How to Build a Movement: Lessons on Peacebuilding and Community from Palestinian Refugees in Amman, Jordan
*Photos by Shahab Khan, Jeromel Lara, and Google Reviews*
Note: I was recruited to write and publish this creative writing piece for the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage based on my anthropological research interviewing descendants of Palestinian refugees. However, after a year of back and forth trying to get it published despite being promised publication in writing, I was not allowed to publish the story I specifically was onboarded to write. The only other story I know that was censored was also on Palestinian storytelling and its heritage. As a result, I have decided to self-publish it instead.
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“Do you smoke?”
I nod, taking the cigarette from Ahmed’s outstretched hand and placing it between my lips.
In Amman, smoking is part of the everyday cafe experience. Each table is set with a ready ashtray. Words are shared between every puff, punctuating exchanges of listening and speaking. Painted murals of city sites face us from all sides and woven lanterns above our heads cast an array of colors across the table between us. I order a vanilla latte and he teases me, “I didn’t know about lattes or mochas or anything like that when I came here at first, you won’t find those in East Amman. Just black coffee.”
East Amman, where Ahmed is from, is the older side of Jordan’s capital city mainly inhabited by the working class, a large portion of whom are refugees. Stacked houses of worn limestone sit atop each other. They rise above the zigzag of alleyways where children play soccer. No parks in sight, just dust and sand. Ahmed’s beginnings as an activist began at home within these hills. He tells me he grew up in a small house, sharing one bedroom with his five siblings – a tumultuous family arrangement shrouded in histories of exile. Stories of his family fleeing Palestine are many you’ll hear from Palestinian refugees and their descendants in Jordan. “Grief is put onto us the day that we’re born,” another descendant of Palestinian refugees tells me.
He grew up hearing stories of his mother dodging bullets from Israeli police and of his father’s imprisonment. One time, Ahmed remembers catching a glimpse of long scars along his father’s legs as he undressed. His father explained that as a young child, he threw rocks at the Israeli military as an act of childish rebellion against the nearly daily violence they experienced at the hands of the occupation. One day, soldiers chased the children and unleashed their dogs, who dug in their teeth and dragged him down by his legs. Throughout the years, his father’s scars stretched to keep pace with his aging body, growing alongside the unwavering pain of occupation, surveillance, and military violence that continues until today in occupied Palestine.
These heavy histories are passed down to children to preserve the memory of a displaced people threatened with cultural erasure. Ghosts of loved ones lost too soon, and ghost stories of a family home entire generations haven’t seen or felt. “We’re living and reliving a trauma that most of us don’t know we’re in, that most of us have grown numb to,” Ahmed concluded.
“[Trauma] can absolutely become stuck in a society,” Dr. Ashraf, a Jordanian psychologist and professor, tells me. Generations of oppression can condition ways of being, enforcing shame and fear under the threat of violence. On a large scale, this can discourage communication and the ability to hold hope, leading to poor mental and physical health, community breakdown, and difficulty in advocating for one’s needs. However, he adds that generational trauma also serves as a continuous motivation for the need for change, and that people can come together to create an organized release.
Later in the evening when standing between my host mother and sister cooking an iftar dinner, I tell them I’ll be traveling to Jerusalem. Looking up from the bubbling stove, they look at me excitedly and ask me to send pictures of their hometown. A pang of guilt hits my chest– their family called this land home, yet they had never even been able to see or feel it for themselves, while I can easily stroll into their homeland with my U.S passport in hand. This is the reality for many Palestinians inside and outside of Israel, where the permit systems, constant checkpoints, movement restrictions, visa fees, police intimidation, segregated streets, and the lack of right of return make it nearly impossible to get around. In Jerusalem, I see young Arab men repeatedly stopped and frisked at checkpoints in the “holiest” city on Earth in what Amnesty International describes as an apartheid system– a charge with which South Africa agrees. Most recently, South Africa has charged Israel with genocide following its indiscriminate bombing of Gaza after October 7th; killing, maiming, and orphaning 50,000 children alone in addition to desecrating the environment and escalating climate change.
When I arrive in Jerusalem, a Palestinian cab driver points to the mountains through the window of his car, telling me, “Even those in the West Bank, 20 minutes away from Jerusalem, can’t see Al-Aqsa Mosque.” It is one of the holiest sites in Islam, and they can’t visit it or come to see it freely.
The day I visit Al-Aqsa, the glow of the mosque’s golden dome mimics the bright, hot sun glaring down. I stop to sit in the shade of a tree and speak to a group of elderly Palestinian men who sit outside, on alert. They tell me stories of the Israeli military stinging worshippers and protestors with rubber bullets at the holy site, including once from just a few days before I arrived. Sitting down to pray, a child sitting next to me in the mosque pets one of the stray cats that wandered in and tells me the story of how his eye was injured in one of the attacks on worshippers during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. A woman from Gaza, tells me she would have never made it to Al-Aqsa, if not for a difficult to obtain permit for a life-saving medical procedure that is unavailable in the blockaded Gaza Strip. These days I often wonder where she is, and if she is still alive or a part of the nearly 70,000 civilians that have been killed in the indiscriminate bombardment of Gaza, of which the majority of bombs are U.S made.
History: The Past is The Present
How did we get to this point? After World War 2 and the worldwide decolonization movement, the British Empire promised the land of Palestine to white European, Jewish people. Following the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and the following Nakba, which translates to ‘the catastrophe’ from Arabic, hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees fled, including a large portion into neighboring Jordan. The majority of those I got to know at cafes and beyond in Amman shared that it was their great-grandparents or grandparents who were forced to flee, part of the nearly 1 million Palestinians who were permanently displaced from their homes and lost family members in large massacres. Over time, the minimal Palestinian land has grown smaller and smaller facing continuous military action and displacement by settlements illegal under international law.
As of now, the Palestinian territories have been divided into the West Bank, ruled by the Palestinian Authority, and the Gaza Strip, controlled by Hamas, the latter of which is a 30 by 3- mile strip containing a population of over 2 million people, nearly half of whom are children, in what Human Rights Watch describes as ‘an open-air prison.’ Freedom of movement is severely restricted. A blockade prevents supplies from entering and exiting Gaza, and the state of Israel controls all water, food, and electricity in the strip. Just now during Ramadan, Israel banned all food, water, and electricity from entering. A large looming wall penetrates the ground to separate Israel from Gaza. Leaving the blockade requires difficult to obtain, temporary permits from the Israeli government.
In Jordan, Palestinian refugees and their descendants– including my host family– are fully naturalized as Jordanian citizens. Over 2 million Palestinians, largely from the formerly annexed West Bank, hold citizenship and have resettled into urban areas, while around 370,000 refugees typically from the Gaza strip are stationed in refugee camps. Today, the number of descendants of Palestinian refugees is so high that it is estimated that 80 percent of Jordan’s population is Jordanian-Palestinian. However, this demographic change doesn’t come without tension. Unnaturalized Palestinians largely from the Gaza strip, as well as any refugees without citizenship, lack access to an equal standard of living. Jordanian laws prevent refugees without citizenship from working in the public sector and relegate them to menial labor. They aren’t allowed to access government-sponsored health care services and are limited in the amount of land that they can own.
Ahmed described the refugee camps as “open air prisons.” He lifts the coffee cup to his lips, but doesn’t drink. He tells me he began to feel the weight of these histories when he became friends with Jamal, a newly arrived Iraqi refugee who had made his way to Amman after the U.S invasion of Iraq. Jamal frequented the same cafe Ahmed did. Slowly, passing hellos turned into chats. Chats turned into long conversations over replenished cups of tea that revealed shared feelings: tension in cramped bodies, a sense of impending doom and fear, and an itching need for change.
Before meeting Jamal at the café, awkward conversations about feelings were swallowed back down. Ahmed found himself spiraling on the internet to find answers, until a space and community allowed him to relax his guard, learn, and connect. Instead of falling into conspiracy theories grounded in antisemitic tropes, fear, and prejudice, Ahmed was able to lean on community, hope, and connection through the cafe to imagine new possibilities towards empowerment and freedom for all.
“Pass the Pipe!”
Café culture has emerged as a site of community-building at the grassroots level. Regulars visit neighborhood staples where connection and conversation organically flow, beyond a quick grab and go of caffeine in the morning. In the place of bars and clubs since alcohol is not permissible in Islam, the center of nightlife in Amman are the late-night cafes, filled to the brim with friends and families laughing over the music. Some cafes exist where only women and their families are allowed, in an effort to make them a safe and accessible space for everyone, free even from the mental burden of harassment.
My friend Jeromel invites me to a café-restaurant in an area informally named Manila Street, a gathering place for the Filipino migrant workers whose labor Amman relies on. The owner, an older woman who was previously a migrant worker herself, serves us platters of bok choy, fried rice, and sweet shrimp. On late nights here, my friends and I smoke hookah with a group of refugees from Somalia we met. The café serves a special flavor of molasses hookah—Zaghloul— that serves as a taste of home for them. Freshly brewed warm cups of tea, embraces, and passing over the hookah pipe, are ritualistic gestures that extend a hand of connection to welcome you into the café.
The café where Ahmed and Jamal met rests nestled into the side of a hill, just a few steps away from the one Ahmed and I are sitting in. Walking up the cobblestone stairs and through the tunnel behind the door reveals an open space with sunlight illuminating everything in the old-home-turned-café, full of homemade and upcycled furniture. Painted tires as tables, oil barrels used as planters for baby sprouts of trees, and a black-and-white mural of Jamal, who has since passed to suicide, painted by his friends in his memory.
Named Jadal, the cafe welcomes all that walk through its doors. An unofficially adopted pregnant cat lies in the shade of a hammock. You pay for drinks by the hour, 1 Jordanian Dinar (about $1.50 USD) per hour, up to a maximum of 5 dinars (about $7.00 USD) per day. If you happen to visit the café on specific nights, you’ll see craft circles, discussion groups, and even dance lessons.
“I wanted the space to embody the values important to me,” Fadi, the founder— a local activist and community leader — shares. He points to pieces of upcycled, homemade furniture, reflecting his love for the environment through sustainable use. Sitting on hand-made wooden chairs in the sunlight, having a conversation over a cup of coffee with a friend grounds me. Fadi’s menu of free refreshments allows the value of hospitality in Arab culture to thrive without the worry of price or the pressure of exchange, contrary to the transactional nature of capitalism. The servers all have an equal say in how the café is run.
Cafes like this are an experiment. This is a site of “…self-unlearning [and relearning],” Fadi says. Rather than bonding over a specific activity, identity, or ideology, the cafe promotes self-discovery and community through dialogue, connection, and critical thinking. The community pours into you, and you pour back into it.
The idea for such a cafe emerged from the fallout of the 2011 Arab Spring. As protests calling for democracy and economic opportunity rocked the region with chants for freedom and justice, Fadi felt frustrated as he stood amongst the crowd. He saw raw rage, hope and passion for change, but no organized roadmap to make that change a reality. Groups split off in different directions and remained further divided amidst police beatings, arrests of protestors, and false promises of democracy from the monarchy.
It was through the café that Ahmed and Jamal found and learned from each other. By looking up to Fadi as a role model, Ahmed found his beginnings as an activist. His father discouraged him, warning him away from advocating for the causes he even agreed with. Not because he didn’t support him, but because his father had also been an activist himself and wanted to protect his son from the violence, disappointment, and defeats he had faced.
His father wasn’t wrong; Ahmed has since been threatened and chased by secret police disguised as fellow protestors, narrowly escaping jail multiple times. Despite these pressures, Ahmed sees his work as a necessary continuation of a broader legacy of struggle alongside the people that came before him and will come after. The people he gathers in the streets with and memories of earlier community members are all a part of the relationships that underpin and motivate his activism. I’m reminded of how my host mother once told me how ‘one person hurt, hurts all.’ She said when someone steals or becomes violent because they can’t get what they need, the effects reverberate throughout the community. We are all in relationship with one another and ourselves. The community is where healing happens, where neighbors check up on you, friends support you, and movements are built.
Crafting Creative Communities
Down the street in the same neighborhood of Jabal Al-Weibdeh, another café embraces creativity and community. Named after the city in Palestine that the owner’s mother hails from and after its renowned oranges, the turquoise storefront of Yafa shines bright. The walls of the cafe are rendered invisible by the hundreds of prints pinned to the wall— including words of Arabic poetry, Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, and portraits of Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum.
The owner, Mohammed, pours me a cup of Sahleb and tells me his original plan was not a cafe, but a collective art project. He had gone door to door asking his neighbors what designs and aesthetics they wanted to represent the neighborhood. Local artists came to paint murals of artistic icons from the Arab world, from Palestinian writers and activists Mahmoud Darwish and Ghassan Khafani to Lebanese singer Fairouz. Newly, hand-planted flowers took to blooming. The community pooled money together to clean the neighborhood and gathered to vote on designs for murals and stairs, which eventually came to be known as the famous Al-Kalha stairs. The rainbow stairs guide visitors from downtown to Jabal Al-Weibdeh, towards cafes and streets lined with vibrant murals. Once the neighborhood came to be filled with color, it became full of life. People gathered on the stairs to play music, dance, and sit to revel in the art together. With more life in the neighborhood than ever, he opened the cafe as a spot for people to gather. The cafe has been featured in short films and local art as a symbol of Palestinian memory. “Art can be a method of resistance beyond guns,” Mohammed says.
Similarly, Huthaifa, a half-Palestinian and half-Jordanian Bedouin music producer active in the Jordanian arts scene, adds: “I don’t want to prove to you anything, but I want to show you who I am. We..[the people, the youth] are beginning to see ourselves as our own hope, and light.” Cultivating joy can be revolutionary. The once run-down, neglected neighborhood of downtown boasts the reminder of Palestinian culture and existence to all tourists that come walking through, claiming: We are still here, we are proud. We will find joy and one another wherever we are.
Baqiryat Al-Atta, a non-profit in East Amman, works to serve others through our responsibilities as neighbors. I visited their offices, where knocks and voices would interrupt us mid-sentence as people walked in with concerns from accessing food, to daycare, to jobs. Itidal Sabra, the founder and CEO, would hear them out immediately and figure out how to help. I found the interruptions endearing. The relationship between the non-profit and the people it serves is not one of formality or bureaucracy, but of hospitality and friendliness.
“Through repeated interactions and continued respect is where trust develops,” Itidal told me between visitors. Emphasizing her ties to the neighborhood as someone born and raised in it, “If I close my eyes and walk through the streets of this neighborhood, I will know exactly where I am.” The streets trace the path of her feet from house to house where she greets neighbors and family members of friends. Volunteers, mostly previous beneficiaries, sweep the stairs, children play during daycare recess, and neighborhood women gather in communal kitchens to bake. “True love inspires relations. Hate breaks them down. Only out of love can creativity and passion emerge.”
Nowadays amidst the violence in Gaza that has killed approximately 70,000 Palestinians and 1,500 Israelis since October 7th, communities and movements in Amman are being tested more than ever. “I am angry, I am disappointed,” Ahmed tells me exhaustedly, when I call him up to check in. “We are fighting an apartheid state with a nuclear weapon.”
I ask him, “What do you want people, namely Americans, to understand?”
“People need to understand that Palestinians are full, equal humans,” referencing the perfect victim narrative enforced against Palestinians and oppressed people broadly, as described by writer Mohammed Al-Kurd.
Though killings of Israeli civilians have stopped following October 7th, thousands on thousands of killings of Palestinian civilians occur daily in Gaza and the West Bank, which has sparked outrage and grief in Jordan. Everyday Jordanians are organizing protests over social media, building on community and shared public spaces to organize despite state repression from the Jordanian monarchy. Ahmed tells me that every Friday, the holy day in Islam, people gather in front of the Al-Husseini Mosque downtown to protest the killings of their loved ones and other innocent people. As a university student he described scenes of students being arrested and denied their degrees for protesting that mimic instances of police brutality on peaceful student encampments across the U.S demanding a ceasefire and divestment from weapons manufacturers. Voices and movements travel across borders and time, a testament to the shared humanity of all people and the power of community.
Amman’s cafes and community spaces are places of connection, empowerment, and creativity, becoming whatever the people that fill them will them to become. The impacts of generational and historical traumas reverberate throughout our bodies. Genes carry narratives, encoding histories of trauma but also resistance and resilience. Taking to the streets and joining hands together or offering a stranger a cup of tea and a listening ear can help reclaim dignity and power in the face of hopelessness. Neighbors freely exchange gifts and time, and even Ahmed’s gentle teasing envelopes me in care. Change begins simply in our relationships with our neighbors, our community, and ourselves. Judgement is easy, but compassion (the root word of which in Latin literally means ‘to suffer with’) means sitting in the pain of someone’s experience to gain understanding. How can we solve problems we cannot understand? We can create space for new conversations over something as simple as a cup of coffee and imagine together, what might we hope for the world to look like?
Interested in reading more? Read my research, The Maps of Us: Generational Trauma, Community Building, and Creative Resistance in Amman, Jordan