Integration and Palestinian Refugees in Jordan: UNRWA's role

A few days after returning to Chicago from Amman, I was in a cab. Because I work with refugees from all over the world, I like to play a game with myself where I try to guess where a person is from by looking at their name. I stared at his license for a while, and then asked the driver where he was from. He said, "I'm Jordanian", so I asked him, "Are you Jordanian Jordanian, or Jordanian Palestinian?" He started laughing and asked me how I knew there was a difference. I explained that I had just returned from Jordan, where I had spent some time visiting refugee camps, speaking to Palestinian refugee agencies, and so on. In the end, he told me he was Palestinian. He also told me he felt most Americans understood Palestinians to be only the people living in the Gaza Strip or the West Bank, without knowing that most Palestinian refugees live in Jordan.

I relate this story because, in almost all cases, to be a Jordanian Palestinian means that this cab driver, his parents, and his grandparents before him were all refugees. Jordan's Palestinian refugee situation is unique in the world, because most of the refugees who fled to Jordan in 1948 and in 1967 were granted full rights and Jordanian citizenship [1]. Traditionally, in a protracted refugee situation, people are continuously classified as refugees and confined to camps, until they can return home or are resettled in a third country. Accordingly, refugees resettled in the U.S. are only refugees for their first year—after that, they are required to become legal permanent residents. At the same time, refugees from the 1972 Burundian genocide who still live in camps in Tanzania have been refugees for 38 years, and there is no sign this will change any time soon.

But Jordan is a special case. When the first wave of refugees, totaling almost 750,000, arrived in Jordan in 1948, the UN Refugee Convention did not exist, and therefore there was no internationally recognized definition of a 'refugee', and no established system for their protection. The UN did realize that it needed to intervene, and so created the UN Refugee Works Agency (UNRWA) in 1950. That was the same year that Jordan granted full rights to the refugees within its borders. However, because there was no established definition of a refugee, UNRWA was left to create one. UNRWA defines a Palestinian refugee as "a person whose normal place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948," but what makes the definition remarkable is that it also grants the right of registration as refugees to the descendants of these refugees.

Because each subsequent generation has the right to register as a refugee, Jordan has the largest Palestinian refugee population in the world, totaling 1,983,733 people. UNRWA shares responsibility for the Palestinian refugees with the Department of Palestinian Affairs (DPA), a branch of the Jordanian Government. According to the Director General of the DPA, over 110 NGOs are also active in the camps, providing vocational training, social services, and advocacy. During my time in Jordan, I had the good fortune to meet Matar Saqer, Public Information Office for UNRWA, who provided our group with valuable insights regarding the Palestinian refugee situation.

Mr. Saqer is a soft-spoken man with excellent English, who was enthusiastic about sharing his professional and personal experience. He introduced himself to our group, and after listing his job duties, he told us he was a Palestinian refugee himself, and had grown up in one of the camps he now helped administer. He focused on three main points: UNRWA's role as a pioneer in education and micro-lending, UNRWA's role in health services, and UNRWA as a political agent. Mr. Saqer explained that UNRWA is tasked with the first 9 years of education in the camps, and administers 173 schools, of which 49% of the pupils are female. A report released for the 60th anniversary of UNRWA credits their excellent school system for "paving the way for economic self-sufficiency for the vast majority of refugees" (Takkenberg, 256). The 49% female enrollment has been true since the 1960s. In fact, while I was in Jordan, I repeatedly heard Jordanians and Palestinians remark that often, Palestinians received a better education than the Jordanians. Mr. Saqer also explained that UNRWA pioneered the concept of vocational training in the region, training over 1300 students in Jordan every year, and since 2003, over 21,000 microloans have been awarded. Although two-thirds of UNRWA's budget is spent on education, the organization also funds 24 primary health clinics. In 2009, there were two and a half million patient visits to these health centers. Perhaps even more significantly, Mr. Saqer stated that all 24 clinics offer family planning services, and that he had personally heard women asking for contraception. Let me interject here with a personal note: I work with refugees who have lived in camps and as refugees in countries of first asylum. The stories they tell are of a lack of basic necessities such as shelter, food, and water, not to mention a lack of education, inadequate or no access to health care (much less contraception), and perhaps worst of all, being relegated to a life that bars them from integrating, from belonging. What UNRWA has done and continues to do, particularly with a $100 million deficit, is amazing.

But UNRWA is also a political symbol. When asked what that meant, Mr. Saqer responded that he thought UNRWA had neglected the refugee relationship—that somehow, it had bred dependence rather than active participation or partnership. For the majority of its sixty year existence, UNRWA has been a place-keeper of sorts: defining all the descendants of Palestinian refugees as refugees, regardless of their rights or integration into Jordanian society, also guarantees their right of return. This was echoed by Wajeeh Azayzeh, Deputy Director of the DPA, whom I met on the last day of our trip, who stated that UNRWA must continue to exist because it represents the stance the international community took when the refugee situation first began.

I admit that I am torn about this perspective, because my work in the U.S. focuses so much on the idea of integration. The primary reason that refugees apply for resettlement is because they recognize that they will never be able to go home, and in that regard, attaining residency and then citizenship grants them the rights they were being denied in their country of first asylum. Resettlement is one of the three durable solutions that the UN advocates for, the other two being to return home or to integrate (i.e., become citizens) in the country of first asylum. At first glance, it seems that the UN achieved this second durable solution with most Palestinian refugees in Jordan. And yet, through the continued existence of UNRWA and the classification of descendants as refugees, this protracted refugee situation continues and in fact grows with each subsequent generation. Of course, nothing related to this issue is simple; when the Israeli-Palestinian conflict began, no one knew or imagined that it would last this long, especially the Palestinians. I spoke to a camp director who said that many of the 1948 refugees still had the keys to their houses in Palestine, and his aunt, whom we met on the streets of the camp, told us that all she wanted was to go home to Palestine so she could die in her homeland. While I do not know her exact age, she must have been six or seven when her family fled to Jordan.

There is no easy resolution, I do not even know if there is a complicated one. The Palestinian refugees in Jordan came from over 450 towns and villages in Palestine, and those refugees and the refugee workers we spoke to all stated the same thing: they want to go home, to their home, to their house. They are not ungrateful to the Jordanian government for the freedoms and protections afforded to them, but they do not feel Jordanian. Before going to Jordan, and particularly before meeting with Mr. Saqer and all of the other men and women who work with and serve Palestinian refugees, I know I equated citizenship with integration, with the idea of a new beginning, of belonging. Now, I'm not so sure.

Lauren Pérez