Chronicles of Disappearance: Palestinian Encampment in the Bekaa Valley (1948–1951)

Abstract Some formal UN camps in Lebanon are becoming ‘over-researched’ while ‘gatherings’ remain unexplored despite their distinctive features. This article is a historical ethnography of encampment defined as the iterative undertaking of settling in while in exile. It contends that any history of Palestinian encampment must attend to entwined histories of presence, dispersal, and absence. Based on interviews conducted in the gathering of Bar Elias in the Bekaa Valley and on archival research concerned with the quiet disappearance, during the 1950s, of the three camps of Qaraoun, Aanjar and Gouraud, also in the Bekaa, this article explores, through the conceptual frame of presence, the forces shaping Palestinian experience in Lebanon both inside camps and outside of them. Shaped by absence, presence appears as the expression, in each historical situation, of the reality of lived experience and is a lens through which to read the archive of international organizations which rarely encompasses refugee voice.