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Growing Up in a Refugee Camp: Shatila, Jenin, Balata

The key is heavy for something so old. In the camps, grandmothers keep them wrapped in embroidered cloth, or hung on a nail above the door, or tucked inside a cedar box alongside a land deed that no living authority will honour. The key is not a symbol in the camps — or rather, it is a symbol precisely because it is also utterly literal. It opened a door. The door still stands somewhere — in Haifa, in Saffuriyya, in Lydda — or it no longer stands, and the key opens nothing on earth. Either way, it is passed down.

To grow up in a Palestinian refugee camp is to inherit that weight before you inherit anything else.

Three Camps, One Condition

Shatila sits on roughly one square kilometre of south Beirut. UNRWA estimates place the camp’s population at somewhere between 13,000 and 22,000 people — the upper figure frequently cited by camp residents and Lebanese NGOs — compressed into a maze of concrete warrens where electrical wires hang so low and so dense they filter the daylight into something grey and particular. The camp was established in 1949. It has been shelled, besieged, and massacred. Its streets are four feet wide in places. Children play football in the alleyways because there is nowhere else.

Balata, on the eastern edge of Nablus in the occupied West Bank, is described by UNRWA as the most densely populated refugee camp in the West Bank — roughly 30,000 residents in an area of less than half a square kilometre, according to UNRWA’s own camp profile. It was also established in 1950, to absorb Palestinians displaced from Jaffa and the surrounding villages. Balata sits directly adjacent to the ancient ruins of Tell Balata, and its children grow up between one of the oldest continuously inhabited sites in the Levant and one of the newest permanently temporary settlements in the world.

Jenin camp, in the northern West Bank, holds a particular place in recent memory. Established in 1953, it was the site of a major Israeli military incursion in April 2002 during which, according to Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International investigations published that year, dozens of Palestinian civilians were killed and hundreds of homes demolished by Israeli military bulldozers, with some areas left “a field of rubble.” The Palestinian Authority put the number of Palestinian dead at 52; Israel’s figure was lower. The argument over numbers never resolved the smell of the concrete dust.

The UNRWA Card and What It Means

Every child born in Shatila, Balata, or Jenin camp to a registered refugee family is added to the UNRWA registry. The registration card — updated over decades into a computerised system, but still physically documented for millions of families — confers access to UNRWA services: schooling, primary healthcare, emergency food assistance. It also confers something harder to quantify: an official, internationally recognised paper trail of dispossession. The card says, in effect, this family was removed from somewhere else, and has not been resettled, and their case is not closed.

UNRWA currently registers approximately 5.9 million Palestinian refugees across its five fields of operation: Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, and Gaza. The original displaced population from the 1948 war — the Nakba — numbered, by the scholarly consensus reflected in Benny Morris’s work and in Walid Khalidi’s All That Remains, somewhere between 700,000 and 750,000 people. The registration cards now belong to their grandchildren and great-grandchildren. The camps were built as temporary shelter. Shatila is 76 years old.

In Lebanon, the legal situation of camp residents is particularly suffocating. Palestinian refugees in Lebanon are barred by law from owning property and, depending on the period, have faced restrictions on working in dozens of licensed professions. The Lebanese state does not permit UNRWA to build vertically — to construct buildings above a certain height — so when the population grows, the camp grows inward and downward: basements converted to bedrooms, ground floors divided and subdivided. The sky above Shatila is a negotiation between concrete and wire.

What the Children Know

Jean Genet, who lived in Palestinian camps in Jordan and Lebanon in the early 1970s and whose observations were published posthumously in Un Captif Amoureux (translated as Prisoner of Love), wrote of the camps’ peculiar relationship with performance and memory — the way the young absorbed history not as a lesson but as a condition of being. “The Palestinians,” he wrote, “live in a present made entirely of the past.”

That observation appears again and again in the testimonies of camp-raised Palestinians who have written about their childhoods. Mourid Barghouti, in his memoir I Saw Ramallah — required reading in many Palestinian studies courses and cited widely by scholars including Rashid Khalidi — describes the refugee’s relationship to place as one of permanent deferral: you are always from somewhere you cannot reach, always going home to a home that exists in the conditional tense. Barghouti was not raised in a camp, but his description of stateless Palestinian consciousness maps directly onto what camp-raised writers and journalists have described from within the wire and concrete.

In the camps, UNRWA schools run double shifts because there are too many children and too few classrooms. In Balata, UNRWA’s West Bank education figures indicate that camp schools regularly operate at or above capacity. Teachers who have spoken to journalists from +972 Magazine and the Electronic Intifada describe classes of 40 or more students. The curriculum is the Palestinian Authority curriculum, but the context is the camp — which means that a lesson about geography takes place in a room where every child’s family file contains the name of a village that no longer exists or that they cannot visit.

The Keys and the Villages

Walid Khalidi’s All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948, published by the Institute for Palestine Studies, documents 418 villages depopulated during the Nakba. Many of the families in Shatila, Balata, and Jenin camp trace their origins to specific villages in that catalogue: Saffuriyya, Lubya, Kabri, Damun, Ein al-Zeitoun. The village names are sewn into embroidery. They appear in the names of camp neighbourhood committees and cultural associations. They are the first piece of geography a child learns — before the name of the street they actually live on.

The key, in this context, is both inheritance and argument. Israeli law does not recognise Palestinian refugee property rights or a right of return. UN General Assembly Resolution 194, passed in December 1948, affirmed that refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that those choosing not to return should receive compensation. It has been reaffirmed by the General Assembly over 130 times. It has not been implemented.

The grandchildren of 1948 grow up knowing Resolution 194 the way other children know nursery rhymes — by repetition, before full comprehension, as a kind of promise the world made and has not kept.

Density as Policy, Memory as Resistance

The density of the camps is not accidental. In Lebanon it is enforced by law. In the West Bank it is shaped by Israeli movement restrictions — the permit system administered under military law, documented exhaustively by human rights organisations including B’Tselem and HaMoked — that limit where Palestinians can build and move. UNCTAD’s reports on the Palestinian economy have repeatedly identified the fragmentation of Palestinian territory and the restriction of movement as primary drivers of economic underdevelopment. The camp is not merely a place of poverty. It is a place of imposed containment.

And yet. UNRWA schools in Jenin and Balata have produced engineers, doctors, journalists, poets. The density that makes childhood in Shatila so materially difficult also produces, by proximity and necessity, an intensity of collective memory that dispersed populations rarely sustain across generations. Every child who grows up in a camp grows up knowing what was lost, why it was lost, and the name of the village the key was made for.

That is an education no single classroom could deliver.

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