5-Nahr Albarid

In the Ruins of Nahr al-Barid: Understanding the Meaning of the Camp
Author(s): Adam Ramadan

Source: Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Autumn 2010), pp. 49-62
Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Institute for Palestine
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In the Ruins of Nahr al-Barid:
Understanding the Meaning
of the Camp
Adam Ramadan
The destruction of Nahr al-Barid camp in Lebanon in 2007 was a disas-

ter for the 35,000 people for whom it had become home.To understand
what was lost, this article explores what the refugee camp is and what
it does, materially and imaginatively, for its residents. Drawing on the
words of ordinary Palestinians from Nahr al-Barid and Rashidiyya
camps, it describes how the camps are social, cultural, and political
refuges from marginalization in exile.While the camps draw meaning
from a particular Palestinian time-space that emphasizes displacement
and transience, they have also become meaningful places in them-
selves. Consequently, the loss of Nahr al-Barid and the displacement of
its society have been understood as a repetition of the foundational
experience of the modern Palestinian nation: the Nakba.
In trying to portray the disturbed and discontinuous nature of Palestinian

existence, Edward Said wrote that Palestinians in exile do not really live, but
“linger in nondescript places, neither here nor there.”1 From this perspective,
life in exile is a kind of meaningless purgatory through which Palestinians
must pass before the promised future return. Time is privileged over space,
and the present comes to be seen as a temporary transition between a mean-
ingful past and a hopeful future.
In contrast to Said’s claim, I would argue that the refugee camps in which
so many Palestinians live are neither meaningless nor nondescript. They may
be temporary spaces in which Palestinian refugees await their right to return,
but they have nevertheless become imbued with meaning and significance
over decades of Palestinian habitation and place making. As I argue in this
essay, the meaning and importance of a camp is perhaps never clearer than
when the camp is viewed through the prism of loss.
Between May and October 2007, a new chapter was written in the story
of the Palestinian people. Nahr al-Barid, a Palestinian refugee camp in north
Adam Ramadan is a fellow in geography at Downing College, Cambridge.This article is

from his doctoral research project, which focused on the everyday lives of Palestinian
refugees in refugee camps in Lebanon, based on original fieldwork in 2007 and 2008.
He would like to thank Linda McDowell, Ali Rogers, and two anonymous reviewers
for their comments. Research for the article was funded by the Economic and Social
Research Council and would have been impossible without the invaluable help of so
many Palestinian friends, contacts, and research participants in Lebanon.
Journal of Palestine Studies Vol. XL, No. 1 (Autumn 2010), pp. 49–62, ISSN: 0377-919X; electronic ISSN: 1533-8614.
© 2010 by the Institute for Palestine Studies. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission
to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s
Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: jps.2010.XL.1.49.
JPS4001_04_Ramadan.indd 49 10/28/10 12:06:08 PM

50 Journal of Palestine Studies
Lebanon home to 35,000 people, was totally demolished first by a 104-day

military conflict between two non-Palestinian sides, and then through the
actions of the victorious Lebanese army: looting, arson, and vandalism. Nahr
al-Barid’s destruction resumed a sequence of erasure of Palestinian camps in
Lebanon dating back over three decades to the destruction of Nabatiyya, Tal
al-Za‘atar, Dikwaneh, and Jisr al-Basha camps in the early years of the 1975–
1990 civil war. The Palestinians of Nahr al-Barid were displaced to Biddawi
camp and further afield, staying with friends, relatives, and acquaintances,
or sheltering in garages, storerooms, and improvised shelters. With the camp
destroyed and the Lebanese army refusing to allow people back, the prospect
of a quick return faded into a prolonged and uncertain displacement.2
In order to understand what, besides buildings and property, was destroyed
in Nahr al-Barid, it is necessary to ask what a refugee camp is and—more
importantly—what it does, both materially and imaginatively, for its Palestinian
residents. In this article, I explore how Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon
act as social, cultural, and political refuges from marginalization in exile. I do
this by looking at two camps: the destroyed Nahr al-Barid in the north and the
still “thriving” Rashidiyya in the south. Using 128 semistructured, qualitative
interviews conducted with residents of the two camps in 2007 and 2008,3 I
show how the camps draw meaning from a particular Palestinian time-space,
which emphasizes displacement and transience, while at the same time becom-
ing meaningful places in themselves. In these interviews, I asked people about
life in the camp, the advantages and disadvantages of living there, what the
camp means to them, and prospects for the future.
Rashidiyya and Nahr al-Barid are quite different places politically, eco-
nomically, and socially, but my intention here is not a straight comparison
between the two. Rather, I have juxtaposed opinions and quotations from
residents of the two camps: the residents of Rashidiyya talking of what they
have, those of Nahr al-Barid talking of what they have lost. My aim was to
understand what the camps mean and do for Palestinian refugees living a
marginalized existence in Lebanon.
The Present as Transient

A refugee camp can be defined as a temporary humanitarian space, usu-
ally set up by international humanitarian agencies and designed to meet the
basic human needs of displaced people, including shelter, protection, and
short-term relief. Palestinian refugee camps have these basic functions, and
Palestinians receive relief, welfare, and social services provided by the UN
Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA),
Palestinian political factions, and various Palestinian and international NGOs,
charities, and other groups. In the course of six decades, however, the camps
have developed into seemingly permanent features of the landscapes of
Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the West Bank, and Gaza. Over the years, the inhabit-
ants themselves replaced their tents first with corrugated iron and then with

Understanding the Meaning of the Camp 51
brick and concrete, and the camps became like small cities. As the built envi-
ronment was assembled into something more permanent, the slow accumula-
tion of experiences and memories, births and deaths, built up a sense of place
and meaning. Alongside the networks of formal institutional support, myriad
informal social relations among camp individuals and families formed chan-
nels through which help and support are given and received. As much as the
material fabric of buildings and streets, these relations between people and
institutions constitute the space of the camp,4 creating a place of refuge from
the bewildering disorientation and insecurity of exile.
The refugee camps are in Lebanon but not of Lebanon, located in the pres-
ent on Lebanese territory but drawing meaning from a separate Palestinian
time-space, “where home is situated, where the past occurred, and where
futures are to be realised.”5 This meaning can be read in the symbolic land-
scape of the camp, where slogans, posters, and murals constantly reference
places and symbols of Palestine: the flag, the map, Jerusalem, the key to the
lost home, the kaffiyeh head covering of the peasant farmer working the
land.6 The camp’s meaning is embodied by the very people who populate it.
The camps are where those displaced, mainly from northern Palestine, con-
gregated, where families and villages reassembled.7 In important if imperfect
ways, the social relations and geographies of Palestine shattered by the Nakba
were reconstituted in the camps, with families gathering together by villages
of origin whenever possible and naming sections of the camps after them.
Nahr al-Barid and Rashidiyya camps were no exception to this process,
and in symbolic ways, Palestine was recreated in exile. Looking over the
ruins of Nahr al-Barid from a rooftop, a young man told me:
There on the hill is called Safuri. . . . In Palestine, Safuri was on
a hill, so the people from Safuri came and lived here on the
hill. . . . That part by the river is called Birwi. . . . In Palestine,
Birwi was near a river and the sea, so they collected here
by the river and the sea. . . . They were together in Palestine,
the same families and the same friends . . . when they came
here, they collected themselves to choose the place which
is similar or most like the Palestinian place . . . in a way, they
were recreating Palestine here.8
The imagination of Palestinian time, a transient
present in exile between a golden past and a happy Unless we understand how
future in Palestine, is fundamental to the construction Palestinian space and time
of the refugee camp both as a temporary abode and are implicated in each
as a Palestinian space. Thus, the camp is a space that other, we cannot make
is also a time, an enduring moment of rupture from sense of the seventy-two-
the space and time of Palestine. Unless we under- year-old Palestinian refu-
stand how Palestinian space and time are implicated gee who told me: “We are
in each other, we cannot make sense of the seventy- from ’48, and we want to
two-year-old Palestinian man in Rashidiyya camp go there.”

who told me: “We are from ’48, and we want to go there.” In contrast to the
(interrupted) permanence of life in the homeland, life in the camp is talked
of by most people as a temporary phase in the Palestinian experience, an
interim period that precedes the return to one’s permanent home.
Of course Nahr al-Barid is a camp, and when we say a camp
it means living not forever in this situation, when we say a
camp it means the people in this camp have their right to
be in their own land, not in the camp. . . . So the camp is a
temporary place for us as Palestinians.9
Like the camp, the category of refugee is also temporary. Continuing in the
same mode, this same man went on to link refugee status to the transience of
the Palestinian presence in Lebanon, with implied emphasis on the ongoing
need to resolve Palestinian refugee status through return to Palestine.
It’s important to be refugees and keep being called refugees
. . . because Lebanon is not our country. We’re guests here,
living here temporarily, and we don’t want anywhere except
our homeland, Palestine.
This is “life in liminality,” the present as a temporary transition period
between two planes of meaningful existence, past and future.10 It is such
understandings and discourses that led Said to describe life in exile as noth-
ing more than “linger[ing] in nondescript places.” From this perspective, the
present is not a normal life to be lived but a struggle for survival and return to
Palestine, to restore “the missing foundation of [Palestinian] existence.”11
I am waiting hour after hour to return to Palestine. We are
only here temporarily, for a short time. . . . I feel that my future
is in Palestine. Here there is no future for anyone.12
Making Meaningful Places

While undoubtedly heartfelt, such ideas cannot be taken at face value.
The woman quoted above no doubt truly believes that her future should be
in Palestine and, like many Palestinian refugees, invests great hope in the
idea of return. But life does go on, and this woman has lived and breathed
for forty years in Rashidiyya camp. While her life may draw meaning from
an understanding of home as elsewhere, in the very act of living, she has cre-
ated new meanings and laid down enduring ties and relations. She may tell
me that her life consists of waiting “hour after hour” to return, but in waiting
she has participated in the creation of a meaningful place. That place is the
camp, and the camp is the people who live their daily lives and struggles,
their hopes and dreams, in its dusty streets. But is the camp “home”?
Nahr al-Barid is my second homeland. . . . I lived the hard-
ships of being a refugee, I lived in tents and in poverty and

I got my education . . . it’s an important thing in the painful

life we lived and our struggle. . . . Nahr al-Barid is my little
paradise.13
To speak of the refugee camp as a “temporary” or “second homeland”
points to how “home” can become a variable term for displaced people.
Home is partly the lost homeland and partly the new spaces of displacement
(the camps) as they are transformed over time into “meaningful places in
which [the refugees] live in exile and plan for the future.”14 The camps are
where Palestinian life has been constructed and maintained for sixty years,
where children have grown up and grown old, where parents and grandpar-
ents have died and been buried, where memories have been made and accu-
mulated. Palestinians fought to defend the camps through the long Lebanese
civil war, and those displaced from destroyed camps like Nabatiyya and Tal
al-Za‘atar still remember them wistfully. The anonymous empty spaces where
refugees first settled have been “imprinted . . . with a landscape of hope for
the future.”15 For the vast majority of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon today,
the camp is the only life they have known.
To recognize the camps as meaningful places should not obscure the real
problems and hardships faced by the millions of Palestinians living in them
today. It was these difficulties that dominated the narratives of residents of
Rashidiyya camp. When asked about life in the camp, fifteen residents spoke
in negative terms, six said life was not bad, and only two spoke in positive
terms. Most stressed the prevalence of poverty in the camp and the restric-
tions on rights in Lebanon, while a few blamed Palestinian leaders for failing
to look after their people.
Like all Palestinian camps, the life here is . . . you can say it’s
a miserable life. . . . All the people here are suffering, from
all directions of life, from the medical side, the work side . . .
[on] all these points the people are suffering. . . . I don’t like
the camp, nobody likes to live in camps. I’d like to live in my
home, in my country.16
Life is really miserable. . . . Animals outside the camps are
living much better than our people in the camps. . . . People
are just living terrible, miserable lives, no work, no jobs, just
roaming around . . . so life really is miserable, terrible here in
the camps.17
In contrast, Palestinians displaced from Nahr al-Barid portrayed life in
their camp in quite different terms, expressing overwhelmingly positive feel-
ings about it and remembering how much better life there was before their
displacement in 2007. When asked whether Nahr al-Barid was a good place,
nineteen respondents expressed positive opinions, while one said it was “not
bad.” In response to another question, sixteen spoke in wholly positive terms
about the camp, while two mentioned good and bad aspects, and nobody

spoke negatively. People emphasized the camp’s success as a regional market

town, attracting Palestinian and Lebanese customers alike, and the closeness
of camp society.
We were living a very prosperous life in Nahr al-Barid. . . . No

people in the world lived a better life than we did.18
Before the war, life was good. . . . Nahr al-Barid was my life
and my soul, and it’s all gone . . . everything has gone, it’s not
easy. . . . We did what we could and we dreamed of improving
the camp, but all of this evaporated.19
Exaggerations aside, was life really so much better in Nahr al-Barid than
in Rashidiyya? Without doubt, Nahr al-Barid was a successful trading town,
situated on the main road between Tripoli and the Syrian border. I spent six
weeks there in 2004, and remember the main road being packed with shops
selling everything from food and clothing to jewelry and domestic appli-
ances. Such economic opportunities are simply not available in Rashidiyya,
which is located among fields along the beach south of Tyre. Still, references
to Nahr al-Barid as being “like heaven” and people living “a very prosperous
life” unquestionably mask the real existence of poverty and social problems.
A 2004 survey by Kenneth Ged found 63.5 percent of families in Nahr al-
Barid had a monthly income of less than $233, or about $1.50 per person per
day based on the average family size of 5.3. Ged found that overcrowding
meant that the homes of 36.9 percent of families received no direct sun-
light and 19.6 percent of the population suffered from chronic diseases.20
These harsh realities, repeatedly testified to by residents of Rashidiyya camp,
scarcely featured in the narratives of residents of Nahr al-Barid.
The reason for this, I suggest, is that the destruction of Nahr al-Barid has
laid bare the importance of the camp as a refuge for Palestinian existence in
Lebanon. The fact that life became so much harder after the camp’s destruc-
tion points to its importance in helping Palestinians negotiate and cope in a
hostile host state, the importance of its networks of social and institutional
relations in helping to insulate people materially and emotionally from mar-
ginalization. As several Nahr al-Barid residents told me, it was only after the
camp was destroyed that they truly understood what it meant to them:
The camp means much to me, it is not only stones and build-
ings.The camp is relations and communication among people.
The camp means to me the good relations between neigh-
bors, between the people, between families. And we didn’t
value the camp enough in the past, but when we evacuated
and came here, we found the difference.21
While the residents of Rashidiyya emphasized their problems, those prob-

lems are far easier to deal with inside the camp than outside. Only six out of
twenty residents of Rashidiyya I interviewed said they would choose to live

outside the camp in Lebanon if they could. The rest stressed the expense of
life outside, the access to relief and social services inside, and the importance
of living within a Palestinian community. The sense was that living in the
camp, immersed in Palestinian culture and politics, helps people keep alive
the idea of Palestine in their daily activities, words, and thoughts. Many even
said that they feared losing their Palestinian identity if they lived outside the
camp, in Lebanese towns and villages.
If people don’t live in the camp, they’ll forget Palestine. But
inside, people talk about Palestine, returning to Palestine,
what happened in Palestine, what’s happening every day. But
if the family is in Sidon or Tyre, it’s not like that.22
Recognizing the camp as a meaningful place need not diminish the impor-
tance of the right of return to Palestine as the central aspiration of Palestinian
lives. As so many people made clear to me, the importance of living in a camp
is precisely so that they remember Palestine and keep alive the demand to
return. With the destruction of Nahr al-Barid camp and the dispersal of its soci-
ety, the processes and practices of place making and of remembering and rec-
reating Palestine have been thrown into doubt. The continuation of Palestinian
existence has been put at risk by a repeat of the foundational experience of the
modern Palestinian people: mass displacement and social disintegration.
Our dialect may be Lebanese, our habits may be Lebanese,
after time maybe we lose our speciality as Palestinians. So
when we are all Palestinians from Palestine, we will always
remember that our home is Palestine, not Lebanon, we are
Palestinian. Not just us, but our children and the coming gen-
erations will have this in their minds.23
Reliving the Nakba in Nahr al-Barid
In terms of population, Nahr al-Barid is the largest Palestinian settlement

to have been destroyed since 1948, and its destruction is understood by many
displaced residents as a repetition of the Nakba experience. For most, the
Nakba was something that happened to their parents or grandparents.
For this generation, they didn’t know exactly what happened
in the past regarding the Nakba of 1948, but we know now
what happened and we’ve seen it. This was worse than the
Nakba . . . it was like a tsunami . . . we are returning to zero,
we have nothing.24
Other interviews also showed how Nahr al-Barid’s destruction gave the Nakba
new immediacy:
It’s the same situation, the same story was repeated. . . . I was
born, grew up, married, and had children in Nahr al-Barid,

I have memories about Nahr al-Barid but I don’t have memo-

ries of Palestine. My parents left Palestine, their homeland,
and I left Nahr al-Barid where I grew up.25
The loss of Nahr al-Barid was the loss of a meaningful place, not just
of a waiting room where refugees would pass the time before returning
to Palestine. What was lost was a part of Palestinian society itself—a “sec-
ond homeland” or a “temporary homeland” as it was often described to me.
Displaced from the camp and barred from returning to its ruins, Nahr al-
Barid’s residents relived a story of war, exile, erasure, and hopes of return
that harked back to 1948, the year on which contemporary Palestinian his-
tory turns. The Nakba remains “the point of reference for other events, past
and future,”26 the unifying event of the Palestinian experience. The repeated
stories of war, loss, and displacement suffered by Palestinians in Lebanon—in
the camps destroyed during the civil war, in the massacre of Palestinians
at Sabra and Shatila camps in 1982—have been understood in relation to
the original Nakba as repeated or ongoing Nakba experiences. As Lila Abu-
Lughod and Ahmad Sa’di write in the introduction to their work on the Nakba
and the claims of memory, “For Palestinians, still living their dispossession,
still struggling or hoping for return, many under military occupation, many
still immersed in matters of survival, the past is neither distant nor over.”27
In an essay appearing in the same volume, Lena Jayyusi writes:
[I]t is in the repeated tales, similar but different, that the col-
lective space and dimensions of the catastrophe and the pre-
dicament that ensued from it are figured and made present. It
is in and through the iteration of similar tales, similar stories
of attack, death, and expulsion, like tales of loss, that the char-
acter of the catastrophe is shaped and understood. Each new
tale is an echo within the echo, focusing and conjuring the
collective predicament through the individual, and ramifying
the significances and symbolic meanings of the individual
experience through the collective.28
It is as refugees displaced from a lost camp, itself a sanctuary in exile from
the lost homeland, that the words of Palestinians from Nahr al-Barid must be
understood. For those who had themselves lived through the 1948 Nakba,
the destruction of Nahr al-Barid felt like a repetition, only more painful:
The Palestinian Nakba in 1948 was much easier than this one.
. . . I felt this more. . . . In Palestine, we had our own land and
I didn’t work hard . . . here we had nothing. . . . We worked
very hard to build our home and bring up our children. . . .
My son worked paving the streets, hard work, we worked so
we could build and furnish our home. . . . Another son went
to Saudi Arabia and brought some money so we could build
a simple home instead of living in a tent. . . . We faced great

hardships, working to save money so our sons could marry.

. . . One son went to Germany and brought money, bought a
piece of land and build a home in the new camp. . . . Now all
this is destroyed.29
What made the events of 2007 so painful was not
just that they were recent but that all the hard work What made the events of
that had gone into transforming Nahr al-Barid from a 2007 so painful was not
tent camp of destitute refugees into a thriving town just that they were recent
had been lost; in similar ways was the fellaheen’s loss but that all the hard work
of their land in 1948 made more bitter by the dawn-to- that had gone into trans-
dusk labor that had made it productive. For the Nahr forming Nahr al-Barid
al-Barid families who came to Lebanon destitute in from a tent camp of desti-
1948 and who for sixty years had struggled and saved tute refugees into a thriv-
to replace tents with stone or concrete structures, and ing town had been lost.
later to add stories or build homes for their sons,30 los-
ing everything for a second time seemed even harder than the first.
We lost everything my parents built in sixty years. My
parents—my mother, for example, she’s finished work and
with her money she built a big house for us, and some shops
for renting and to have work and money for the future. She
put all her money in Nahr al-Barid in building.What they did in
sixty years, we lost it in one month. So we lost everything.31
Disillusionment or Determination: To Rebuild or Emigrate?

For residents of Nahr al-Barid, rebuilding the camp means not just to recon-
struct a physical living space but to remake what that place had been socially,
culturally, and politically; in other words, to reconstitute the assemblage of
social relations and practices that make and remake Palestinian identities.
Indeed, my interviews suggest that to return to Nahr al-Barid and reassemble
the camp has become an essential step along the road to eventual return to
Palestine:
When we say that we should return to our Nahr al-Barid, this
does not mean we have forgotten our Palestine, but this is
the step to go back to Palestine, to live in a camp not in cities,
not to dissolve in societies.32
Return to Nahr al-Barid is a name and the way for our return
to Palestine. . . . It is a name for our painful life and the Nakba.
. . . Nahr al-Barid means being refugees, and “refugee” means
our right in Palestine. . . . We don’t want any other place than
Nahr al-Barid before our return to Palestine.33
In the meantime, people survive in temporary housing and improvised
shelters. The Lebanese government plans to rebuild Nahr al-Barid camp,

although many Palestinians expressed to me their skepticism that the

plans would materialize. Several refugee camps were destroyed during the
Lebanese civil war and never rebuilt, while the reconstruction of the sur-
viving camps was a slow process, hindered by government restrictions and
only permitted with the acquiescence of Lebanese army personnel patrolling
camp boundaries. The camp-wide, state-organized, internationally funded
project of reconstruction in Nahr al-Barid is unprecedented and controver-
sial, seen by some Lebanese as undermining the camp’s temporary status and
risking making of permanent resettlement a fait accompli.34
Nahr al-Barid would be the first camp in Lebanon to be reconstructed in
its entirety. Palestinians have attempted to intervene in the planning process
via the grassroots Nahr al-Barid Reconstruction Commission, working with
the displaced community and UNRWA. The resulting master plan, which
has been approved by the Lebanese government, will rehouse all Palestinian
families in their original neighborhoods, attempting to reproduce the social
geographies that existed before the conflict, themselves reproductions of
social geographies from Palestine. Nonetheless, it is impossible in a single
intensive rebuilding program to reproduce the piecemeal fashion in which
the camp was first assembled, and its success will be judged by the extent to
which it enables Palestinian society to re-form, reconstruct, and repossess
the camp as a Palestinian space.
When (and if) Nahr al-Barid is rebuilt (there remains a severe shortfall
in essential international funding to implement the project), the Lebanese
government intends it be a “model camp” addressing the state’s security
concerns and marking an end to the “security vacuum” whereby Lebanese
writ has not been enforced in the camps since 1969. If Nahr al-Barid is
not rebuilt, Palestinian families will be expected to survive indefinitely in
improvised shelters, prefabricated shelters the size of shipping containers,
and wherever else they can find. In this sense, they truly have been reduced
to their original status as refugees, destitute and placeless, awaiting the
intervention of outsiders to determine their fate. The Lebanese government
recognizes that continued exclusion and marginalization of the refugees
“perpetuate a lack of trust in government and challenge the revival of the
appropriate governance structures within the other Palestinian camps in
Lebanon.”35
Most Palestinians from Nahr al-Barid want to see their camp rebuilt (of
my interview participants, thirty-five did, and only three did not), but not
everyone wants to return to live there. While the camp functions as a buffer
for Palestinians against the restrictions and marginalization in Lebanon, it is
unlikely that the camp economy could offer more than very limited avenues
for making sustainable livelihoods. Even at the height of its success as a
trading town, Nahr al-Barid contained significant poverty and deprivation.
Particularly among young people, disillusionment with life in Lebanon is
strong, and emigration (in many cases illegal) is an established practice. This

is true both in Nahr al-Barid and in Rashidiyya, and today almost four out of
five Palestinian households in Lebanon have relatives living abroad who send
substantial remittances to their families in the camps.36
Recently many young people aimed for emigration, to
Germany, to Sweden, maybe to other countries. They emi-
grated so as to maybe live as human beings, or to find work, or
to flee from our Palestinian restrictions here in Lebanon.37
The destruction of Nahr al-Barid has made the desire for emigration
more urgent for many people, especially those who doubt the camp will be
rebuilt:
If they open an emigration door to any country, we are leav-
ing. . . . Africa, Sri Lanka, the poorest country, Sri Lanka, Mexico,
no problem, Philippines, Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, no problem,
I just don’t want to stay here. I’m forty years old and I’m get-
ting tired. . . . We don’t want the camp, we don’t want Nahr
al-Barid. Just do us a favor—speak with the United States,
Canada, Australia, the European Union, open the emigration
doors. We want to leave, we don’t want to stay here.38
For some, this disillusionment perhaps signals the end of the dream for
Palestine, a final surrender to the world, or at least a resignation to lives of
displacement, instability, and impermanence.
I know that returning to Palestine is impossible. . . . Nahr al-
Barid is gone, and Palestine is gone, and I’m living in a garage,
my children are living in a garage. Shall I wait sixty years and
our sons and daughters will live in a garage too?39
Still, for most, the return to a reconstructed Nahr al-Barid is seen as a
stepping stone toward eventual return to Palestine. Nahr al-Barid is not the
homeland nor a substitute for the homeland, but its loss represents another
displacement, another slippage, another step away from Palestine. To regain
the camp and return there moves Palestinians one step closer to home, can-
cels out one displacement, and allows Palestinians to return to being refu-
gees in a refugee camp, instead of refugees displaced from the refugee camp
into which they were displaced from their homeland.
We think that the best solution is to return, to return to
our camp because this is a step to go back to our Palestine
afterwards.40
In Conclusion
Soon after the “new camp,” adjacent to the main Nahr al-Barid camp, was
reopened to Palestinian residents in October 2007, a wedding was organized.

The bride and groom clambered over the rubble in order to marry in Nahr
al-Barid. As the wedding party danced Palestinian dances and feasted on
Palestinian food, this space of war and destruction was reclaimed and recon-
structed as Palestinian space. As the groom explained:
[T]he most important thing to us is that we’re married and
we’ve returned to the camp. It felt like a kind of resistance, to
celebrate and dance despite everything we’ve suffered.41
To understand the destruction of Nahr al-Barid, it is necessary to see how
the camp has become more than a humanitarian infrastructure of physical
relief and welfare. In the camp, Palestinian social formations, cultural prac-
tices, political identities, and national consciousness can be produced and
reproduced. Just as the Palestinian homeland is imagined both as a space
(the land) and a time (before 1948), so too is the camp a space (of Palestinian
life and meaning) and a time (transient, a passage to future return). While
this Palestinian time-space emphasizes displacement and transience, the
camps have become meaningful places in themselves. Like the loss of the
Palestinian homeland in 1948, the destruction of Nahr al-Barid has put at risk
these processes and practices that constitute and bind together Palestinian
society.
For the elderly, the generation of the Nakba and their children, those who
have survived and struggled through sixty years in exile only to lose every
hard-won lira, the current situation is especially difficult. Like the eighty-
year-old man, deserving of some comfort in his old age, who told me: “Now
I’m living in a metal container.” And like Munir, the sixty-one-year-old teacher
who planned to travel in his retirement but was forced to spend his pension
renting a garage for his family, then buy a two-bedroom flat in Biddawi camp
to replace the four-storey house he lost in Nahr al-Barid, and go back to work
to make ends meet. These people built Nahr al-Barid through decades of hard
work, and they have been made homeless again. Through it all and still today,
the cause of their situation and the cause for which they strive are the same.
I leave the final words to Munir:
There is no place to feel like home, except in our Palestine.
. . . Here in Biddawi I always feel like Gypsies who carry their
possessions on donkeys or animals and go from one place
to another. . . . I am called Palestinian. Whatever I do I am
Palestinian. People call me Palestinian. Palestinian means I
belong to a land called Palestine, so I can’t feel comfort and
confident and peaceful except in Palestine. And in spite of
that I was born here on the Lebanese-Palestinian borders, but
in my mind lives the grain that I am Palestinian, so I should
go back to my source.

Endnotes
1. Edward W. Said, After the Last Sky: 16. Interview with anonymous male,
Palestinian Lives (New York: Columbia forty-eight years old, Rashidiyya.
University Press, 1999), p. 21. 17. Interview with anonymous male,
2. Adam Ramadan, “Destroying Nahr sixty-one years old, Rashidiyya.
el-Bared: Sovereignty and Urbicide in the 18. Interview with anonymous female,
Space of Exception,” Political Geography fifty-six years old, from Nahr al-Barid,
28, no. 3 (March 2009), pp. 153–63. now living in temporary housing.
3. I interviewed 69 residents of 19. Interview with anonymous male,
Nahr al-Barid camp and 48 residents of forty-seven years old, from Nahr al-Barid,
Rashidiyya camp. These included 40 now living in a garage.
women and 77 men, aged between 18 20. Kenneth Ged, Nahr el Bared Camp:
and 80. Of the Nahr al-Barid interviews, Population Census with Social, Education,
22 were conducted in the camp itself Healthcare & NGO Surveys (Beirut:
and 47 in places of displacement in and Mokhtarat, 2004), pp. 24, 34, 36, 44.
around Biddawi camp. All interview quo- 21. Interview with anonymous male,
tations but one are left anonymous, as fifty-two years old, from Nahr al-Barid,
agreed with participants. now living in a garage.
4. See Doreen Massey, For Space 22. Interview with anonymous male,
(London: Sage, 2005). forty-seven years old, Rashidiyya.
5. Helena Lindholm Schulz, The 23. Interview with anonymous male,
Palestinian Diaspora: Formation of sixty-one years old, from Nahr al-Barid,
Identities and Politics of Homeland now living in Biddawi camp.
(London: Routledge, 2003), p. 98. 24. Interview with anonymous female,
6. Adam Ramadan, “A Refugee thirty-eight years old, from Nahr al-Barid,
Landscape: Writing Palestinian sheltering in an UNRWA school.
Nationalisms in Lebanon,” ACME 8, 25. Interview with anonymous male,
no. 1 (March 2009), pp. 69–99. forty years old, from Nahr al-Barid, now
7. Rosemary Sayigh, Too Many living in a garage.
Enemies: The Palestinian Experience 26. Lila Abu-Lughod and Ahmad
in Lebanon (London: Zed Press, 1994), H. Sa’di, “Introduction: The Claims of
pp. 35–37; Julie Peteet, Landscape of Memory,” in Nakba: Palestine, 1948,
Hope and Despair: Palestinian Refugee and the Claims of Memory, ed. Ahmad
Camps (Philadelphia: University of H. Sa’di and Lila Abu-Lughod (New York:
Pennsylvania Press, 2005), p. 49. Columbia University Press, 2007), p. 5.
8. Interview with anonymous male, 27. Abu-Lughod and Sa’di,
twenty-eight years old, from Nahr al- “Introduction,” p. 10.
Barid, now homeless. 28. Lena Jayyusi, “Iterability,
9. Interview with anonymous male, Cumulativity, and Presence: The
sixty years old, from Nahr al-Barid, now Relational Figures of Palestinian
living in a garage. Memory,” in Nakba, ed. Sa’di and Abu-
10. Lindholm Schulz, The Palestinian Lughod, pp. 107–33; quote from p. 110.
Diaspora, pp. 94–98. 29. Interview with anonymous female,
11. Said, After the Last Sky, p. 26. seventy-eight years old, from Nahr al-
12. Interview with anonymous female, Barid, now living in a garage
forty years old, Rashidiyya. 30. It usually is sons; daughters marry
13. Interview with anonymous male, into other families.
sixty-five years old, from Nahr al-Barid, 31. Interview with anonymous male,
now living in Biddawi camp. twenty-eight years old, from Nahr al-
14. Peteet, Landscape of Hope and Barid, now homeless.
Despair, p. 29. 32. Interview with anonymous male,
15. Peteet, Landscape of Hope and sixty years old, from Nahr al-Barid, now
Despair, p. 31; see Laura Hammond, living in a garage.
This Place Will Become Home: Refugee 33. Interview with anonymous male,
Repatriation to Ethiopia (Ithaca: Cornell thirty-eight years old, from Nahr al-Barid,
University Press, 2004). now living in Biddawi camp.

34. See Farid El Khazen “Permanent 37. Interview with anonymous male,
Settlement of Palestinians in Lebanon: A sixty-one years old, from Nahr al-Barid,
Recipe for Conflict,” Journal of Refugee now living in Biddawi camp.
Studies 10, no. 3 (September 1997), pp. 38. Interview with anonymous male,
275–93. forty years old, from Nahr al-Barid, now
35. Government of Lebanon, living in Biddawi camp.
“A Common Challenge, A Shared 39. Interview with anonymous male,
Responsibility: The International Donor forty-eight years old, from Nahr al-Barid,
Conference for the Recovery and now living in a garage.
Reconstruction of the Nahr el-Bared 40. Interview with anonymous male,
Palestinian Refugee Camp and Conflict- sixty years old, from Nahr al-Barid, now
Affected Areas of North Lebanon,” living in a garage.
Vienna, 23 June 2008, p. 47. 41. “Ahmed Hassan, Lebanon: ‘It Felt
36. Ole Fr. Ugland, “Difficult Past, Like a Kind of Resistance to Celebrate
Uncertain Future: Living Conditions and Dance Despite Everything’.” IRIN
among Palestinian Refugees in Camps and News, 2008, http://www.irinnews.org/
Gatherings in Lebanon,” FAFO, 2003, p. 58. HOVReport.aspx?ReportId=76244.

5-Nahr Albarid

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5-Nahr Albarid

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In the Ruins of Nahr al-Barid: Understanding the Meaning of the Camp

Author(s): Adam Ramadan

The destruction of Nahr al-Barid camp in Lebanon in 2007 was a disas-

In trying to portray the disturbed and discontinuous nature of Palestinian

Adam Ramadan is a fellow in geography at Downing College, Cambridge.This article is

JPS4001_04_Ramadan.indd 49 10/28/10 12:06:08 PM

Lebanon home to 35,000 people, was totally demolished first by a 104-day

The Present as Transient

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JPS4001_04_Ramadan.indd 51 10/28/10 12:06:09 PM

Making Meaningful Places

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I got my education . . . it’s an important thing in the painful

JPS4001_04_Ramadan.indd 53 10/28/10 12:06:10 PM

spoke negatively. People emphasized the camp’s success as a regional market

We were living a very prosperous life in Nahr al-Barid. . . . No

While the residents of Rashidiyya emphasized their problems, those prob-

JPS4001_04_Ramadan.indd 54 10/28/10 12:06:10 PM

Reliving the Nakba in Nahr al-Barid

In terms of population, Nahr al-Barid is the largest Palestinian settlement

JPS4001_04_Ramadan.indd 55 10/28/10 12:06:10 PM

I have memories about Nahr al-Barid but I don’t have memo-

JPS4001_04_Ramadan.indd 56 10/28/10 12:06:10 PM

hardships, working to save money so our sons could marry.

Disillusionment or Determination: To Rebuild or Emigrate?

JPS4001_04_Ramadan.indd 57 10/28/10 12:06:11 PM

although many Palestinians expressed to me their skepticism that the

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