PROJECTS

This project explores how Palestinian refugees navigated displacement, war, and political upheaval between 1948 and the mid-1970s—not simply as victims of history, but as a people who built communities, pursued opportunities, organized politically, and imagined different futures. Focusing on six refugee camps across Palestine, Jordan, and Lebanon, I ask how moments of rupture transformed everyday life, and how refugees responded with adaptation, organizing, resistance, and political imagination.

Bringing oral histories into conversation with humanitarian, state, visual, and community archives, the project recovers stories and initiatives often missing from conventional histories of Palestine and the region. Rather than treating refugee camps as spaces of waiting or dependency, it approaches them as places of movement, creativity, political action, and possibilities. In doing so, the project offers a new social history of Palestinian refugees—and a broader way of thinking about displacement, memory, agency, and the futures people create in the midst of ruptures.

In June 1967, the Israeli military forces occupied the West Bank, including the Jordan Valley, a central Palestinian geography and home to thriving communities that had formed an integral part in Palestine’s social and economic fabrics. Under the swift blows of the War of 1967, Israel displaced most of the Jordan Valley’s Palestinian population—the majority of whom were 1948 Nakba refugees—and systematically prevented their return; demolished several of their depopulated communities; and has been establishing and expanding Israeli settlements in the area ever since. Until today, this crucial period of the Jordan Valley’s past and its connections to the present remain overlooked, preserved in the memories of Palestinians. 

This research project draws from the oral histories of Palestinians and pertinent archives to reconstruct and scrutinize the fading narratives of the Jordan Valley’s occupation in 1967 and its aftermath. Anchored in the field of settler colonial studies, this research adopts a bottom-up approach to shed light on the consequences of the Jordan Valley’s occupation on the lives of Palestinians, and what they can tell us about the logic and manifestations of settler colonialism in Palestine and beyond.