Understanding Community Resilience Through the Accounts of Women Living in West Bank Refugee Camps

Introduction

The concept of community resilience can be understood as “(1) the actions taken by the community to absorb the shock of a crisis; and (2) the resources available to help a community act as a ‘collective unit’” (Nuwayhid, Zurayk, Yamout, & Cortas, 2011, p. 508 ). This idea has many variations, yet central to its utility in the health and social sciences is the focus on a community’s strengths rather than weaknesses. Researchers have raised the question of “why, despite significant exposure to war, individuals and families achieve emotional adjustment and social functioning” (Eggerman & Panter-Brick, 2010, p. 71). Identifying how and why certain individuals and communities achieve and adjust amidst displacement and war helps to better contextualize social dynamics within groups. There are several frameworks in the literature that discuss community resilience; two main models will be highlighted here. Norris, Stevens, and Pfefferbaum’s (2008) popular model presents community resilience as a set of networked adaptive capacities—economic development, social capital, cultural competence, and information and communication—which function together to reinforce personal abilities to handle adversity and prepare for short-term disaster readiness. Kirmayer, Sehdev, Whitley, Dandeneau, and Isaac’s (2009) model differs as it is particularly focused on displaced populations under long-term occupation (Aboriginal Canadians), which rely on different components and resources to maintain resilient communities and lifestyles over long periods of time. Community resilience is a powerful concept because it draws attention to the sociocultural components that are beneficial and increase community members’ capacity to work and live together under adverse situations.

In the Middle East, protracted conflict has long been a normal facet of many people’s daily lives (Giacaman et al., 2011; Moran, Khawaja, Khoshnood, & Ramahi, 2011). Displacement and political violence in Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, and other neighboring countries has threatened the existence or establishment of stable democratic institutions on which citizens can rely. This has had the effect of reinforcing people’s reliance on community networks and social ties. In Lebanon and the occupied Palestinian territories, strong politico-religious networks, such as Hezbollah and Hamas, have at various times enjoyed more popular support than secular governing parties (Nuwayhid et al., 2011). People look to these networks for medical, monetary, and physical support, and in exchange often support the political movement. In countries such as Lebanon, Syria, and the occupied Palestinian territories, the effects of violent conflict, including death and physical displacement, have been felt heavily by the civilian population. Because women and girls “comprise a significant proportion of the civilians living in war-torn areas, they are therefore faced with significant risks and threats to their physical, psychological, and social well-being” (Haeri & Puechguirbal, 2009, p. 112). Even in times of peace, gender roles typically segregate men from women in many Middle Eastern countries, and both sexes exist in and perform very different roles. By maintaining social traditions and a sense of female identity, women in situations of displacement play distinct roles in community life and in contributing to its resilience under adversity (Kassam & Nanji, 2006). Their activities and inspirations warrant attention because greater understanding can lead to better delivery of humanitarian assistance as well as a more nuanced picture of how gendered ideas of community support and shape resilience.

This study explores the following questions:

What do Palestinian women living in the West Bank see as their participation in, and contribution to, community resilience? What are the various ways women leverage individual coping strategies for larger community efforts to withstand violence, symbolic, and physical?

Study Context

This study partnered with UNRWA and research was undertaken by the first author through her participation in UNRWA’s community mental health program. Semistructured interviews with 31 women were conducted in nine camps over the region from May to July 2012. Interviews took place inside UNRWA health centers (14 in the North, 7 in the Middle, and 10 in the South). Ethics approval was obtained through the University of Toronto Research Ethics Board, which was accepted by UNRWA without further review. Participants were women between the ages of 22–48, who had no clinical condition, who accompanied family members, were waiting to participate in health promotion programming, and who generally spoke Arabic only. Interviews were conducted in private rooms within the clinic, with the assistance of translators.

Study Design

Interviewees were chosen from women sitting in the UNRWA health center waiting room. They were invited one at a time by a female UNRWA clinic psychosocial counselor to participate. None of the women were previously known to the interviewer, nor did any of the women know about the research prior to being asked to participate. The first author explained the study and its voluntary nature. An informed consent form was developed in English and translated into Arabic using a professional translation service. It was then back-translated to ensure that the intention and information remained the same. The UNRWA clinic psychosocial counselor or male UNRWA field operations director acted as an interpreter, reading the document to each participant and obtaining written and verbal consent. There were no inclusion criteria related to health status, physical ailments, or mental health status. Approximately three interviews per day were conducted, with women of different ages invited each time. Interviews lasted approximately 30–40 minutes, and 20 interviews were recorded. For interviews that were not recorded, the lead author took written notes from the English verbal translation. These interviews are denoted with <<>> in the Results section.

The interview guide contained five open-ended questions, relating to social identity, family customs, relationships, and social norms (see Box 1). There were no incidents of women retracting their answers or not agreeing to participate. Out of the total respondents, 25 women were married and 6 were single. The average age of respondents was 35 and the average household size was 4 children. In conjunction with the interviews, informal conversations were held with the psychosocial counselors in the clinics about the general state of women’s participation in camp society and political life and notes were taken. All interview and informal conversation notes and English translations of interviews were transcribed and encrypted. The researchers used the constant comparative method, as per Strauss and Corbin (1990) to look for instances that represent categories. After the open coding phase, categories of information supported by interview text were identified. The first author read five transcripts using open coding, and the open codes were used to apply to the remaining 26 transcripts. Subcategories were created in the major codes to distinguish nuances.

Results

Discussion

Portrayals of women in conflict settings such as an occupation often focus on their vulnerability and reliance on formal institutions for physical and emotional assistance. Some scholars propose that there are just two main coping paths for the women interviewed in this study to deal with occupation: (a) to turn “inwards” toward traditional Palestinian values or (b) to look “outwards” and adopt Western norms and ways of life (Popper-Giveon, 2009). This dichotomy does not reflect the perspectives gathered from interviewees whose accounts demonstrate how the complex intersections of religion, culture, and gender create a specific form of resilient adaptation (Logie, James, Tharao, & Loutfy, 2011). Coping strategies that women spoke of most closely mapped to several aspects of Kirmayer et al.’s (2009) model, such as connection to the land and collective knowledge and identity (Table 1). Like Aboriginal Canadians’ connection to the land, the women interviewed in this study stressed the importance of their connection to a physical place (UNRWA camps). These women have always had the choice to leave the camps they live in, and move to a larger city inside the West Bank, or leave the territory altogether and emigrate elsewhere in the world. Doing so would officially annul their refugee status, but not impose any financial or physical penalty. Whether the choice is symbolic or material is a matter of debate and perspective, but it serves to underscore the centrality of sumud to the Palestinian community identity.

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Table 1.

Comparison of Aspects of Community Resilience.

Norris et al.	Kirmayer et al.	This Article
Social capital	Social capital	Social capital
Economic development	Ecological capital	Economic participation
Community competence	Aboriginal cultural knowledge, values, and practices Collective knowledge and identity Spirituality and ceremony	Palestinian cultural knowledge, values and practices Collective knowledge and identity Spirituality and ceremony
Information and communication	Family and community connectedness Intergenerational communication	Family and community connectedness Intergenerational communication Raising children
	Connection to land	Connection to land
		Ability to meet

Interviewees also presented strategies akin to Kirmayer et al.’s concept of collective knowledge and identity (Table 1). Defiance against occupation forces was a central aspect of women’s understanding and definition of their community identity. The ability to meet and share the stories of suffering under occupation was a central strategy our respondents used when they explained how they supported community resilience. Women’s ability to publicly show this defiance was stifled, however, because of the prevalent socioreligious norms that pressured them to inhabit the private sphere and manage their anger internally (Gilgun & Abrams, 2005). Like other women in remote, isolated locations, the women interviewed sought out opportunities to share adversity, downplay the negative aspects of their situation, and promote their Palestinian identity (Leipert, 2005). What compounded their difficulty in doing so was the asymmetry in notions of who can maintain community in public, whereby women sought out opportunities to share social space in public like the men, but men saw women in public spaces as a mixing of the sexes and therefore immoral ( New York Times, 2014).

The emphasis on community action and information exchange may be appropriate for resilience in the face of acute disaster regions (as per Norris et al., 2008); however, it does not align easily with how interviewees understood and experienced life inside UNRWA camps (chronic disaster conditions; Table 1). The issue of space and having an environment to meet for social and political reasons was central to our interviewees’ ability to share information and plan for action. The process of achieving the communication infrastructure and support for community action is where our respondents encountered obstacles and is what explains the need for a different understanding of community resilience for groups like displaced women. Women eagerly discussed how the health centers were not only points for medical care, but served as quasi-community centers where they could go to connect with each other without suspicion from their husbands and male relatives. In their maternal capacities, women mentioned holding group meetings to teach tales of struggle and remember their sons and husbands as martyrs killed by the IDF as methods of managing collective grief. Despite the lack of education opportunities, gendered ideas about protecting women and physical restrictions placed on their mobility, respondents also spoke favorably about searching out employment opportunities as cleaners, teachers, or as low-paying nannies. Several women discussed participating in collective camp-based work projects, involving handicrafts or culinary products. These female-run endeavors brought women together to make goods to sell in a semi-formal network. The actual market feasibility and income generation potential of these activities were very limited, and the jobs they spoke about with enthusiasm were unlikely to improve the financial status of their family in a substantive way. This is illustrative of how Palestinian women are repurposing the limited resources available to them, trying to leverage resilient individual behaviors into a resilient community network, sometimes with success, as in the health centers. Participants were clearly interested in contributing to their community, but could not easily do so because of prohibitions on movement and rigid gender norms.

Eggerman and Panter-Brick (2010) have raised the contradictory nature of such types of resilience in their work in Afghanistan, where “the ability to demonstrate adherence to cultural values may reproduce inherent social injustices, perpetuated for women by the dominance of men in politics, economics and social relations (Eggerman & Panter-Brick, 2010, p. 81).” Working together as a community was a challenge for female participants because there were so few ways they could collectively meet to discuss and plan their efforts. Through raising children with particular values and keeping a strict Islamic faith, the respondents illustrated how individual and societal actors can improve conditions but also the numerous obstacles to collective long-term progress. Existing research highlights that faith-based social networks like the one described by the interviewees are common among displaced communities exhibiting high levels of resilience, such as internally displaced Ugandans (Horn, 2009) and Aboriginal Canadians (Kirmayer, Sehdev, Whitley, Dandeneau, & Isaac, 2009). Unique to our respondents, however, is that their faith existed within refugee camps where cultural and religious norms gave them strength and identity and at the same time discouraged free community networking for women.

Similar to research done by Nyugen-Gilham et al. with Palestinian youth in the West Bank, this research exposes the complexities inherent to the notion of resilience (2008). Women in this study talked about being supported officially to resist the Israeli occupation while at the same time being required to fit with traditional Palestinian values and norms. Many interviewees raised the role of patriarchy in Palestinian society as an obstacle to individual freedom of choice and movement. While religion and cultural identity enabled a positive outlook on life events in many cases, Palestinian identity posed certain obstacles in the lives of many of the women. This subject has not been covered sufficiently in other studies and points to the need for more research on the gendered experiences of community resilience in situations of displacement. Amidst protracted conflict, this study highlights the ways women’s attitudes and activities in refugee camps enable them to normalize a situation that for most people is highly abnormal. New models need to be developed to capture the interactions between gender, culture, faith, and territory in order to adequately articulate and document the accounts of women such as those interviewed in our study.

Limitations

This study was conducted within UNRWA, a singular institution that pervades all aspects of people’s lives in the camps. If interviews were conducted at other centers or sites, women may have voiced other concerns or questions. We used a convenience sampling method of healthy women who attended the clinics within an age range of 22–48, and no additional information was collected about income or political affiliations. This does not represent all characteristics of the female population in UNRWA camps. While female Arabic translators were relied upon as much as possible, resource and time scarcities necessitated that the male field operations director translated 11 of the interviews. This could have limited the answers women felt comfortable sharing and may have reduced the ease and freedom participants experienced in the interaction. In cases when the director had to translate, the women interviewed did not know him or his role. We believe that the influence on recruitment was minimal for two reasons, that is, (a) the director was unknown to the women and (b) we perceived that the women were waiting with time on their hands and wanted to do something new. It is possible that the women participating in the interviews who had a male translator felt they could not refuse to answer questions—leading to a positive response to participation. However, there are ways to subtly resist answers during the interview process if this is the case and we did not perceive that this happened. In the future, recruitment and translation of women interviewees should be done completely by women. We also had to rely on the clinic psychosocial counselor as a recruiter and interpreter. Women may have felt less comfortable talking with a staff member of UNRWA than an unknown translator from outside the camp. To mitigate this, the women we spoke with were not currently seeking treatment at the clinic. Interview transcripts were made from English translations, which could have an impact on the accuracy and/or representativeness of responses.

Conclusion

This study’s findings offer an enriched understanding and detailed picture of Palestinian women’s perspectives and strategies for living under occupation and persevering in the face of adversity. Interviewee accounts suggest the multiple social and physical boundaries that must be navigated to express and belong to their Palestinian community. Life in UNRWA camps imposes hardship on all residents, such as the occupying Israeli presence and attendant economic disadvantage. This article underscores that women face a disproportionate challenge.

In situations of chronic occupation, such as that of Palestinian women living in the West Bank, existing models of community resilience are only partially able to explain the dynamic process of resilience building and utilization of space. The respondents in this study highlighted how important a safe meeting space was to their social lives and ability to support each other through challenging times. Each interviewee commented on how she sought out more time at UNRWA health centers to meet with other women and share stories and hardships. For these women, more opportunities to meet might enrich the strength of their connection to the larger community and thus their community resilience. The process through which our interviewees created de facto community centers is itself illustrative of the active forces resilience requires, which often are not examined or identified in formal institutions. At present, the individualized resilience of these women is strong, but the ability to work together to negotiate the education and employment opportunities they themselves highlighted is weak. A steadfast commitment to their land, political activism, faith, and maintenance of identity through storytelling were strong contributions to community resilience that were identified in other models. The importance of safe social space is an addition to the existing models of community resilience.

What this research did not answer is the question of the long-term costs of such resilience. For women, having a Muslim faith in the context of UNRWA camps gives a strong sense of identity and meaning, but it also carries restrictions on movement and pressures to raise children. The women illustrated that good coping in certain circumstances can mean perpetuating the status quo political situation. The architecture of the Palestinian struggle is founded centrally upon resilience and resistance activated by men and women in the West Bank. The question that could be answered in future research is identifying the role of both genders in fostering community resilience.