When the Palestinian refugee camp became a “squatter settlement”

Abstract

Palestinian refugees in Amman persistently call what is now a densely built urban environment, a camp (mukhayyam). Officially, however, the camp went from being recognized by Jordanian host authorities to becoming a “squatter settlement” in World Bank projects, all the while remaining non-recognized by the UN body responsible for Palestine refugees. This article uncovers how sustained humanitarian non-recognition ushered in a language of “informality” that justified demolition and displacement as vehicle for development. In locating this lexical shift in the 1980s and 1990s, this article exposes a new form of epistemic and spatial dispossession brought upon the Palestinians. In calling into question acts of classification, this article historicizes how and why the refugee camp component of the question of Palestine became submerged under “informality.” At the same time, attuned to a Palestinian spatial vocabulary and grammar, this article reveals how the mukhayyam remained resistant to the forces that did not recognize its legitimacy and those that sought to informalize it. It is in this sense that the camp, as a broader encompassing Palestinian vocabulary, has a radical currency.

1. Introduction

Amid one of the most impoverished and densely populated neighborhoods of Amman, a Palestinian refugee camp exists, but not for everyone, nor every time. As a direct result of the ethnic cleansing and obliteration of the Palestinian village of al-Dawayima in October 1948, Palestinian survivors of the massacre sought refuge in Amman. They set up a tent encampment on the city’s edges. Before long, they turned tents into houses. To this day, seventy-plus years later, Palestinians have persistently called what is now a densely built urban environment, a camp (Arabic: mukhayyam). After all, to them, the camp is the direct architectural historical product of the Nakba and their exile from al-Dawayima. Officially, however, the camp went from being recognized as a camp and recorded as such in state archives in the 1950s to becoming a “squatter settlement” in World Bank-funded development projects in the 1990s, all the while remaining non-recognized by the only remaining United Nations body charged with specific responsibility toward Palestine refugees, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). And yet, as we will see, through a continued spatial and linguistic presence, the mukhayyam remained resistant to the forces that did not recognize its legitimacy and those that sought to informalize it to fulfill developmental imaginaries.

This article examines how and why a refugee camp could be called “informal” even though, in many situations, the camp was/is formally recognized, and, perhaps even more importantly, Palestinian refugees continue to inhabit the camp and claim it as a category of existence. Unsurprisingly, non-recognized camps have been subject to little research compared to recognized refugee camps, about which considerable literature exists. If studied at all, such camps are typically comprehended through the lens of “informality,” thereby accepting UNRWA’s taxonomy and reproducing developmental terminology that not only denies Palestine and the Palestinians’ presence in the record, as Said (1980) noted long ago, but that can be applied to spatial discourses and architectural interventions that have the power to legislate camp demolition. In other words, humanitarian borders become epistemological boundaries. This article calls into question localized acts of classification by making the process of such localization visible. At the same time, it reveals contradictory naming practices by staying attuned to a Palestinian vocabulary and grammar of inhabitation that emerges from camp-life. In so doing, we can begin to understand the political implications of when the refugee camp component of the question of Palestine became submerged under the name “squatter settlement,” as the title suggests.

2. What’s in a name?

Since at least the late nineteenth century, camps have permeated our modern world: military camps, famine camps, concentration camps, internment camps, and more. In its refugee form, the camp arrived in the Arab Eastern Mediterranean with the Armenian and Assyrian Genocides during and after the First World War (Watenpaugh 2014; White 2023). Before long, the refugee camp would appear again, this time as a direct result of the Nakba. While the Zionist settler colonial project began mobilizing camps as a spatial device to colonize Palestine as early as the early 1900s (Katz 2022), it was only after the expulsion of nearly two-thirds of the native population of Palestine between 1947 and 1949 that Zionism produced its “irreducible double”: the Palestinian refugee camp (Abourahme 2020).

It is unclear how many camps existed prior to UNRWA’s establishment in 1949. What we do know, however, is that refugees and NGOs operating prior to UNRWA set up tent camps. Some were near borders where refugees had gathered waiting for return, while others were near or adjacent to cities. In other cases, previous Armenian refugee camps and military barracks were reused (Plascov 2017; Al Husseini 2010; Berg 2023). Upon its establishment, “the Agency” (al-wikala), as it is referred to colloquially, took over the administration of camps. During the 1950s, the Agency formalized and spatially regulated existing camps, replacing tents with shelter units and providing services within them (Al Husseini 2010; Berg 2023; Abourahme 2025). It also set out to build entirely new camps. In what could be called a period of formalization, recognition, and exchanging tents for cement shelters, a camp was defined as: “A concentration of refugees and displaced persons which has been recognized by UNRWA as an official camp, which is operated by the Agency and has, in particular, a camp leader and environmental sanitation services provided by the Agency” (Berg 2023). Tent encampments and reused camps, in other words, became UNRWA camps.

Who established the camp did not necessarily condition UNRWA’s recognition. However, as this article will show, recognition did not extend to all camps, particularly those entirely built by Palestinian refugees. For years, host governments and UNRWA would enter intense negotiations over the issue (Feldman 2012; Berg 2023). The Jordanian government, for instance, wanted all camps officially recognized and operated by the Agency. While for UNRWA, recognition entailed increased costs and responsibilities. And, at least until 1969, this was the logical ground for nonrecognition (Berg 2023). These negotiations eventually produced Palestinian refugee camps with varying degrees of recognition: fully recognized “official” camps and partially recognized “unofficial” camps. As this spatio-legal process of differentiation proceeded, the non-recognized camp was a byproduct (rather than a predetermined or actual category) of sustained humanitarian nonrecognition. Over the coming decades, the Agency would repeatedly shrink the group of Palestinian refugees it aided and the number of services it provided in camps (Al Husseini 2010; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2018). In Jordan today, there are ten “official” camps, three “unofficial” camps (as referred to on UNRWA’s website), and at least eight non-recognized camps (see Fig. 1). Unofficial camps are also known as Department of Palestinian Affairs (DPA) camps.

After Israel’s 1967 occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, which produced a second round of expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and the prevention of their return, UNRWA established six new camps in Jordan. Not long after this expanded colonization, the Agency’s role toward the camps would shift from a powerful position of humanitarian governance to withdrawal (Berg 2023). No new official camps would be constructed or, for that matter, recognized after 1967. This shift can be located within the Palestinian revolutionary period (from 1968, the year of the Battle of Karameh, which combined the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) forces and the Jordanian army, and 1982, the year of the PLO’s expulsion from Beirut under Israel’s military pressure), Lebanon’s and Jordan’s camps became “revolutionary spaces” where encamped refugees would be transformed into fedayeen fighters that would end refugee camp-life by liberating Palestine (Abourahme 2025). Palestinian revolutionary politics would be brutally crushed in September 1970, when the Jordanian army sought to disarm Palestinian camps and put a brutal end to the guerrilla groups (Sayigh 2000). From 1969 onwards (the year of the Cairo Agreement when the PLO assumed control of Lebanon’s camps), UNRWA no longer operated, formalized, or built camps. Instead, as Berg (2023: 86) makes clear, the Agency emphasized its responsibilities in and toward camps as “limited,” only providing “services,” and that it does not “own, administer or police the camps, as this is the responsibility of the host authorities.” In this period, the Agency would also wind up rethinking the name. As Abourahme (2025: 12) writes, “Agency administrators would spend months if not years haggling over what to rename the camps so as to delimit the organization’s liability and responsibility over them (while maintaining an ambiguous form of authority): ‘settlements’, ‘living quarters’, ‘towns’, ‘encampments’ (as if that gets very far) all came and went as suggestions, until they realized ‘camp’ wasn’t going to budge.” Although the name camp remained, in terms of governance, camps were no longer UNRWA camps; they became just refugee camps (Berg 2023).

During the revolutionary years, Arab host countries and Israeli-backed militias would clamp down on “real or alleged resistance in camps” (Berg 2023). In Palestine, Israel would seek to “undo” Palestinian refugee camps altogether and, with it, the possibility of return (Abourahme 2025). The destruction of Palestinian refugee camps continues to this very day for the same reasons. Gaza’s refugee camps are rubble from Israel’s current and ongoing genocide of Palestinians. In West Bank refugee camps, house demolitions and clamp down on resistance have only intensified in the past year, as well. And while it remains to be studied whether non-recognized camps were also the target of such destruction and elimination, what we do know is that, during the Syrian civil war, “unofficial” camps such as Ein El Tal and Yarmouk have suffered significant shelling, destruction, and massive population displacement (Gabiam 2016). What we also know is that in November 2024, the Jordanian government initiated another round of demolitions in the non-recognized camp of Marka camp and took over parts of the camp’s land (Encyclopedia of Palestinian Camps). Unlike Syria and Lebanon, where Palestinians were kept stateless to preserve the Palestinian right of return (haq al-‘awda), the Jordanian government’s position was to grant Palestinians (except Gazans) Jordanian nationality. In Jordan, the number of Jordanian nationals of Palestinian origin is so high that some estimates have placed the number at approximately 50 percent. Thus, adding confusing demographic statistics to camp destruction. Given the very real possibility of destruction and disappearance and the near impossibility of UNRWA reconstruction in unofficial and non-recognized camps, I would argue that the stakes of academic research on non-recognized camps are quite high. As Berg (2022) has argued, there is an urgent need to historicize disappeared camps and, I add, unrecognized camps as “one small piece” of a more comprehensive history of Palestinian refugee camps.

Of course, notwithstanding UNRWA’s authority over camp recognition, there are other sources of empirical knowledge on Palestinian camps. The Palestinian team of the Encyclopedia of Palestinian Camps, for example, has built a digital archive of Palestinian refugee camps that includes (rather than excludes) camps in their entirety: official, unofficial, non-recognized, and demolished. News outlets have also reported on the issue of non-recognized Palestinian camps (e.g. AlJazeera 2010).

Nonetheless, UNRWA’s nonrecognition resulted in non-recognized camps eventually acquiring a new name: “squatter settlements” (sakan ’ashwai). This new name removed all traces of Palestine. Instead, using a term from the developmental lexicon resuscitated old and dangerous nomenclature about poor people (Gilbert 2007). In locating this lexical shift toward strictly “informal” settlements in the 1980s and 1990s, this article exposes a new form of epistemic and spatial dispossession brought upon the Palestinians. Ushering the language of “informality” served to justify demolition and displacement as a spatial vehicle for achieving developmental aims. When the Palestinian refugee camp becomes a “squatter settlement”, as the title suggests, reveals how the international order’s reduction of the Palestinian refugee problem from a “political issue” to a “humanitarian one” (Imseis 2021) coupled with UNRWA’s failure to recognize all camps, created the conditions of possibility for the question of non-recognized Palestinian refugee camps to be abandoned altogether, in favor of a generic problem of “informality”. In Agamben’s terms (1998), the international system has effectively rendered non-recognized camps as “spaces of exception” where the rights and protections afforded to Palestinians are denied. The non-recognized camp is the product of an “abandonment”.

And yet, the name camp (al-mukhayyam) remains. Over the seventy-plus years of their existence, despite drastic architectural, demographic, infrastructural, and socioeconomic changes and against changing names, the name mukhayyam remained resistant to the forces that did not recognize its legitimacy and those that sought to informalize it. The name is a repository of Palestinian refugee camp histories: as direct spatial products of the Nakba, as sites of revolutionary struggle, as symbols and placeholders for villages of origin (Khalili 2004), and as an “icon of the nation” (Farah 2009), to name but a few. And as the Palestinian geographer Salman Abu Sitta has made clear, time and again, Palestinians preserve place names because they are the vocabulary of Palestinian social and political history (Sitta 2016: 273). Unsurprisingly, then, al-mukhayyam has become an essential component of the spatial vocabulary of Palestinians. And there is no reason to believe that the name will fade away anytime soon “as long as the political events that produced them (read camps) remain historically open” (Abourahme 2025: 12–13). In this insistence on the camp (as camp and not settlement or neighborhood) persists a set of claims to a more spatially just present and a decolonial future––that we need to consider more seriously, intellectually and politically. In short, what’s in a name is the possibility of a “radical re-conceptualization” (Misselwitz and Hanafi 2009) of what a refugee camp is and what it does.

3. What is a refugee camp? What does a refugee camp do?

To begin to understand the non-recognized Palestinian refugee camp, I follow Simon Turner’s (2016) and Camillo Boano’s (2020) calls to think of “what a camp is”, as well as “what a camp does”. The ambiguity of non-recognized Palestinian refugee camps means that potentially revealing questions can be asked about how recognition is determined, who has the power to declare the exception, and around variations in recognition. To address these questions, I draw on Nina Caspersen’s (2015) “degrees of legitimacy” while attending to legitimacy as continually in production and as something that proceeds from a way of being (Feldman 2015; Jeffrey et al. 2015). What I shall call “degrees of recognition” reveals the contours of humanitarian thinking about “what a camp is,” “what it can be,” and “what constitutes it” (Misselwitz and Hanafi 2009; Feldman 2015). Focusing on how degrees of recognition take form, that is, how they manifest in the built environment, this article expands refugee studies debates on recognition and legitimacy in a more deliberate spatial dimension.

In a recent article, Berg (2022) demonstrated how, in the face of “informal” camp demolition and relocation to an “official” UNRWA camp, Palestinian refugees in Jerusalem hold onto the “informal” camp. In this refusal, Berg argues, lies a claim to camp history in the face of disappearance. Linking “squatting” to the camp echoes Sanyal’s (2011) earlier observation that Palestinians in the “official” UNRWA camps of Lebanon have used covert building acts to articulate an “insurgent Palestinian nationalism” in the face of periodic Israeli bombardments, UNRWA budget cuts, and host government hostility. As we shall see, Palestinians view non-recognized camp-life as having political effects, comparable to what Gabiam (2016) has called a “politics of suffering”, whereby Palestinians in Syria’s “official” and “unofficial” camps reposition urban development schemes within a vision of development that does not ignore Palestinian camp history nor compromise claims of redress linked to the Nakba. As we shall see, Palestinians contest “informality” by repositioning “camp-life” [hyphenated, as Boano (2020) has stressed, to emphasize the inseparability of camp and its life form] inside a “legitimate political realm” (Ramadan 2013). This political realm includes the present city and a claim to future Palestine.

In a post “exception” trajectory in camp studies, Boano (2020) notes that the camp endures in “inhabitable conditions”, in living with and acting upon one’s spatial conditions in relation to a “collective existence” and a “possible future.” Boano’s thinking of inhabitation as a possibility of life and of new definitions echoes Abourahme’s (2020) conclusion that in the Palestinian camp, acts of inhabitation “push the domestic up” against “the authority of supranational humanitarian power” and “the colonial injunction to forget and move on.” This article builds on these thinkings about inhabitation, offering a view of a “camp-life” that is not a simple fact of building an abode but a relationship with space, time, and language through which the camp is claimed as a category of Palestinian existence. So, an answer to “what the camp does,” therefore, is that the camp refuses, contests, and repositions the boundaries of UN-centric views of recognition.

4. A brief note on method and positionality

How does one research the camp when it appears in one register only to disappear in another? My engagement in Muhammad Amin Camp began in 2012 as a Jordanian architect working with an architectural NGO. In collaboration with the community, we approached the camp as a camp and proceeded to map its built environment and social spaces to counter its invisibility in official maps. My academic research continued with a similar impetus: take the camp seriously, not as an object of analysis but as an epistemic and ontological site of inquiry. This involved thinking about the camp as a site from which to retrieve a history that stands “against citational erasure” (Qato 2019). I attempted, therefore, to retrieve the camp from archives, sites, and people outside UNRWA centers, moving from the personal archives of camp residents to the archives of various host-state entities and back. This movement on the margins was conceived as a move against the archive of humanitarian organizations as the stable center from which to retrieve the camp.

My positionality as a Jordanian architect and an academic in a Western university afforded me the position of a professional “insider” and welcome “outsider”. For instance, to understand the episteme of the “squatter settlement” development project, I conducted archival research in government archives, which involved readings of the governmental records of housing projects on the brink of getting sent to the paper shredder. I also read World Bank reports, analyzed aerial maps and architectural plans, and conducted semi-structured interviews with architects and engineers who have worked on the project. My interviews focused on the distinctions between the categories of “refugee camp” and “squatter settlement” and on understanding “what happened” before, during, and after the project’s completion. As these archives, architects, and engineers evinced, it was not epistemic clarity but epistemic uncertainty that generated debates, paper trails, and architectural visions that themselves were confused about their classifications.

Inside the camp, as a Jordanian woman married to a Palestinian-Jordanian whose family originates from Beit Jibrin, one of the ethnically cleansed villages of the hills al-Khalil (Hebron), a Palestinian village that once stood near the village from which Muhammad Amin Camp inhabitants originate, I found myself to be welcomed as an “insider” in camp homes, among camp women, and seen as someone who will write with a commitment to Palestine and the Palestinians. Nevertheless, despite the trust the Palestinian families gave me, I was also an uncomfortable “outsider” to the dispossession camp-life entails by reason of my middle-class background and my living in the wealthier neighborhoods of West Amman.

5. Degrees and forms of recognition

One day, during a meeting, the Director General of the Department of Palestinian Affairs (DPA), Eng. Khirfan, when asked about the history of “unofficial” camps, told me how the Jordanian government and UNRWA got into conflict over the issue of recognition. The Jordanian government wanted all camps to be recognized and eligible for the whole gamut of UNRWA services and protections, while UNRWA did not.¹ This divergence in positions is evidenced, for instance, in how Muhammad Amin Camp was called a camp by DPA engineers and recorded as such in DPA’s archives (El-Abed 2015). To my surprise, however, when asked whether DPA recognizes Muhammad Amin Camp, Eng. Khirfan carefully answered that such camps are now considered ’ashwa’iyat (squatter settlements) and, therefore, not recognized. Then, when I pointed out that scholars have documented that the camp was recorded as a camp in DPA’s archives of the 1950s, he said he had no knowledge of the fact, pointing out that DPA is the heir of several government institutions. The Department, he informed me orally and showed me digitally, went from operating under the Ministry of Refugees in 1949 to the Ministry of Construction and Restoration (1950–80), then to the Ministry of the Occupied Land Affairs (1980–88), and finally to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1988-present). In this recursive institutional profile, Eng. Khirfan rationalizes the plausibility of the erasure of some camps from DPA memory and his non-knowledge of a historical fact to a matter of institutional location. Another day, in a far less formal meeting, a contradictory official position regarding camp recognition emerged. In a coffee shop meeting with the former Minister of Transport and former Secretary General of Great Amman Municipality, Eng. Masri told me that irrespective of UNRWA recognition, throughout the time of his work at the municipality, his team and he referred to Muhammad Amin Camp as “mukhayyam,” going on to say, “For us, it is a camp.”² These two contradictory statements emerged as two instances of an official spectrum of recognition––from one that reduces the Palestinian refugee camp to a humanitarian or informal condition, legitimating the status quo, to a more critical position that does not bow to and openly challenges imposed categories.

In stark contrast to contradictory official statements, there is a consensus within the camp regarding recognition. According to the camp’s mukhtar (chief) and camp elders, the earliest houses were built as a direct outcome of the Nakba. The Palestinian families that first set up a tent encampment on the empty slopes of Jabal al-Nathif (one of the many hills surrounding Amman’s central valley) were peasants from al-Dawayima, one of the ethnically cleansed and completely obliterated villages in the hills that surround the Palestinian city of al-Khalil (Hebron). These refugees were the survivors of the larger but less known al-Dawayima massacre that was perpetrated on 29 October 1948 by Zionist gangs that became Israel’s armed forces (Abu Sitta and Saah 2023). As a matter of documentation, most of the inhabitants I interviewed were from al-Dawayima clans and families.

In 1955, UNRWA established Amman New Camp, referred to colloquially and simply as Wihdat, in direct reference to its barrack unites (Arabic: wihdat; Al Husseini 2013). Wihdat is one of the very few camps that UNRWA established from scratch. Soon, UNRWA and DPA would ask refugees in the Jabal al-Nathif encampment to move to the new camp. Wihdat camp was planned to receive those refugees “squatting” in Amman (i.e. tent encampments, caves, disused buildings, and quarters such as Wadi al Sir; see Jaber 2006). The Jordanian government had a vested interest in the relocation: it considered “squatters” a threat to the city. In the 1950s and 1960s, as Berg (2023: 75) shows, the government repeatedly requested UNRWA to build official camps to resolve the refugee “squatter” problem. During conversations, camp elders recounted the reasons they chose to stay. First was the built environment. During these five-plus years, Palestinians had begun building houses using more permanent and durable materials such as bricks and cement. As one elder put it: “We had already built houses.”³ Plus, people did not perceive tents and barrack unit camps as reason enough for moving. The second was location. Jabal al-Nathif was strategically located, within walking distance of the central suq, near main roads, bus lines, and a water source (Ras al-Ayn was down the hillside), while Wihdat was perceived as remote.

Given the refugees’ decision to stay, the Jordanian government sought to recognize the camp, but to no avail. Despite this failure, the state did not lead any evictions for almost a decade, nor had the landowner filed complaints. Camp building, therefore, continued. This would change, however, in 1962 when the landowner, Hajj Muhammad Amin Habjoka, filed a complaint.⁴ Based on that, the state took action, declaring its intent to evacuate and demolish the camp, whose population, at the time, according to Habjoka’s family, consisted of “sixty-six Palestinian refugee families.”⁵ According to Mukhtar’s chronicle, camp inhabitants contested this decision by writing a letter to King Hussein. In response, the Minister of Construction and Restoration (under which DPA was housed), in a perhaps dissenting voice, wrote a letter to the Minister of Justice pleading for the police to stop terrorizing the Palestinians. Later that year, the Mukhtar said, the state gave an order to provide the camp with electricity.⁶ Then, in 1965, despite UNRWA’s nonrecognition, DPA temporarily expropriated Hajj Muhammad Amin’s 87-dunam land plot (8.7 hectares).⁷ In light of this account, it is not surprising that Oroub El-Abed, in her study of Palestinian refugees, writes, “An engineer who used to work at the DPA, Tahseen Barkawi, reported the hillside of Jabal al-Nadheef used to be known as Mohammed Amin Camp in the 1950s and that this is reflected in records in the DPA archives” (El-Abed 2015: 72).

Having been acknowledged as a material presence, the Palestinian refugee camp on Muhammad Amin’s land had categorically entered formal local governance. Since the 1960s, a mukhtar has been regularly appointed as the camp’s representative. As quasi-governmental employees in the Ministry of Interior, camp mukhtars are responsible for dealing with external governmental authorities and for settling conflicts between camp residents (for mukhtars in Lebanon’s camps, see Hanafi and Long 2010). Over the years, as camp representatives, mukhtars have negotiated with public authorities the inhabitation needs of the dwellers of Muhammad Amin Camp, such as infrastructure and waste management. The practice of appointing camp mukhtars applies to all Palestinian camps regardless of their status, thus shedding light on the inclusion of non-recognized camps in political and urban governance structures. What’s also important here is how the governmental practice of appointing mukhtars brought legitimacy to the camp.

On the everyday level, perceived recognition of the camp as a legitimate space had spatial effects: continued construction, made easier by state-sanctioned municipal connections to water and electricity. Like other camps and neighborhoods in the ever-growing city, refugees engaged the hills to create the built form of what came to be known as Muhammad Amin Camp, named after the landowner. Then, to accommodate growing families and a new influx of twice-displaced Palestinians after the 1967 Israeli occupation, camp inhabitants began to convert open spaces, including those used for gardening, to build houses nestled between the hill’s topography. And, as land supply began to dwindle, people started to expand vertically. Like other hillsides in Amman, the hillside of Muhammad Amin Camp allowed for a particular aesthetic, with houses mounted on top of one another. By the early 1970s, the hillside was fully built with multistorey brick and cement houses. Today, no traces of land or greenery remain amid the densely built camp (aerial photographs and panoramic views of the camp illustrate this spatial historical transformation; see Figs 2 and 3).

While conducting fieldwork, I was struck by the linguistic significance of the camp for Palestinians living in Amman’s non-recognized camps and how names etch the geography of place and the history of people. Palestinians use mukhayyam to refer to location or particular architectural and geographic features (e.g. Jofa Camp, Mahatta Camp, Nuzha Camp) or to honor people, in the case of Muhammad Amin Camp, taking the name of the landowner. Such names pop up in everyday spatial discourses (e.g. oral histories of camp building and as referents in direction-giving) or in personal documents and paperwork. For example, the inhabitants of the Muhammad Amin Camp record the camp’s name in state-authorized property documents (Alnajada 2023). In the past decade, the descendants of Hajj Muhammad Amin have taken their case to court. Their attorneys filed lawsuits against the government (not camp residents), basing their case on the built presence of a Palestinian refugee camp on privately owned property.⁸ In the sense of language, it could be argued that the name mukhayyam itself is an ongoing, ever-shifting contestation over recognition between residents, the landowner, and the state. Such naming practices showcase the discursive and performative function of words and names in the face of sustained humanitarian nonrecognition.

However, UNRWA’s authority over recognition exuded its effects on camps, which were as much architectural as social. Today in Wihdat, for example, schools, field offices, and clinics are decorated with distinct blue signs that display UNRWA’s logo. You find a similar built environment in unofficial DPA camps in Amman, such as al-Nasr (also known as Prince Hassan). While you will not encounter UNRWA field offices or clinics, you will find UNRWA schools. You will also see a DPA camp services office and probably notice the proliferation of government signs that carry the names of the camp and DPA beneath the emblem of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. By comparison, in Muhammad Amin Camp, while the built environment is similar to the point of indistinguishability, there are no UNRWA motifs or official name signs. And yet, still, there is a Palestinian refugee camp. Words such as Filastin, mukhayyam, and al-Dawayme (in reference to clan name and origin village) ornament the concrete walls of the camp. So do graffiti of the Palestinian flag, Handala, and maps of historic Palestine.

UNRWA’s withdrawal from camps since 1969 eventually resulted in their long-term urban marginalization (Al Husseini 2010; Berg 2023). And, as we will see next, marginalization manifests not only in the absence of humanitarian services and waning governmental services but also in classifications that would ultimately lead to the lumping of non-recognized refugee camps under the general rubric of “informality.” Between the 1980s and early 2000s, Muhammad Amin Camp became part of the broad catch-all term of “squatter settlement,” further stripped of its Palestinianess.

6. When Muhammad Amin Camp became a “squatter settlement”

In the late 1970s, Jordan became the first country in the Middle East to follow the developmental ideology instigated by the World Bank in South America, Africa, and Asia (Al-Daly 1999). Faced with growing pressures to reconcile the presence of Palestinian refugees with World Bank requirements, various entities of the state abided by UNRWA’s taxonomy of camps, accepting and reproducing such words as “slums,” “squatter settlements,” and “informal settlements.” One example is the 1980 East-Wihdat Upgrading Program, which received the prestigious Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 1992. East-Wihdat is a Palestinian refugee camp that grew out of Wihdat Camp but that would not receive recognition and thus became a “squatter settlement” for development aid purposes (Ababsa 2012). This shift toward adopting developmental imaginaries would continue. In 1999, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan received a 30-million-dollar loan from the World Bank, other development agencies, and donors to support infrastructure upgrading in “refugee camps” and “squatter settlements” in Jordan (World Bank 2004). The Housing and Urban Development Corporation (HUDC) was selected as the local implementing agency because of its success in the 1980 East-Wihdat “Upgrading Program”. HUDC, a public agency under the Ministry of Public Works and Housing, identified thirteen “refugee camps” and fourteen “squatter settlements” to develop. “Refugee camps” were only those recognized by UNRWA, a category that included UNRWA and DPA camps. Non-recognized camps, therefore, fell under the category “squatter settlements” (Arabic: sakan ’ashwai).

The project’s premise was simple and went something like this: the selected sites were deprived of infrastructure, property rights, and municipal services because of the temporary, order-less, and lawless way its poor dwellers (Palestinian refugees or not) had built their houses and livelihoods. According to World Bank criteria, these physical and socio-legal characteristics are a symptom of poverty. The solution, it follows, lies in upgrading physical infrastructure (i.e., roads, water and electricity supply networks, drainage, waste disposal) and social infrastructure through institutional training programs. The project will benefit not only the poor dwellers but also their “less developed” poor countries. Within such a problem, context and history have been ignored in favor of technical, apolitical solutions to the external signs of “Third World” underdevelopment (Ferguson 1994).

The project was written and understood through the language of “informality.” The words Palestine or Palestinian do not appear once in the numerous reports, studies, architectural plans, and maps comprising the project’s archive. (Unless we consider the inclusion of DPA’s full name a Palestinian appearance.) Consider this: the term “refugee camp” appears forty times in one World Bank report, and not once are these camps identified as Palestinian. Even the well-known acronym UNRWA, when stated fully, is written as “United Nations Relief Works Agency” instead of its correct full name, “United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East” (World Bank 2004: 2). What happened to non-recognized camps? They were named after their locations. Muhammad Amin Camp was generically called “Al Natheef.” In HUDC documents, “Al Natheef” was identified as eighty-seven Dunums, corresponding to the area of Muhammad Amin’s land plot discussed earlier and not the neighborhood of Al Natheef, which is at least six times larger (see Fig. 4). While the name Muhammad Amin Camp carries within it a recognition of the Palestinian inhabitants and the landowner, “Al Natheef” dismisses both. This language depoliticizes, deliberately ignoring the conditions of colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and dispossession, which created this “poverty.” In this spatial and linguistic erasure, it is difficult not to conclude that this project acts as what anthropologist James Ferguson (1994) once called “anti-politics machine.” In a depoliticization comparable to that Ferguson identified in Lesotho, the World Bank-funded project in Muhammad Amin Camp ignores historical and political realities while performing its own political operation of denying Palestinian refugees their camps. “Al Natheef” has precisely that effect. Ignoring actual names makes it easier to lump a non-recognized camp with various highly diverse areas and grossly misrepresent it as a single unit of analysis. Whereby a “squatter settlement” is a marker of underdevelopment and not marked by sustained humanitarian nonrecognition and long-term urban marginalization, of which the effect was urban poverty in and around Palestinian camps (Hejoj 2007; Ababsa 2012). It is difficult, here, not to echo Edward Said’s conclusion as to how Palestinians are denied presence in the record: “As with most of the other matters in the question of Palestine, we need to connect things with each other, and see them, not as they are hidden […] but as they are ignored or denied” (Said 1980: 46).

The architectural plan below is HUDC’s development scheme for Muhammad Amin Camp (see Fig. 5). The main goal was to upgrade housing conditions by solving transport problems. The said objective of providing paved streets and vehicular accessibility served to justify demolition; houses were entirely or partially demolished, and alleyways torn down. In their place, three new streets were created, paved with asphalt and edged with concrete sidewalks. Over 100 housing units were demolished (see Fig. 6a and b). Families were bought out of their homes. As one of the architects who worked on the project told me when asked about HUDC’s approach to design and implementation: “In refugee camps,” she said, “Interventions were minimal. We could not widen streets more than a meter. Whereas in squatter settlements, we could demolish houses to open streets.” When I asked about the rationale for such restrictions to demolition, the architect answered: “Because of the dangers of Palestinian resettlement (tawteen) and the loss of their right to return (haq al-‘awda).”⁹ So, in the realm of World Bank-funded development, the architects, planners, engineers, and social scientists rationalized the preservation of a humanitarian definition of refugee camps, i.e. temporariness (Oesch 2018), poor physical conditions (Al Husseini 2010), and abject need (Feldman 2015), presumably because such physical conditions will presumably preserve the Palestinian right of return (Al-Daly 1999). As a result, in “refugee camps,” streets were left untouched; houses were not demolished; only the most dilapidated ones were rehabilitated, wherein renovations were limited to a single room, kitchen, or bathroom (Al Husseini 2010). Then, unseeing a Palestinian reality, demolition, and displacement became acceptable tools of development. Demolition, in other words, was only possible because the Palestinian refugee camp became a “squatter settlement.”

Local architects and engineers unsaw political realities by bowing to and accepting catch-all terms. This internationally “sanctioned ignorance” (Roy 2011) justified design interventions, quite literally, founded on house demolitions, initiating another process of Palestinian displacement and dispossession. Thus, a street in a non-recognized camp is not simply a passage for traffic. It embodies a principle of architecture and urban planning predicated on the camp’s disappearance through its conversion into a “squatter settlement.” Through this register shift, “demolition” and “compensation” become part of the lexicon used to describe, arbitrate, and intervene in the built environment with a palpable hostility (World Bank 2004: 34). Of course, demolition as a “solution” only added to the problem. In Muhammad Amin Camp, overcrowding only intensified–– as architects and scholars have warned since the late 1960s. However, “sanctioned ignorance” could not sublate realities. Engineers and government accountants operating at the level of implementation, that is to say, below that of “design,” were re-confronted with the camp. To calculate compensation for house demolition, they had to accept hujja property documents that identified “Muhammad Amin Camp” as the location of such intervention (Ababsa 2012; Alnajada 2023). On the ground, the “squatter settlement” emerges as an unstable category, challenged by the camp, as-built form and inhabited place. In such a situation, technocratic projects and their grand teleological narratives of development are re-inscribed with other forms of recognition, reorganized by the vocabulary and grammar of the camp. As we will see next, this complex history of negotiation and contestation, a good deal of which remains undisclosed in HUDC archives and memories, is itself facing disappearance.

7. The lexicon of “informality” and the repositioning of camp life

Today, the project’s folders stand mounted on top of one another on one bookshelf in an otherwise empty room. This room, I was told, used to be the office of the project’s director. None of the engineers, architects, and accountants who worked on the project remain. While rummaging through the archive, a HUDC architect told me: “The whole department has disappeared. We no longer work in refugee camps or squatter settlements. All our housing projects are commercial now.” Another employee followed, saying, “Well, at least someone will look at these folders before they are sent for shredding.”¹⁰ While the project is set to disappear materially, it continues to exert its influence discursively, living on as an authoritative reference for faulty and slippery classifications. For example, in a 2010 report written by a French “expert,” the author first categorized Muhammad Amin Camp as an “unofficial camp,” then using World Bank and HUDC reports as a reference, identified it as a “squatter area,” then finally, zooming out to a different scale, homogenized the whole of Jabal al Nathif as an “urban informal popular neighborhood of East Amman” (Chatagnon 2010). The “idiom of informality” (Roy 2009) and its local HUDC archive have also structured the knowledge produced by local scholars (e.g. Abed, Tomah, and Dumour 2015). As we have seen, the “squatter settlement” also lives on in official DPA statements. In all these accounts, the lexicon of “informality” is sustained and reproduced. In none has the category itself been critiqued or openly challenged.

Two decades after the completion of the project, the inhabitants of Muhammad Amin Camp use the ruins of demolition to contemplate camp-life. As one of my interlocutors showed me around her house, she directed me to a window, saying: “See, this was our neighbor’s bathroom.” I looked to see the remains of pink ceramic tiles that still decorated the building façade (see Fig. 7). She then said, “They demolished the house next door. They compensated them. Our neighbors moved out and bought a house. Some people got as high as 60,000 dinars. Now they live in al-Yadouda. We tried to convince them to demolish our house.” Then, she exclaimed, “They rested from camp-life (hayat al-mukhayyam)!”¹¹ Her contemplation of the ruins of “squatter settlement” development and of changed lives makes visible the project’s inherent spatial injustice: those outside the intervention area are left without the possibility of becoming propertied, remaining without secure tenure in a camp without recognition. During my fieldwork, I realized inhabitants had contradictory feelings about camp-life: on the one hand, they were building attachments and investing in a particular place and a particular collective claim; on the other hand, inhabitants hoped to leave the camp and the precarious housing conditions that camp-life entails. Echoing other Palestinian camp lives and the “ambiguous desire” (Hanafi and Long 2010) to both preserve multigenerational camp houses as an archive of dispossession and leave camp-life and its dispossession. To return to my interlocutor’s account, while her family may have grown beyond camp politics, embracing a developmentalist narrative of demolition for changed lives, the camp returned to that very account, but this time as a critique of the unfulfilled promises of development.

As we walked through the house, Umm Said excavated a second self from under the ruins of “informality,” taking me to a balcony overlooking the modern street. She told me how, in 2009, she began expanding the house, building two new rooms, in “violation of the street,” she said laughingly (see Fig. 8). Until she saves enough money to finish the expansion, the family uses one room for storage, while the other, oriented toward the south, is used as a sunny balcony, for get-togethers, and for spending time outdoors. A relief, she says, from “al-hashra (cramming, chock-fullness, suffocation) of camp houses.” Here, we see how camp-life can only be endured in a refusal to live in the limited and unjust imagination of a development project. Such a logic of transgression that repositions camp-life within developmental imaginaries can be seen in the self-built swings that adults set up every Eid for the “children of the camp” (Arabic: wlad al-mukhayyam). Rooms, swings, and the words used to describe them reveal the forms through which presence (in and of the camp) is reaffirmed (Fig. 9). Thus, the questions of “What a camp is” and “What it does” return us to the grammar of inhabitation. But it would be a critical mistake to think that the language of development has not intruded upon the vocabulary and grammar of the camp, modifying its meaning and intent.

8. Toward a Palestinian vocabulary and grammar of the camp

By way of conclusion, let us return to the questions of what a camp is and what it does. The mukhayyam challenges not only UN-centric views of recognition and UNRWA authority over camp definition, and not simply the lexicon of “informality,” but also our assumptions about refugee camps. To dismiss the Palestinian vocabulary of the camp not only misses the point of what a camp is and what it does, but it also erases the labor of Palestinians who have thought carefully about their deliberate word choices and who have meticulously built the camp as a form of life in exile under conditions of marginalization and international indifference. Currently, UNRWA defines a Palestinian refugee camp as “a plot of land placed at the disposal of UNRWA by the host government to accommodate Palestine refugees and set up facilities to cater to their needs. Areas not designated as such and are not recognized as camps. However, UNRWA also maintains schools, health centers, and distribution centers in areas outside the recognized camps where Palestine refugees are concentrated, such as Yarmouk, near Damascus” (UNRWA website). What is being advocated here is not the replacement of one violent spatial terminology, the “squatter settlement” in this case, with another, the “refugee camp,” official, unofficial, UNRWA, and whatnot. Instead, this article stresses the need to consider, more seriously, epistemologically and ontologically, the tenacious Palestinian insistence on the name mukhayyam. This deliberate naming is not an issue of representation or a last-ditch attempt at getting recognition when other attempts have failed, as though adding camp names will produce justice for Palestinians in exile. The mukhayyam pushes us to accord with a grammar of inhabitation that meticulously builds and rebuilds camp houses while always insisting on the historical roots of current suffering as part of a historical trajectory of multiple, shifting, contested iterations of the Palestinian struggle.

In the case taken up here, a Palestinian spatial vocabulary emerges from a politics (as opposed to a humanitarian condition) that insists on an inhabitable condition in the present city of refuge and on using this vocabulary more intentionally as a placeholder waiting for return to Palestine. By reinforcing histories of survival after massacre and ethnic cleansing, camp inhabitants reposition the camp inside legitimate broader geopolitics, insisting on claiming Palestine, past and future. Such vocabulary, grammar, and life forms materialize in words and place names, in negotiations and property documents, and in acts of building, expanding, and repairing houses. Such a political modality of living is comparable to thinking about inhabitation (e.g. Simone 2016; Abourahme 2020, 2025; Boano and Astolfo 2020; Lancione 2020). So, what the Palestinian refugee camp does when it becomes a “squatter settlement” is call out the issue of what it is still: a camp that materially endures the effect of ongoing settler colonial dispossession and that cannot be solved as a humanitarian issue nor as an issue of development.

Materially, intellectually, and politically, the “squatter settlement” ends when the camp begins (as we have seen with engineers confronted with the camp). This could be taken further, too. As Abourahme (2025) has argued, the “settler colony” begins and ends with the camp. It remains unsettled because the Palestinian refugee camp keeps the question of return open. In this very real material and political sense, the camp is at the center of the Palestinian question. It is also in this sense that the camp, as a broader encompassing Palestinian vocabulary, has a radical currency as a liberatory, decolonial, and anti-colonial inhabited language of existence against an imposed lexicon.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Mezna Qato and Kjersti Gravelsæter Berg for organizing the 2021 workshop, Camp Histories, for their labors in publishing papers from the workshop and for their engagement with the manuscript, helping me think through the historicization of camps and informalization and the stakes of Palestinian spatial vocabulary. Nasser Abourahme for critical feedback on an earlier version and an insightful discussion on the politics of camp-life. The editors and anonymous reviewers at JRS for their suggestions for its direction and for pushing me to account for terms, concepts, methods, and material I had taken for granted; their contributions improved this article immeasurably.

Conflict of interest. None declared.

Funding

The research for this paper was conducted with grants and funding from the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, Critical Refugee Studies Collective at the University of California, and the Global Metropolitan Studies and Joan E. Draper Architectural History Endowment at the University of California, Berkeley.

References