Why Shatila? I guess the main reason was because Shatila got me by my guts and I think places like that do have something to teach you. In my case, the experience of living in Shatila for a year forced me to revisit many of my assumptions but also the disciplines in which I was trained: Marxism, Statistics, and Feminism. They all came out transformed from the encounter with Shatila.
Besides, Shatila has always been, in several senses, an iconic camp, with the Palestinian Liberation Organisation’s headquarters established in the immediate vicinity of the camp. So, it was a very good place to get to know the Fedayeen and reflect on how their lives were different from those of their sons.
TM: The Shatila refugee camp was originally set up for Palestinian refugees in 1949. In what way has it become part of the Lebanese society?
GB: This is precisely one of the issues I deal with in my book. There’s a whole trend in the literature on Palestinian camps in Lebanon that present them as states of exception, confined places where there’s no sole source of legitimate authority. What I propose in the book is that Shatila is at the margins precisely because it is part of, and communicates with Beirut, so it isn’t confined.
Shatila inhabitants are actually exposed to and have to deal with the effects of very crude laissez-faire economic policies adopted in Lebanon in the same sense that poor Lebanese are. There’s no doubt that the Palestinian refugee issue in Lebanon is one of legal inclusion – as there’s legislation that bars their free access to the labor and real estate markets. But I argue that their question is also one of economic and social inclusion and, in this sense, there may be more approximating Shatilans to, rather than separating them from the Lebanese, or at least some Lebanese.
It’s true that there are no sole sources of legitimate authority in a place such as Shatila, with several popular committees, linked to the different Palestinian factions, functioning simultaneously. But this doesn’t mean that Shatila is chaotic, or a ticking bomb, where young unemployed men are being drafted into jihadism or are terrorists in the making.
Actually, what I propose is that Shatila appears as chaotic only to those who have become so used to a state-centered perspective that they cannot see what kind of order may characterize places where the state is not obviously present.
TM: How much do you think the camp has changed during the timeframe you were working on – and how much did the dynamics inside the camp change when more refugees who are not Palestinians arrived?
GB: During the so-called ʾayyām al-thawra (the days of the revolution), the heyday of the Palestinian military resistance in Lebanon and other diasporas, roughly between 1967 and 1982, Shatila was a cradle for the Fedayeen. The chroniclers of the Palestinian saga in Lebanon suggest that the camps, and Shatila prominently among them, functioned as moral spaces during this period, providing a hospitable environment for refugees to recover a certain sense of pride.
In spite of Shatila nowadays being a very tough place to live in, and while I do not want to romanticize the camp at all, I still think that it’s worth viewing it as a space of possibility and political invention as well.
First, I think it was very interesting to observe the functioning of Shatila polity, beyond the state: Shatilans have learned how to live without counting on the support of state-like figures because they know that very little, if anything at all, will come their way. But second, I also think that Shatilans may enable us to see other forms of citizenship. They show us that there’s political life beyond the state and that other kinds of social contracts are possible that don’t demand the subjection and submission of us all to the power of the state.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
