Protracted Palestinian exile and the “right to have rights”
On World Refugee Day, Deena Dajani discusses the challenges faced by Palestinians in protracted displacement in Jordan and how Palestinian refugees remind us of the need to recognise refugees everywhere as agents, with clear demands for justice and recognition, and the “right to have rights”.
View of Amman, Jordan (Photo: Global Water Partnership - a water secure world, via Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
The “right to have rights” is arguably Hannah Arendt’s most often quoted phrase. It embodied Arendt’s critique of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She argued that the universal rights promised by the declaration can only be attained through membership of a political community. To Arendt, the stateless refugee epitomised how the ability to access the rights enshrined in universal declarations (to education, healthcare and so on) was dependent in the first instance on the individual’s right to claim them.
More than 75 years since Arendt’s essay was published, it is not difficult to see how humanitarian action – while well intentioned – has been unable to deliver dignified lives for refugees whose displacement is protracted (in other words, lasting five years or longer).
Access to rights such as education and healthcare, rendered as services by humanitarian actors, is premised on provision, not entitlement. And when aid budgets wane and shift, that provision is often cut, leaving refugees living in protracted displacement without access to ‘services’ or the mechanisms to claim them as rights.
The very protracted nature of Palestinian forced displacement is an obvious example. As part of our research agenda on protracted displacement, in collaboration with our partner IRCKHF, we recently conducted focus groups with various refugee communities in Amman, Jordan, including four focus groups with Palestinian refugees of different genders and ages.
Most were born in Jordan, and many were born to families forcibly displaced from Gaza in 1948 during what many scholars and Palestinians describe as Israel’s campaign of ethnic cleansing (known as the Nakba or catastrophe). None of them has access to a Jordanian ID number, and therefore, decades after their families’ forced displacement, they are still without the “right to have rights”.
Painful testimony
The sense of deep injustice shared by Palestinians in the focus groups was undeniable. What may appear to be minor everyday inconveniences add up to a life of constant humiliation: long queues at government offices and dismissive treatment; residence permits, costing more than double the amount a Jordanian citizen pays for a passport, that don’t even secure them the right to work or to access healthcare or higher education; and inability to access a better life despite making huge efforts to attain this.
“We can’t even be Uber drivers!” said one participant, highlighting with dark humour how being unable to legally own a car (let alone a property) bars them from even joining the often exploitative gig economy.
People pass down property, we pass down suffering
Focus group participant
Another participant, despite getting himself through university (paying higher fees as an international student, though born in Jordan) is a street vendor selling vegetables on a stall, because he couldn’t access any other opportunities. And another spoke of the debt incurred to get their very bright daughter through her engineering studies at university, only to find she could not take up a single job opportunity for lack of an ID number.
Many testimonies were painful, and enduring this decade after decade has clearly taken its toll. “We’ve started limiting births, this suffering is inherited. People pass down property, we pass down suffering,” said one participant.
A clear demand for rights
It is important to acknowledge the depth of Palestinian pain and the continued injustices Palestinian refugees face and, as illustrated in the stories above, their struggle to overcome their circumstances.
A very strong theme emerging from the focus groups was the participants’ unequivocal and clearly articulated demand for political rights: for full residency rights in Jordan, for the right to access financial services like mortgages, the right to travel, the right to own cars and property, and the right to work in any field without discrimination.
And, of course, the right of return as an inalienable political right. As participants put it: “We want rights, that is what we are demanding” and “Dignity is every human’s right.”
While media framing of refugees as humanitarian subjects of compassion, at best, continues to abound, Palestinian refugees offer important reminders to recognise refugees as political agents with clear demands for justice and recognition who should have “the right to have rights”.
On this World Refugee Day, the voices of Palestinian refugees living in protracted displacement should remind us to celebrate refugees everywhere today and every day.
The views expressed reflect the author’s and are part of an ongoing research agenda on protracted displacement. They are not necessarily the views of IIED.
