Palestinian Refugees
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Palestinian Refugees
Challenges of Repatriation and Development
Edited by Rex Brynen and Roula El-Rifai
Published in 2007 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd and the International Development Research Centre
6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com
International Development Research Centre PO Box 8500 Ottawa, ON KIG 3H9 Canada /www.idrc.ca ISBN (e-book) 978–1–55250–231–0
In the United States of America and Canada distributed by Palgrave Macmillan a division of St. Martin's Press 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010
Copyright © International Development Research Centre 2007
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
ISBN 978 1 84511 311 7
A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available
Typeset by Jayvee, Trivandrum, India Printed and bound in Great Britain by T J International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall
Contents
List of figures and tables / viiList of contributors / x
Preface and acknowledgements / xvi
Glossary / xix
1 Introduction: Refugee repatriation, development, and the challenges of Palestinian state-building / 1
Rex Brynen and Roula El-Rifai
2 Statistical data on Palestinian refugees: what we know and what we don't / 14
Hasan Abu-Libdeh
3 Living in provisional normality: the living conditions of Palestinian refugees in the host countries of the Middle East / 29
Jon Hanssen-Bauer and Laurie Blome Jacobsen
4 Social capital, transnational kinship and refugee repatriation process: some elements for a Palestinian sociology of return / 46
Sari Hanafi
5 The return of Palestinian refugees and displaced persons: the evolution of a European Union policy on the Middle East Peace Process / 79
Mick Dumper
6 Refugees, repatriation, and development: some lessons from recent work / 102
Rex Brynen
7 Planning in support of negotiations: the refugee issue / 121
Khalil Nijem
8 Infrastructure scenarios for refugees and displaced persons / 132
Nick Krafft and Ann Elwan
9 Land and housing strategies for immigrant absorption: lessons from the Israeli experience / 163
Rachelle Alterman
10 Israeli settlements and the Palestinian refugee question: evaluating the prospects and implications of settlement evacuation in the West Bank and Gaza – a preliminary analysis / 218
Geoffrey Aronson and Jan de Jong
Notes / 229
Index / 237
Figures and tables
3.1 Labour force participation rates / 423.2 Number of household members in the labour force. Camp refugees / 43
7.1 Returnee housing programme, design for the West Bank and Gaza / 148
9.1 Housing production strategies: conceptual policy spectrum / 185
9.2 Housing consumption policies: de facto spectrum of subsidies and approximate periods / 186
Tables
1.1 UNRWA-registered refugees (mid-2003) / 72.1 Estimated Palestinian refugee population by country of residence,1998 / 17
2.2 Schedule of censuses and sample surveys at PCBS / 18
2.3 Percentage distribution of the Palestinian population in the OPT by refugee status and region, mid-2002 / 19
2.4 Percentage distribution of households in the OPT by size and refugee status, 2002 / 20
2.5 Percentage distribution of employed persons (15+ years) by status and occupation, 2002 / 21
2.6 Percentage distribution of persons (15+ years) by employment status and refugee status, 2002 / 22
2.7 Households by availability of durable goods and refugee status, 2002 / 23
2.8 Preferred solution of refugee issue for refugees in the OPT, by region and refugee status / 24
2.9 Expected solution of refugee issue for refugees in the OPT, by region and refugee status / 25
2.10 Preferred solution of refugee issue for refugees living outside the OPT, by region and refugee status / 26
2.11 Expected solution of refugee issue for refugees living outside the OPT, by region and refugee status / 27
3.1 Fafo surveys on Palestinian refugees in the Middle East / 30
3.2 Fafo population projections / 32
3.3 Summary of good and poor health and infrastructure outcomes / 36
3.4 Percentage of women receiving pre-natal care by a skilled attendant (doctor, nurse, trained midwife) / 37
3.5 Summary of good and poor maternal and child health outcomes / 38
3.6 Summary of good and poor education outcomes / 40
3.7 Summary of poverty rates among camp and gathering refugees / 44
4.1 Financial contribution of the Palestinian diaspora / 61
4.2 Scenarios taking into account only socio-economic factors / 72
6.1 Costs of sample refugee absorption programme / 117
8.1 Distribution of registered refugee population / 135
8.2 Options for upgrading or new development of housing and infrastructure for refugees and displaced people / 138
8.3 Estimated costs for on-site public and social infrastructure / 142
8.4 Indicative costs for housing and land / 144
8.5 Vacant expansion areas and public land in study locations / 136
8.6 Available public land in the new town sites / 148
8.7 Potential for accommodating new residents on public land in or near existing towns / 149
8.8 Potential for accommodating new residents on public land in new towns / 150
8.9 Summary of illustrative infrastructure cost estimates for new residents in study areas / 152
8.10 Illustrative cost estimates of infrastructure for new residents in study areas, including costs of upgrading existing water/wastewater infrastructure for existing residents / 154
8.11 Illusrative cost estimates of infrastructure and housing for new residents in study areas / 156
9.1 Major periods of immigration to Israel, by number of immigrants, existing population and GDP per capita / 166
9.2 The evolution of public land policies as related to immigrant absorption / 176
9.3 The outputs and outcomes of the housing strategies in key policy periods / 212
Contributors
Dr Hassan Abu-Libdeh
Dr Hassan Abu-Libdeh served as Minister of Labor and Social Affairs with the Palestinian National Authority. An expert in socio-demographic statistics, Dr Abu-Libdeh was previously Founder and President of the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS). He received his B.Sc. in Mathematics from Birzeit University in 1979, his M.Sc. in Mathematical Statistics from Stanford University (1981), his M.Sc. in Applied Statistics and a Ph.D. in Biostatistics from Cornell University (1988). He also served as a member of the Board of Governors and Deputy Managing Director of the Palestinian Economic Council for Development and Reconstruction (PECDAR), a board member Al-Quds Open University, the Palestinian Economic Policy Research Institute, the Policy Research Initiative for Palestine, the Council for Higher Education, and the Higher Council for Children and Motherhood. He served as a member of the Central Election Commission (CEC), in charge of planning and implementing the first ever general and political elections in the West Bank and Gaza Strip (January 1996). He is currently a member of the Palestinian National Council (1996). Since the beginning of the peace process with the Madrid conference in 1991, he was appointed to several delegations to bilateral negotiations and multilateral working groups.
Dr Rachelle Alterman
Professor Rachelle Alterman is an urban planner and lawyer who holds the David Azrieli Chair in Town Planning/Architecture at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. She holds degrees in social science and city planning from the University of Manitoba, a Ph.D. in planning from the Technion, and a law degree from Tel-Aviv University. Dr Alterman is internationally known for her cross-country comparative research on planning law and property rights, urban and housing policy, and planning theory. She has published extensively in international academic journals and is the author of many books, among them Planning in the Face of Crisis: Land Use, Housing, and Mass Immigration in Israel (Routledge, 2002), and National-Level Planning in Democratic Countries, (Liverpool University Press, 2001). Dr Alterman has been invited as a visiting professor at leading American and Dutch graduate planning programmes and has served as consultant to the World Bank and the UNDP. Professor Alterman is in the process of founding the world's first international academic association of Planning and Law.
Geoffrey Aronson
Geoffrey Aronson is Director of the Foundation for Middle East Peace in Washington, DC and Editor of the Foundation's bi-monthly Report on Israeli Settlement in the Occupied Territories. He is author of From Sideshow to Center Stage: US Policy towards Egypt and Israel (Lynne Rienner, 1986) and Israel, Palestinians and the Intifada: Creating Facts on the West Bank (Routledge, 1990) as well as numerous newspaper, magazine, and journal articles on a wide range of Middle East issues. He writes regularly in the USA, the Arab world, and for European publications, and has consulted for both the World Bank and the UN.
Dr Rex Brynen
Dr Rex Brynen is Professor of Political Science at McGill University in Canada. He is author, editor, or coeditor of eight books on Middle East politics including A Very Political Economy: Peacebuilding and Foreign Aid in the West Bank and Gaza (USIP Press, 2000) and Sanctuary and Survival: The PLO in Lebanon (Westview, 1990). Professor Brynen has served as a member of the Policy Staff of Foreign Affairs Canada, and as a consultant to the Canadian International Development Agency, the International Development Research Centre, and the World Bank. He is also coordinator of the Palestinian Refugee ResearchNet (<http://www.prrn.org>).
Dr Michael Dumper
Dr Michael (Mick) Dumper is Reader in Middle East Politics, Department of Politics, University of Exeter, UK. Prior to his academic career at Exeter University, Dr Mick Dumper worked for several NGOs in the Middle East. His PhD thesis was on the waqf in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories and he has published two books on Jerusalem, The Politics of Jerusalem since 1967 (Columbia University Press, 1997) and The Politics of Sacred Space: the Old City of Jerusalem and the Middle East Conflict (Lynne Rienner, 2003). He is currently researching on comparative perspectives on refugee repatriation programmes and has edited a volume entitled Palestinian Refugee Repatriation: Global Perspectives (Routledge, 2006).
Roula El-Rifai
Roula El-Rifai is a Senior Program Specialist with the International Development Research Centre in Ottawa, Canada. She currently manages the Middle East Unit (MEU) which consists of three programmes: the Expert and Advisory Services Fund (EASF), which supports policy-oriented research on the Palestinian refugee issue; the Middle East Good Governance Fund (MEGGF) which aims to increase policy-relevant knowledge that is useful to promote good governance in the Middle East region, particularly Iraq; and the Scholarship Fund for Palestinian Refugee Women in Lebanon. Roula has a Master's degree in International Relations from the University of Kent in Canterbury in the UK, and a Master's degree in Rural Planning and Development from the University of Guelph in Canada. She did her Bachelor's degree in Political Science at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon.
Ann Elwan
Ann Elwan consults for the World Bank, and others, particularly in housing and infrastructure. She worked for the World Bank for 22 years, during which time she worked on infrastructure and housing projects in the Middle East and North Africa, and the Europe and Central Asia Regions. Also, while at the Bank, she worked on several post-conflict reconstruction projects and the Bank's post-conflict reconstruction policy paper. She is also working on a consulting assignment on a global housing finance facility for UN HABITAT.
Dr Sari Hanafi
Dr Sari Hanafi is Visiting Associate Professor at the American University of Beirut teaching Sociology. A sociologist holding a Ph.D. from EHESS-Paris (1994), Dr Sari Hanafi was formerly the Director of the Palestinian Refugee and Diaspora Centre, Shaml. He is the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters on economic sociology and network analysis of the Palestinian diaspora; relationships between diaspora and centre; political sociology and sociology of migration (mainly about the Palestinian refugees); sociology of the new actors in international relations (NGOs and international NGOs). Among his books are Here and There: Towards an Analysis of the Relationship between the Palestinian Diaspora and the Center (In Arabic, 2001); Between Two Worlds: Palestinian Businessmen in the Diaspora and the Construction of a Palestinian Entity (in Arabic and in French, 1997); La Syrie des ingénieurs: Perspective comparée avec l'Egypte, (1997). He is editing three books on the Arab NGOs (2002; 2004) and Palestinian Sociology of Return (forthcoming). His last book, with Linda Taber, is The Emergence of Palestinian Globalized Elite: Donors, International Organizations and Local NGOs (in English, Washington: Institute of Palestine Studies and Muwatin, 2005; in Arabic, Ramallah: Muwatin, 2006).
Dr Jon Hanssen-Bauer
Jon Hanssen-Bauer is Senior Adviser in the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Relations on research within the area of peace and reconciliation. He is on leave from his position as managing director for the Fafo Institute for Applied International Studies based in Oslo, Norway, a position he held at the time of writing his chapter contribution. He is trained as a social anthropologist, and since 1993 has been involved in the Oslo process. He managed the Palestinian–Israeli People-to-People Programme financed by Norway, and has co-ordinated Fafo's studies of the Palestine refugee issue in all the host countries in the region. He managed the Fafo study on living conditions in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
Laurie Blome Jacobsen
Laurie Blome Jacobsen is a researcher with the Fafo Institute for Applied International Studies, Norway. Ms. Jacobsen's background is in Middle East Studies and International Public Administration. Her professional background includes consultant work in Egypt with the International Finance Corporation and various international nonprofit organizations associated with USAID. Subsequently, she has worked as a researcher for Fafo in Oslo for the past five years with a focus on Palestinian refugees and the Middle East.
Jan de Jong
Jan de Jong is a Strategic Planning Consultant working for the Palestinian Negotiations Support Unit in Ramallah and a researcher for Israeli and Palestinian organizations analyzing the impacts of Israeli planning policies on Palestinian communities in the West Bank and in Gaza. He is a freelance consultant for land use planning and documentation targeted toward developing client-oriented decision support systems for institutions, local communities and developmental agencies. He taught history and specialized in historical geography and worked as a geographic editor, authoring a number of Arabic Studies related Map documents for the Dutch Encyclopedia of Islam. In 1982 he authored an illustrated documentary record, titled 'Palestine, Palestinians' for the Dutch Developmental Agency 'Novib'. From 1989 to 1993, he worked in the 'Palestine Geographic Research and Information Center' where he collected and compiled vital data and information on land use planning policies in the Palestinian territories, particularly in Jerusalem. His work in the form of reports, maps and articles, was widely published in the Hebrew, Palestinian and international press (Ha'aretz, Ma'ariv, An Nahar, Al Fajr, Sunday Times, Tageszeitung, Le Meridien, Le Monde Diplomatique). As a consultant in land use planning, he published a number of reports on the Palestinian territories, in particular on Metropolitan Jerusalem (Le Monde Diplomatique, Manière de Voir, Le Meridien, Die Tageszeitung, Foundation for Middle East Peace). He has authored chapters in books that were published in the UK and Holland and Belgium in 1996 and 1997. One report, summarizing his analysis on the current perspective of the Palestinian Territories was published in the anthology After Oslo: New Realities, Old Problems, published by Pluto Press, London in 1998.