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Citizenship and Development: Palestinians in France and the Multiple Meanings of Statelessness

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Abstract

In this paper, I analyze the recent efforts by UNHCR (office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) to combat statelessness by drawing on fieldwork conducted in summer 2012 among Palestinians of various ages, genders, and legal statuses living in France. By privileging my Palestinian informants’ own understanding of what it means to be stateless, I question some of the assumptions that inform UNHCR’s discourse on statelessness. I show that, while they echoed some of UNHCR’s views on statelessness, several of my Palestinian interlocutors diverged from these views in that they expressed skepticism about the state’s emancipatory potential. At a broader level, I show that the official categories associated with statelessness and that are used by UNHCR in its effort to end statelessness do not fully capture the predicament of Palestinians in the twenty-first century.

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Notes

  1. This fieldwork was part of a broader project, (Re)Conceptualising Stateless Diasporas, which examines the experiences of Palestinians and Kurds in Italy, France, Sweden, and the UK, and forms part of the Oxford Diaspora Programme funded by the Leverhulme Trust. The portion of the research involving interviews with Palestinians in France was also funded by a Council for International Programs grant from Iowa State University.

  2. An example of such an instance would be a country refusing to issue a passport to one of its nationals or not guaranteeing this national the right to return home (Leclerc and Colville 2007).

  3. An in-depth discussion would need to address the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire through Franco-British colonization, the policies of the British Mandate in Palestine, Zionism, as well as modern Arab nationalism, among other issues.

  4. Despite its Gaza Disengagement Plan of 2005, Israel retains absolute authority over Gaza’s airspace, territorial sea, and borders. In this sense, Gaza continues to be part of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (see Scobbie 2006; Loewenstein 2006).

  5. The Palestinians who fled to Jordan as a result of the 1948 war were granted Jordanian citizenship. Those who fled to Lebanon, Syria and (in smaller numbers) to other Arab countries, such as Iraq or Egypt, were not granted citizenship by the host country.

  6. In the aftermath of the 1967 war, Israel did not extend Israeli citizenship to the inhabitants of East Jerusalem, Gaza, or the West Bank. West Bank Palestinians had been granted Jordanian citizenship as a result of Jordan’s annexation of the West Bank from 1948 until the 1967 war, but they lost this citizenship in 1988 when Jordan decided to “disengage” from the West Bank. Gaza was annexed by Egypt from 1948 until the 1967 war, but Gazans were never granted Egyptian citizenship. Today, Gaza and West Bank Palestinians can apply for a Palestinian Authority-issued “passport” but this document is not the equivalent of a passport issued by a sovereign state (see Khalil 2007; Shiblak 1996).

  7. A “laissez-passer” is a travel document, usually issued by a state government or an international organization such as the United Nations, and that can be used in lieu of a passport. After Israel’s annexation of (mostly Arab) East Jerusalem following the 1967 war, its residents were declared permanent residents—but not citizens—of Israel. They were issued identification cards and laissez-passers as travel documents (see Shiblak 2006).

  8. There is no consensus as to the exact features that make up a nation, and as argued by others, nations tend to be defined as such a posteriori; that is, they are historically situated constructs that tend to be a product of nationalism rather than the other way around (Gellner 2008; Hobsbawm 1992; Anderson 1983). This is not to say that there are no pre-existing features that hold together a group of people who might, later on, define themselves as a nation (Hobsbawm 1992; Spencer and Wollman 2005).

  9. While Palestinian Authority-issued travel documents are often referred to as “passports,” they are not the legal equivalent of passports issued by sovereign, independent states (see Loewenstein 2006).

  10. Most of Bisan’s entirely Arab population fled to Jordan during the 1948 war but a sizable number were expelled (also to Jordan) by the Haganah, a Jewish paramilitary organization (Morris 1947).

  11. See Davis and Kirk 2013, Ibrahim 2012, and Loewenstein 2006 for scholarly work on the subject of Palestinian mobility in the Occupied Territories in the post-Oslo era.

  12. Ethnic nationalism posits that membership in the nation is determined by birth and descent (Smith 2005, 2010).

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  1. Departments of Anthropology and Political Science, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA

    Nell Gabiam

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  1. Nell Gabiam
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Correspondence to Nell Gabiam.

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Gabiam, N. Citizenship and Development: Palestinians in France and the Multiple Meanings of Statelessness. St Comp Int Dev 50, 479–499 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-015-9196-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-015-9196-0

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