An Educated Refugee Goes Far: Palestinians, Jordan, and the UNRWA/UNESCO System, 1948–59

In order to provide emergency relief and assistance to Palestinian refugees after the 1948 war, the UN established the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). As months of dispossession and displacement turned to years, UNRWA, in partnership with Unesco, quickly established basic schooling for refugee youth by late 1950.

This educational system was not autonomous, but was bound by the priorities set forth by donors and powers dictating their parameters at the UN General Assembly.  In addition, Jordan, which had just annexed the West Bank in 1950, and hosted the majority of the Palestinian refugees, played a critical role. This paper explores the first decade of schooling in the camps, and the technologies for socialization, de-nationalization, and surveillance set in place to curtail Palestinians’ political mobilization. 

Fearful of the increasing politicization of the population, and in particular refugees’ challenge to Jordanian political legitimacy, the Jordanian regime compounded UNRWA’s own priorities with curricular and inspection mechanisms of their own.  What tools did the Jordanians use, what role did UNRWA play, and how did they attempt to achieve the aim of upending nationalist refugee youth mobilization?  

With UNRWA/Unesco archival material, documents and reports, memoirs of teachers, inspectors, and students, interviews and press articles by UNRWA and Jordanian Ministry of Education curriculum developers, and textbooks from 1949 to 1958, I draw out the logic(s) and ramifications of UNRWA and Jordan’s educational regime for refugees. I attempt to make sense of the ways in which UNRWA’s refugee schools have and continue to act as spaces of contention and experimentation, and draw out the complex interplay between the needs of UN agencies and host states, and the demands of refugee agency, within the structural imperatives of refugee containment and de-mobilization.