Refugees with Jennifer Mogannam

Transcript

Refugees with Jennifer Mogannam

Emmaia: Welcome to Unpacking Zionism. I’m Emmaia Gelman, the director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, and in this episode we’re talking with Jennifer Mogannam, a member of the Institute’s founding collective, about “refugee” as a keyword for thinking about Zionism. Jennifer is an Assistant Professor in the department of Critical Race & Ethnic studies at UC Santa Cruz. She is also a co-founder of the Palestinian Feminist Collective and of the Palestinian Youth Movement. She’s an oral historian and cross-disciplinary scholar whose work centers Palestinian and Arab transnational movements, third world solidarities, gendered power in anti-colonial struggle, violence, refuge, and revolution. Her work, while often historical, is also always forward looking, toward the possibilities of decolonization and building a new world. 

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Thanks so much for being here, Jennifer. You published a conversation with two other scholars who are also in the Palestinian Feminist Collective, Rana Sharif and Eman Ghanayem, titled “Locating Palestinians at the Intersections: Indigeneity, Critical Refugee Studies, and Decolonization” that lays out the insights that are grounding our conversation today. It was in the Amerasia Journal in 2021, and listeners can read it in the show notes. 

Those insights in Critical Refugee Studies also help explain Zionism. But before we quite get there, I want to take a short step back for some context. Before the genocide, before Israeli attacks destroyed most of Gaza’s housing, schools, hospitals, poisoned the ground with munitions, the UN counted 5.9 million Palestinians as refugees, which is a fifth of all refugees in the world. And now there will be more. The Right of Return, which is the right of Palestinians who have been displaced and dispossessed in the time since 1948, to come back to Palestine, is an essential part of any discussion about justice for Palestinians. Not only because it’s international law, but because any “solution” that doesn’t include return in fact locks into place the injustice of colonization and ethnic cleansing.

So refugees are central. But the word “refugee” is a term that conjures up a set of images and meanings from many different instances of displacement, and you write about how much that doesn’t describe Palestinians, even though Palestinians are refugees. You write that Palestinian refugee-hood is technically different from others; and that the term, which is a bureaucratic label, misses how Palestinian resistance to the condition of refugee-hood permeates culture, community, politics, and sense of the future — not only for Palestinians but actually for all of us — and how that resistance poses a major challenge to the narratives that Zionism relies on.

We’re going to talk through a lot of this. To begin, why is it important to understand Palestinian refugees as different?  

Jennifer: When we think about refugees generally, there’s a displacement from some context of war, economic injustice, or something that displaces communities. They generally go to a neighboring country as sort of like a temporary place where they might experience a camp-like, like an actual refugee camp experience, with the eventual intent to move to a First World Nation, a Global North Nation, and resettle through an asylum process.

In most, or all refugee instances besides the Palestinian case, this is facilitated by the UN Higher Commission on Refugees, the UNHCR. The UNHCR does not have jurisdiction over Palestinian refugees. Instead, when Palestinians became refugees as a result of the Nakba in 1948, an agency called UNRWA, the UN Refugee Works Agency, was established to handle Palestinian refugees exclusively. And there are some differences in the jurisdictions of UNRWA versus the jurisdictions of UNHCR. So one major distinction is that UNRWA, their responsibilities don’t include finding a final solution for the refugee, whereas UNHCR does. 

The second thing is that UNHCR functions everywhere in the world, whereas UNRWA only functions within Palestine, specifically the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem, as well as Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. It was in Egypt because Gaza was part of Egypt when it was established as well. So those are the only countries where UNRWA has jurisdiction over Palestinian refugees. So this actually has become an issue in recent years for Palestinian refugees who maybe were displaced from their refugee host countries and have moved to somewhere like Turkey as their interim place from, for example, contexts like Syria, and then they don’t fall under the jurisdiction of UNHCR or UNRWA, and there’s this like stateless, documentless, weird situation, for example. But it’s happened also following the Iraq war and other contexts. 

So that’s one main distinction. And the establishment of UNRWA was a political move and it was a Zionist political move to ensure that the UN wouldn’t meddle with any resolution for the Palestinian question as far as Zionism was concerned, but also because they wanted there to be a separation between Jewish refugee-hood and Palestinian refugee-hood. And so the establishment of UNRWA is actually a political decision that happened in support of the Zionist project. So this is one major distinction. 

Another major distinction is the longevity of the Palestinian refugee question. We’re talking about Palestinians who’ve been displaced since 1948, so three to four generations of Palestinians who have grown up in refugee-hood where there hasn’t been any kind of resolve for the refugee question for Palestinians. And so that is a much longer duration than other refugee contexts. And so that, sort of temporal difference matters in terms of thinking about Palestinians within that question.

Emmaia: How does the Right of Return, which is not necessarily guaranteed in all refugee contexts, but is a key right of Palestinians, play a role in the experience of waiting — meaning waiting not just for an end to uncertainty and temporariness of displacement, but waiting for rights to be actually restored? 

Jennifer: So in December of 1948, the UN adopted Resolution 194, which is the resolution that Palestinians have the right to return to their original homes and villages and they have the right to reparations for their loss. This is a resolution that’s been in place for almost as long as the Zionist state and almost as long as the Palestinian refugee condition, but we know that the UN is not actually going to facilitate that return. And with the establishment of UNRWA as the body handling Palestinian refugees, it doesn’t have the jurisdiction through the refugee agency, we can say. I mean, those are technical things, but we also know that the United Nations was formed to serve an imperialist agenda. And so it has played a major support role. Maybe I can talk a little bit about what UNRWA does do for Palestinians. But it’s not a body which we hope or believe could facilitate our liberation, for sure. 

I think one of the most threatening things to the Zionist project and to imperialist interests in the region is this idea of the right of return and Palestinian refugees continuing to assert the right of return. And Palestinian refugees asserting the right to return and contradicting this like pathologizing narrative of the refugee as like someone to be pitied and saved. Like, no Western country is trying to save Palestinian refugees, you know? That’s not part of the dynamic of the Zionist-Palestinian refugee relationship because it’s a settler project, not like a militarized sort of economic colonial, franchise colonial project, for example, where the US can go and wage war so that they can extract from the Amazon or build military bases. And then they can save the refugees and save their reputation with it. We don’t have that dynamic in the Palestinian refugee and Zionism sphere. 

And so because there’s no way to erase the ill-doing so long as the refugee narrative exists, the Palestinian refugee remains a threat, and I think different sort of attempts at trying to resettle into different places in order to, like, shrink the scale of the refugee question is one of the threats against the Palestinian refugee community. So for example, Palestinian refugees from Syria or Lebanon for either war or economic reasons have made their ways to Europe, for example, and may have acquired citizenship, or are being granted asylum and citizenship as a way of moving them out of the Palestinian refugee sphere. I do think that that’s one way in which different imperialist agendas try to subvert the subjectivity of the refugee and relinquish that grandness of the responsibilities. 

Emmaia: UNRWA was attacked a few months ago by the Israeli state, in the midst of the genocide — the Israeli state made claims without evidence that UNRWA staff were connected to Hamas and other groups, and that UN aid was being diverted by those groups. Those claims were repeated by the US state dept and outlets like the NYT. And Israel demanded that contributing countries defund UNRWA, which is what happened — the wealthy countries that provide most of UNRWA’s funds suspended those funds. When Israel’s allegations were totally debunked in the international arena, the US, which provides about 30% of the total funding for UNRWA, didn’t reinstate its funding although almost all other states did. And we see that defunding cheered on in the Zionist press, and by Zionist organizations who have, for years, attacked UNWRA.

For Zionist organizations, choking off things like education, food, health care, and other basic life needs, by defunding UNRWA, is only partly a matter of punishing Palestinians for existing, which we know is a Zionist strategy. To quote the UN, this was an effort to strip Palestinians of refugee status. And thereby of the right of return. 

You write that it’s the ongoing condition of Palestinians being refugees that constantly makes the Nakba incredibly present, and ongoing. You write: “refugee-hood serves as a daily reminder of the necessity for return.” That’s true as it shapes Palestinian resistance, and also as it stops the Israeli colonizing project from being normalized in the eyes of the rest of the world. The newness of Israel, the violence that produces it, can’t be hidden in the way that the founding violence of, say, the United States can be pretended away because the dispossession of Indigenous people in the United States is not taken up as an issue by other states. Whereas in theory the world is concerned with the fate of Palestinian refugees, and the way that the colonization of Palestine by the state of Israel is in direct conflict with their internationally recognized rights.

How do you see Palestinian refugees and refugee status as a challenge to Zionist narratives and so disruptive that even the story of refugees is a subject of attack by Zionist institutions?  

Jennifer: Maybe we can start from the beginning and how Palestinians became refugees and what that actually looks like. Beginning in December of 1947, actually, when the British military pulled out of Palestine, they basically left Palestine to Zionist gangs who started to destroy, depopulate, attack villages in Palestine. By the end of 1948, ver 500, about 530, Palestinian villages had been destroyed and depopulated. And we know May 15th, 1948, was the declaration of the Zionist state. And that’s what Palestinians talk about as the Nakba or Catastrophe. But that sort of moment of erasure continues actually through the whole year of 1948. People were killed and forced to flee their villages. And about 750,000 Palestinians at that moment in the year 1948 left their original homes. Some went to Gaza, which was under Egyptian jurisdiction at the time. Some went to the West Bank, which was under Jordanian jurisdiction and other parts of Jordan. Others went to Lebanon and Syria. They went into literal tent cities and they stayed there for a long time. And eventually, so these 750,000 Palestinians were spread across like four different nations without really any travel documentation, like literally walking across borders. A lot of them left with the keys to their homes thinking like, okay, we’ll just be gone for a couple weeks or maybe a couple months and we’ll return to our houses. Now those keys have been passed down for 76 years within their families. 

Eventually the tent camps, when the UN sort of started to build them out, they built 8 meter by 8 meter homes for each family regardless of size. So you could have like an 8 person family or a 10 person family in this 8 meter by 8 meter home, the bathroom is shared outside the property and that was the camp. But over these decades, the camps have expanded, mostly upwards, because when you’re being hosted by another country it’s hard to acquire expanded land. And so, the camps have become overly populated. What started as 750,000 refugees is about 5 to 6 million refugees that are still living in camps – all over Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and inside West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem. And so, they’ve been in camps for generations now.

So, one thing that this does, a lot of people from the villages that they lost actually, there are camps where many families from the same village live. And so there’s a knowledge and a memory that, that stays within the camp about specific places in certain camps and there’s a community around that.

There are different moments in Palestinian history where the camps themselves have been under attack. We did have some Palestinian refugees also that lived in Iraq and then were displaced in the First or Second Iraq war. Maybe they made their way to Syria and then were displaced in the Arab uprising period. Even like we know of a family that was living in Syria from Gaza, was displaced in 2012 when Yarmouk camp was depopulated and destroyed, moved back to Gaza and is now in the war. So this kind of insecurity and this kind of violence, it really follows the Palestinian refugee wherever they go.

There’s a constant threat of the relinquishing of the Palestinian refugee question. Palestinian refugees don’t have citizenship to anywhere in the world including Palestine, which is also something that’s unlike many other refugee populations. So their ability to travel is through whether or not they’re documented by the United Nations. The Palestinian refugees who went to camps from 1948 were documented. So those about 750-800,000, those were the registered ones. There are others who aren’t registered. And then you have some refugees from the 1967 war who did not get registered. Bedouin communities in Jordan or Lebanon, for example, have been without any paperwork for 50 years. And so their ability to move is highly restricted and then depending on which country they’re in, their access to basic life needs can be very challenging. 

In some places for example, in Jordan, Palestinians were largely given Jordanian citizenship. So, it’s like, you can become a citizen of the Jordanian kingdom, but you can’t really be Palestinian, and you can’t have Palestinian political agency in that place because it threatens the Jordanian national identity. In Syria, Palestinians were given rights like Syrians except to citizenship and to vote so long as their political work and advocacy stayed within the Palestinian realm, an acceptable Palestinian realm, and did not move into the Syrian political scene. 

In Lebanon, the situation is particularly dire because Palestinian refugees don’t have access to many industries within Lebanon that are public. They don’t have their own schools. The UNRWA provides education only until ninth grade. So your education ends at ninth grade in Lebanon, if you can’t manage to get into another school because you don’t have the right to get an education in the Lebanese system. That’s the same for many industries of work. 

The situation for Palestinian refugees and is particularly dire obviously under Zionist military occupation in the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem. And we’re seeing refugees being attacked again in the current genocide in Gaza. A children’s school in Nuseirat camp was bombed yesterday. And Jabalia has been, like, pummeled to the ground. And already two thirds of the Gaza population was refugees to begin with, prior to these current displacements, so we’re seeing, like, a recurring attack on refugees in different forms throughout the decades of refugee-hood, and it’s really indicative of how the Nakba actually follows Palestinians, wherever they go. 

And I’m just talking about the regions geographically surrounding Palestine, where the official refugee camps are, but even in the broader diaspora and even the refugees who did not go into camps because maybe they had families in some of these neighboring countries, or maybe they had a little bit more wealth, they aren’t recorded as refugees, but would still be considered Palestinian refugees to Palestinians. But while the condition for refugees is really dire, it’s also a condition that grows resistance, Palestinian resistance and survival.

Emmaia: In your writing about Palestinian resistance, refugee status acts as a moral compass as well, helping to hold the line for decolonization — helping to resist the trajectory where people who were once leaders of resistance become a national bourgeoisie, and start to implement the strategies of the colonizers themselves. As you write, this process produced leadership that has, you write, “shifted the Palestinian liberation trajectory from an anti-colonial struggle to a state-building project.” 

I’ll read a little more:

“The adoption of state frameworks on disappearing slivers of Palestinian land, crystallized through the Oslo Accords of 1993 and its subsequent establishment of the Palestinian Authority, and the attempt to establish statehood through neoliberal, capitalist modes under occupation, reflect further the erasure of return possibilities.”

As you and your co-authors lay out: the state framework defines things like freedom, self-determination, or even “resolution of refugee status” in ways that are state-shaped — meaning they start by accepting the world as colonialism has made it, and misconceive “liberation” as something that can fit within that. Maybe freedom to have your own state, freedom to compete in a marketplace of exploitation.

And it’s the centrality of refugee identity to Palestinian life and struggle that pushes back on this, because it demands return. These are the insights that you bring from Critical Refugee Studies. Refugee-hood doesn’t allow the demand for decolonization to be softened and remolded into something else that actually cooperates with colonialism. 

Jennifer: I actually don’t know if the creation of the Palestinian refugee was a strategic move on the part of the Zionists. You know, they would say things like the old will die and the young will forget but when you’re in a place where you’re in a Palestinian community, you know that you’re refugees. You know that your whole identity is formulated around the camp as a place, the community that it provides, the access that you do or don’t have because of that identity. Your entire life is built around this moment of Nakba and the things that unravel following it. And so I think one of the main crises for Zionism is the refugee question, because not only are refugees not forgetting, but we’re continuing to grow in number.

And so, I think there have been attempts to, like, there have been, just like the villages in 48, in the 60s and 70s, in the 2000s, there are camps that have been completely destroyed and depopulated for different reasons but it all ties back to Zionism and the imperialist project in the region that supports Zionism as the reason for those kind of destructions. So you have three refugee camps, for example, that are completely depopulated and destroyed during the Lebanese Civil War. Now, it wasn’t the Zionist Army that was the main perpetrator but it was powers within Lebanon and the Syrian regime’s role in Lebanon that destroyed and depopulated these camps. And it’s those forces that were, even if there was no direct line of communication with the Zionist state, there was this shared sort of agenda. And that was to delegitimize and undermine and ultimately squash the Palestinian liberation movement. 

Emmaia: I want to ask more specifically how Zionism as an imperial project is changed by the confrontation that refugees present it with. In the course of these podcasts, we’ve had several conversations about how Zionism is textbook settler colonialism, modeled so overtly on US settler colonialism, and also in some ways has not worked, simply has not been successful, in implementing settlement. And one of the things you’re getting at is that the existence of a massive number of refugees violates the precept of settler colonialism which is that indigenous people must be erased. 

Jennifer: One of the things that a colleague of mine and I, Loubna Qutami, are working on and we’ll have a a publication come out that’s very relevant to Critical Zionism Studies, but is thinking about like two sides of this kind of Zionist genocidal coin or Zionist logic, which is settler colonial erasure and racial colonial carcerality and how they actually necessitate one another and work together. So on the one hand, you have this erasure point, whether it’s material, physical, bodily erasure, or the narrative, the discursive, which is what we’re seeing here, right. The Zionist logic, settler colonial logic of erasure is functioning at full force. But where we resist that erasure and assert our presence and our ability to be determinants of our own struggles and futures,

that’s where this racial colonial carceral logic comes in, which is like, okay, if we can’t erase you, then we are going to criminalize and punish you into silence. And so I think that’s functioning in the places where it can, where there isn’t that direct control, right, over the Palestinian.

Emmaia: Let’s talk about that kind of erasure and the ways that it’s resistant. Your co-author Rana Sharif writes so eloquently that platforms like Instagram “allow for Palestinians to communicate an experience of their displacement that is rooted in the violence of Zionism and not abstracted by a condition without end.” That kind of expression has been incredibly powerful in building support for decolonization over the past couple of years. I don’t think I’m alone in the feeling like that flow of Palestinian self-expression has transformed the possibilities for what Palestine solidarity work, and work to dismantle Zionism, can look like in my own spaces.

And all of you write about how formative of Palestinian resistance it has been to have identity and subjectivity imposed from outside, whether by Zionist forces, states, aid agencies, whatever — and to formative it has been to build community and struggle that rejects those impositions. Can you explain how refugee status has worked to bureacratize Palestinian being, and how that has conditioned resistance?

Jennifer: Sure. So definitely, there is a bureaucratization of Palestinian refugee-hood through this UN documented structure where only refugees who registered with the UN by like the early 50s, I think, 51 or 52, perhaps, depends on which camp they ended up in, are registered refugees. And then also women don’t pass down refugee status only men do. So like yeah, no, it’s, it’s wild. This is the UN decision. It’s not like, we don’t need to put it on the Arab nations or anything. This is the United Nations only allows men to pass down their refugee status.

So if your mom is from a camp, but your dad is not, you don’t acquire refugee status. If your dad’s from a camp, but you’re, girl, your children do not get refugee status. So there is this bureaucratization that also does have like an erasure function as well. But then what I want to say about Palestinian refugees and our history of struggle and resistance is that largely in the early period, the Palestinian, you know, revolutionary struggle, anti-colonial struggle, was birthed through the refugee context. So we’re talking about a rise in Palestinian political movement initially in the 50s through the student movement, especially in Cairo and Beirut, but also other places. And then in the 60s you have the Palestinian political parties established and they take over the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization, which comes into this sort of revolutionary trajectory through the building of the student movement in the 50s and through the building of political formations and militant wings in the 60s. And also this set of unions, so, for example, the general union of Palestinian students, women, etc. And there’s this whole infrastructure for Palestinian life as a transnational people. There’s a research center, there’s a national fund, there’s an executive committee, and a central committee. And so you have the building of this Palestinian National Liberation Movement on a transnational scale. 

So refugees were at the forefront of the Palestinian Liberation Movement for decades. They established the liberation movement. And Palestinian refugees created this infrastructure, community-based infrastructure, that was functioning outside of the state framework. It was a national framework, but it was functioning outside of the state framework because of the nature of our people being a stateless people and the refugee question as one of the biggest components of that question.

So history played out in different ways, but I think there were moments where we could think about and I think we can and should still think about, the Palestinian liberation struggle outside of the nation state framework. Because we know that the Palestinian liberation struggle is connected to struggles globally against different powers that be, so we need to think critically actually about what the state as a formation means within those struggles.

Emmaia: I want to ask you about the ways that both the Israeli state and Zionist institutions actually perform support of refugees? Through international aid work — like, the Israeli state’s aid website touts its support work around Venezuela, Sudan, Afghanistan. And then there are NGOs that are also explicitly Zionist, like HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which are involved in supporting refugees. What are they doing here? Given that Zionism actively makes people refugees, what do you make of these refugee aid programs?

Jennifer: That’s a whole another can of worms. It’s 100% to wash their hands of being the perpetrators of a major refugee crisis, 100%. I mean, there were, like, Israeli delegations to Greece to support refugees from Syria and Afghanistan and, like, North Africa and stuff, who were coming in on boats to Greece, for example. There’s a whole interfaith ecosystem in the United States where Zionist institutions work with Christian, Jewish Zionist institutions work with Christian, maybe Zionist or not, and Muslim institutions to do refugee support work in the United States, for example, and that is with like Iraqi and Syrian refugees. So there’s this way in which Zionists are using support for other Arab and Muslim refugees to be like, see, there’s good ones. The Palestinians are just the bad ones, you know? And to re-racialize and isolate and exceptionalize the Palestinian question and the Palestinian refugee position .

Emmaia: Those tactics that you’re describing, which are both Zionist and more broadly imperialist moves, aren’t actually working as well as they used to. The global uprising for Palestine names and rejects that anti-Palestinian racism, and it rejects Zionism’s claims to be a benevolent civilizing force. Even though governments and institutional leaders are trying so hard to consolidate their control against that global uprising and resistance. And the vision of Palestinian liberation that popular movement is supporting is increasingly a decolonial one, not a state one. As you’ve explained the politics, the values, the movement that’s been forged through the experience of Palestinian refugee-hood and the centering of return, we can see that the popular movement is really shaped by that. And at the same time as this immense global uprising and hopefulness, it’s a moment of unfathomable destruction, crisis, and grief, producing even more refugees. What do we need to hold in mind, what thoughts would you end with here?

Jennifer: I think the one thing that I would end with is that the Palestinian refugee struggle is part of the liberation struggle. It’s ongoing and we’re witnessing the real material consequences right now as we have been all along the way. They’re saying like almost 2 million people are internally displaced, at least like 1.9 million, I think. Given the landscape of Gaza right now, it’s unlivable. You know, the buildings are flattened. Most of the water salinization plants have been destroyed, schools, hospitals. I mean, all the infrastructure is just gone. So I think we’re going to see a major crisis of displacement of second or third time refugee-hood, serious medical and educational needs. But the refugee struggle and the refugee communities have always been central to the Palestinian struggle for liberation and freedom.

Emmaia: Thanks so much Jennifer, our beloved Dr. JMo, for this conversation. You can read Jennifer’s roundtable article with Rana Sharif and Eman Ghanayem, “Locating Palestinians at the Intersections: Indigeneity, Critical Refugee Studies, and Decolonization” in the show notes at criticalzionismstudies.org. And to our listeners: if there’s a piece of research, writing, or art that you think really illuminates a keyword in Critical Zionism Studies, and you’d like to share it with us, please do. Find us on Instagram and Twitter, or email it to info@criticalzionismstudies.org. 

Thanks, and solidarity from the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism.