Refugee History.

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Palestinian petitions: activism in exile

In April 2020, a group of Palestinian NGOs from Shufat refugee camp joined in a petition to the Israeli Supreme Court. The petition demanded that the Israeli Ministry of Health open COVID-19 testing centres for Palestinian communities in East Jerusalem, including those living in the densely-populated Shufat camp. Media coverage largely discussed the petition’s ultimate success in the context of Israel’s pandemic policies for Palestinians.  Yet the latter’s decision to contest the government in this way speaks to another story as well: Palestinian refugees’ use of petitions to demand their rights.

In fact, there is a long history of Palestinian refugees deploying petitions as part of their political activism. From the early aftermath of their dispossession in 1948 – known as the Nakba or ‘catastrophe’ – Palestinians have continually organised and submitted petitions to a range of international organisations. Most often, they appealed to the UN and its various bodies, particularly the Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). But over the years Palestinian petitioners have also targeted the League of Arab States, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, and the International Committee of the Red Cross, among others. This was not an entirely new phenomenon for Palestinians after the Nakba: many had submitted petitions to the Ottoman Sultan (before 1918), and the British authorities in Palestine (from 1918-48). The legacy of this tradition might provide some explanation as to why petitioning remained so popular for Palestinians in exile, although it is not the whole story.

Despite the longevity of the Palestinians’ exile, and their geographical dispersal, their petitions after 1948 were characterised by a remarkable consistency in their demands. Whatever the specific issue at hand, they nearly always framed it in terms of their underlying national dispossession and displacement. In 1960, for example, a Palestinian petition in Syria protested reports that UNRWA was planning to restrict access to its schools, on the ground that education ‘kindles enthusiasm in [Palestinian] hearts to return to their homeland’. The petition presented the issue of UNRWA’s provision of schooling as inseparable from the Palestinian struggle for their national rights. This trend continued across time and space. To put it simply, it was rare for Palestinian refugees to compose petitions on any single issue without also invoking the plight of their people as a whole. Petitioners appealed to recipients not only to address the issue in question, but also to implement the Palestinian right of return, and, after 1967, to end the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Extract from 1968 Palestinian petition to the UN. Source: United Nations Archive, New York, file S0667-0006-03

That so many Palestinian refugees chose to deploy petitions in this way is revealing on a number of fronts. At its core, a petition is a form of contentious engagement with politics, comprising neither deference nor anti-systemic radicalism. Petitioners are agitating within the system, implicitly recognising the recipient’s authority; they often frame their demands within the authority’s own norms and principles. Palestinian refugee petitions typified this: one 1978 appeal to the UN contended that the organization should implement the Palestinians’ rights ‘as affirmed by various United Nations resolutions’. Numerous other Palestinian petitions to the UN affirmed the consistency of their cause with its norms in this way, stating that the Israeli actions they opposed were ‘inconsistent with the United Nations’ resolutions’ and ‘in discord with all Security Council resolutions and the United Nations Charter’. Palestinians’ use of this form of contentious politics, alongside the militancy and civil disobedience that have received far more attention, illustrates the complexity and multi-dimensional nature of their activism in exile.

It’s also telling that Palestinian refugees so often chose to appeal to international organisations. This might be unsurprising: petitioners generally write to their governments, and this was not an option for the stateless Palestinians. Yet the multitude of Palestinian petitions to global bodies, and particularly the UN, was not simply a default response to statelessness. It also reflected the international community’s long-running involvement in Palestinian politics, dating back to the League of Nations granting the British Mandate of Palestine in 1922. After the Nakba, UNRWA embodied this international interventionism, taking on a quasi-governmental function as the primary provider of healthcare, education and municipal services in the Palestinian refugee camps. Palestinian petitioners often invoked these dynamics when petitioning UNRWA, stating that it was the agency’s ‘duty’ to help them, and framing their appeals in terms of entitlement, not charity. ‘We are your responsibility and you should provide us with services’, wrote the mukhtar of Balata refugee camp in a 1979 petition to the UNRWA Commissioner-General.

The fact that Palestinian refugees are still organising petitions in 2020 demonstrates the tactic’s deep-seated importance to their national activism. While historians have largely overlooked this history, it can tell us a great deal about Palestinians’ experiences as refugees, their political engagement, and their capacity for organising in exile. At the same time, the subject’s importance is not limited to the Palestinian sphere; on a much bigger scale, the continuing deployment of Palestinian petitions also serves as a reminder of the myriad ways in which refugees respond to structural disempowerment by acting to situate themselves as agents of their own destinies. In this, the Palestinian refugees’ petitions are consistent with many broader themes in refugee history as a whole.

Sources:
The 1960 Palestinian petition in Syria is taken from Al Ayyam newspaper, 6 September 1960. All petitions appealing to UN conventions & norms are cited from the UN archive (UNA) in New York, files S-1808-0101-0006 and S0667-0006-03. The 1979 petition from the Balata camp mukhtar is cited from the UNRWA Central Registry Archive in Amman, File RE410(WB) II, Box RE65.

Further reading:
Anne Irfan, ‘Petitioning for Palestine: Refugee appeals to international authorities’, Contemporary Levant, 5:2, 2020, pp. 79-96

Andrew Arsan, ‘“This age is the age of associations:” committees, petitions, and the roots of interwar Middle Eastern internationalism’, Journal of Global History, 7, pp. 166-188

Yuval Ben Bassat, Petitioning the Sultan: Protests and justice in late Ottoman Palestine. London: IB Tauris, 2013

Katyrzyna Nowak, ‘“To reach the lands of freedom”: petitions of Polish displaced persons to American Poles, moral screening and the role of diaspora in refugee resettlement’, Cultural and Social History, 16:5, 2019, pp. 621-642

The header image shows the Jerash refugee camp in Jordan, 1968, in an UNRWA photo taken from the top of the camp’s water tower. The large tents at bottom right are an UNRWA school, with a crowd of children arriving for their lessons. Source: Cadbury Research Library - Special Collections, University of Birmingham, Save the Children archives, Box 73, PP1524. Used by permission of Save the Children (as granted to the site editor Benjamin Thomas White).