputed winners of a free and fair election, i.e., Hamas?

But the moral issues cut both ways. Sometimes the refusal to talk to a party is heralded as standing up for one’s moral or political principles. When a political figure espouses policies which one abhors, is it immoral to meet with that person? Or might it be moral to meet in private and unofficially but immoral to meet in public, since a public and publicized meeting runs the risk of being seen as approval or support?

The Middle East has more than its share of morally-challenged leaders. Ahmadinejad is a Holocaust-denier who imprisons his opponents. Sudan’s president Omar al-Bashir has been indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur. Sharon was forced to resign as Israel’s Defense Minister for his role in the Sabra and Shatila massacre.

Do you – should you – refuse to meet with such people, whose views or actions you find reprehensible? Does meeting with someone mean that you agree with their views? Of course not, though the world may construe it that way. We each make judgment calls. We each set different limits for how much contact, if any, is too much. Some people criticized President Obama not for meeting Hugo Chavez but for smiling during the meeting. Sharon never shook hands with Arafat, but Netanyahu did. Acts signify. A smile is often interpreted as friendliness. A handshake can be seen as a sign of respect, even trust.

The decision to talk or meet with an adversary is not a matter of applying a universal principle universally. It must be taken on a case-by-case basis, and each case can change over time. For example, at the beginning of the year, active U.S. engagement with the Iranian regime seemed to many to be long overdue. Now, just a few months later, in the aftermath of a fraudulent election and a crackdown on dissidents, any eager outreach to the Khamenei-Ahmadinejad regime appears unseemly.

Blood on their Hands
One argument for Israeli officials not to meet with Hamas is that Hamas members have “Jewish blood on their hands.” Indeed they do. Hamas has sent dozens of suicide bombers into Israel’s cities, causing indiscriminate mayhem. Hamas has launched thousands of rockets against Israeli cities and towns, targeting civilian populations.

It is also true that Israeli political and military leaders have much Palestinian blood on their hands. In December and January alone, during the fighting in Gaza, Israeli soldiers killing more than 1,000 men, women, and children.

In this hundred years war, thousands from both sides have killed and been killed. Yet when vital national interests are at stake, the odds are that leaders will be willing to meet, regardless of who has blood on his hands.

The moral stance of refusing to talk to or meet with an enemy who has perpetrated crimes against one’s people is understandable, perhaps even laudable. The moral imperative of speaking with that same enemy in order to prevent one’s people from suffering further harm – that too is understandable, perhaps even wise, though one’s constituents may disagree. Leaders who decide not to meet with their enemies can easily be labeled “intransigent” or “short-sighted”, while those who agree to meet can be attacked as “appeasers” and “sell-outs”.

These two sets of moral/political considerations must be weighed even as they clash against each other. The shifting balance of factors may yield different decisions at different points in time. Especially in the Middle East, today’s rejection may be followed by tomorrow’s embrace.

[Next blog posting: Talking with Hamas, Part 2]

Michael Lame, posted August 19, 2009

Hussein Agha and Rob Malley caused quite a stir with their New York Times op-ed piece earlier this month entitled “The Two-State Solution Doesn’t Solve Anything”. In the final paragraph, the authors wrote that “the heart of the matter is not necessarily how to define a state of Palestine. It is … how to define the state of Israel.” This is a provocative statement, though less than fully accurate. The debates over definitions of both Palestine and Israel are themselves crucial battlegrounds, critical conversations in the search for peace. The Agha-Malley article makes an important contribution by refocusing attention on the unresolved issues of 1948:

“the conflict… can be settled, both sides implicitly concur, only by looking past the occupation to questions born in 1948 — Arab rejection of the newborn Jewish state and the dispossession and dislocation of Palestinian refugees.” [Emphasis added.] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/11/opinion/11malley.html

Question: from a Palestinian perspective, when did “the occupation” begin – in 1948 or in 1967? Or, to ask it differently, what land is occupied?

In a conflict situation, when there is no meeting of the minds about the definition of a key term, mischief can ensue. And so it has with usage of the word “occupation”.

“Occupation: taking or holding possession, esp. of country or district by military force (army of ~, left to hold occupied region till regular government is set up”) [from The Concise Oxford Dictionary]

Especially for those who have lived under occupation, a discussion of this subject is far from academic. Occupation is often accompanied by gross crimes against persons and property. Occupation brings with it fear, pain, loss, brutality, incarceration, expulsion, exile, death. Occupation is a structured relationship designed far more for the benefit of the occupier than the occupied, sometimes exclusively for the benefit of the occupier.

Yet occupation was not always a dirty word. At the end of World War II, the United States participated with its military allies in the occupations of Germany and Japan. A case can be made that these occupations – which lasted for years in both instances – greatly benefited the population of the defeated countries. Most will concede that this is the exception, not the rule. Some claim that a “benign occupation” is an oxymoron and that any occupation is inevitably oppressive by its nature as well as its practices.

“The Israeli Occupation”
I have never met a Palestinian who thought the Israeli presence in Gaza or the West Bank was benign. But from my personal experience and conversations with many Israelis on the subject, I’ve concluded that the vast majority of Israeli Jews don’t know and don’t want to know about Palestinian life under occupation.

In the business world, a company does not implement a major new course of action without first evaluating whether it will likely result in an improved competitive position. As much as West Bank and Gazan Palestinians suffer under Israeli occupation – or even as much as Israelis might suffer in a third intifada – the occupation is unlikely to end until and unless the Israelis conclude that they would be better off without it. They need to see a more desirable alternative.

No legal argument about the Geneva Conventions will supersede Israelis’ view of their national interest. Ethical arguments against the ugliness of occupation are often offset, in the minds of Israelis, by the countervailing “what if” moral concerns that deadly attacks on Jews might result from Israeli forces withdrawing or even easing up on restrictions imposed upon Palestinians.

The weighing of such options is not part of the Palestinian moral equation. For those living under occupation, the goal is to end it, not to improve it, and not to wait until a clear-cut superior alternative emerges.

For decades, until the premiership of Ariel Sharon, the Israeli government denied that it was an “Occupying Power” in Gaza and the West Bank, while the rest of the world came to describe these very areas as the “Occupied Territories”. (The Golan Heights is considered by the international community to be “Occupied Syria” and, prior to its return to Egypt, the Sinai was also deemed to be “Israeli-occupied” foreign soil.)

Having evacuated all its citizens and soldiers from the Gaza Strip in 2005, Israel still retains control over most of the Strip’s borders as well as its airspace. Palestinians contend – and the international community concurs – that as long as it maintains its stranglehold on Gaza, Israel remains the Occupying Power.

As it applies to Israel/Palestine, occupation is a term whose meaning remains geographically as well as conceptually ambiguous. In the Arab world, all of Israel was considered “Occupied Palestine” before 1967. (By contrast, in the aftermath of the ’48 war, the rest of Palestine was not considered occupied, even though none of it was under sovereign Palestinian rule: the Gaza Strip was militarily “administered” by Egypt; the West Bank was “annexed” by Jordan.)

But beginning in 1967, and especially after Fatah and the PLO accepted a two-state solution some twenty years later, The Occupation came to refer to Israeli control over those portions of Palestine which Israel conquered in the June War/the Six Day War: namely, Gaza, east Jerusalem, and the West Bank.

The so-called Green Line dividing the land between the river and the sea is often used to delimit where the occupation begins and ends geographically. But a remarkable phenomenon is that, for Palestinians and over time, the term occupation has shifted completely from referring to everything inside the Green Line (pre-‘67) to referring to everything outside the Green Line (post-‘67).

How did this happen? The meaning of the word occupation evolved as Palestinian political thinking changed. While most Palestinians still don’t accept the right of Israel to exist, increasingly they accept the fact of its existence, a fact that is apparently here to stay. Occupation no longer fits the Arab consensus reality with regards to pre-’67 Israel. On the other hand, Israel never annexed the West Bank and Gaza, and its annexation of east Jerusalem never received support from the international community. The world consensus and the Arab consensus reinforce the Palestinian view of those areas beyond the Green Line as Occupied Territories.

The earlier, pre-’67, usage of occupied has not disappeared, however. For some Palestinians, its meaning has expanded. In the midst of Israel’s withdrawal/
disengagement from Gaza in August 2005, the London-based Arab newspaper Asharq Al Awsat interviewed Mahmoud Zahar, a key leader of Hamas later credited with masterminding the 2007 Hamas takeover of Gaza:

Q: “Will Hamas resume its operations in Israeli towns after the withdrawal?”
A: “Firstly, there are no Israeli towns. These are settlements.”
(http://aawsat.com/english/news.asp?section=3&id=1294)

Settlements, as examined in the last blog posting, is a term often used to portray habitations as temporary, even illegitimate. Settlements and occupation go together. The establishment of settlements is one of the means by which Israel has maintained its occupation of the West Bank and, until 2005, of Gaza. To claim that all Israeli communities on both sides of the Green Line are settlements is an attempt to delegitimize the presence of Jews anywhere in Palestine/Eretz Yisrael.

Just one year ago, on July 19, 2008, the sometimes Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh concluded his speech at a massive Hamas political rally in Gaza by declaring “Jerusalem is ours, Gaza, Haifa, Jaffa, all of them are ours.” If all these cities are, of right, Palestinian and nothing is legitimately Israeli, then the idea of The Occupation has now been extended to include the entirety of Palestine, which includes all of Israel.

Who believes this? Many Hamas members and other Palestinians as well. How many believe this I don’t know. Polling data from early June indicates that 61% of Palestinians support a two-state solution while 23% support a one-state solution. (http://www.pcpsr.org/survey/polls/2009/p32ejoint.html) Whether the one-staters also think of The Occupation as covering the entire country is impossible to know without asking that question.

Khaled Meshal, the Damascus-based political leader of Hamas, told the New York Times in May that “The central goal is the liberation of the occupied land and regaining our rights, ending the Israeli occupation…” In reading this, we should not assume that we understand Meshal’s intention without his further elaboration.

When Palestinians, Europeans, or Americans call for “an end to the occupation”, we don’t know for sure, without hearing more, whether they want to restrict Israel to the size it had prior to the ’67 war or whether they seek the elimination of the State of Israel altogether (or as they might see it, the liberation of all Palestine). This difference goes far beyond semantics. It also goes beyond a party distinction between Fatah and Hamas.

Choosing One’s Words
The purpose of exploring the meaning of these critical terms is not to play word games. Middle East conflict is serious business. So is language. Words can be deadly. Words can lead to wars. In America, a single usage of the “N” word can end a political career. Designating Hamas a “terrorist organization” can shut down the possibility of dialogue. Hurling the epithet “Nazi” at Israelis is almost guaranteed to produce a viscerally negative reaction.

In the Middle East and around the world, millions of people are willing to fight and kill and die for the ideas behind the words. President Obama, as he draws a distinction between America’s invasion of Iraq as a “war of choice” and our invasion of Afghanistan as a “war of necessity”, is attempting to redefine the nation’s foreign policy in terms that he hopes will find favor with the American people. Will a change in language deliver a change in support for the war effort? We shall see.

The choice of words can make the difference between legislation’s passage or failure, candidates’ election or defeat, peace plans’ acceptance or rejection. If we are serious about finding a way out of endless violent conflict in the Middle East, then we must examine the words we use to describe that conflict and, when necessary, clarify if not replace the loaded terminology that can all-too-easily confuse or mislead.

Michael Lame, posted August 11, 2009

[Note: This short series, WORDS MATTER, is not designed to answer the questions of what should be done about Palestinian refugees or Israeli settlers. Rather, the author hopes to raise questions in the mind of the reader about the language that we use and the way that we think about these issues.

Anyone who carefully listens to politicians or who reads political columnists knows that certain words and phrases are employed with the intention of eliciting an emotional response from the audience. Do you want a negative response to an idea? Then preface it with an adjective like unfair, undue, immoderate, extreme, unhelpful, old, tired, elitist, sexist, racist, etc. If you want a positive response to an idea, add the descriptor reasonable or prudent, frugal or thoughtful. Good legislation is carefully crafted; poor legislation is hastily slapped together. These characterizations are perhaps simplistic but, apparently, still effective. After all, who doesn’t want good government, efficient administration, and honest officeholders who give careful consideration to the insightful suggestions of senior citizens?

In my youth, I served as press secretary to a congressional candidate. One day a long-serving U.S. senator came through town to campaign for my guy, and in his speech the senator described the candidate as “a courageous, creative man of integrity and great ability.” I’ve never forgotten the phrase; it became a joke among the campaign staff.

Our candidate was a good man, but the senator’s description – especially since the two of them had just met – seemed like such generic political rhetoric that we imagined the senator using it to describe every candidate across the country that he supported that year. After the senator’s visit, whenever staff members were asked their opinion about anyone at all, the answer would come back loud and clear: “He’s a courageous, creative man of integrity and great ability!”]

SETTLEMENTS
The myth of the temporary Palestinian refugee camp mirrors the myth of the impermanent Israeli settlement. Camps and settlements are parallel linguistic constructs. In the context of the Middle East, neither name fits reality. Each name creates a false impression.

The term settlement shapes what we think is there and what we believe should happen to it. Even before defining the term, for those who equate morality with legality or who view Middle East conflict through the prism of international law, the moment the term settlement is prefaced with illegal or unlawful, then it is only natural to think the worst of the place and of the people who live there.

Settlement, when modified by Israeli, is a loaded term, though it doesn’t seem that way from the dictionary:
a: occupation by settlers b: a place or region newly settled c: a small village
(http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/settlement).
The term settlers summons up images in my mind – history-lover that I am – of Daniel Boone leading a band of hearty men and women into the wilds of Kentucky or of Ward Bond (the 1950’s television star of Wagon Train) shepherding intrepid pioneers across the plains of the Midwest.

Like the term camp, the word settlement often refers to simple dwellings, for a few people, which are temporary or of recent vintage. Settlement, in the context of Israeli housing in the West Bank, can refer to anything from a single caravan on a hilltop with a handful of occupants to an entire suburb of Jerusalem – like French Hill (7,000), Gilo (27,000), or Pisgat Ze’ev (40,000) – to small cities such as Ariel (16,000), Betar Illit (32,000), Modi’in Illit (38,000), or Ma’aleh Adumim (33,000). [2007 population figures]

Today, close to 200,000 Israelis live within the expanded city limits of Jerusalem on the Palestinian side of the Green Line (separating pre-1967 Israel from the West Bank and East Jerusalem). Another 290,000 Israelis dwell elsewhere in the West Bank. To provide a sense of proportion, the Palestinian population of east Jerusalem and the West Bank is approximately 2.5 million.

When hearing the word settlement, I still think of a make-shift bunch of shelters – tents, shacks, or lean-to’s. I imagine that a well-established, thriving settlement would at some point graduate to a different designation, such as village or town. In reading the word settlement, I certainly don’t think of a decades-old centrally-planned community with parks, playgrounds, and shopping malls, with stone or concrete multi-storey buildings and industrial parks. Yet that is what the settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim looks like, just five miles east of Jerusalem, and when I first saw the place, its appearance surprised me. Whether it should be there or not, whether it is legal or not, whether it will eventually become part of a Palestinian state or not, it was clearly built to last. Calling it a settlement can mislead us into thinking of it as something small and easily removable.

The words settlements and settlers hold a different, more ideological meaning for some on the Left. In 1967 (just before the war that year) the French Marxist and Islamic scholar Maxime Rodinson, himself a Jew, wrote a provocative essay, later published in book form in English as Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? For Marxists, anti-imperialists, and supporters of third world liberation movements, the term “settler” has always been highly pejorative. It represents Europe and America at its imperialist-colonialist worst.

The 21st century usage of settlers and settlements often echoes that anti-Western perspective. Settlers and settlements are frequently portrayed in the media and in political discourse as inherently illegitimate, as holdovers from the now-discredited bad old days of colonialism. This meaning of settlement has nothing to do with the size of the community or its longevity. According to this view, settlers are foreigners. Settlers don’t belong. Settlers have imposed themselves on the legitimate and legal residents of the area – the indigenous peoples, the natives, the locals. Looking from this perspective on the Middle East, the term settler is not merely an identification but an indictment. It serves as a validation of the wrongfulness of Israelis’ presence on the West Bank: The Boers of South Africa were in the wrong. The Pied-Noirs of Algeria were in the wrong. The Dutch in Indonesia, the French in Indochina, and the British damn near everywhere were in the wrong. Now it’s the Israelis’ turn, in the West Bank.

For some reason, this pejorative sense of settler is not universally applied to all peoples who “intrude” on others’ long-inhabited lands. For an example of how else “newcomers” can be viewed, compare coverage of West Bank Israelis to the portrayal of the Han Chinese who, with the backing of Beijing, have flocked to the Muslim Uighur-inhabited Xinjiang region of western China and to the rugged plateaus of Buddhist Tibet. They are not vilified by Western media for their settlements but rather are criticized for their treatment of the local inhabitants. Their presence is seen as the result of migration. [See the recent NY Times article, Migrants to China’s West Bask in Prosperity, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/07/world/asia/07xinjiang.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Chinese%20settlers&st=cse.]

What might you call Israeli settlements in the West Bank if you were to use another term? If you want them dismantled, then you don’t want to use a term that seems benign. If you want them to remain, then you prefer a term without negative baggage. And if you search for a neutral term without clear-cut positive or negative connotations, then you will likely be accused by one side or another of bias.

The suggestion box is now open. . .What else could we call Israeli places of abode on the West Bank and how might we relate to them differently if they had a different name?
Communities? – Jewish Communities? Bedroom Communities? Gated Communities (my favorite)? Towns? Development Towns? Villages? Built-Up Areas?
Or we could go overtly partisan:
Colonies? Imperialist Outposts? Potemkin Villages?

What about the people? What else could we call Israelis living in the West Bank other than settlers?
We could go positive: immigrants or pioneers.
We could go negative: interlopers, usurpers, colonizers, squatters.
We could go neutral: inhabitants, populace, residents.

Small settlements not authorized by the Israeli government are called outposts. They could just as easily and just as legitimately be called camps.

Indeed, imagine if we switched the names and began to speak of Palestinian refugee settlements and of Israeli camps in the West Bank. Or what if we used the exact same words to describe Israeli and Palestinian settlements/camps? Communities could cover both. So could enclaves in many cases, as in Palestinian refugee enclaves in Lebanon or the Israeli enclave in downtown Hebron.

“Enclave: a distinct territorial, cultural, or social unit enclosed within or as if within foreign territory enclaves>”
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/enclave

Are these terms likely to change? Probably not. Too many people – from the Middle East and from the West – want to continue using words like settlements and camps precisely because such words imply a makeshift impermanence. They want the settlements to disappear. They want the camps to eventually close.

Certainly, vast differences exist between the Israelis’ Ma’aleh Adumim settlement and the Palestinians’ Balata refugee camp, not only in infrastructure but in the rights and privileges, status, income and opportunities of the inhabitants. And, of course, there exists the most fundamental of psychological differences in how the residents view their communities. The Israelis hope to stay and build. The Palestinians dream of going home.

Michael Lame, posted August 4, 2009

What is a camp?
In my youth, I sometimes went camping. In particular I remember a backpacking trip of several days in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California, my home state. At night, my friend Paul and I would set up camp, erect our two-man tent, build a fire, cook dinner, and crawl into our sleeping bags. In the morning we would disassemble the tent, pack up our gear, and begin our hike for the day. That, to me, is camping. Tents are associated with camping. When I hear or read the word camp, I think of a temporary site for food and shelter, with simple structures that are easily assembled and easily dismantled.

“CAMP: 1 a: a place usually away from urban areas where tents or simple buildings (as cabins) are erected for shelter or for temporary residence (as for laborers, prisoners, or vacationers) b: a group of tents, cabins, or huts ” http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/camp

Some friends of mine send their kids to summer camp. The buildings there may be permanent but the period of residency is not. That’s my second word-association for camp.

“CAMP: d: a place usually in the country for recreation or instruction often during the summer ; also: a program offering access to recreational or educational facilities for a limited period of time ” http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/camp

The third kind of camp I think of when hearing the word is for refugees. I imagine vast tent cities, with outdoor latrines and no electricity. Temporary facilities for temporary residents. I have seen films and photos of row upon row of canvas tents in such places in Africa and Asia run by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

Palestinian refugee camps don’t fit any of these mental pictures. That surprised me when I first visited such camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and Jordan twenty-five years ago. There is nothing camp-like about many Palestinian refugee camps.

Just as the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) provides its own definition of who is a refugee which is specific to Palestinians, so it gives us a similarly unique definition of a camp. “A camp, according to UNRWA’s working definition, is a plot of land placed at the disposal of UNRWA by the host government for accommodating Palestine refugees and for setting up facilities to cater to their needs. Areas not designated as such are not considered camps.” (http://www.un.org/unrwa/refugees/wheredo.html)

Initially, the Palestinian refugees were housed in tents. But eventually UNRWA replaced the tents with more durable shelters. Yet when catastrophe strikes, as it did in Gaza during the most recent Israeli incursion in December and January, or during the 2007 battles between the Lebanese Army and Fatah al-Islam militants in the Nahr el-Bared refugee camp, tents once again provide shelter to thousands while destroyed housing is rebuilt. That process can last months or even years.

Someone once said, “There is nothing as permanent as the continuous temporary.” The continued existence of Palestinian refugee camps, sixty years after most were originally established, proves the point. The very longevity of Palestinian refugee camps makes them unique in the world. Administratively, financially, even architecturally, these camps are anything but temporary.

If you were to visit one of the dozens of refugee camps (58 to be precise) in the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon, Jordan, or Syria, and if you didn’t already know what it was, you might not suspect that you were in a refugee camp. You might think of it as something else – perhaps a slum or shanty town, a poor neighborhood or run-down suburb, or simply a city or village.

Sometimes it’s hard to know where a camp ends and the rest of the neighborhood begins. In some camps you will see multi-storey apartment buildings and paved roads; in others, tin-roofed hovels and narrow alley-ways. Some camps are set apart, in rural areas. Others are in the middle of cities. It’s not easy to generalize about their appearance, as they vary greatly from one to another, but the UNRWA description is a good place to start: “Socio-economic conditions in the camps are generally poor with a high population density, cramped living conditions and inadequate basic infrastructure such as roads and sewers.” (http://www.un.org/unrwa/refugees/wheredo.html).

In Gaza alone, half a million Palestinians live in the camps. The total number of Palestinian refugees registered with UNRWA who live in camps exceeds 1.37 million people. (Another 3.3 million registered refugees live outside the camps.)

The names by which we call things shape how we think about them. It makes a difference whether we call the ’48 war the War of Independence or Al-Naqba (the Catastrophe), whether we say Israel or the Zionist entity, Palestine or the Occupied Territories, the West Bank or Judea and Samaria. It makes a difference whether we call the areas where displaced Palestinians live camps or communities or something else.

The word camp implies a small temporary set of shelters, but when three or four generations have been born in a community, it is misleading to speak of it in terms that suggest the temporary. And when a hundred thousand people live in one locale, calling it a “large camp” doesn’t even come close to conveying the reality of the situation. The longer we go on thinking of a Palestinian refugee camp as temporary, the longer we will tolerate the perpetuation of that limbo existence – even if for just one more year, which becomes five and then fifty.

[Next blog posting: Words Matter, Part 3: Settlements]