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Flexible Citizenship and the Inflexible Nation-State: New Framework for Appraising the Palestinian Refugees’ Movements

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Abstract

This paper is a synthetic piece drawn from my writings from the past 14 years on Palestinian refugees’ problems. These writings were based on surveys among the Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) and in the diaspora, in-depth interviews, and participant observation, as well as secondary data. The aim is to discuss the interplay between three key factors which impact the construction of “Palestinian-ness” and will impact the process of return: geographical borders, social boundaries, and nation-state policies in the region. The interplay between them will be used to depict (1) the problematic relationship between the diaspora and the OPT in the current/eventual return movement of Palestinian refugees and the absence of the diaspora as a social space; (2) the flexibility of transnational strategies adopted by the Palestinians, whether citizens, refugees, current returnees, or transmigrants; and (3) the inflexibility of the policies of the nation-states in the region.

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Notes

  1. Count over 8 million according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (http://www.pcbs.gov.ps/DesktopModules/Articles/ArticlesView.aspx?tabID=0&lang=en&ItemID=396&mid=11117), the Palestinian diaspora is scattered all over the globe, but mainly in the Arab world. As refugees, there is a special UN organization dealing with them, UNRWA. In 2010, there are in excess of 4,25,640 Palestinian refugees registered with this organization (http://www.un.org/unrwa/publications/index.html.

  2. Geneva Initiative is a nonofficial model permanent status agreement to end the Israeli–Palestinian conflict based on previous official negotiations, international resolutions, the Quartet Roadmap, the Clinton Parameters, and the Arab Peace Initiative. Parameters of the Accord were negotiated in secret for over 2 years before the document was officially launched in the end of 2003, at a ceremony in Geneva, Switzerland.

  3. Led by myself, this survey has as its objective the identification of the patterns of return and transnationalism and the highlighting of the social and economic kinship between the Palestinians inside and outside the Palestinian territories as well as the mode of entrepreneurship in the Palestinian Territories. The questionnaire will identify also the family and gender implications of return, which are mainly about Palestinian transnational kinship ties and sociological factors affecting the return. It was conducted by Shaml between January and October 2003. A total of 560 questionnaires were completed by people in the Palestinian Territories and Israel. In addition, 50 in-depth interviews were conducted to triangulate some of the results obtained from the survey. Questionnaire consist of 82 open-ended and close questions targeting all the adult age group. For more details about the survey and its result, see (Hanafi 2007)

  4. The results in this paragraph stem from the interviewed returnees in Shaml survey in addition to complementary interviews I did with those who returned through the help of the United Nation Development Program’s TOKTEN program–Transfer of Knowledge Through Expatriate Nationals. As the sample is not representative, the percentages presented in this paragraph are indicative of a weight of a category compared to other ones. For more details, see (Hanafi 2008a, b).

  5. Interview with Raz and Zidan in June 2006.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to express my grateful thanks to the readers of earlier versions of this paper and those who discussed these ideas with me, especially Françoise De Belair, Aude Signoles, and Jalal al-Husseini.

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  1. American University of Beirut (AUB), Beirut, Lebanon

    Sari Hanafi

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Hanafi, S. Flexible Citizenship and the Inflexible Nation-State: New Framework for Appraising the Palestinian Refugees’ Movements. Int. Migration & Integration 13, 441–458 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12134-011-0198-0

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