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"But I think everyone should stop patting themselves on the back and feeling so good about themselves..."

Interview with Nadia Latif

Nadia Latif is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Human Rights at Bard College. She has been conducting field research in Bourj al-Barajneh Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon since 2004.

 

Daniel Miller: You were involved researching refugee camps in Lebanon...

 

Nadia Latif: I was working primarily in Bourj al-Barajneh camp, which is located in the Southern part of Beirut. It was set-up in 1948, and it came into existence initially through the initiative of the refugees themselves.

 

DM: How exactly?

 

NL: Someone who is an important person in a village in the Galilee had some connection to some important families one from this area in Lebanon. And when they were forcibly displaced from the Galilee in 1948, this person used his previous business connection and ties of friendship to ask if some land could be provided for him and members of his village to maintain them for a little while until they could go back. And when people from neighboring villages heard that this village and this important person was there, they started moving there. So they started gathering there around 1948, and logistically it is always convenient for humanitarian organizations if there is one place where they can bring the food and the supplies, and all that good stuff. And so that's where, and how this camp began. And for the first two years it was the league of Red Cross and Red Crescent societies that was providing assistance to these refugees.

 

DM: What was your project?

 

NL: My project started out looking at how people, who have lived in this camp now for most of their lives, and have had children and grandchildren and great grandchildren there, and asking about their relationship to the camp, and to the places they were forcibly displaced from. Why do they continue to identify with those places, and why do their children, grandchildren and great grandchildren continue to identify with those places?

 

DM: What were the mechanisms of identification which you observed?

 

NL: If you asked people where they are from, they would say Palestine, and you would say, where in Palestine, and they would name the village. And they would do that even if they were members of the third and fourth generations, which had never seen that place. Also, there are religious associations in the camp, different religions have different resources, and former village members have different income levels. There are the ones that are wealthier, their association is able to do more, and many of them have a space which members of the village will use for funerals, weddings, engagements, bigger social functions. There is even now intermarriage between people from the same villages...

 

DM: People intermarry from the same villages?

 

NL: Yes.

 

DM: Deliberately. In order to retain...?

 

NL: No, I don't think it is that clear-cut, or as self-conscious as that. It is more, well, ''we know who the family is, from the village, who these people are, and so it makes more sense, you have a better sense of what you are getting into, if you already know who they are and what they are like. For some people, it can be a very strong preference that their children marry into this village rather than marry into another village, or someone from outside of the camp, or non-Palestinian...

 

DM: Why do you think these people are continuing to hold onto their identities?

 

NL: Because Lebanon made it completely clear from 1948 that they were unwanted and unwelcome. Furthermore, the first generation were agrarian, and this was organized through family ties, relationships within the village, and that's how people felt a sense of identity... both in terms of the community, but also how they related to the land. And that was something really terrible that was taken away from the when they were forcibly displaced. And I think that really marked the experience of the first generation, and it marked the experience of their children and grandchildren, somehow like Holocaust memory.

 

DM: So it was almost an unconscious transmission...

 

NL: Yes...

 

DM: What is the economy of these camps?

 

NL: In the 1950s and the 1960s, especially in the 1960s, the refugees were prohibited – and they remain prohibited – under Lebanese law from practicing any kind of profession. But they could work as unskilled labor. In the 1950s and the 1960s the Lebanese economy was booming, and so their labor was wanted, and they were able to make a living. Then in the 60s the men started to migrate as labor migrants to other Arab countries. Libya was one. In the seventies, the Gulf also became an important market for labor. In the seventies and the in eighties the Palestinian organizations moved their base of operations to Lebanon, and that was another important source of income. But that all went to pot once the PLO withdrew in 1980. And then they ceased to be a source of income. And then in the 1990s you had the Palestinians being expelled from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and after Oslo, from Libya... borders were closing.

 

DM: What about today?

 

NL: In the current economy women are better able to get professional jobs working for NGOS that provide services in the camps then the men. Men who are able to get jobs mostly work as unskilled labor. There is very high unemployment, and remittances from family members who were able to get asylum in other countries, European countries, Canada, Australia, that is also a very important source of income.

 

DM: Why did Lebanon deny rights to the Palestinian refugees...

 

NL: It was for different reasons than the other Arab countries. The other Arab countries claimed that the reason they denied civil rights to Palestinians was in order to support their right to self-determination and national independence. And the Lebanese state argued that because the majority of the refugees were Sunni Muslim, they would upset the balance of power, the sectarian balance of power that had been reached at the time of Lebanon's independence from France.

 

DM: They closed-off integration for political reasons.

 

NL: Yes, it was a different set of reasons than the other Arab countries, where the other Arab countries fought Israel. Iraq, for example, sent army officers, and Egypt as well, to fight the Haganah and the other Jewish militias. Lebanon never did, and never would, because that country has a very different history to the other ones. Jordan, the King of Jordan, King Abullah, had already been negotiating with the leaders of the Haganah about how to divide Palestine well before 1948. So they got they wanted, they got the West Bank, and then Egypt got control over Gaza.

 

DM: Why were you led to research in this area?

 

NL: I grew-up in the eighties in Pakistan. The Afghan war was taking place, and there were lot of refugees in Pakistan, many of my family members worked in various NGOS, they were involved in all kinds of organizations, and this was something that I grew up hearing quite a bit about... And then I went to boarding school in Hong Kong, and there was a Vietnamese detention camp, a ten minute walk from our school, and we could see them very clearly from our dorm windows... It was a horrible place. We had a voluntary community service program with them. And once every two weeks they would allow the children, below the age of ten to come to our campus, and we could play with them, and give them some food. And that was a very powerful experience for me. So I wanted to do some doctoral work on refugees and I ended-up working on Palestinians in Lebanon...

 

DM: Someone I interviewed compared the situation in Israel to the situation in Kashmir. Do you agree with the comparison?

 

NL: I don't think that's as good a comparison as the comparison between the United States and Israel. In both cases you have settler colonists that are coming there because they are fleeing persecution from their place of origin, and they feel very strongly, and for very valid reasons that they have been victims, but then that plays itself out with the people who are already there, who can then be displaced and killed because being persecuting can also teach you very well how to persecute. I think what would actually be even more interesting would be to look at Liberia. Because Liberia was established as a settler colony for freed slaves, and there were already people there, and they had the whole dynamic of conflict between ''civilization'' and the discourse of ''you are all uncivilized animals...'' that they somehow had internalized in their experiences being slaves. So, I think that comparison I find more valid. Plus, in the case of Kashmir, what you had happen in 1947 with the partition of the subcontinent, you had certain areas that were considered princely territories... but were puppets under British rule. And the ruler of Kashmir was himself Hindu, and he thought it would be a good idea for Kashmir to become a part of India rather than Pakistan, and the Pakistani government at various points in the history of Pakistan also made use of that conflict in order to deal with internal problems, just as they did with Afghanistan...

 

DM: And just as Arab countries have done with the Palestinians.

 

NL: Yes, absolutely. And this is especially the case with Egypt, I would argue.

 

DM: I saw an amazing film about Liberia, where it just looks like the most fucked-up country.

 

NL: Pakistan is quite close...

 

DM: I haven't asked you to comment very much on our repatriation plan.

 

NL: Well, I would like to hear more about it...

 

DM: It's become pretty difficult for me to talk about at this point.

 

NL: Why is it being proposed?

 

DM: I think it has a lot to do with the desires of the Polish to come to terms with...

 

NL: With what they did?

 

DM: Or with what happened...

 

NL: But why just Poland? Why not the Netherlands? Or France? Why not the United States? Anti-semitism in this country was institutionalized. But everybody just deflects the blame on the Nazis and the crackpot Germans, or these horrible Poles, or these uncivilized Eastern Europeans, and pat themselves on the back and acts self-congratulatory, I think that's why you have the problems that you do today. So why not demand that they recognize the part they played in the long history of antisemitism here as well, and in Britain, and in France..

 

DM: In France they emancipated actors and Jews...

 

NL: And the reason why they did it was because the question came up: ''What do we do with the non-Catholics? If you extend to the Protestants the Rights of Man, then how can you keep out the Jews?

 

DM: These Jews are gone...

 

NL: Yeah, they were all killed... and forced to leave. I don't know. I don't know what they should do. But I think that everybody else should stop patting themselves on the back and feeling so good about themselves...

 

This interview was conducted in New York on April 20, 2012 by Daniel Miller, and transcribed and edited by Daniel Miller.


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