Introduction

Sixty-five years have passed since the Nakba, the Palestinian reference to the events and war of 1948 that resulted in the displacement of more than 700,000 Palestinians. Once it became clear that the plight of these refugees could not be rapidly resolved, the United Nations General Assembly in December 1949 created the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) to take over initial relief efforts by local authorities and international non-governmental agencies. From then on, the plight of the Palestinian refugees and UNRWA has been intrinsically linked. To mark the 60th anniversary of UNRWA, the Issam Fares Institute for

Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut (AUB) and UNRWA co-hosted a two-day international conference on 8 and 9 October 2010. The conference explored a number of themes high on the Agency’s agenda as it prepared itself for its seventh decade of operations in a situation where a solution to the plight of the Palestinian refugees remained elusive, with little prospect for progress. The substantive and strategic impetus of the conference’s focus was a review of some of the main themes being studied by UNRWA at the time relating to the future of the refugee question and the Agency. The conference programme was developed around those aspects of UNRWA’s activities that most heavily bear on the Agency’s standing to contribute to durable solutions for the refugees – developmental services, protection, governance, participation, camp improvement and the political horizon. Not surprisingly, a number of these themes also feature prominently in the Agency’s Medium-Term Strategy for 2010-15 (UNRWA, 2010). The chapters in this book are updated versions of many of the papers presented

during the conference, complemented with several others. The book is divided in six parts: I: Meeting Challenges in Programmes and Service Delivery; II: Protection: from Concept to Practice; III: Governance: the Camps and UNRWA; IV: Civic Participation and Community Engagement; V: Camp Improvement/ Reconstruction and Community Development; and VI: Palestinian Refugees and Durable Solutions: a Role for UNRWA. Together they explore how UNRWA has been adapting since the turn of the century, when the outbreak of the second Intifada led to the realization that the optimism and subsequent

planning for a wind-down of the Agency generated by the Oslo peace process had been premature, and that the Agency’s continued existence would be required for the years to come. A number of innovations and reforms discussed in the book were triggered at an earlier conference in Geneva in 2004, co-hosted by the Swiss Government and UNRWA. The book highlights the many and varied challenges that UNRWA faces.

Some of these are internal to the organization, such as the persistent budget deficits, which hamper the Agency’s drive to raise the quality of its services, and the challenge to sustain the momentum for reform. Other impediments relate to the context of occupation, conflict, and an absence of human rights for Palestinians. These include uncertainties about the peace process, the blockade in Gaza, the closure regime in the West Bank and, most recently, the outbreak of conflict in Syria. The latter is a stark reminder of the vulnerability of the Palestinian refugees

and UNRWA in the face of external developments. At the time of the 2010 conference, no one could predict that six months later the decades-long stable and favourable living conditions that Palestinian refugees had enjoyed in Syria would radically change, not only dramatically affecting their safety and security, but also causing a renewed displacement of both Syrians and Palestinians at an unprecedented scale. With these latest developments, Palestinian refugees in all of UNRWA’s five ‘Fields’ of operations – the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria – have had to cope with armed conflict and secondary displacement at some point in time during their exile, in addition to the challenges associated with their original flight, including dispossession and statelessness. UNRWA and its relationship with the Palestinian refugees is a rich source

for academic enquiry and yet the literature on the Agency is very limited. Aside from a special edition ofRefugee Survey Quarterly (Bocco and Takkenberg, 2009) and the catalogue of a recent exhibition on camp improvement (Misselwitz, 2012) most literature on the Agency is dated. The only specific studies on UNRWA look at its history (Altamemi 1974; Prittie 1975; Pilon 1985; Schiff 1995), administrative structure (Buehrig 1971; Dale 1974; Lindsay 2009; Rosenfeld 2009), core programmes (Tamari and Zureik 1996; Blome Jacobsen 2003), and contribution to peace and stability in the Middle East (Forsythe 1971; Perlmutter 1971; Stebbing 1985; Viorst 1989; Schiff 1989; Besson 1997; Husseini 2000; Gottheil 2006). Focusing on some of the key challenges facing the longest lasting case of forced migration in modern history, this book aims to help significantly filling this void. It is hoped that it will contribute to a better understanding of a unique agency and of the centrality of the Palestinian refugee issue for peace-making in the Middle East.