Chapter 2
The settings: The communities
and their environment
The persistence of the Palestinian refugee-status is most apparent in the
existence of more than fifty official UNRWA refugee camps in the Middle
East, making the experience of camp-life a reality which nearly one million
Palestinians share, a number corresponding to a third of the total registered
Palestinian refugees in the Middle East.3 Despite dissimilar territorial
settings, Palestinians thus have a common historical experience or reference
of camp-residency struggling to cope with an everyday-life continuously
influenced by external and internal political events in their respective
host countries.
Four official UNRWA- camps, Askar on the West Bank, Baqa'a and Wihdat in
Jordan, and Rashidiyya in Lebanon were chosen as settings in this report.
In addition, different suburbs in the city of Amman where Palestinians live
are also included in order to give a picture of Palestinians living outside
camps. These settings constitute the physical framework within which the
data in this report was gathered, even though the social networks which
involve these settings have a much greater scale.
In line with the general case oriented methodology of this study, the settings
were chosen not to be particular representative, but rather to be useful
in generating contrasts and different life situations.
All names of persons and respondents have been changed in order to maintain
personal anonymity.
3.) 1993-UNRWA statistics show that of the total 2,797,179 registered
Palestinian refugees, 957,107 live in camps while 1,840,072 live
outside camps (Map of UNRWA's Area of Operations, 30 June 1993). The
exact numbers are contested, but the general order of magnitude
is correct
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