The Palestinian Refugee Camps with Nasser Abourahme
In the wake of Operation Al Aqsa Flood on October 7, Israel’s violent operations not only on the refugee camps in Gaza, from Khan Younis to Jabalia, but also on camps like Jenin and Tulkarm on the West Bank, have become regular if perfunctory items on the mainstream news. In the long history of Israel’s settler-colonial project the camp has had a central role, both as the institution into which ethnically cleansed Palestinians have been concentrated since 1948 and as sites of Palestinian militancy and Israel’s counter-insurgency incursions, demolitions and massacres. The camps extend well beyond historic Palestine to Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, and camps like Tel al-Zaatar, Sabra and Shatila have become bywords for massacre. Meanwhile, Israel is intent on destroying the UN agency, UNRWA, that has been responsible for maintaining the camps across the region and has long sought to finalize its ethnic cleansing by making Palestinian settlement in the Arab states a permanent condition, in violation of refugees’ right to return to their homes, affirmed in UN Resolution 194. Yet despite their notoriety, not enough is known about the history of the refugee camps, whose temporary establishment has not only become of long duration but also seems to offer a model for the camps that are emerging all over the globe, from the shores of the Mediterranean to the US-Mexico border or Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh, where the Burmese Rohingya are currently housed in appalling conditions.
In this show, as the massacres and the literal concentration of the Gazan population into shrinking spaces that resemble the ghettos of Nazi-occupied Europe continue, we speak to Professor Nasser Abourahme about his work on the story and the context of the camp as a colonial institution in order to get that history.
Nasser Abourahme is Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at Bowdoin College and author of the book The Time Beneath the Concrete: Camp, Colony, Palestine, forthcoming from Duke University Press later this year. His work addresses borders and migration; histories of encampment and carcerality; settler colonialism and race; revolution and revolt; Marxism and global Left thought; the anticolonial tradition; and the question of Palestine.
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