Children of Palestine

Palestinian children and young people living both within and outside of refugee camps in the Middle East are the focus of this book. For more than half a century these children and their caregivers have lived a temporary existence in the dramatic and politically volatile landscape that is the Middle East. These children have been captive to various sorts of stereotyping, both academic and popular. They have been objectified, much as their parents and grandparents, as passive victims without the benefit of international protection. And they have become the beneficiaries of numerous humanitarian aid packages which presume the primacy of the Western model of child development as well as the psycho-social approach to intervention. Giving voice to individual children, in the context of their households and their community, this book aims to move beyond the stereotypes and Western-based models to explore the impact that forced migration and prolonged conflict have had, and continue to have, on the lives of these refugee children.

Dawn Chatty is University Reader in Anthropology and Forced Migration and Deputy Director of the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford. She is a social anthropologist with long experience in the Middle East as a university teacher, development practitioner, and advocate for indigenous rights. She has taught at the Universities of California at Santa Barbara, at the American University of Beirut, at the University of Damascus, and at Sultan Qaboos University. She has worked with various international agencies including UNDP, UNICEF, FAO, IFAD, and USAID. She is also co-editor (with Marcus Colchester) of Conservation and Mobile Peoples: Displacement, Forced Settlement and Sustainable Development (Berghahn Books, 2002).