NAHR AL-BARED CAMP, Lebanon — A few streets away from Mohammad al-Hajj Hussein’s home, a piece of graffiti scrawls across a wall. It reads, “Typical neighborhood.”
Compared to residential neighborhoods in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Arab world, the statement rings true. There are broad concrete streets punctuated by corner shops and modern, pastel-colored apartment blocks of multi-bedroom homes and breezy courtyards. Nahr al-Bared, however, is not a typical neighborhood but a Palestinian refugee camp, places usually known in Lebanon for their overcrowded, ramshackle squalor. It is also untypical because it preserves social structures that can be traced back to villages uprooted in Palestine in 1948.