The Palestinian Diaspora (Global Diasporas)

THE PALESTINIAN DIASPORA

From the refugee camps of the Lebanon to the relative prosperity of life in the USA, the Palestinian diaspora has been dispersed across the world. In this pioneering study, Helena Lindholm Schulz examines the ways in which Palestinian identity has been formed in the diaspora through constant longing for a homeland lost. In so doing, the author advances the debate on the relationship between diaspora and the creation of national identity as well as on nationalist politics tied to a particular territory. But The Palestinian Diaspora also sheds light on the possibilities opened up by a transnational existence, the possibility of new, less territorialised identities, even in a diaspora as bound to the idea of an idealised homeland as the Palestinian. Members of the diaspora form new lives in new settings and the idea of homeland becomes one important, but not the only, source of identity Ultimately, though, Schulz argues, the strong attachment to Palestine makes the diaspora crucial in any understandings of how to formulate a viable strategy for peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Helena Lindholm Schulz is Associate Professor at the Department of Peace and Development Research, Göteborg University. She is the author of The Reconstruction of Palestinian Nationalisms (Manchester University Press, 1999).

GLOBAL DIASPORAS Series Editor: Robin Cohen The assumption that minorities and migrants will demonstrate an exclusive loyalty to the nation-state is now questionable. Scholars of nationalism, international migration and ethnic relations need new conceptual maps and fresh case studies to understand the growth of complex transnational identities. The old idea of “diaspora” may provide this framework. Though often conceived in terms of a catastrophic dispersion, widening the notion of diaspora to include trade, imperial labour and cultural diasporas can provide a more nuanced understanding of the often positive relationships between migrants’ homelands and their places of work and settlement. This book forms part of an ambitious and interlinked series of volumes trying to capture the new relationships between home and abroad. Historians, political scientists, sociologists and anthropologists from a number of countries have collaborated on this forward-looking project. The series includes two books which provide the defining, comparative and synoptic aspects of diasporas. Further titles focus on particular communities, both traditionally recognized diasporas and those newer claimants who define their collective experiences and aspirations in terms of diasporic identity. This series is associated with the Transnational Communities Programme at the University of Oxford funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council. Already Published: Global Diasporas: An Introduction Robin Cohen New Diasporas Nicholas Van Hear The Sikh Diaspora Darshan Singh Tatla Italy’s Many Diasporas Donna R.Gabaccia The Hindu Diaspora: Comparative Patterns Steven Vertovec The Israeli Diaspora Steven J.Gold The Ukrainian Diapora Vic Satzewich New African Diasporas Edited by Khalis Koser

THE PALESTINIAN DIASPORA Formation of identities and politics of homeland

Helena Lindholm Schulz with Juliane Hammer

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2003 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 2003 Helena Lindholm Schulz All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congree Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schulz, Helena Lindholm. The Palestinian diaspora: formation of identities and politics of homeland/Helena Lindholm Schulz; in cooperation with Juliane Hammer.—1st ed. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Palestinian Arabs-Politics and government—20th century. 2. National liberation movements—Palestine. 3. National characteristics, Palestinian. 4. Repatriation—Palestine. 5. Refugees, Palestinian Arab. I.Hammer, Juliane. II. Title DS113.6.S38 2003 305.892′74-dc21 2003009734 ISBN 0-203-98903-1 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-415-26820-6 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-26821-4 (pbk)

CONTENTS

Preface List of abbreviations 1 Between nationalism and globalism

viii xi 1

Introduction

1

About this book

3

Diasporas: definitions and problems

8

2 Catastrophe and beyond

23

Migration patterns at the turn of the century

23

The catastrophe

24

Becoming a refugee

35

UNRWA and its cause

37

The setback

38

Forced migration continues

40

Patterns of new migration/labour migration

42

Christian migration

43

3 Palestinians in the world

44

Jordan

45

Lebanon

52

Egypt

61

The Gulf

63

Gaza/West Bank

67

vi

Israeli citizens: ‘refugees in the homeland’

73

Latin America

78

Western Europe

80

4 Stateless, rootless, homeless: meanings of homeland in exile

85

On the move

85

Missing home: estrangement, victimisation and suffering

91

Life in liminality

93

Land of longing

96

Exile as deserts and placeless places 5 Resistance and return: the politics of homeland

110 117

Struggle as ideology

118

Struggle as identity

120

De-territorialised state-building

130

Expanding the discourse of struggle

132

Gender and struggle

135

6 Right of return, the refugees and the collapse of the peace process

139

Right of return as politics

140

The peace process

141

Resentment and bitterness

145

Peace process derailed

149

Territorialisation of leadership/the PLO 1994–2000

155

The ‘al-Aqsa intifada’

160

7 New homes and identities in motion

167

The transnational through class and economy

169

Family networks

170

Economy/remittances

173

Recreating Palestine from afar

177

vii

Home away from home, moving homes, new homes and homes in your 181 head Processes of identification: hybridity? 8 Coming home?

191 204

The dream and the fear

208

The peace process

141

Real return

213

Remaining in diaspora

223

9 Nationalism through transnationalism

225

Return

227

Notes

229

Bibliography

243

Index

268

PREFACE

My then 5-year-old daughter once said, going home from kindergarten and discussing her future ‘marriage plans’ with one of her friends: ‘Mom, when I am grown up, maybe it will be nicer for me to live in a life of my own.’ Now, that’s not the way you would put it in correct Swedish; it would, rather, be ‘live in a place of my own’ or ‘house of my own’, or, with a different meaning, ‘have my own life’. But thinking about it, I found the phrasing rather wonderful. Maybe that’s how it ought to be; maybe we don’t live in places after all, maybe we live in lives. That would be a radical transformation of the ways in which we have considered place throughout the modern era. Although I was enchanted with Rebecka’s ideas about life and place, feelings of stability, security, continuity and harmony connected to a place are prominent indeed. ‘Place’ carries profound significance. However, ‘place’ seldom exists on its own terms, but is defined by social relations, by socioeconomic conditions, by politics and power. Writing this book, I’ve been thinking a lot about place. About what place means in life. And what losing a sense of place might mean. What does, for example, the place/ locality that I have found for myself and my family entail? Being forcibly and violently evacuated from the place that you have chosen for yourself does indeed have a traumatising potential. Studying the literature and the material for this book, speaking to Palestinians about their life and exile, as well as following the news of Kosovars, Afghans, Chechnians, Bosnians, Rwandans fleeing for their lives in contemporary times, I have been trying to imagine what it would be like to take my youngest son in my arms, my daughter by her hand, and together with my husband walk away from our house on the edge of the forest, trying to avoid snipers and hearing the eerie sound of tanks and helicopters approaching. I have also been trying to figure out what it would feel like to live in a refugee camp with my

ix

children, to constantly rehearse how wonderful life used to be in our real home, back there in Sweden, and not being allowed to go there. The Palestinian refugee catastrophe is today one of the oldest refugee situations in the modern world. In concluding this book, the intense violence between Israelis and Palestinians made it difficult for several reasons to wrap things up. It was not always easy to acquire an accurate description of events ‘on the ground’, not to speak of the difficulties in correctly understanding their impact. However, events in the early 2000s underline the urgent need to investigate the situation of the Palestinian diaspora. A number of people have been crucial to this undertaking. First of all, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Professor Robin Cohen of the University of Warwick for believing in and encouraging the project. Mari Shullaw at Routledge has been equally encouraging and supportive. The anonymous reviewers were all crucial in helping me avoid some of the shortfalls that may otherwise have resulted. Readers of various parts of the manuscript who have contributed analytically are Marita Eastmond, Erik Andersson, Maria Stern, Maria Eriksson Baaz, Lisa Åkesson, Camilla Orjulea, and Henrik Norberg. Thank you all for theoretical insights, sharp comments and for opening my eyes to potential mistakes and traps. Henrik Norberg should also be especially thanked for conducting interviews with Palestinian refugees in Jordan. Juliane Hammer has been of invaluable benefit through her exacting knowledge and competence, through her skills in Arabic, through her excellence in interviewing and through her assistance in the writing process. I am deeply grateful that Juliane joined me in this endeavour. Without her, I know this book would lack a number of insights. My husband, Michael Schulz has provided unceasing support and encouragement. Lisa Williams has conducted a careful and precise copy-edit. I also have a great debt to my mother, Annika Lindholm, who has on a great number of occasions helped me take care of my children in order to help me find the time to finalise this book. Above all, however, a great thank-you to all Palestinians in Lebanon, Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza, in the USA and in Sweden who have answered our questions, who have shared with us painful memories and (sometimes) difficult descriptions of life at present. I am also extremely grateful to the generous grant that was provided by the Swedish Board of Sciences, which enabled the employment of Henrik Norberg and Juliane Hammer as well as collection of material and data. A previous grant from the Swedish Sida/Sarec related to a project on democratisation has also been a tremendous value.

x

To Rebecka and Johannes, may you always feel that you belong, if not to some place, then to something, be it a relationship, a family, a life that you feel that you have the power and possibility to control. Thank you for providing perspective. Helena Lindholm Schulz September 2002

ABBREVIATIONS

AHC ALF ANM CPRS DAP DFLP DOP GNP GUPS GUPT GUPW GUPWom IDF IZL JNF LHI LNM NDA NGO PA PADICO PBS PCP PDFLP PFLP

Arab Higher Committee Arab Liberation Front Arab Nationalist Movement Centre for Palestine Research and Studies Democratic Arab Party Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine Declaration of Principles gross national product General Union of Palestine Students General Union of Palestinian Teachers General Union of Palestine Workers General Union of Palestinian Women Israeli Defence Forces Irgun Tzevai Leumi; the Irgun movement Jewish National Fund Lochaemi Cherut Yisrael; the Stern movement Lebanese National Movement National Democratic Alliance non-governmental organisation Palestinian Authority Palestinian Development and Investment Corporation Palestinian Bureau of Statistics Palestine Communist Party Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine

xii

PFLP—GC PFLP—SC PLA PLF PLO PNA PNC PNF PNSF PPP PPSF PRM UN UNCCP UNGA UNHCR UNLU UNRWA UNSC UNSCO

Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—General Command Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—Special Command Palestine Liberation Army Palestine Liberation Front Palestine Liberation Organisation Palestinian National Authority Palestinian National Council Palestine National Front Palestine National Salvation Front Palestine People’s Party Palestine Popular Struggle Front Palestinian Resistance Movement United Nations United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine United Nations General Assembly United Nations High Commission for Refugees Unified National Leadership of the Uprising United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East United Nations Security Council United Nations Special Coordinator

1 BETWEEN NATIONALISM AND GLOBALISM

But I am the exiled one behind wall and door, Shelter me in the warmth of your gaze. Take me, wherever you are, Take me, however you are. To be restored to the warmth of face and body, To the light of heart and eye, To the salt of bread and song, To the taste of earth and homeland. Shelter me in the warmth of your gaze, Take me, a panel of almond wood, in the cottage of sorrows, Take me, a verse from the book of my tragedy, Take me, a plaything or a stone from the house, So that our next generation may recall The path of return to our home.

(Mahmoud Darwish 1966, 1970, ‘A Lover from Palestine’, in Elmessiri 1982) Introduction One of the grim paradoxes of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is that the foundation of the state of Israel, intended to create a safe haven for the ‘archetypical’ Jewish diaspora, spelt the immediate diasporisation of the Arab Palestinians. The territorialisation of the Jewish diaspora spurred a new ‘wandering identity’ and the Palestinians became a ‘refugee nation’ (Siddiq 1995:87). To the Palestinians, the birth of Israel is thus remembered as the catastrophe, al-nakba, to imprint the suffering caused by dispersal, exile, alienation and denial. Cohen (1997) adequately labels

2 BETWEEN NATIONALISM AND GLOBALISM

both Jewish and Palestinian diasporas ‘victim diasporas’ to indicate the ways in which they have been formed as a consequence of disasters befalling them. In 2001 the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) estimated the number of Palestinian refugees at almost 3.9 million (UNRWA 2001). The Palestinian diaspora is spread throughout the world, with the bulk residing in the Arab world. Many Palestinians, however, live in Europe, the USA and Latin America. The nakba is the root cause of the Palestinian diaspora. However, migration from Palestine began in the late eighteenth century, at that time primarily constituted by Christians and primarily oriented towards the ‘new world’. As most people aspire for a better life for themselves and their children, Palestinian migration has also been caused by attempts at securing improved living conditions. Their destitution is, however, in itself a cause of the exodus and, later, of the Israeli occupation, as well as of impossible life situations. The majority of the Palestinian population live in the diaspora and most are refugees. Experiences in exile have been building blocks in shaping Palestinian national identity. Fragmentation, loss of homeland and denial have prompted an identity of ‘suffering’, an identification created by the anxieties and injustices happening to the Palestinians because of external forces. In this process, a homeland discourse, a process of remembering what has been lost, is an important component. It was, furthermore, in exile that the ‘resistance’ was formulated, that the ideology of ‘armed struggle’ and ‘revolution’ was asserted as a strategy to overcome processes of victimisation and to transcend the state of dispossession, denial and statelessness (R.Sayigh 1979, 1994a; Peteet 1991, 1993; Y.Sayigh 1997). It was thus in the diaspora that the two central poles of ‘suffer’ and ‘struggle’, composing the (main) narrative of Palestinian identity (cf. Lindholm Schulz 1999), took form. Therefore the dispersal (shatat in Arabic) and fragmentation of the Arab population of Palestine have served as uniting factors behind a modern Palestinian national identity, illuminating the facet of absence of territory as a weighty component in creations and recreations of ethnic and national identities in exile. Deterritorialised communities seek their identity in the territory, the Homeland Lost, which they can only see from a distance, if at all. The focal point of identity and politics is a place lost. It is in the placeless space1 of exile that the political struggle has been mounted. It is in the deterritorialised context of dispersal that nation- and proto-state-building a la Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) have occurred. Consequently, with the ‘territorialisation’ of the PLO as a result

BETWEEN NATIONALISM AND GLOBALISM 3

of the peace process and the self-rule arrangements from 1993 onwards, both the meaning and the function of the diaspora in Palestinian nationalism changed. The peace process further illuminated the predicament of the Palestinian refugees. Although the PLO has officially continued to demand fulfilment of UN resolution 194 and a return to homes lost and compensation, there is not substantial international support for such a solution. Yet it is around the hope of return that millions of Palestinian refugees have formed their lives. This hope has historically been nurtured by PLO politics and its tireless repetition of the ‘right of return’—a mantra in PLO discourse. In addition, for hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of Palestinian refugees, there are no prospects (or desires) for integration into host societies. In Lebanon, the Palestinians have been regarded as ‘human garbage’ (Nasrallah 1997), indeed as ‘matters out of place’ (cf. Douglas 1976), and as unwanted. To other members of the Palestinian diaspora, the homeland in concrete terms long ago lost its ultimate significance, and remains but a symbol to gather around in the land of exile. Many are ‘integrated’ into host societies to the extent that a return is not important. For others, a return process would require difficult decisions. Nevertheless, the neglect of the refugees that characterised the Oslo process galvanised a new movement for the right of return and set the PLO leadership further apart from the refugee population. The failure of the negotiations in Camp David in the summer of 2000 was to no little extent the result of the diverging views on how to proceed on the refugees. Much more attention was given to the refugee issue during the Taba talks in December that year. The refugee question was then acknowledged as perhaps the central issue. Therefore, there is a vital necessity to engage in studies and research on what constitutes the reality for Palestinian refugees and migrants. About this book Although there exists a large number of important works on specific Palestinian refugee situations, there is, perhaps somewhat oddly, a lack of comprehensive studies on the Palestinian diaspora so far. Most studies on Palestinian society have focused on PLO politics, the conflict with Israel and the Israeli occupation. With some noteworthy exceptions,2 the people living the ordeal of Palestinian exile have been conspicuously absent from academic undertakings.3 What is more, only seldom is the Palestinian predicament treated from a diaspora perspective. This absence is becoming more of an anomaly as the need to analyse the plight of the refugees are

4 BETWEEN NATIONALISM AND GLOBALISM

becoming ever more acute. To the Palestinians, the nakba and the prolonged refugee situation are the core of the conflict with Israel and there is an urgent call for a link between studies on the ideas, perceptions and life-situations of refugees with policy-oriented works. The purpose of this book is to look further into the relationship between diaspora and the creation of national identity,4 as well as nationalist politics related to a particular territory, but also to explore the possibilities incumbent in a transnational existence and new, less territorialised identities even among a diaspora community as tightly knitted around the idealised homeland as the Palestinian. It will do this by the following means: • describing the dispersal in itself, i.e. its history as well as the very different settings of Palestinian diaspora(s); • analysing the meanings of place/homeland in relation to identity; • investigating the role that the exile has played in the mounting politics of struggle, as well as the changing impact of the exile on PLO politics from the early 1980s; • providing an analysis of the peace process in the 1990s as well as its collapse from the perspective of the refugee question, • analysing the impact of the fact of transnationalisation on Palestinian lives and experiences—to what extent do Palestinians in exile create identities not solely shaped by the context of remembering, longing and struggling, but also crafted by new contexts and the potentials of forming new homes in host societies?; • investigating the meanings inherent in the notion of ‘return’, as well as different strategies to cope with actual homecoming. Chapter summary In Chapter 2, ‘Catastrophe and beyond’, we will account for the history of the Palestinian diaspora, the factors leading to the Palestinian exodus, and the multiple forms of migration and mobility that do exist. The following chapter, ‘Palestinians in the world’, provides an overview of the whereabouts and the different political, social and economic circumstances of the Palestinian diaspora.5 Chapter 4, ‘Stateless, rootless, homeless: meanings of homeland in exile’, brings us to the meaning of homeland to identity-formation in the diaspora. What are the prevalent discourses on the territory/homeland of Palestine?

BETWEEN NATIONALISM AND GLOBALISM 5

Chapter 5, ‘Resistance and return: the politics of the homeland’, discusses the role of the diaspora in Palestinian nationalist politics as well as how an identity as victims was transformed into an identity of strugglers and resistance fighters. This chapter thus also considers the relationship between diaspora and nationalism and marginality as a site of resistance.6 Chapter 6, ‘Right of return, the refugees and the collapse of the peace process’, focuses on trends in relation to the peace process initiated in the early 1990s.7 What did the self-rule arrangements and the territorialisation of the PLO imply in terms of the meaning and function of refugees in PLO politics and in terms of the right of return? Also, the break-out of the alAqsa intifada in late September 2000 will be accounted for.8 Chapter 7, ‘New homes and identities in motion’, brings us to the issue of transnational activities as influential factors in shaping people’s conceptualisations of home and identity, moving away from mythical imaginings of the homeland. Chapter 8, ‘Coming home?’, turns our focus to ‘return’ as a vision for the future. The peace process has also implied an unprecedented opportunity for return for a number of ‘displaced persons’ from 1967, and in particular for PLO cadres and officials. How has the return taken place and how have ideas of ‘outside-inside’9 been dealt with in this process? Chapter 9, ‘Nationalism through transnationalism’, provides some conclusions on the role that diasporas might play in a nationalist, territorialist movement. It intends to shed some light on how diasporas may form identities both in relation to perceived ‘roots’ and in relation to experienced travels. In this last, concluding, chapter the profound meaning of return as a life-coping strategy is also underlined, along with the political consequences of this. A note on sources and methodology The study is based on a variety of sources. Documentary material provided by the PLO caters for one important category of sources. Extensive use has been made of exile literature in terms of novels, short stories, poetry and autobiographies. The national poets and writers Mahmoud Darwish, Fadwa Tuqan, Ibrahim Jabra and Ghassan Kanafani and authors who have written extensively in the English language, like Fawaz Turki and Edward Said, are examples of the rich body of texts conceptualising Palestine and exile. It should be noted, however, that, although this constitutes a treasure trove in terms of accessibility and information, the sophistication of this literature is not a style of expression that is altogether typical of the Palestinian experience. To be sure, many Palestinians know of famous

6 BETWEEN NATIONALISM AND GLOBALISM

poets (such as Mahmoud Darwish) but much fewer are acquainted with novels and short stories. In addition, the experience of Edward Said and Fawaz Turki, in their globalised (although differently defined) lifestyles, may to some extent be rather ‘untypical’. On the other hand, the rich variety of this literature together portrays important aspects of Palestinian lives in the diaspora. Oral stories will serve as a third form of narrative, where discourses about homeland, identity and politics are articulated. Series of interviews have been conducted with Palestinians in Lebanon, Jordan, the USA and Sweden.10 The intention is not to accommodate a detailed account of any of those settings, but, rather, through these varied stories to provide something that might amount to a narrative of the Palestinian diaspora as such. The stories collected are as diverse as the Palestinians we talked to. Most of the interviews were conducted in 2001–2, although material collected in the West Bank and Gaza during earlier periods (1994–511, 199712 and 199813) has also been brought into play in order to shed further light on the issues reflected upon. Many of these earlier interviews were centred on similar issues and questions. All in all, we have spoken to well over 150 people.14 In Jordan, 15 people residing in Rusaifah, Ramtha and the camp of Hitteen were interviewed in May 2001.15 In Lebanon, 25 interviews were conducted in Shatila, Ein el-Hilweh, Burj Shemali and Mar Elias, as well as among Palestinians living in Beirut, outside of the camps, in July—August 2001. In the case of the Arab countries it has to be emphasised that highly insightful sociological and anthropological studies are available. Our own interviews served the purpose of complementing and updating existing works and allowing us to gain our own impressions of the situations in Jordan and Lebanon. The interviews in the USA were concentrated on Washington, DC,16 where 26 interviews were conducted in April—May 2001.17 This material was vital, since the situation of Palestinian Americans has rarely been described in more detail.18 In Sweden, 12 interviews were conducted, for the most part in Göteborg, between January and April 2001 and in February—March 2002.19 People have shared with us their often painful experience of being refugees as well as the everyday experience of transnational facets of life. Sometimes the accounts are highly personal. Often, the building of trust was, however, only possible with the help of friends and acquaintances, who introduced us and our project. Sometimes the knowledge of Arabic and previous travel experiences in the West Bank and Gaza helped in opening doors. At other times it was difficult, if not impossible, to establish trust. People remained suspicious and the narratives, as a consequence, were more distant and impersonal. Many of the interviews

BETWEEN NATIONALISM AND GLOBALISM 7

were conducted in a highly charged political atmosphere as the violence in the West Bank and Gaza became a backdrop to the research. Almost daily news on violence occurring in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip made the violence an ever-present topic for discussion, and probably informed many of the answers. This was particularly true for the material collected in camps in Lebanon and Jordan.20 The intention is to capture both the grand narrative of Palestinian identity and life in exile as that story is constantly reconstructed and repeated, as well as the potential discrepancies and dissonances existing between an official, highly pitched politicised discourse, on the one hand, and individual and collective ‘small stories’ of everyday coping and management, on the other. Telling other people’s stories Any project claiming the validity of ‘representing’ ‘others’, of presenting stories told by ‘others’, requires reflection on the ways in which this is conducted. Clearly, and as is so often underlined in recent post-colonially influenced texts on culture, identity and people’s lives, it is problematic that the narratives of the ‘other’ come about through the works of, in the words of the Palestinian writer Suheir Hammad, ‘sympathetic anthropologist[s] talking for’ them (Hammad 1996a:88). One example of the problems inherent in a research project such as this one is revealed by how an informant in Shatila told of frustrations over foreigners who visit the camps. In a sort of ‘misery tourism’, they walk around for a while, take some pictures and, yes, some even cry about the desolation, but then they leave again and everything is as before. In his view, the camps have become like ‘zoos’ and the refugees like ‘animals to stare at’. Some come for research and to write articles, but, he asked, have all these writings ever changed anything about the situation, have they brought help or at least some money into the camps? As researchers come to visit over and over again, the inner wounds of people are constantly reopened. As for this project, not only might we have contributed to the unravelling of wounds without offering much in return, we might also have forced our own images and frames upon those we met. One Palestinian filmmaker, speaking at a seminar in Göteborg in early 2002, explained how Western representations and expectations of a ‘particularly political Palestinian’ have become like a cage, a frame to escape from.21 Must Palestinians constantly dwell on their identity and the politics of that identification with Westerners, be they researchers or journalists?

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Surely, this is something to take seriously. Do academic texts change anything for the people we claim to tell something about? Many refugees have called for us to write their story, to serve as intermediaries to the Western world, so that the West ‘will know’, and then surely things must change. If it not always explicitly uttered, this may have served as a motive for many for taking part in this study. We do not believe this book will change the situation for Palestinian camp refugees. Neither has that been our purpose. However, it is our firm conviction that the stories told in this book are crucial to any understanding of how to come to terms with the bitter conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Events in recent years, such as the mobilisation around the refugee issue, the negotiations in Camp David and Taba and the al-Aqsa intifada, further underline the necessity of bringing the experiences of the Palestinian diaspora to life. Also, along with Farah below, we ultimately believe it is of overarching importance to bring the stories and their implications to life rather than to take part in not hearing these voices at all: Needless to say, there are theoretical and methodological problems inherent in all forms of ‘representations’, in the utilization of lifehistories and in ‘giving voice’ to the ‘other’; yet, the alternative is to unwittingly collaborate in the process of silencing. (Farah 1999:8) However, we have no inclination to echo official postures and political rhetorics. The politics of Palestine, the homeland, has served to obscure many aspects of the Palestinian experience of diaspora, for example the possibility of finding new homes away from the homeland. Diasporas: definitions and problems As has been underlined by most recent studies, ‘diaspora’ is a problematic term, related as it has become to one very unique experience, i.e. the Jewish, yet applicable and relevant to a number of very different cases and forms (cf. Cohen 1997). The term is further complicated by the fact that ‘diaspora’ has increasingly come to be employed as a metaphor to signify a global condition of mobility, in which migrants are frequently seen as at the core. The term ‘diaspora’ relates to a group of people that has been dispersed or has expanded to at least two countries of the world. Whether force and coercion of some form are necessary conditions is a debated issue. Faist

BETWEEN NATIONALISM AND GLOBALISM 9

(2000) maintains that a traumatic event is the cause of a diaspora existence, whereas Cohen (1997) has made a useful distinction between various forms of diasporas—not all of them the result of force or trauma. For the concept to be applicable, strong collective images of the homeland should exist. In terms of identity, there is often a strong sense of community with other members of that diaspora and an uneasy relationship with the host society (cf. Safran 1991:83f.; Clifford 1994: 304f.; Cohen 1997:26). That is, diaspora is something ‘more’ than an ‘ethnic minority’ resulting from migration.22 Diaspora requires a transnational existence—a dispersal and a diffusion throughout the world. Also, a time-aspect is required; dispersal alone does not necessarily imply the constitution of a diaspora population. It needs to have existed for some time and it needs to be an enduring condition. However, we do not necessarily see the diaspora concept as implying everlasting dispersal or a firm establishment in new societies. Diasporas may be enduring yet define themselves as temporary residents where they are. ‘Diaspora’ could be seen as an overarching term, with the potential to embrace different and more specific notions of residing outside of territorial home, such as exiles, migrants and refugees. There has recently been a shift in emphasis in the definition of diaspora, from concentrating mainly on geographical displacement to viewing diaspora as a form of social organisation, as a form of transnational community (cf. Wahlbeck 2002). However, it remains a fact that there are no clear-cut delineations between, for example, diaspora and exile and it is not once and for all clear how to view refugees within the contemporary frame of diaspora studies. The central role of the ‘homeland’ is often accentuated in definitions of diaspora. However, this has recently become an issue of contention in the debate. For example, Clifford has argued that a homeland lost must not necessarily serve a crucial role in identity-formation in the diaspora. Rather: Decentered, lateral connections may be as important as those formed around a teleology of origin/return. And a shared, ongoing history of displacement, suffering, adaptation, or resistance may be as important as the projection of a specific origin. (Clifford 1994:306) It is thus not necessarily territory, but the lack of it, which defines diasporic communities. The relationships between territory, displacement and resistance are complicated. It is in the process of displacement that identity is shaped, or reshaped, but that process requires a sense of a place

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left behind. In order for displacement to serve a function in meaningcreation, place, or the imagination of a shared place, must have existed beforehand. In addition, it is not necessarily ‘our’ homeland which is of importance, but the fact of ‘others’ relating to a homeland. ‘Having a homeland’ to relate to is supposedly a way of positioning oneself in time as well as space. Furthermore, ‘homeland’ must not necessarily represent a national entity, but in concrete commemoration and longing the ‘homeland’ might be represented through local places or experiences. And yet again, for diasporas, ‘territory’ and ‘land’ may be more metaphorical and symbolic than ‘real’. As Malkki has put it: The homeland here is not so much a territorial or topographic entity as a moral destination’ (Malkki 1992:35f.). The globalisation debate further fuels this argument, since the core aspects of globalisation refer to the increasing sense of loss of space and time as defining concepts for societies and societal processes. For Paul Gilroy (1999), diaspora is an ‘outer-national term’. The transnational condition Exile is contrary to what is stable, secure and static. It is not the equivalent of life after movement, but represents movement itself. Diaspora, life away from one’s homeland, is life in flux; it implies an unstable and ephemeral, fugitive condition: Exile…is ‘a mind of winter’ in which the pathos of summer and autumn as much as the potential of spring are nearby but unobtainable. Perhaps this is another way of saying that a life of exile moves according to a different calendar, and is less seasonal and settled than life at home. Exile is life led outside habitual order. It is nomadic, decentered, contrapuntal; but no sooner does one get accustomed to it than its unsettling force erupts anew. (Said 1984:55) The diaspora condition encompasses transnational lives. The very term implies, as we have seen, a cross-border, unbounded condition. ‘Diasporas’ have come to serve as one of the most crucial metaphors for a globalised condition of identities in constant motion. Terms like ‘diaspora’, ‘nomads’, ‘tourists’ and ‘vagabonds’ represent mobility and spaceless conditions. Chambers (1994), for example, argues that all identities are formed ‘on the move’ (cf. Said 1979; Gupta and Ferguson 1992; Hall 1995) and that deterritorialisation is a state of affairs also for those not

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formally displaced. The sense of being lost/dispersed is (supposedly) universal in a globalising world. Ostensibly natural connections between land and people are being disrupted at an ever-faster speed. Diaspora entails that ‘local’, ‘rooted’ life has been replaced by a ‘transient’ life (Tomlinson 1999:9). Diasporas may be homesick, yet they form lives and experiences in a homeless condition, or create new homes in new settings. To some extent, this implies possibilities of creating unbounded identities. Despite an often nostalgic look towards a bounded ‘home’, diasporas lead lives not confined to a ‘home’. There is thus an intense and acute difference between the lived, transnational, unbounded and out-of-space experience of diaspora and the memory of a nationalised, rooted, placed and essentialist past and identity. Being placeless is the fundamental symbol of the decreased role and meaning of the nation-state. Yet rootlessness is (for the most part) not an enviable condition. Diaspora/ migration as a metaphor for a globalised world needs also a critical approach. We have no intention of romanticising the Palestinian diaspora. Neither do we wish to pursue the line of passivisation and victimisation through too much emphasis on the traumas (cf. Shami 1996: Eastmond 1998). The term ‘placeless’ can surely be discussed. To some, it might seem like a word devoid of meaning, since ‘place’ always exists and as long as people live in different places meanings will be attached to those places. Nevertheless, to the Palestinian diaspora (and potentially also to others), there is certainly (as we shall see) a strong sense of actually living outside or without a place. Salma Khadra Jayyusi (1992:48) also employs the notion ‘placeless’ to articulate Palestinian sentiments of exile. Said speaks of places as provisional: The exile knows that in a secular and contingent world, homes are always provisional. Borders and barriers which enclose us within the safety of familiar territory can also become prisons, and are often defended beyond reason or necessity Exiles cross borders, break barriers of thought and experience. (Said 1990:365) Diasporas create new and other forms of social connections and interactions that are not bound by territory. Social interactions in the diaspora are often trans-territorial. Sense of community is created and maintained through other means than official national identity connected to a sovereign space (cf. also Cohen 1997). Through trans-border activities, through flows of peoples, information, money and meaning,

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members of a diaspora connect with each other. What is more, they contribute to an intensification of linkages between the nation-states in which they reside. Diasporas make use of globalising techniques and mechanisms as spelled out in communication technology (Basch et al. 1994:23). By transnational is meant exchange and interactions of various forms such as visiting, travelling, spending vacations, going to weddings, looking for jobs, i.e. activities that for dispersed populations are transnational/crossborder by their very nature. Vertovec defines transnationalism as ‘long distance networks’ (1999:447). Portes sees transnational activities ‘as those that take place on a recurrent basis across national borders and that require a regular and significant commitment of time by participants’ (Portes 1999:464). Previously, studies on migrants have taken for granted a movement from somewhere to somewhere else, implying that the move supposedly causes a complete change in context, in spatial frameworks and in social relations. With the proliferated emphasis on globalisation, porousness of borders and boundaries, ‘home’ and ‘host’ societies are increasingly seen as overlapping. In fact, it is progressively possible to act within two (or more) spatial systems on almost equal terms. There is a blurring of ‘here’ and ‘there’ (Fuglerud 1999:178). Basch et al. have stated in relation to the nation-state and its altered function in the era of globalisation: In contrast to the past, when nation-states were defined in terms of a people sharing a common culture within a bounded territory, this new conception of nation-state includes as citizens those who live physically dispersed within the boundaries of many other states, but who remain socially, politically culturally, and often economically part of the nation-state of their ancestors. (Basch et al. 1994:8) Diaspora populations reside in one state, but remain to some extent part of their homeland. Frequently they also act within other societies, as keeping contact with kin in other states leads to connections in the plural rather than the dual. Van Hear has defined diaspora as ‘people with multiple allegiance to place’ (Van Hear 1998:4). In a globalising world, diasporas play a number of significant and practical roles, in the sense that they maintain relationships with several places. Tölölyan has claimed that diasporas are ‘the exemplary communities of the transnational movement’ (1991:5). Hammar has argued that new diasporas call for a new social label, ‘denizens’, in order to account for people who are not simply foreign

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citizens or naturalised citizens in receiving countries (Hammar 1990:13). Margolis has stated that transnationalism implies that ‘home and host society [form] a single arena of social action’ (Margolis 1995:29). Although these approaches have slightly diverse emphases, what they do have in common is the way in which they bring to the forefront how diaspora relations and processes of identification escape easy categorisations and challenge the common knowledge posited by the nation-state. Now, to act within ‘home’ and ‘host society’ in the form suggested by Margolis above, is clearly not possible for the vast majority of Palestinian refugees, since most of those are barred from travelling at all and most are restricted from coming ‘home’. Indeed, refugee situations constitute the prime argument against transnationalism as the defining reality of people living outside their places of origin. Yet Palestinian refugees still relate to their homeland through acts of memory and by preserving links with family members. Transnational aspects of life also have considerable implications for politics, since diaspora populations are frequently deeply entrenched in the political situation of their homeland (cf. Shain 1999; Davies 2000). Hybridity Exile does not mean the total separation from your place of origin but is rather a condition where one never abandons the old nor completely accepts the new. It is not a state in which one can become complacent, comfortable and secure. Rather, it is a state that hones your skill for survival. (Ashcroft and Ahluwalia 1999:139) Maintaining social interaction means concrete journeys to visit family, friends and co-members of ethnicity/nationality in other parts of the world, but it also implies the recreation of a collective self in several different places. Hybridity has come to refer to the ways in which identities are formed anew in the process of meetings occurring through travels and movement. What is distinctive about the cultures of contact zones or diasporas is that they never remain ‘pure’ to their origin. The new circumstances in which these cultures must survive begin to have consequences for how the ‘original’ culture is changed and adapted over time. The original cultures of the displaced groups come into

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contact and are obliged to negotiate with the cultures of the other groups with whom—on whatever terms— they establish a ‘copresence’. The culture which evolves in diasporas is therefore usually the result of some never-contemplated, complex process of combining elements from different cultural repertoires to form ‘new’ cultures which are related to but which are not exactly like any of the originals. (Hall 1995:193) Diaspora thus entails possibilities of inventiveness and potentiality in new and pluralistic settings (Cohen 1996). Forms of constructing identity in diaspora have become an emblem for the ‘hybridisation’ of identity (cf. Bhabha 1990; Hall 1992). Perhaps it needs to be stressed that all identities not only are historical constructs, but are in a constant process of hybridisation. The contemporary celebration of the ‘mélange’, ‘the hotchpotch’, ‘a bit of this and a bit of that’ (Rushdie 1991) is also problematic, since the very usage of terms such as ‘mixing’, ‘mingling’, ‘hybrids’ and ‘creoles’ leads the thoughts to an existence of two or more ‘pure’/static entities being mixed in the intersection. Thus, the term seems to presuppose a pre-hybrid essentialism (cf. Tomlinson 1999: 143f.). This slip of the tongue should be avoided, however, and, as Hall (1995) asserts, all identities are always hybrid. Identities are, further, the result not only of mingling, or of difference, but also of people’s creative activities and constructions. Nevertheless, the diaspora condition concretely manifests the ‘hotch-potch’. Diasporic searches for identity provoke both new boundaries and attempts at fixing identities by localising them in the absent but longed for territory, and the unbounding and delocalisation of identity. Paradoxically, diasporas show that the homeland is not really necessary in order to maintain a sense of community, identity and belonging. Nationalism’s main idea of an ultimate and unbreakable bond between people, state and territory is thus made increasingly redundant. Diasporas (taken generally) are involved in a double process of desperately missing what has been lost and concretely doing without it. At the same time, globalisation and the reduction in the meaning of space have spurred a new need of ‘home’ and ‘place’ in a disoriented global condition (Morley and Robins 1993:5). Globalisation also trig- gers reactions in the form of renewed needs for identities firmly rooted in time and space (cf. Castells 1997).

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Diasporas and nationalism Despite the current emphasis on mobility, travelling and routes and despite actual placelessness, diaspora populations often embrace nationalist programmes and ambitions in their specific memories of a place lost. Although the variety of diaspora experiences makes it difficult to generalise, many diasporas have a specific relationship to the nation-state as well as nationalism. The precise ways in which diasporas are related to nationalism are contextually as well as historically contingent. Nationalism is an ideology of boundedness and a believed or claimed congruity between people, territory and state, or population, geography and politics. We concur with Portugali, who states that the main elements of nationalism are ‘territory, place and environment (i.e. spatial entities) in relation to people and their collective memories (i.e. temporal entities)’ (Portugali 1993:37). Space is thus a crucial component in the creation of nationalism and nationalist identities, given its potential narrative power in concretising relations between ‘us’ and ‘them’. An illuminating perspective on the relationship between nationalism and place is (unintentionally) provided by Relph, who tells us that the meaning of place is situated in its capacity to separate an ‘inside’ from an ‘outside’. Being inside ‘is the difference between safety and danger, cosmos and chaos, enclosure and exposure, or simply here and there’ (Relph 1976:49; George 1995:2). Collective memory in national(ist) discourses is intimately connected to place and geography, manifest in Palestinian memories of orange groves and olive trees. Since nationalism is ultimately an ideology relating to the distribution of territory, nationalism as an ideology also thrives on the meaning of ‘our’ nature, landscape and geography. One particular feature of the symbolic use of nature is the tree, often used as a symbol of rootedness, as in the Swedish fir and birch, the Lebanese cedar or the Palestinian olive tree. Metaphors of people being rooted in the land (cf. Appadurai 1988; Malkki 1992:24) are a powerful means through which to claim historical rights. A representation of a peasant past and an ideology of cultivating the land portray rootedness and belonging to the land. Nationalism’s preoccupation with territory is also evident in the notions of ‘motherland’ and ‘fatherland’, indicating genealogical linkages and the idea of common ancestry and kinship. Representations of a nation’s birth in a specific territory provide nationalisms and national identity with a sense of both historical continuity and territorial rootedness (Malkki 1992:28).

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These connections with ‘land’ become particularly acute in diaspora politics of nationalism and identity. Remembering home and place serves as a means of maintaining community in exile. ‘“Homeland” in this way remains one of the most powerful unifying symbols for mobile and displaced peoples’ (Gupta and Ferguson 1992:11). As we have seen, diasporas challenge the notion and the idea that state and nation should coincide. Therefore, diasporas defy the very fundament of the modern international system as it has evolved (cf. Massey 1995:51). Diasporas live and reside in host states and societies, yet their priority is not to become part of those states. They do not involve themselves in integration programmes, yet at the same time— despite the urge to return —they often stay on, as part of the host society but not quite. Diasporas behave neither as permanent residents nor as temporary visitors.23 Diasporas thus cause disorder in the modern vision of neat correlations between state borders, national boundaries and citizen’s loyalties. Discursive practices used to describe especially refugee situations often refer to such images of linkages between territory and identity. Refugees are frequently described as ‘uprooted’, meaning that the natural state of affairs is to stay put, to continue belonging to a certain place. To be ‘rooted’ connotes being secure, stable, healthy (Sarup 1994:96). Refugees are seen as representing an unnatural condition and as a problem to be solved. Refugees are perceived as traumatised because of a forced separation between people and land, and are therefore in need of treatment (cf. Eastmond 1998). From the perspective of the nation-state, diasporas are ‘anomalies’ (Malkki 1992:33f.), ‘matters out of place’ (Douglas 1976) or categories of liminality, in Victor Turner’s (1969) words. Given our conceptions of culture (especially ‘national culture’) as rooted in territory (cf. Hall 1995), diaspora populations are often seen as not only placeless but also devoid of culture (Malkki 1992: 34). Yet: diaspora formations and secessionist claims are in fact endemic to a world order of nation-states, rather than anomalous anachronisms doomed to extinction. (Shain and Sherman 1998:339) Diaspora discourses and politics frequently embrace precisely this notion of an unnatural disconnection from the essential, ancestral land. The political ambition is then to reunite the people with the land and undo the traumatic separation. Thus, host societies often find themselves uneasy containers of nationalist sentiments directed elsewhere (cf. also Lavie and Swedenburg 1996:14).

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Indeed, some of the most violent articulations of purity and racial exclusivism come from diaspora populations. But such discourses are usually weapons of the (relatively) weak. It is important to distinguish nationalist critical longing and nostalgic or eschatological visions, from actual nation-building. (Clifford 1994:311) Clifford’s argument is that diasporas may promote nationalist programmes but hardly actual nation-building projects. According to Clifford, the relationship between diaspora and nationalism does not include (typically) the vision/project of a nation-state with its attributes and institutions. Nationalism in diaspora settings is, rather, to be seen as a strategy of resistance by the marginalised. Yet, nation-building in exile certainly exists (cf. Seton-Watson 1977), and one of the most obvious examples of this is the Palestinian case, having achieved both nation-and proto-state-building in exile. And as Basch et al. have asserted: Deterritorialized nation-state building is something new and significant, a form of post-colonial nationalism that reflects and reinforces the division of the entire globe into nation-states. (Basch et al. 1994:269) Thus diaspora nation-state-building occurs without the one condition that has been the crucial fundament in nationalist ideologies, i.e. territory Yet territory is not completely absent, since nation-building programmes in the diaspora continually centre on the idea of territory and the vision of return. Edward Said has underlined the crucial linkages between exile and nationalism: Nationalism is an assertion of belonging in and to a place, a people, a heritage. It affirms the home created by a community of language, culture and customs; and, by so doing, it fends off exile, fights to prevent its ravages. Indeed, the inter-play between nationalism and exile is like Hegel’s dialectic of servant and master, opposites informing and constituting each other. All nationalisms in their early stages develop from a condition of estrangement. (Said 1990:359) Said’s forceful argument could be seen in analogy with, for example, Anderson, who argues that the nation as an imagined community is constituted through ‘pilgrimages’, journeys in social space, through which

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individuals become aware of the fact that their present state of affairs depends on something particular, namely that they belong to this or that nation (Anderson 1991). Like Said, Anderson treats nationalism as a reaction to conditions of estrangement, threat and alienation. From that perspective, diaspora relations to the nation-state, nationalism and national identity become especially intricate. Forcible evacuation, but also marginalisation and exclusion in host societies, may provoke reactive tendencies of nationalism. Yet, as has been argued elsewhere (Lindholm Schulz 1999), nationalism and national identities are not solely reactive processes. Nationalism requires creative internal dynamics as well as a symbolic capital of rootedness and culture to draw upon in order to be meaningful. Nevertheless, placelessness is a constant reminder of the fact that national or ethnic social boundaries are both externally ascribed and internally produced. In order to create the potential for resistance from a diaspora position, a process of ‘othering’ is required. Diaspora populations are involved in social boundary-production in dialectic ways. Often, marginalisation and stigmatisation occur by ‘othering’ from outside. At the same time, in order to maintain ideas of territory lost as well as a sense of internal solidarity diaspora populations draw boundaries around themselves. Exile is a jealous state. What you achieve is precisely what you have no wish to share, and it is in the drawing of lines around you and your compatriots that the least attractive aspects of being in exile emerge: an exaggerated sense of group solidarity, and a passionate hostility to outsiders, even those who may in fact be in the same predicament as you. What could be more intransigent than the conflict between Zionist Jews and Arab Palestinians? Palestinians feel that they have been turned into exiles by the proverbial people of exile, the Jews. But the Palestinians also know that their own sense of national identity has been nourished in the exile milieu, where everyone not a blood-brother or sister is an enemy, where every sympathizer is an agent of some unfriendly power, and where the slightest deviation from the accepted group is an act of the rankest treachery and disloyalty. (Said 1990:360f.) Outside labelling, discrimination, exclusivism and oppression imply that diasporas are left without the kind of security that is connected to a ‘home’. The importance of ‘home’ lies in it providing a centre of meaning

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and significance (Relph 1976). Home provides security, identity, a place where one is comfortable, needs no roles, where stability, warmth, comfort, relaxation and meaning prevail (cf. Sarup 1994:94; Sagar 1997; Rapport and Dawson 1998).24 ‘Home’ belongs to the taken-for-granted categories (Minh-ha 1994:14). Loss of home therefore has a traumatising potential. One way of dealing with the loss of a securing home is through exclusivism and/or through the creation of institutions that could serve the interests of a population without territory. In a globalised world, however, ‘home’ becomes ever more relative and to some extent stripped of its cosy associations. Instead, ‘home’ can be brought with you and ‘home’ can be recreated. ‘Home’ can be placed in interpersonal relations rather than in a certain house/place/geography, or it may be placed in habits, styles, memories. ‘Home’ can be constructed through the journey/the route. As Madan Sarup has phrased it: It is usually assumed that a sense of place or belonging gives a person stability. But what makes a place home? Is it wherever your family is, where you have been brought up? … Where is home? Is it where your parents are buried? Is home the place from where you have been displaced, or where you are now? (Sarup 1994:95) However, and again contradictorily, ‘homes on the move’ give rise to uncertainty and a longing for a secure place, a home which is not moving. Zygmunt Bauman states: Near, close to hand, is primarily what is usual, familiar and known to the point of obviousness; someone or something seen, met, dealt or interacted with daily, intertwined with habitual routine and dayto-day activities. ‘Near’ is a space inside which one can feel chez soi, at home; a space in which one seldom, if at all, finds oneself at a loss, feels lost for words or uncertain how to act. ‘Far away’, on the other hand, is a space which one enters only occasionally or not at all, in which things happen which one cannot anticipate or comprehend. (Bauman 1998:13) Those spatial divisions correspond with ‘us’/‘them’ categorisations. Exile implies being removed to ‘far away’, to the land inhabited by ‘them’, and that home/‘near’ is out of reach. In exile, home is ‘far away’ whereas self is situated where insecurity and chaos prevail. Feelings of threat, insecurity

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and fear may be the result (cf. Nederveen Pieterse 1997). Often such feelings of collective fear are enough to trigger exclusivist politics. As Morley and Robins assert, the search for a ‘pure’ and ‘unpolluted’ homeland is potentially an absolutist and fundamentalist discourse, potentially including exclusivism, stereotyping and boundary-production (Morley and Robins 1993:8). Diasporas thus live the tension between nationalism/the nation-state and transnationalism/globalisation in very concrete terms. The equivocacy of diaspora is therefore found in its location at the disjuncture between two opposite principles: nationalism and globalism. Defining the Palestinian diaspora The application of the term ‘diaspora’ might conceal the variegated realities of how Palestinians actually live in the diaspora. The experience of diaspora/exile is differently lived and sensed in different contexts and we will attempt to take care to give voice to these variations. Linguistically, a number of different terms are applied in Arabic. One such term is ‘alshatat’, which means to be dispersed, scattered or separated. It might well be an adaptation of the English term ‘diaspora’, literally meaning ‘to be scattered, dispersed, separated’. Clearly the Greek notion of being scattered and separated from the homeland or parent is semantically present here. The Arabic term much longer in use and more emotionally charged is ‘alghurba’. Hans Wehr, in his Arabic-English dictionary translates ‘al-ghurba’ as absence from the homeland; separation from one’s ‘native country, banishment, exile; life, or place, away from home’ (Wehr 1994:783). ‘Manfa’ is exile in a more literal sense, as the verb ‘nafa’ means ‘to banish’ or ‘expel’. In Palestinian literature and poetry it is ‘al-ghurba’, where the Palestinian is a stranger, that carries all the notions of suffering, cold, winter, estrangement and dislocation. Not only is ‘diaspora’ an elusive term, but defining the ‘Palestinian diaspora’ is equally problematic. One problem is political and moral. Employing the term ‘diaspora’ might to many Palestinians indicate a potential acceptance of the Palestinian dispersal, making the term dubious (cf. Kodmani 1997). One disagreement with using the term is provided by Said (1986), who argues that Palestinian ties to the homeland render associations of the term ‘diaspora’ enigmatic. However, strong connection to the homeland is to many a defining component of diaspora communities rather than not (cf. Wahlbeck 2002). The Palestinian diaspora, in general terms, certainly relates to the dispersal in the late 1940s as well as the second exodus in 1967, but not all ‘members of the

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Palestinian diaspora community’ are refugees or descendants of refugees. In particular, Christian migration to avoid conscription in the Ottoman army or to attempt to make a better life in the ‘new world’ began in the late 18th century (Tsimhoni 1993). Continued patterns of migration are formed as refugees residing in Jordan or Lebanon search for better lives and employment opportunities in the Gulf, as families send their children for studies in the USA, as refugees are displaced again and again and as people are prevented from entering various countries at all. Who is to be defined as belonging to a ‘Palestinian diaspora community’? Is it only those who were dispersed from their homeland in 1948 and 1967; or all those who reside outside of the borders of ‘historical Palestine’? Is it a requirement to have been ‘dispersed’ and exiled from territory/country? Where does one place the refugees of the West Bank and Gaza, who reside within the territory of Palestine but were expelled from their homes in 1948? And how does one regard the Palestinians who currently reside within the borders of Israel—those who remained within the boundaries of the homeland but became a minority in a new state and citizens of Israel? Many Palestinians in Israel were subject to ‘internal displacement’ after the war in 1948. To residents of the West Bank and Gaza a form of ‘diasporisation’ has also occurred since the inception of the occupation in 1967. The loss of land, concretely felt by peasants and landowners as land was confiscated, implied an alienation from previous forms of existence. Whether one has stayed put or moved, the meaning of ‘diaspora’ to Palestinians is larger than referring to specific processes of migration and displacement. The diaspora is, rather, a ‘condition’ of alienation and estrangement, of ‘shattered lives and homes’ (cf. Peteet 1995:177). Therefore, in this book ‘diaspora’ will be used in this overarching way, and Palestinians in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Israel will be seen as (to some extent and in many regards) leading ‘diasporic lives’. This may seem odd if one presumes that there exists a ‘real’ Palestinian diaspora and other segments of the Palestinian population who are still rooted in their homeland. The claim I make is that displacement, dispersal, forced movement and constraints on movement have a much wider significance in this case. The predicament of alienation from land, territory, place defines the lives of most Palestinians—although in different regards. This is not, however, to say that Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza (or in Israel) live in the diaspora. Rather, their lives are defined by a diasporic condition. Certain features important to the term are indeed applicable also to West Bank, Gazan and Israeli Palestinians. To illustrate this point, the Israeli Palestinian writer Emile Habibi25 writes about an encounter in

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prison between a West Bank activist and a Palestinian woman from Haifa. The West Bank woman asked: ‘What moves you in this song about return when you had never left your homeland?’ She answered: ‘My homeland? I feel like a refugee in a foreign country You at least dream of return and the dream sustains you. Whither shall I return?’26 Palestinians live and experience the diaspora in a myriad of ways, some of which will be explored in this book. Although these variations are coloured by the contexts in which different parts of the Palestinian diaspora find themselves, it is also the case that despite separation and dispersal there exists a wholeness to the Palestinian issue as such. This wholeness is attributed to land and the loss of it.

2 CATASTROPHE AND BEYOND

Migration patterns at the turn of the century The nakba and the circumstances of intense violence and warfare in the period of 1947–9 are the paramount factors behind the Palestinian experience of exile. Patterns of Palestinian migration are also, however, more complex. Palestinian migration started late in the 18th century, motivated to a large extent by socioeconomic preconditions, by personal interests and by family relations. This early migration was mainly made up of Christians from Bethlehem, Ramallah and Jerusalem on a trek to various parts of the Americas. Most of the early migrants eventually returned to Palestine. Many engaged in business and trade. For the next generation to conduct the journey across the Atlantic, economic motivations continued to be important. Now many also attempted to escape harsh Ottoman treatment and army conscription at the outbreak of World War I (Smith 1984; González 1992; Tsimhoni 1993). Frequently, migrants made their way to kin and relatives already settled in the Americas (Tsimhoni 1993:18). Also, politically motivated flight and migration patterns commenced prior to the nakba. One such peak was the Great Revolt of 1936–9.1 The Great Revolt was a popular uprising which started spontaneously and without direction from the urban-based political elite, the ay’an. It consisted of a general strike as well as violent attacks against the Jewish population and Jewish institutions. It was also an uprising against the British mandate and the politics of the local elite. The uprising was finally crushed in 1939 by harsh British repression, resulting in the flight of many of its leaders and activists.

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The catastrophe The lion’s share of Palestinian refugees and the exile community originate, however, in the fighting of 1947–8, when approximately 700,000 people fled or were expelled because of the war and atrocities that occurred in relation to the creation of the state of Israel.2 As noted previously, the flight and the fighting are remembered as al-nakba, the catastrophe, a ‘root structure’ in the narrative of Palestinian identity. It is to this forceful process that the Palestinians trace their suffering, and the nakba is constitutive of a specific Palestinian identity. In narratives of identity the exodus is frequently given a ‘primordial’ quality. It is the birth of the Palestinian nation, it is the beginning of a story (R.Sayigh 1998). This is how the catastrophe was recollected by the Palestinian National Authority in commemorating the 52nd anniversary of the catastrophe in 2000: Three-quarters of a peaceful and mostly peasant people were transformed into homeless refugees scattered around their lost country, while the small number who succeeded in clinging to their land were stripped of their property and of their most elementary human, civic and political rights within the apartheid system of the newly erected settler-state. This took place amidst the sound and fury, the blood, fire and tears of a total war waged by the armed branches of the Zionist political parties and organizations, before and after they were integrated into the ‘official’ army of the new state, against the Palestinian people as a whole, and as a people. A war of mass expulsion. That which today, after the bloody dismantlement of the former Yugoslav federation, the world has learnt to identify as ethnic cleansing. Not because they threatened anybody, but because they were there. Because they were the people of the very land the newcomers wanted to take by force for their exclusive use. So much so that they were not content to conquer Palestine, and expel the overwhelming majority of its inhabitants. In the 77% of the country they controlled on the morrow of the Naqba, they undertook to destroy the very signs of our roots in the land, and razed to the ground more than four hundred villages and towns. And we owe it to those who fell then, and later, and to those who mourn them and to all those whose individual lives were crushed in that tragedy— to all Palestinians—to remember those

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days, to understand their reality and their sense, and also to learn the harsh lessons of that dearly paid historical experience. (PNA 2000a) The exodus Inter-communal violence escalated throughout the 1930s and 1940s. The first wave of Palestinian refugees occurred between February and March 1948. Most of those who fled belonged to the urban middle classes of Jaffa, Haifa and Jerusalem. Some had houses in Lebanon, Nablus or Amman, where they sought refuge. This part of the flight mainly took place from the parts of Palestine that were to fall under Jewish statehood according to the UN partition plan of 1947, such as Haifa and Jaffa as well as the rural lands along the Coastal Plain, the Jezreel and Jordan valleys (Morris 1987: 59). Jamil Toubbeh describes how his family escaped from the Qatamon Quarter of Jerusalem, southwest of the Old City, as violence increased in November 1947 following the presentation of the UN partition plan. The family did not move far, but went to stay in the apartment of one of Jamil’s sisters a few blocks away In those days, many who had left their houses seeking shelter away from the immediate violence went back and forth between their houses and their places of refuge in a pattern of daily movement. Our own house now became an annex, a temporary storage area, or an extra bathroom for those who enjoyed solitude and an occasional therapeutic muwwal, a chant of the soul and the night. This daily ritual of undocumented and unchronicled emigration and migration, rampant in Palestine from 1946 through 1948, was soon interrupted by rumors of increased violence and massacres. Poor communication and transportation reinforced feelings of isolation and the insecurity accompanying it. (Toubbeh 1998:20) Violence escalated and Toubbeh describes how snipers intended to scare residents away (ibid.: 26). In the late spring of 1948 the family left Qatamon altogether and moved further away from the battleground, to the Christian Quarters of the Old City, where they lived throughout the war. Thus, in the first months of unrest people left their homes but mostly to seek shelter among kin or friends in a nearby quarter, village or town. As for the Christian population in Jerusalem, nearly half of them lived in

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neighbourhoods in West Jerusalem (Tsimhoni 1983:56). The Palestinian exodus from the western parts of Jerusalem was nearly complete as around 60,000 fled from the city (W.Khalidi 1992). Most took up residency in East Jerusalem and its suburbs Ramallah and Bethlehem, but Amman also became a destination of importance (Tamari 1999:7). People began to leave Jerusalem in early 1948 on a rather sporadic basis, and, as in other areas, flight was based on fear and occurred in relation to attacks of various sorts. Two military operations/events were determining factors in the fate of Palestinians in Jerusalem. One was the battle for Qastal, a village overlooking the Jerusalem-Jaffa highway. On the Palestinian side, al-Jihad al-Muqaddas led the irregular forces. The death of commander ’Abd al-Qadir al-Huseini on 8 April 1948 led to a demoralisation of the Palestinian forces. The other event was Deir Yasin, and the psychological impact these atrocities had upon the Palestinian population (Tamari 1999:82). The second and major period of the flight occurred between March and July 1948. Now the violence had reached much greater proportions and the people fleeing the scene widely outnumbered the first wave. The PLO official Abu Iyad3 tells his story of leaving the homeland: May 13 1948, is a day that will remain forever engraved in my memory. That day, less than twenty-four hours before the proclamation of the Israeli state, my family fled Jaffa for refuge in Gaza. We had been under siege; the Zionist forces controlled all the roads leading south, and the only escape left open to us was the sea. It was under a hail of shells fired from Jewish artillery set up in neighboring settlements, especially Tel Aviv, that I clambered onto a makeshift boat with my parents, my four brothers and sisters, and other relatives. (Iyad 1978:3) Maissoun, now 81 years old and residing in Ein al-Hilweh camp in Lebanon, tells the following story of how the flight of her family occurred: When we heard about Deir Yasin and how they killed, slaughtered the people there, we were scared that this would happen to our children, too. So we left…. We were afraid that we would die. We left with tears in our eyes, we didn’t have anything with us. I had a son, I was nursing him at the time, so I put his things in a small bag, a few clothes and diapers for him, his bottles, his umbrella, I put it all in a bag and carried it on my head, and the baby in my arms. We

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left with nothing more than that. We left the clothes, the dishes, the furniture, you know, all the things a house has. And we left. (Maissoun, Ein el-Hilweh, 13 August 2001) As fighting became disseminated, fears also spread. In most cases flight was connected to attacks by Jewish forces or to fear of attack. As word of events in nearby villages and towns spread throughout Palestine, people decided to take temporary refuge in order to avoid being caught in the midst of violence. For the most part, the flight was disorganised. The commander of the northern front, Moshe Carmel, described the exodus: They abandon the villages of their birth and that of their ancestors and go into exile…. Women, children, babies, donkeys—everything moves, in silence and grief, northwards, without looking to right or left. Wife does not find her husband and child does not find his father…no one knows the goal of his trek. Many possessions are scattered by the paths; the more the refugees walk, the more tired they grow—and they throw away what they had tried to save on their way into exile. (Quoted by Morris 1987:231) One of the major events of the war was the nearly complete exodus from Haifa after its fall on 23 April 1948. In early May only 3,000–4,000 of the Arab inhabitants out of an original 70,000 remained in Haifa (Morris 1987). The fall of the city was significant in determining flight from other areas, since Haifa had maintained a prominent political and economic role in the region. In July the towns of Lydda and Ramle were emptied, and 50,000 people left. Here, a direct order of expulsion was given by Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion (ibid.: 207; Masalha 1992:191). On 12 July Lydda was attacked and a slaughter occurred. News of what had happened here reached Ramle and people left in panic. Violence and fear The fighting, the violence and the atrocities were main driving forces behind the exodus, whether the violence was part of an explicit transfer policy or not. Flight occurred for the most part as a result of violence and warfare subsequently entering different areas of the land. This happened in different forms; there were direct attacks, fear of attacks or word of attacks in neighbouring areas. The flight occurred through a domino effect, where

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attack against one place precipitated escape also from neighbouring areas. ‘No town was abandoned by the bulk of its population before Jewish attack’ (Morris 1987:131). Serious atrocities were committed in several instances, for example in Lydda, accelerating flight. The most stark example is Deir Yasin, carved into the memory of Palestinian suffering. The Deir Yasin massacre, conducted by a joint IZL—LHI4 operation with the reluctant, but nevertheless given, consent of the Haganah, was the one event that had the most immediate effect upon flight. The attack was connected to an operation intended to secure the western entrance to Jerusalem (ibid.: 113). The atrocities that were committed in the event, in which 250 villagers were massacred and scores of others subject to rape, torture and mutilation, contributed to the spread of panic among Palestine’s Arabs (ibid.: 113f.). Deir Yasin came to serve as a representation of what Jewish forces (irregular or not) might be capable of. Deir Yasin continues to stand out as a symbol of the nakba and the main focal point in remembering the catastrophe. Atrocities committed by the regular forces were for the most part initiated by local commanders and troops, and, according to Morris, not part of top military decisions (ibid.: 230). Later, Morris found new sources telling about acts of savagery not previously known (Morris 2001). The Arab side also carried out brutal crimes in the course of the war. One example of such an atrocity was on 13 April 1948, when Arab forces attacked a convoy of supplies and civilian workers on their way to Hadassah Hospital and the Hebrew University; 78 people were killed. Another incident was the killing of 129 civilians in the Jewish settlement of Kfar Etzion, in the Hebron region, in May 1948 (Benvenisti 2000: 116f.). In the south, the exodus was nearly complete, as people fled en masse to the Gaza Strip or the Hebron area. In the north, the majority of Druze and Christians stayed despite the military operations between 8 and 14 July, while the majority of the Muslims fled (Morris 1987: 198). Nazareth was given special treatment (ibid.: 201), although there was a substantial flight also from the Nazareth area. Although local commanders, for the most part, by October 1948 thought it best that as many Arabs as possible left the country (ibid.: 235), Morris maintains that there was no general, overall plan or strategy to expel the Palestinians. Since the early 1990s this has been the main issue of contention in the debate on what caused the Palestinians to flee.

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Expulsion or ‘accident’? Over the decades, the catastrophe in 1948 has been the subject of an intense and highly politicised debate. Only in the late 1980s did Palestinian and Israeli scholars and historians come to merge their perspectives. This was primarily the result of the work done by the Israeli ‘new historians’, such as Benny Morris, Simha Flapan, Avi Shlaim and others, who distanced themselves from official Israeli historicism. Although the ‘new’ Israeli historians concur with the Palestinians that there was never an Arab encouragement of the exodus —as was so often previously argued by Israeli leaders—but that the flight was a result of the war, there is still a difference on whether there was a plan and an order to expel the Palestinian population or not. The point of departure for this debate has been the main strategic plan for the war, Plan Dalet, or D, which was designed by defence leaders in Haganah, the Jewish defence forces. The main objective of Plan D was to face ‘enemy populations’ and to prevent population centres being used in attacks against Israel. In order to safeguard these goals, Plan D gave instructions to destroy villages. In cases of resistance the population could be expelled (cf. Pappé 1999:41). The prime purpose of Plan D was to secure the Jewish state against the expected Arab onslaught and to create ‘territorial continuity between the major concentrations of Jewish population’ (Morris 1987:62). Morris’s conclusion is that there was never a master plan to evict the Palestinian population. Rather than a political blueprint, Plan D was a military plan for how to deal with the local population in order to prevent attacks and resistance. According to Morris, the expulsion was, rather, something that ‘happened’, caused by the war and the fighting. The strategic aim of securing the Jewish state meant that villages where resistance forces had their bases were dragged into the conflict and that destruction and depopulation were somehow unintended by-products of the events and fighting (ibid.: 62f.). As Jewish society felt itself under severe threat, ‘The gloves had to be, and were, taken off’ (ibid.: 113). One aspect to emphasise is the perception of threat which exists in Israeli Jewish society, created by the horrors of the Holocaust but also by the enmity in the region (ibid.). In the event of resistance, the armed forces in the village should be destroyed and the inhabitants should be expelled from the State. (Morris 1987:63)

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Eviction was thus contingent on the behaviour of residents of different areas. In case of resistance the inhabitants were forced to leave, and in this regard plan D was a sort of a blueprint. Morris does not dispute the fact that there were expulsion orders in such cases. These were, however, never taken by top leaders, but by local commanders. In addition, those were not political decisions, but were, rather, determined by military leaders as the fighting moved on. Expulsion usually occurred in areas that were strategically important. During April—May 1948 local Haganah commanders carried out parts of Plan D, given free rein to interpret the plan in accordance with circumstances in that particular area. The tendency to expel was encouraged by the fact that people fled. Increasingly, Jewish leaders saw a ‘pure’ Jewish state as a possibility (ibid.: 292). Morris’s main (albeit later modified) conclusion was thus that the Palestinian flight was ‘born of war, not by design’ (ibid.: 286). Palestinian (and other) authors have challenged the main line of Morris’s argument, arguing that Zionist policy was before, during and after the war bent on ‘transfer’ or ‘expulsion’ of the Palestinian population from Palestine (Finkelstein et al. 1991; W.Khalidi 1992; Masalha 1992, 1997a, 2001). Nur Masalha, for example, argues that the ‘transfer idea’ is an inherent strategic goal of Zionism and that this idea was reflected in Plan Dalet. Zionism portrayed Palestine as a ‘blank place’ (Swedenburg 1990:19), as an uninhabited place, simply open to Jewish settlement and claims. In the early phase, the plan of Zionism was simply to make it difficult for the Palestinian population and to ‘encourage’ them to leave. In later phases, transfer was forced. Khalidi explains: But along with the others he [Benny Morris] views the Palestinian exodus in an historical vacuum. To be sure, he mentions discussions before 1948 in the highest Zionist circles of the ‘transfer’ (euphemism for expulsion) of the Arab population, but he sees no link between this and Plan Dalet. He regards the obvious linear dynamic binding together the successive military operations of Plan D as fragments in an, as it were, cubic configuration accidentally related to one another only through their joint occurrence in the dimension of time. From his perspective, no connection exists between the imperative to ‘transfer’ the Arab population and seize its lands and the imperative to accommodate the hundreds of thousands of Jews it was planned to bring to the new Jewish state. (W.Khalidi 1988:5)

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Palestinian researchers have thus focused on the history and ideology of Zionism, epitomised in statements such as the following, made by Israel’s first president, Chaim Weizmann: there is a country which happens to be called Palestine, a country without a people, and on the other hand there exists the Jewish people, and it has no country. What else is necessary, then, than to fit the gem into the ring, to unite the people with this country? (quoted by Masalha 1999:66) In context of this ideological commitment of ‘fitting the Jewish people into the land of Palestine’ and the continuous refusal to recognise the Palestinians as another people of that land, it is, according to Masalha, difficult to see Plan D as anything other than a strategic plan to rid the land of as many Palestinians as possible. Khalidi states: ‘The ideological premises of Plan D are to be found in the very concept of Zionism’ (W.Khalidi 1988:9). Masalha covers different transfer policies put forward by different Zionist leaders from the period of early Zionism onwards. Although revisionist leaders such as Jabotinsky were more explicit in their ideas of transfer, David Ben-Gurion (in the 1930s) also expressed the view that the Arab population had to be removed in order to make room for the Jews, although this was to be done voluntarily and not by coercion (Masalha 1992:69). In May 1944, David Ben-Gurion5 stated: Zionism is a transfer of the Jews. Regarding the transfer of the Arabs this is much easier than any other transfer. There are Arab states in the vicinity…and it is clear that if the Arabs are removed [to these states] this will improve their condition and not the contrary (Protocol of the Jewish Agency Executive meeting, 7 May 1944; quoted by Masalha 1992:159) Transfer was therefore a vision present in the thoughts of Zionist leaders at the time. Masalha claims that the exodus was caused by Zionist plans and military force (2001). Pappé takes a middle position, agreeing with Masalha and others that Plan D was a plan to expel. Pappé differs from Musalha and Khalidi in that he sees this, not as a sign of Zionism per se or a plan for Zionism, but a ‘specific plan for the 1948 war’ (Pappé 1999:52). The two sides agree that expulsion did occur and that forced expulsion towards the later phase was systematic, although Morris maintains that there was no grand plan. Atrocities, in the form of massacres and threats,

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which increased during the later stages of the war, exacerbated the situation and acted as a catalyst for flight. Both arguments are based on the same sources. Whereas Morris claims that he is not reading anything into the documents which is not there and that, hence, there was not an explicit expulsion policy of grand design, Masalha and others claim that the documents cannot be interpreted in any other way than as a clear policy of expulsion. Morris does not refute the argument that there might have been a Zionist wish to transfer the Palestinians, reflected in part in Plan Dalet, but says that there was never a cabinet decision to expel the Palestinian population. Rather, events were haphazard and without any inherent order (Morris 1987:106). The Zionist wish to ‘clear the land’ of the native population was never transformed into direct policy, and it can therefore never be proven that such a transfer policy guided the acts of Zionist leaders, claims Morris. Rather, the leaders of the Zionist movement and the new state of Israel were taken by surprise by the events of war and by the scale of the exodus. The fact that the exodus took place could, however, be exploited (ibid.: 87; Benvenisti 2000:126). Chaim Weizmann, the first president of the state of Israel, claimed that the exodus was ‘a miraculous clearing of the land: the miraculous simplification of Israel’s task’ (Masalha 1992:175). Meron Benvenisti states that David Ben-Gurion did not need to give explicit orders. Instead, the Jewish/Israeli leadership was taken by surprise by the mass exodus and sought to capitalise on it. Benvenisti also claims, however, that it is necessary to assess the different phases of the war in different regards. By and large, Benvenisti concurs with Morris as to the first half of the war, i.e. during this time there was no expulsion order (Benvenisti 2000: 127). However, from the founding of the state until mid-June 1948 there was expulsion on a grand scale, reminiscent of an ‘ethnic-cleansing’ project (ibid.: 145). After the ‘miraculous exodus’ had taken place and it had become evident that the establishment of a Jewish state without Arabs—a possibility that the leaders of the Yishuv had not previously envisioned—was indeed achievable, ‘ethnic cleansing’ became an acceptable, or even a desirable, means of achieving it. (Benvenisti 2000:149) Recently, Morris (2001) has modified his findings after analysis of previously unknown documents. Morris now gives greater weight to the thoughts of transfer that existed prior to and during the war. His conclusion in 2001 was that the proportion of the refugees that fled as a

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result of outright expulsion was greater than previously believed. He maintains, however, that this did not imply an explicit policy of transfer. Arab/Palestinian leadership Among the contributing factors of the exodus is also the lack of strong organisation among the Arab/Palestinian leadership. The poorly equipped, poorly trained and largely unaided Palestinian guerrillas had little with which to confront the onslaught. There was no national authority to take decisions, and there was generally a lack of information. In the later phase, the Arab Higher Committee (AHC)6 sought to stop the exodus and to organise resistance, but to no avail. Neither the Arab states nor the AHC provided the population with any clear guidelines, and decisions were left to local leaders (Morris 1987:68). There was never a plan through which to counter the Jewish offensive. Instead, the leadership on the Arab and Palestinian side remained confused (ibid.: 289). In a recent contribution, R.Khalidi (2001) focuses on the weakness of the Palestinian leadership. This weakness is attributed to internal divisions characterising Palestinian society prior to 1948. One underlying cause of lack of organisation is claimed to be the effects of the Great Revolt, which left over 10 per cent of the adult male population dead, wounded, imprisoned or exiled (ibid.: 27). The economic situation deteriorated considerably after the revolt, further fragmenting the notables. Hajj Amin al-Husayin, the mufti7, was exiled and lived in Beirut, but closely guarded leadership of the national movement. His exile and his leadership style meant a weak organisational structure. No return What is beyond any doubt is the Israeli refusal to allow refugees to return after the war. As early as spring 1948, refugees attempted to go back to their lands, primarily to reach crops or to be able to harvest, to water plants or simply to fetch things from their homes. The driving force was often sheer hunger (Morris 1988:256). During this period approximately 20,000 Palestinians were deported (Morris 1991:338). Initially a number of measures were taken in order to prevent refugees from returning. At the end of May a Transfer Committee was set up, proposing that return be barred and that the Arab Palestinian population be assisted in being absorbed elsewhere. In this plan, villages were to be destroyed during military operations, cultivation was to be hindered and Jews were to be settled in towns and villages (Morris 1987:136). The plan

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became official policy during the latter part of the war. Again, the official motives were security related, but they also had to do with the perceived need to secure the new state from the creation of fifth-columnists in the form of a sizeable Arab minority within state borders, as well as the need to settle the Jewish population and economic requirements. However, the issue was not uncontroversial and Israel was under pressure, not least from the UN and Folke Bernadotte. Morris argues that the denial of any right to return stemmed from the ‘needs of the new Jewish state’ (ibid.: 155). In June the Israeli government decided officially to bar a return, (ibid.: 132) in order to maintain what had, from a Zionist perspective, been achieved. The Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) had received an order to halt any movement of refugees back to Israel by the use of fire (Morris 1988: 256). In the wake of the war 418 villages were destroyed, according to the research conducted by W.Khalidi (1992). Traces of Palestinian inhabitance and residency of the country were simply erased. The destruction of villages was controversial, however, and in July the IDF General Staff ordered that it was forbidden to destroy Arab villages and to expel Arab inhabitants without special permission or an explicit instruction from the minister of defence (Morris 1987:163). As Jewish immigration began to take on mass proportions, the urgent need for housing also implied that villages were saved rather than destroyed. Yousef Weitz, the director of the Jewish National Fund’s (JNF) key Lands Department and chairman of the first and second Transfer Committees 1948–9, said that the empty houses were good for the settlement of [our Jewish] brothers, who have wandered for generation upon generation, refugees...steeped in suffering and sorrow, as they, at last, find a roof over their heads. (quoted by Morris 1987:169)8 This is how Levi Eshkol, head of the Settlement Department, described the relationship between Jewish settlement and Palestinian exodus: After the victory over our enemies, what was required was an act of conquest by settlement, an act of ingathering of exiles and of rooting our exiled brothers, in their multitudes (in the soil of the homeland). (Eshkol 1958:270ff.)

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Replacing one diaspora with another was to an extent a deliberate policy. The destruction continued, as a policy of clearing areas for Jewish habitation or cultivation. Lost property in the form of land and real estate is therefore still part and parcel of the refugee problem. Attempts to solve the refugee problem (including the Lausanne Conference in 1948/9)9 came to naught, as Israel revealed only reluctant willingness (under US pressure) to let a maximum of 100,000 return, which was immediately rejected by the Arabs. UN officials were already considering the settlement of refugees in Arab countries on a permanent basis rather than pressing for return, although that would have been the optimal solution according to the international community. Becoming a refugee The majority of the refugees seem to have moved about within Palestine for some time (R.Sayigh 1979:87). When they eventually ended up in Arab states, arrivals in Egypt, Lebanon and Transjordan were troublesome, to a large extent dependent on the numbers. Although they were also met by genuinely empathetic attitudes and policies—exemplified by the words of Lebanon’s president: ‘Welcome home’—Palestinians often met with reservations. In many Arab countries, antagonism towards the refugees subsequently rose. There were accusations that Palestinians had deserted their cause and their homeland and now begged others for help (Morris 1988:255). From the very first moments, becoming a refugee implied stigmatisation. International concern regarding the plight of the refugees arose during the Autumn of 1948 as it became clear that the unsheltered and destitute refugees would have little prospect of making it through the winter. Also, the sheer magnitude of the problem meant that host governments could not possibly cope with the situation (ibid.: 265). International assistance was a necessity. For this purpose, UNRWA was created in 1950, in order to ‘rehabilitate’ the refugees. Since then, Palestinian refugees have been receiving support from that UN organisation rather than the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which manages the situation of all other refugees. Palestinian refugees constitute a unique category among world refugees as they are excluded from the 1951 Geneva Convention on the status of refugees, because the Geneva Convention does not apply to persons receiving protection or assistance from other UN agencies than the UNHCR. The definition of Palestinian refugees therefore derives from

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relations to the specific organ UNRWA rather than the political circumstances causing the exodus.10 Since 1993, UNRWA’s definition of a ‘Palestine refugee’ reads:11 Palestine refugees are persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946, to 15 May 1948, and who lost both their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict. (UNRWA 1993:368–9) To be counted as a refugee, a person must have lost both her/his ‘home’ and her/his means of livelihood, meaning that tens of thousands fell out of the definition. For example, although they lost access to grazing lands (surely implying the loss of means of livelihood) and were severely affected by the exodus and the war, Bedouins did not count as refugees as they did not lose their homes. Those who fled the western parts of Jerusalem did not count as refugees, since the economic aspect was lacking. In addition, one was only eligible to be registered as a Palestinian refugee if one was settling in a country where UNRWA had decided to operate. Thus, Palestinians who sought refuge in Egypt or other countries could not register as refugees simply because UNRWA did not operate there (B.Schiff 1995:24; Tamari 1999:6). There are also instructions for how the status of refugee is passed on from one generation to another (UNRWA 1993).12 The main purpose of the definition has been to define who is in need of UNRWA assistance rather than to determine the rights of refugees. That is, rather than refugees with rights and claims related to the universal principle of rights, Palestinian refugees have been defined and counted precisely as ‘Palestinian refugees’, in a collective sense. Of particular relevance here is the absence of international protection for Palestinian refugees. Most refugees receive international protection, as defined by the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, from the UNHCR. In the case of Palestinian refugees there is no international body that provides full protection. UNRWA has occasionally taken on the task of protection, but in effect lacks such a mandate. The UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine (UNCCP), the body established by the UN under General Assembly Resolution 194 to provide protection for Palestinian refugees, ceased to work for the implementation of protection in the early 1950s (see Akram 2000a, 2000b, 2001).13 In the early phase of UNRWA’s existence, UNRWA distinguished between registered refugees eligible for service and relief and better-off

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refugees who were eligible only for service (education and health). UNRWA has thus been crucial in both the economics and politics of Palestinian refugees. UNRWA and its cause The creation of UNRWA was the direct outcome of the failure of the Lausanne Conference in 1949. The formation of an agency such as UNRWA was intended to ‘rehabilitate’ the refugees, meaning to make them self-supporting (Adelman 1988; B.Schiff 1995; Weighill 1997: 297), to provide welfare and to create work opportunities. Therefore, in the 1950s UNRWA was more or less a development organ14 rather than an organisation working for the political rights of the refugees. The development focus of UNRWA has at times caused friction between the organisation and the refugees. By Palestinian refugee communities, UNRWA has sometimes been seen as an attempt to make Palestinian resistance quiescent by providing economic support. For one Palestinian interviewed in Gaza, the purpose of assistance was to ‘stuff our mouths with bread so that we could not talk’ (Weighill 1997:306). However, this is one side of the story, and refugees have also come to view UNRWA as a quasi-governmental apparatus and as embedded in their political struggle (Farah 1999). Development assistance and helping refugees provide for themselves would not only ease their immediate situation, but would integrate them more fully into countries of first asylum. Host countries were provided with assistance in a number of different development schemes and further benefited from the aid provided to the refugees. UNRWA has been pushed into other areas of work, such as during the first intifada, when positions as Refugee Affairs Officers were established in order to defuse violence, to report incidents, to assist in smoothing medical treatment of the sick and injured, and to provide a neutral presence. UNRWA and identity UNRWA’s definition of refugees has provided an unusual and paradoxical source of identity. To be defined as a refugee was the only way in which the loss was made explicit. The UNRWA ration card has often been the sole document linking individual refugees with their loss, and has thereby become a weighty symbol of Palestinian identity (Shamir 1980:152; Husseini 2000:52). In Iris Noble’s Mahmud’s Story, the hero of the book, Mahmud, cannot take employment as a teacher with UNRWA, since his

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family would then be taken off UNRWA’s ration rolls. Mahmud’s father was afraid of this happening: ‘If we are struck off the register, we have nothing to show who we are and where our land is. We can never reclaim it. It is our only identification.’ He was terrified…. All the older men…held to the registration with UNRWA as the one and only written proof that such-and-such a dunnum of land was theirs, and that the house in the village beside their name on the register was really theirs. (Noble 1976:116) ‘The Palestinian clung to his UNRWA ration card as if it were title to his lost homeland’ (Brand 1988:152f.). As camps, tents and ration cards became symbols of authentic identity, UNRWA’s role in identityformation became increasingly substantial. UNRWA as an organisation has had to tread a difficult middle road in terms of the charged political atmosphere surrounding the refugee issue. UNRWA institutions have been protected by immunity from governments’ interference and, for example, from laws against labour organisation, and this is why those institutions have been bases for political activism. UNRWA’s engagement in so many aspects of refugee lives and the camp experience has enmeshed the organisation with the identity and culture of refugee camps throughout the region. This is especially so for the second generation of refugees, who have grown up with UNRWA (Farah 1997:266; 1999). It is important also to emphasise the clash of identity for UNRWA personnel. Most UNRWA staff are Palestinian refugees. That is, refugees are to serve refugees but from within an international agency. As Farah (1997, 1999) has noted, this means that refugee and UNRWA representations often overlap. The setback The second major cataclysmic event causing Palestinian dispersal was the war of 1967, which has been coined naksa, the year of the setback. The exodus related to the 1967 war is still less researched than that of 1948. It also has its controversies, however. This time, the dispersal was not only the result of sheer flight and expulsion. One category certainly left in relation to the fighting. Many of these were refugees from 1948 who had until then resided in refugee camps in the West Bank and who now fled for the second time. UNRWA

CATASTROPHE AND BEYOND 39

estimated that about 200,000, of whom 100,000 were UNRWA-registered refugees, fled the West Bank (B.Schiff 1995:67). For example, most of the inhabitants of the refugee camps in Jericho left for Jordan. Another category was composed of all those who were not allowed to return to the West Bank or Gaza after the war. Immediately after the occupation Israel conducted a census. All individuals who were abroad at that time, i.e. those studying and working abroad or who were away for other reasons, were defined as ‘foreign residents’. Therefore they lost the possibility of returning. The fact that they were not there, on the land, at the time of the war implied that they lost all their rights to live in their native land. Family members of those who were abroad at that time later left and joined their husbands, sons or fathers in exile. ‘Foreign residents’ who wished to return could potentially do so by applying for family reunification. Otherwise, such ‘foreign residents’ have been able to visit their former homes only as ‘summer visitors’ or ‘tourists’. Altogether, approximately 320,000 Palestinians fled, were expelled or lost the possibility of returning in relation to the 1967 war (Masalha 1999: 63). The UN called for repatriation. By 1969 approximately 17,500 people had returned (B.Schiff 1995:68). According to Gazit, between 1968 and the early 1990s a total of 88,000 had returned on family reunification schemes (Gazit 1995:68). UNRWA was mandated to provide assistance to 1967 displaced persons, who were never, however, to be registered as refugees. In the aftermath of the war, Palestinians were ‘encouraged’ to leave through various transfer schemes. In particular, residents of towns and villages near the Green Line were subject to expulsion. Also, ‘the Israeli authorities offered financial “incentives” and free transportation to Palestinians willing to leave’ (Masalha 1997b:5). Among the first to be evicted were the residents of al-Magharbe Quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem. The quarter was located close to the southern part of the Wailing Wall and was completely demolished. Palestinians were also forced to leave the Jewish Quarter, in order to enlarge it. People were also forced to depart from other villages and localities, such as for example in the Latrun area. According to Masalha, 100,000 Palestinians were transferred from the West Bank to Jordan. This operation included taking Palestinians ‘free of charge’ by bus to the Allenby Bridge, on condition that they stated that they were leaving voluntarily. Many were, however, expelled by force (Masalha 1997b, 1999).

40 CATASTROPHE AND BEYOND

Forced migration continues Forced migration has continued throughout the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Deportations have been used by Israel as a means of punishment for activities which allegedly threaten security In the early 1970s, for example, the leadership of the Palestine National Front (PNF) was deported to Lebanon. This policy was invigorated during the intifada, the Palestinian uprising which broke out in December 1987, when a number of activists were deported to Jordan or Lebanon. Israel has also used deportations as a form of collective punishment. A spectacular event occurred in late 1992, following the Hamas kidnapping of an Israeli soldier, who was later killed. The Israeli government then decided to deport 412 Palestinians, allegedly suspected of membership in Hamas and Islamic Jihad, to Lebanon.15 The deportation was much criticised, and it jeopardised the bilateral Israeli-Palestinian negotiations taking place in Washington, although the secret negotiations going on in Norway were not affected. Sheikh Bitawi told the Palestinian author Hisham Ahmed that ‘[t]o be away from the homeland was the most difficult trial to endure’ (quoted in Ahmed 1994:30) and ‘[t]he sheer fact of uprooting a person from his land, home, family and job and to throw him in a no-mans land is the worst a human being can face. Imprisonment compared to deportation can be considered a picnic’ (ibid.: 80). The 1992 deportations carried the whole symbolic discourse of uprootedness, dispossession, suffering and sacrifice. The image produced with the help of the international media showed a righteous, deeply religious, committed and steadfast community of men in the snowy Lebanese mountains who organised their lives and pursued their prayers in the cold in front of a worldwide media audience. Deportations are considered deeply inhuman and threatening. Through deportations, ‘roots’ are lost without the slightest possibility of influencing the decision to exile. However, deportations have also served to strengthen Palestinian nationalism, through their persistent emphasis on a theme, the unjust uprooting from the homeland. Jerusalem: silent transfer Another example of how forced migration continues is what the Israeli lawyer Lea Tsemel calls the ‘ongoing expulsion of Palestinians from Jerusalem’ or, in other words, ‘the silent transfer’ (Tsemel 1999:111 and 120). Following the formal Israeli annexation of East Jerusalem and the enlargement of the Jewish municipality in 1980, Palestinians in Jerusalem

CATASTROPHE AND BEYOND 41

were classified as ‘permanent residents of Israel’, placing them in a third category, separated from both Israeli Palestinians as citizens of Israel and West Bank Palestinians as permanent residents of the West Bank (see further Chapter 3). Permanent residence grants the same status to East Jerusalem Palestinians as to foreign citizens who have come to live in Israel. Entry into Israel is thus seen as a privilege and not a right. Permanent residency can be revoked if the Israeli authorities believe that a resident has changed her/his place of residence. This means that if anyone stays outside Jerusalem for more than seven years this person is considered to have changed her/his place of residence and therefore her/his right to live in Jerusalem expires. Since 1996 the West Bank is included in this category of places (Tsemel 1999: 112f.), implying that if a person goes to live in the West Bank for more than seven years, perhaps because of marriage or work, that person would automatically lose her/his status as a resident of Jerusalem. In 1998 it was estimated that 1,300 families each year lose their Jerusalem ID on these grounds (al-Shaml Newsletter 1998, no. 10, February). One has to prove that municipal Jerusalem is the ‘centre of one’s life’. Toward the end of the 1990s there were approximately 200,000 Palestinians in Jerusalem. During the early years of the peace process, and especially after the signing of a peace treaty between Israel and Jordan, there was an increase in the number of Palestinians in Jerusalem applying for Israeli citizenship. The Palestinian National Authority vigorously criticised these procedures and the acquiring of Israeli citizenship has been seen as belittlement of Palestinian patriotism. According to Rubinstein (1999), it is fear of losing residency in Jerusalem that has driven many to seek citizenship. With the Netanyahu regime (1996–9) it became more difficult to acquire citizenship, partly as a result of coordinated JordanianPalestinian efforts to curb the process. In order to become a citizen of Israel the applicant had to prove that Jordanian citizenship had been relinquished. Paradoxically, despite Israel’s efforts to Judaise Jerusalem, and the politics of settlements and expansion, the proportion of Jew to Arab in Greater Jerusalem has not changed to the benefit of the Jewish population. Although in absolute numbers there has been an increase in the Jewish population, the enlargement of the Jerusalem municipality has in fact meant that the proportions have not changed (cf. Dumper 1997). The Bedouin community has been particularly effected by Israel’s Jerusalem politics. The Jahileen Bedouin society that has been living on the outskirts of Jerusalem since 1948 has been resettled by the Israeli authorities in order to create space for the expansion of the Ma’ale

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Adumim settlement, which is just to the east of Jerusalem. Ma’ale Adumim is situated just where Jerusalem is descending into the desert slopes and this area has been used as grazing area for sheep and goats by the Bedouins. The Jahileen was offered to option of living near the municipal garbage dump in Abu Dis (Badil press release, Bethlehem, 1 December 1997). Patterns of new migration/labour migration As return to one’s place of origin was totally blocked, landless refugee peasants stranded in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon and Jordan desperately sought to make a new living. As their social mobility was severely restricted in many cases, many decided to seek their fortune elsewhere. Some moved to Amman. From Bethlehem, Ramallah and Jerusalem, many went to the USA, whereas a large part settled in the Gulf region. Flight for political reasons has thus been followed by migration for economic need. In order to make a living and find more acceptable forms of lives, Palestinians have continued to migrate, either from the West Bank or Gaza or from camps in Lebanon and Jordan. From, for example, the West Bank, there has been a large outmigration. Many went to the East Bank during Jordanian rule. During the 1950s this was coupled with Jordanian investment patterns which clearly favoured the East Bank over the West Bank. Jordan also assisted Palestinians to migrate (Migdal 1980:41). Many went to Iraq, from where one continued to Kuwait. According to Hilal, 375,000 Palestinians left Jordan between 1950 and 1967; 170,000 of these were from the West Bank (Hilal 1977). Palestinians have migrated to the Gulf since the late 1940s, but migration increased considerably during the 1970s. The Gulf was never the primary receiver of 1948–9 refugees, but constituted a destination of secondary migration. Support of families was the major reason for going to Kuwait and other Gulf states (Ghabra 1987:66). In the early 1950s many travelled by what was called the underground railroad, via northern Syria, to Iraq, where they travelled by train from Baghdad to Basra. From there, Palestinians had to find guides to take them across the desert to Kuwait (ibid.: 67). The journey to the Gulf was dangerous, as Palestinian ‘illegal migrants’ were at the mercy of human smugglers. This way of coming to Kuwait persisted until the late 1950s. From then onwards, a visa was no longer necessary to go to Kuwait (ibid.: 68).

CATASTROPHE AND BEYOND 43

Christian migration For the Christian communities, migration has been fuelled by particular factors. Christians in Jerusalem were, as a community, particularly hard hit by the nakba. During the Jordanian era (1949–67) the economic situation in East Jerusalem deteriorated, affecting the Christian community constituting the urban middle class in negative ways, leading to considerable migration. Between 1944 and 1961 the Christian population of Jerusalem declined from 29,350 to 10,982 (Tsimhoni 1993:19). Christians continued to target North and South America, but added to this pattern was increased migration to Amman. Jerusalem Christians have also moved to Jerusalem suburban surroundings such as Shu’fat and Beit Hanina, as well as to Ramallah (ibid.: 19). The Christian part of the population of Jerusalem has decreased from 15.8 per cent in 1967 to 8.4 per cent in 1989 (ibid.: 24).16 In 1999 it was estimated that 2.2 per cent of the population of Jerusalem was Christian (Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistic 1999). In the West Bank the pattern has been slightly different, since Christian refugees from West Jerusalem and the coastal towns have resettled primarily in Ramallah.17 In absolute terms, the Christian population in the West Bank has therefore grown, but as part of the population it decreased from 6 per cent in 1944 to 3.2 per cent in 1989 (Tsimhoni 1993:23, based on different statistical sources). Economic deterioration has continued to serve as a push-factor behind Christian migration. According to Tsimhoni, several factors have contributed to sentiments among Christians of constituting a small and vulnerable community, ‘leading to the conviction that emigration is their only solution’ (ibid.: 24). Also contributing to Christian migration is the fact of their encounter with missionary schools, providing them with a better knowledge of and acquaintance with the West. Chain migration over the generations has been particularly important. Christian emigration was also boosted by the intifada in the late 1980s. According to figures presented by Tsimhoni, 2,000, or 5 per cent, of the 40,000 remaining in the West Bank and Jerusalem emigrated during the first three years of the uprising (ibid.: 29). It also appears that the increased assertiveness of Islamist movements has triggered Christian fears, in turn feeding into decisions to migrate. Therefore, Palestinian migration patterns are intricate and complex. Although the nakba and the naksa of 1948 and 1967, respectively, are behind the Palestinian exodus(es) in a general sense, for individual people and families there are also more immediate causes behind migration and remigration.

3 PALESTINIANS IN THE WORLD

Although Palestinian refugees for the most part ended up in countries with similar ethnic, cultural, religious and linguistic structures, their ‘outsideness’ in the Arab world was striking from early on. The majority of Palestinian refugees live in Jordan, the Gaza Strip, Lebanon and Syria, but Palestinian communities of various sizes exist all over the Arab world. Their situation varies from exclusion in Lebanon to relative integration in Jordan. According to projections made by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, in late 2000 there were 7.9 million Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza and the diaspora. Of these, 4.5 million lived in the diaspora (al-Quds, in Arabic, 11 January 2002). According to UNRWA figures, there were nearly 3.9 million registered Palestinian refugees in June 2001. The lion’s share of refugees from 1948 live in Jordan (1.5 million) and in the West Bank and Gaza (1.46 million). In Lebanon there are 380,000 registered refugees1 and in Syria there are 392,000 (UNRWA 2001). In Jordan there are approximately 1 million additional non-refugee Palestinians. All numbers and statistics around the Palestinian refugees are potentially problematic, since they are based on UNRWA registration and not all refugees are actually registered with UNRWA. One-third of registered refugees live in 59 refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. The remainder live in towns, cities and villages. In 1991 it was estimated that there were 325,000 Palestinians living in ‘non-Arab states’ (New York University Journal of International Law and Politics, vol. 24, 1992:1,512). Another figure is 450,000 in ‘the rest of the world’ for the same period of time (Facts and Figures about the Palestinians 1993). Most of those live in the Americas. In what follows we will present an overview of the whereabouts of Palestinian refugees. We will cover issues pertaining to policies of host states vis-à-vis the refugees; as well as the PLO; PLO politics, since this

PALESTINIANS IN THE WORLD 45

is one of the most enduring features of Palestinian life in the diaspora; the economic situation; and issues of identification and relations with host populations. The PLO and its activities and networks throughout the world indicate the pervasiveness and salience of diaspora politics in international relations.2 Jordan Jordan holds a specific position in the Arab world simply because of the large number of Palestinians residing in the country and because of Jordanian administration of the West Bank and East Jerusalem between 1949 and 1967. The first category of Palestinians in Trans-Jordan was those who migrated throughout the 1920s and 1930s. The second category was the large amount of refugees of 1948, when approximately 450,000 refugees arrived. Urban refugees moved into Amman and other towns, while peasants ended up in refugee camps (Plascov 1981). The massive influx proved unmanageable for the Trans-Jordanian authorities (Morris 1988:257). The population more than doubled, which put pressure on the land, and a rapid process of urbanisation ensued as Palestinians migrated to Amman. Subsequently, restrictions were enforced on migration to the capital. Also, refugees were removed from overcrowded urban areas to refugee camps. A third category consists of the 1967 ‘displaced persons’. Since they did not cross any international border, but rather moved within the Jordanian kingdom, the term ‘displaced’ was employed. Today, there are 10 recognised refugee camps in Jordan and three unregistered. Some 287,000 refugees live in the camps, out of the total of 1.5 million registered refugees in Jordan; 33 per cent of the population in Jordan consists of Palestinian refugees (UNRWA 2001). Citizenship and identity Jordan is the sole Arab country where Palestinians have been able to receive citizenship on a larger scale.3 All registered refugees are holders of the Jordanian passport, except for those originating from Gaza. UNRWAregistered refugees could thus be at the same time citizens of a state and stateless refugees. The Jordanian passport has become an important ‘asset’, enabling the Palestinian holders of such a passport to enter other Arab countries. Legislation passed also allowed refugees to participate in the parliamentary elections, gave every refugee the right to be employed, to acquire land and a home ‘until the final settlement in Palestine’, indicating

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the temporary nature of the refugee presence in Trans-Jordan (Plascov 1981:44f). With the Jordanian disengagement in 1988 (the Decision for the Administrative Disengagement) from the West Bank, changes were made regarding Jordanian citizenship for West Bankers. Jordanian passports were to be issued for a period of two years for Palestinians in the West Bank at Palestinian request. West Bank Palestinians were from now on to be considered Palestinians and not Jordanian nationals.4 In the wake of the peace process, the Jordanian government in 1995 issued new regulations, so that ‘West Bankers who had a Palestinian passport before July 1988 could replace their two-year documents with a regular five-year passport, even if they had lost their right to West Bank residency’ (Arzt 1997:40). Following the Declaration of Principles between Israel and the PLO, and later the Peace Accords between Jordan and Israel, there were reports that many Palestinians residing in the East Bank had been deprived of their right to five-year passports (Abu-Odeh 1999:194). In 2001, in relation to the intensification of violence in Israeli—Palestinian relations, Jordan tightened its immigration rules for Palestinians (‘Peace Monitor’ 2001:117). Jordanian politics Jordan was affected not only by the large influx of refugees, but by the fact that the West Bank was annexed by the Jordanian kingdom between 1950 and 1967, causing the Hashemites to see themselves as the representatives of what was left of Arab Palestine. In governance, King Abdallah sought to utilise the local hamuleh system, with the co-option of Palestinian notables into the Jordanian administration. Palestinian institutions were dissolved. The objective was to undermine tendencies towards the centralisation of Palestinian leadership and, in fact, to eradicate all forms of identity with ‘Palestine’ (Mishal 1978; Migdal 1980:38). Those who supported the king, such as members of the Nashashibi, Tuqan, Dajani, Abd al-Hadi, Jayyusi and Nusseibeh families, were given prominent positions (Smith 1986:97). In 1951 King Abdallah was assassinated by a Palestinian when he visited Jerusalem, aggravating the troublesome relations between Jordan and the Palestinians. In the 1950s the government made an effort to provide support to the refugees and grant them rights within the kingdom. At the same time, however, the government continued to stress the exclusiveness of the refugee situation in order to attract international financial support (Plascov 1981:44). This was a difficult political balancing act.

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Equal representation was guaranteed, but only to the lower house of parliament. The majority of refugees were prohibited from taking part in elections and politics, due to the requirement of paying tax on property in order to be able to cast a vote (Brand 1988:16). Palestinians entered governmental structures and played a considerable role in civilian bureaucracy The armed forces (Arab Legion), however, were kept a uniquely Trans-Jordanian affair, as very few Palestinians were recruited. Palestinians were regarded as strangers and as not trustworthy or worthy of defending the kingdom (Plascov 1981: 97). This exclusion increased Palestinian sentiments of being not only excluded, but vulnerable and insecure. Pro-Hashemite Palestinians have, however, been recruited into the army. In 1976 military service became obligatory and greater numbers of Palestinians thus joined the armed forces in lowerechelon positions. PLO politics Although most camp refugees initially respected the Hashemite regime and did not engage in opposition politics, radical nationalist forces in the form of the Communists5, the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM),6 the Ba’ath7 and the Muslim Brotherhood grew in the 1950s. Under the leadership of the nationalist Sulayman al-Nabulsi, Palestinians and Jordanians combined demands for reform. The elections in 1956 brought Nabulsi and a nationalist coalition to power for a short period of time. Not until the mid-1960s did the Palestinians engage in a political movement asserting an autonomous Palestinian political strategy vis-à-vis the regime. When the PLO was formed in 1964, fears arose in the kingdom over the challenge it implied to Jordan’s claims to sovereignty over the West Bank. The PLO made an effort to assure Jordan that the PLO would not act so as to tear the West Bank apart from the East Bank (cf. Mishal’s quotation from the document in Mishal 1978:68, n. 40). The early phase of the Palestinian revolution was to a large extent acted out on the Jordanian stage, posing a serious challenge against the Jordanian regime. Palestinian guerrilla cross-border activities triggered Israeli retaliation, threatening Jordanian interests. PLO institutions and military presence included the potential for a coup d’état. In 1970 the leftist PLO fronts (most notably the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; PFLP) carried out terrorist activities such as aeroplane hijacking with Jordan as their base. To the Hashemite regime, this was the ultimate trial. The fedayeen openly disobeyed Jordanian laws and authority, fuelled by growing resentment against the Jordanian regime among the Palestinian

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population. The bitter civil war between Jordanian forces and PLO troops in 1970/1—‘the battle for Jordan’ (Abu-Odeh 1999:183)—led to the virtual elimination of the PLO in Jordan. Palestinian bitterness against Jordan grew considerably. In 2001 it remained difficult or impossible for many to talk about what happened during this period (cf. Farah 1997: 280). The expulsion of the resistance movement led to increased vulnerability of the Palestinians in Jordan. In 1972 King Hussein outlined his United Kingdom Plan, whereby the West Bank would be granted autonomy within a scheme of overall Jordanian control (cf. Ma’oz 1984:101), which provoked strong reactions from al-Fateh and the PLO. In the aftermath of the showdown of the early 1970s there was an increased assertiveness of ‘Trans-Jordanian nationalists’ and antiPalestinian sentiments (Abu-Odeh 1999:189ff.), which meant that the number of Palestinians in the administration was subsequently reduced. This process was also triggered by the Arab League Summit in Rabat in 1974, when the Arab League recognised the PLO as the ‘sole, legitimate representative of the Palestinian people’. In November that year, the percentage of Palestinians in the cabinet was reduced from 46 to 20 per cent (ibid.: 211). Palestinians were increasingly alienated and marginalised from the state at the same time as the Jordanian regime maintained a discourse of also being the state for its Palestinian citizens (ibid.: 200). At the same time, a division grew in the Palestinian community between proHashemite and pro-PLO sections of the elite. With the Camp David accords between Egypt and Israel in 1979, rapprochement occurred between Jordan and the PLO. Jordan again severed its relations with the PLO in the early 1980s. In 1983–5 relations were once more improved and in 1985 the Amman Accord between Jordan and the PLO suggested a confederation between a future Palestine and Jordan.8 After 1985, Jordan sided with Syria, however, and together they attempted to manipulate and divide the PLO. The PLO cancelled the Amman Accord, and a few months later Jordan closed the PLO offices in Jordan. A renewed recovery of the relationship occurred in 1988, along with the withdrawal of Jordanian claims to the West Bank as a response to the intifada. A confederation was again discussed in relation to the peace process and the establishment of Palestinian self-rule. Also, during the time of the peace process Jordanian-Palestinian relations have fluctuated and tensions have arisen particularly over the issue of sovereignty over Jerusalem. When Israel and Jordan signed the Peace Accords in October 1994, Arafat was not even invited to the ceremony. The Peace Accords further granted a specific role to Jordan vis-à-vis Jerusalem. At the time of

PALESTINIANS IN THE WORLD 49

the celebrations, Palestinians in the West Bank went on a general protest strike. Since 1989 Jordan has undergone a partial process of political liberalisation. Parliamentary elections were held in 1989,9 1993 and 1997. Few Palestinians have stood in the elections (Brynen 1998). In the 1993 elections al-‘Ahd (a Jordanian nationalist party opposing Palestinian influence) became the second largest party. In the elections of 1989 the Islamists gained a large portion of parliamentary seats, and reforms were designed to minimise the possibility of Islamist opposition in future elections. In administrative reforms, new governorates have been added. These administrative units have become the bases for elections, meaning that candidates for the parliament are chosen at a district level. Only one of the 12 governorates (Zarqa) is predominately populated by Palestinians. This system, combined with predetermined allocation of seats for minorities (Christian, Circassian and Chechen), ensured that the proportion of Palestinians in the parliament could not exceed 25 per cent (Abu-Odeh 1999:230). Between 1993 and 1997, Palestinians occupied only 13 of the 80 seats in the parliament. In the early 1990s Tahir alMasri was appointed prime minister. Masri belongs to the prominent Nablus-based Masri family and was the first Palestinian in decades to be appointed prime minister. The reasons were, first and foremost, to be found in the king’s need to create legitimacy for his peace politics (Brand 1999:56). The regime of Masri was short-lived, however, as a coalition of Islamists and the Constitutional Bloc managed to get through a noconfidence vote in October 1991. In December 1999, King Hussein died and was succeeded by his son, Abdallah. Elections planned for 2001 were postponed. Integration Also, the refugees have had a difficult time trying to balance their political rights and the need to lead lives as decent as possible in Jordan. There has thus been an acute tension between the political right of return and economic and social rights in the situation in which they were. The refugees were against all attempts at integration and settlement. Resettlement plans were regarded as part of Western imperialism and a plan to eliminate the refugee problem—UNRWA was accordingly (in the early 1950s) seen as an agent of imperialism. The government, however, encouraged UNRWA’s policy of building huts to replace the initial tents in the camps. Such programmes were from the outset rejected by camp inhabitants, who saw them as attempts at integrating them in host

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societies. However, camp inhabitants began to improve their conditions and their shelters for reasons of health and security. As shelters were improved, the camps began to expand as they now attracted people moving into the camps. Ten years after the exodus the camps came to resemble villages. ‘In 1959 refugees even began planting trees’, which symbolically indicated the potential of rooting oneself or at least accepting where one was (Plascov 1981:67). Living conditions in refugee camps established after 1948 have been improved substantially Socioeconomically, the Palestinian community in Jordan is rather diverse. Wealthy Palestinians have come to make up the economic elite of Jordan, controlling the private sector. The existence of refugees in the kingdom has altered Jordan’s economic outlook. The loss of the West Bank to Israel in 1967 therefore became a major blow to the economy of Jordan. In the Arab world, it was only in Jordan that refugee families were able to buy plots of land, often through government aid or helped by wealthier relatives. The gravest condition, in both economic and legal terms, is that of refugees from the Gaza Strip who are not Jordanian citizens. According to some figures, there are around 100,000 Gaza Palestinians in Jordan who hold Egyptian travel documents. Jordanian—Palestinian relations In the aftermath of 1948 there was a great deal of sympathy with the plight of the Palestinians. This attitude changed, however, in 1951 with the assassination of King Abdallah in Jerusalem. Suspicion and wariness have since been part of attitudes towards the Palestinian presence. Suspicions in relation to employment were aggravated with the entrance of UNRWA, since UNRWA employed only refugees. Trans-Jordanians resented what were seen as Palestinian attitudes of superiority and their education. Many thought that the Palestinians had failed to defend themselves in 1948 and that the Arab Legion had attempted to rescue them because of Palestinian inferiority and ‘cowardice’ (Abu-Odeh 1999:57). Relations worsened in relation to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and military actions, on both sides, Israeli and Palestinian. Also, as in many other Arab countries, the Palestinians were accused of betraying their country and of acting in an arrogant and expansionist manner in host contexts. Trans-Jordanians also saw the anti-monarchist Palestinian position as ungrateful, as ‘an ingratitude unbecoming of guests’ (Plascov 1981:34). As in other refugee contexts, hostility from host country

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populations exalted Palestinian identity. The Palestinians ‘were constantly reminded in various ways that they did not really belong there’ (ibid.: 35). They were foreigners, guests who were supposed to be grateful for the generosity of their hosts. In 2001, Palestinian refugees in Jordan appeared very careful in their judgements about the Jordanian regime and the Jordanians. Jordan was called the ‘best of the bad’, the ‘best government of the bad’, ‘the best of bad choices’. Many asserted that although they were not precisely happy in Jordan, the situation for Palestinians was ‘okay’ (interviews, May 2001). However, there were also complaints about what was seen as discrimination in, for example, the labour market (cf. Farah 1997: 278f.). Many of those interviewed for this project said that they felt that they had been turned down when seeking jobs or when dealing with the authorities, because they were Palestinians. It does not mean that you can hear it in the street, but you can feel it and you can touch it while you’re going to have an opportunity to a job in the government or any position. You will find that there are many people who are less qualified. You are more qualified than them, but they have better chances of getting the job. Because you are Palestinian. (Ahmed, Rusaifeh camp, Jordan, 30 May 2001) There is also mischief about taxes and fees that are said to be higher in Palestinian-populated areas. One quite typical statement would be: I am a stranger, I am not from here. If there is something that I can do a little better, then suddenly you hear, ‘yes, you are a Palestinian, you have blue blood, you can do everything’. (Ghassan, Ramtha, Jordan, 2, June 2001) In Jordan, the peace process has spurred Trans-Jordanian nationalism and the idea that ‘Jordan is for Trans-Jordanians’ (Brand 1995; Abu-Odeh 1999:194). While proponents of Trans-Jordanian nationalism have argued that the Palestinians should be expelled from Jordan, Palestinians in Jordan have instead claimed their right to equality (Abu-Odeh 1999:194f.). Nonrefugees and refugees living outside the camps are more at ease and identify more solidly as Jordanians of Palestinian descent. As Israel and Jordan signed their peace treaty, US President Bill Clinton indicated that Jordan should see itself as a potential permanent home for Palestinians:

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Your nation’s commitment to pluralism has been matched by a remarkable generosity of spirit, for you have opened your doors to millions of your Arab brethren. And they have come here, year after year, seeking refuge in your nation. And here they have found a true home. In return, they have enriched your economy and culture. (President Clinton’s address to the Jordanian Parliament, 26 October 1994; quoted in Abu-Odeh 1999:266) Lebanon Approximately 104,000 Palestinians fled from northern Palestine to Lebanon in 1948 (R.Sayigh 1979:99), a ratio of about 1:10 to the Lebanese population (R.Sayigh 1994a:17). Initially the refugees clustered in the south. Eventually, however, the Lebanese government adopted a policy to ‘thin out’ the concentration of Palestinians in the south, out of fear of ‘infiltration’ and smuggling; this was similar to the Jordanian policy of moving the Palestinians away from border areas. In the 1960s the south was declared a military zone and entry was restricted. The government also wanted to reduce refugee concentrations around Beirut (R.Sayigh 1988: 281) because of Maronite fear of a Palestinian takeover of the city. The majority of the refugees settled in Muslim, mainly agricultural areas. As soon as there was a possibility of doing so, refugees migrated to urban camps (R.Sayigh 1994a:24). Currently, there are around 380,000 Palestinians who are registered as refugees in Lebanon, making up 11.3 per cent of the population (UNRWA 2001). More than half of those live in the 12 UNRWA refugee camps which are scattered around the country However, emigration from Lebanon has reduced the number who actually reside in Lebanon to approximately 200,000 (Uglerud 2002). Much of the Palestinian history in Lebanon must be understood in relation to the sectarian make-up of Lebanon and the fear that the influx and potential settlement of Palestinians there would endanger the balance between different confessional communities. Another determining factor is the linkage between the sectarian/segmentary principle guiding political life and familism/clientelism in Lebanon (Klaus 1999). ‘Foreigners’ Lebanon has refused to apply the League of Arab States Protocol of 1965, which called for Arab host states to give Palestinian refugees the same rights as their own citizens. Instead, the Palestinians have been considered

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‘foreigners’, implying a wide range of restrictions. Palestinians have, for example, during extended time periods been required to procure a work permit, which has been difficult, not to say impossible, for most. There has been a long list of jobs that could simply not be held by ‘foreigners’. Far-reaching restrictions have been placed on building and expansion of the camps. In 2001, Palestinians were barred from owning property. Citizenship has been an opportunity only for a small portion of predominantly wealthy Christians or through marriage. From the mid-1960s the policies towards the Christians have also, however, seen increased restrictions (R.Sayigh 1988:279; Hudson 1997). In 1995 it was decided that Palestinians with Lebanese travel documents were required to have an entry visa in order to return (al-Shaml Newsletter 1996, no. 2, March; al-Natur 1997), which restricted freedom of movement even for Palestinian refugees legally registered in Lebanon. In January 1999 the new Lebanese government announced that it was lifting the 1995 legislation (al-Majdal, March 1999, issue no. 1) and that holders of Lebanese travel documents were to be treated as passport holders (alShaml Newsletter, no. 15, February 1999). During recent years there has been an increase in the number of Palestinians who have been naturalised in Lebanon (Peteet 1996; al-Shaml Newsletter, no. 15, February 1999). Acquiring citizenship has, however, been met with resentment from other Palestinians. Further, exclusion and marginalisation remain the most prominent features of Palestinian experience in Lebanon. Nevertheless, it is also true that interchange of various forms is part of the story. This was in particular the case during the early years of Palestinian existence in Lebanon (Klaus 1999). PLO politics The advance of Palestinian commandos and guerrillas in Lebanon, particularly after Black September in 1970, heightened the impact of the Palestinian presence. This occurred at the same time as Lebanon’s political crisis was manifested. The fragile sectarian balance of Lebanon as a state proved increasingly untenable. Formally, the intention of the Cairo Agreement of 1969 was to reconcile Lebanon’s authority over its sovereign territory with the Palestinian presence. The Agreement legitimised the Palestinian armed presence in the country and therefore strengthened the de facto Palestinian territorial control in parts of Lebanon. It gave the PLO the right to have a military presence in the camps and to provide camp resi- dents with

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security. The Agreement also stipulated the right to employment and residency for all Palestinians at the time residing in Lebanon. Initially, there was cooperation and solidarity between the Palestinian forces and the Lebanese nationalist left, including the Arab Nationalist Movement, the Syrian National Party, the Ba’ath and the Lebanese Communist Party (R.Sayigh 1994a:25f.). There was also support from the Sunni community and to some extent the Greek Orthodox and the Shi’ites. The resistance movement also attracted support from underprivileged Lebanese as well as amongst the urban intelligentsia and middle class (Shiblak 1997). Soon, the PLO entered a coalition with the Lebanese National Movement (LNM), a coalition of Muslim-dominated forces on the ‘left’. By the mid-1970s the PLO had developed extensive territorial control as well as built up an impressive bureaucracy PLO Chairman Yasser ‘Arafat was now a head of state in all but name, more powerful than many Arab rulers. His was no longer a humble revolutionary movement, but rather a vigorous para-state…. Its role in Lebanon had also changed profoundly, as had Lebanese attitudes toward it. (Khalidi 1986:29) The Palestinian ‘state within the state’ was the ‘Fakhani republic’. Fakhani was the place in West Beirut where most Palestinian offices were located. The south of Lebanon was called ‘Fateh-land’ or ‘PLO-land’ because of the heavy PLO/Fateh presence and the frequent attacks and infiltration against Israel. By the Maronite elite, the Palestinian resistance movement was seen as a potential cause of internal turmoil and as jeopardising Lebanon’s sovereignty. The first real clash occurred in 1969 and violent incidents have since been part of the relationship. Israeli reprisals against guerrilla raids into Israeli territory further destabilised PLO-Lebanese relations as civilians (mostly Shi’a peasants) were forced to flee en masse from the south. The Palestinian resistance and its alliance with the National Movement and the left eventually became a direct ingredient in the civil war. The starting point of the war is usually seen as the clash between the Phalanges and a Palestinian organisation on 13 April 1975. The incessant fighting cast Beirut into an exceedingly violent period, with a paralysation of government from early on and fragmentation occurring at all levels. The army disintegrated, with officers joining different militias. The leftist PLO organisations were deeply engulfed in the situation from early on, while

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Fateh tried to stay out of the imbroglio. The PLO Executive Committee authored a memorandum in October 1975 intended to reassure the Lebanese right about the non-provocative approach of the PLO. rejection of ‘any country as a substitute for the occupied Palestinian homeland’…, second, rejection of ‘any nationality or political identity that may be offered as a substitute for their Palestinian nationality’, third, reaffirmation of the PLO’s ‘concern for the security, stability and sovereignty of Lebanon for its territorial integrity and the unity of its people, with all that this involves in the way of the state’s reaffirmation’ of ‘the agreements concluded between the Lebanese state and the Palestine Liberation Organization as being the formula that governs Lebanese— Palestinian relations and the basis for resolving any problems or complications’. (quoted in Brynen 1990:85f.) From 1976, the PLO as such was entrenched in LNM’s fighting against Syria and the right. This alliance also meant a development of a common sociopolitical ground, aiming at challenging the family/sectarian style of politics. The slogan of ‘sha’b wahed’, ‘one people’, was employed and there were all forms of social exchange. The refugee camps were increasingly the targets of military assaults. Camille Chamoun’s10 right-wing militia surrounded the Tal al-Zataar camp in 1976 and the camp endured a seven-month siege. It was the brutal Phalange strategy against Palestinian refugee camps which finally drew Fateh into the war, as Fateh and the PLO were eventually forced to intervene. There was also involvement of Syrian forces, placed in Lebanon in order to curb simmering violence. The situation for Tal al-Zataar became increasingly disastrous. When the camp eventually fell, 3,000 Palestinian refugees were killed. The PLO held Syria ultimately responsible (Brynen 1990:103). One account of the siege of Tal al-Zataar is that by Lyana Badr (1983/ 93) in her novella ‘A Land of Rock and Thyme’. The story is about a young woman, Yusra, who recalls how ‘Everyone expected death; no one in Tal al Zataar thought to live out their natural life’ (ibid.: 11). Daily chores such as fetching water from the well amounted to a flirtation with death. When the camp fell, its habitants surrendered, and upon leaving the camp people cautioned each other to remember to say that they were Lebanese if they were stopped and questioned by militias. Yusra’s brother

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Jamal forgot this simple fact of survival and answered ‘Palestinian’. He was immediately shot. The end of the Fakhani republic The PLO was then a party to the conflict as much as any of the ‘internal’ actors, although the blame put by a large part of the Lebanese right (cf. elKhazen 1997:275) on the PLO for causing the civil war is misplaced indeed. Gradually, the PLO diminished its influence in Lebanon. The Israeli invasion of 1978 caused some 200,000 refugees (Brynen 1990:125), mostly among the Shi’a peasantry The establishment of the security zone and the continuous Israeli onslaught against the south meant heavy pressure on the PLO. The situation deteriorated rapidly Hostility by broader strata of the Lebanese population was inflamed by arrogance and misconduct among the Palestinian forces in the form of, for example, severe human rights abuses. The definitive end of the ‘Fakhani republic’ occurred with Israel’s 1982 invasion and Operation Peace for Galilee. After months of fierce fighting, the PLO was evacuated from Lebanon and the Beirut era was over. An agreement was negotiated through the USA and special envoy Philip Habib, and meant harsh terms for the PLO. What was of major importance for the PLO was protection of the refugee camps, something that the Americans verbally promised they would safeguard. When the PLO left Beirut the Palestinian refugees were left largely without protection, as was grimly pointed out by the Phalange massacre of Palestinian refugees in the camps of Sabra and Shatila while the camps were lit up by the IDF (see R.Sayigh 1994a).11 Sabra and Shatila reinforced Palestinian identity as victims and have served as a mighty symbol of Palestinian suffering ever since. This period also witnessed disintegration of the PLO when al-Saiqa and the General Command of the PFLP (PFLP—GC) withdrew from the PLO and a mutiny occurred within al-Fateh—a ‘civil war within a civil war’ (Kimmerling and Migdal 1993:236)—through Abu Musa’s al-Fateh Uprising. Increasing Shi’a resentment against the Palestinians was channelled by the Amal movement, which was linked with Syrian interests in power and attempts to oust the PLO. Amal hostilities culminated in another disaster, the Battle of the Camps,—the sieges of the camps in South Lebanon which continued until late 1987. The sieges included three assaults by the Amal on the Shatila camp during the period 1985–6.12 Sieges of the camps in South Lebabnon which continued until late 1987. The sieges served,

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however, to reunify Palestinian ranks, and Fateh and Arafat came out stronger than before. At the same time, PLO links and relations moved away from the secular left to the Shi’a Hizbollah. The Ta’if accord of 1989 formally ended the civil war. After Ta’if, Palestinian groups were also to be disarmed. Weapons were handed in to the authorities and the Palestinians withdrew from the south. In addition, the Lebanese authorities extended their security controls around the refugee camps. In the early 1990s, with sporadic Israeli bombing of PLO bases and Syrian involvement against the PLO, the decline in power of the PLO in Lebanon was further accelerated. Since the 1990s and the Gulf War, the PLO has increasingly come to disregard the Palestinians in Lebanon. Due to financial strain, the PLO in the early 1990s reduced all forms of aid to refugees in Lebanon (R.Sayigh 1995:41). The peace process has further triggered a political fragmentation of Palestinian organisations in Lebanon, as a severe polarisation has occurred, within the Fateh movement too. Anti-Arafat tendencies are strongest in the north, where opposition factions are in control. Socioeconomics The PLO also established an economic sector of considerable strength in Lebanon. A separate Palestinian economy involving a large administrative apparatus, social institutions, productive institutions such as factories, etc. was gradually established and expanded. The resistance movement eventually employed some 65 per cent of the Palestinian workforce (sources cited in R.Sayigh 1988:286). In 1982 the Palestinian economy generated more than 15 per cent of the Lebanese gross national product (GNP). Also, voluntary taxes on Palestinian emigrés and contributions from rich Palestinians paved the way for a social welfare system on the side of UNRWA. After 1982, not only were the Palestinians vulnerable in terms of security, but there was an economic squeeze on them, called khanq, strangulation, by the Palestinians (R.Sayigh 1994a:322f.), meaning even further restrictions and hardships. In 1987 the Lebanese Parliament declared the Cairo Agreement of 1969 null and void, forcing the Palestinians once again to acquire a work permit. Only employment within the camps and with UNRWA is excepted from this rule. About 11 per cent of the UNRWA-registered Palestinian population is registered as Special Hardship Cases, families unable to sustain themselves (UNRWA 2001).

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Lebanon’s reconstruction programme has not included the refugee camps, which means that infrastructure is still poor and there has been no reconstruction of what was destroyed during the war (Besson 1997: 340). The Lebanese government has declined to rebuild destroyed camps. It is forbidden to build new camps or to enlarge existing camps. Even to bring building material into the camps in southern Lebanon is prohibited. In the late 1990s unemployment among the Palestinian labour force in Lebanon was estimated at 30 per cent, and more than 50 per cent worked as day labourers in construction and agriculture, where a permit was not needed, earning US$200–300 per month. UNRWA remains the main permanent employer of Palestinians. UNRWA’s financial drain has left much of the social infrastructure in a miserable shape. UNRWA schools are the only existing educational option, except for a minority of Palestinian families who can provide their children with expensive education in Lebanese private schools. UNRWA’s budget crisis has brought primary education in the refugee camps to the verge of collapse (al-Majdal, March 1999, issue no. 1). The Palestinian community in Lebanon has also suffered from the loss of employment opportunities in the Gulf and the loss of remittances from Palestinians in the Gulf after 1991. As a stark contrast to the life of camp refugees, the Palestinian privatesector elite has found few restrictions in Lebanon. The Palestinian business elite established themselves in banking, tourism, manufacture and imports (R.Sayigh 1988:285) and played a cardinal role in Lebanon’s economy prior to the war. Stigmatisation and identity In the period between 1948 and 1969 there was little overt hostility between Palestinians and Lebanese. The reception of Palestinian refugees was replete with social warmth and assistance was provided from many sources. Marriage and other forms of social interchange between Palestinians and Lebanese Sunnis were fairly frequent. There was also an initially quite widespread belief that the refugees would soon be repatriated. Anti-Palestinianism was/is strongest among the Maronites, whereas sympathetic approaches were/are most frequent among the poor Shi’ite stratas (R.Sayigh 1988). Between 1969 and 1982, with the forceful emergence of the resistance movement, a process of polarisation occurred. Lebanese society was shattered into pro- and anti-Palestinian sentiment. The period since 1982 has been characterised by a sharp rise in the threat perception

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of Palestinians in Lebanon and their vulnerability has increased (R.Sayigh 1988:275; Badran 1991; Natur 1993). Anti-Palestinian attitudes have sometimes been formulated around the poverty of the Palestinians and the creation of stereotypes relating to fears of crime. At other times, however, it has been their relative advantage that has been seen as revolting. The existence of UNRWA has been taken as a sign of injustice and as a token of Palestinian privilege. The stigmatisation taking place has also involved accusations against the Palestinians that they have ‘given up’ and ‘sold their land’. The Lebanese authorities have used extensive means of control and repression vis-à-vis the camps (R. Sayigh 1979:132f.). The security organisation Deuxième Bureau has its special Palestinian section, using force when it is thought necessary. Repression grew harsher in the 1960s as Palestinian activism grew stronger (ibid.: 150). Palestinians have been excluded from all forms of formal representation and there is therefore no mechanism to advocate civil rights. All improvement of houses has been made conditional on permits, as has construction of all kinds (R.Sayigh 1994a). Repression and discrimination directed against Palestinian identity as such was commonplace. A common story is that when Maronite soldiers wanted to distinguish Lebanese from Palestinians at any of the numerous checkpoints regulating life in the civil-war days each person was asked to say ‘tomato, which is pronounced bandura in Lebanese colloquial Arabic and banadura in Palestinian accent. To use the banadura-pronunciation could mean detention or death’ (Peteet 1995: 176). Many learnt the Lebanese accent for security reasons. However, there has also been a process of accommodation of styles, especially among the younger generation, who socialise rather intensely at institutes of higher education. Perceptions of the Palestinians and their strength might be formulated in the following way: There were two brothers living near each other. A guest arrived and asked for shelter. Our brother closed the door; the other was more tolerant, and invited the guest in. The guest stayed longer than anticipated. He then brought his wife, and then his cousins, and then even his friends. While originally he had occupied a little corner of the three bedroom house, he soon took over most of the house and was knocking at the master bedroom. This is our story with our brothers the Palestinians. (quoted in Salem 1995:60)

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The Palestinians were thus viewed with increasing hostility, as imperialist, expansionist and ungrateful (cf. R.Khalidi 1986; R.Sayigh 1994a: 102). Refugee camps were called ‘zoos’ (Peteet 1995:178). A refugee woman in Burj el-Shemali in 2001 phrased how she felt about Lebanese attitudes in the following way: The Lebanese hate us, they make us feel and never forget that we are unwanted in this country, they would like to see us all dead and don’t treat us as human beings. (Kamila, Burj el-Shemali, 15 August 2001) Interaction is more frequent in Beirut and the cities, but camp populations for the most part socialise less intensely with Lebanese. For university students, friendship across ethnic boundaries is more frequent. Interaction and social relations have, however, been submerged since the war. When Libya’s president, Mu’ammar al-Qadaffi, decided to expel thousands of Palestinians, a number of whom held Lebanese travel documents, the Lebanese government refused to admit them into the country. This was intended as a political message to the world that any plan to resettle the Palestinians in Lebanon would be vehemently opposed. Passions flared to such an extent that one minister declared that ‘Lebanon was not a dump for human waste’ and the Lebanon’s refusal was intended to put an end to the ‘human invasion’ of Palestinians. (al-Safir 1995:9 September; quoted in Nasrallah 1997:357) Stigmatisation has been further heightened since the initiation of the peace process, increasing Lebanese fears of an incumbent process of integration and tawteen. In the Lebanese media there has been a campaign charging the Palestinian camps with being zones of militarisation as well as criminality. For this reason, camps in south Lebanon were placed under siege. The gravest danger against Lebanese security and stability is therefore seen as coming from the Palestinians (Suleiman 1999:72). The Lebanese foreign minister, Faris Buwayz, proposed in April 1994 that all Palestinians be removed from Lebanon (interview with al-Safir, 18 April 1994; quoted in R.Sayigh 1995:43). President Elias Hrawi has said that since the Palestinians now have their own territory Lebanon cannot accept the permanent settlement of refugees (Sosebee 1996).

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For entirely different reasons, there is thus consensus among Lebanese and Palestinians that ‘permanent settlement’ (tawteen) is to be utterly rejected (Weighill 1997:308). Throughout the civil war, approximately 100,000 Palestinians left Lebanon (Takkenbeg 1998:18); another 50,000 were internally displaced13 (Rubenberg 1984; Natur 1993), and 12,000 PLO fighters were forced to leave in 1982 (Hijazi 1993). Palestinian migration has been caused by growing feelings of insecurity and lack of safety, but also by economic factors, unemployment and the impossibility of finding a secure livelihood. This means that the actual number of Palestinian refugees residing in Lebanon is considerably lower than that registered with UNRWA. Nabil states that he felt at home in Lebanon until 1975, but that after the war that was no longer possible: From that time on I felt that it wasn’t my home anymore, when we came back, and now my relations are almost entirely with Palestinians, with the camps etc., and I feel that it is over, it is not our country and we can’t feel safe here or live comfortably, not even for a day. (Nabil, Beirut, 31 July 2001) Egypt Although Palestinians had already sought residence in Egypt during the British mandate, the Palestinian community in Egypt proper has always been rather small. The number of initial refugees in 1948 has been estimated at 11,600 (Brand 1988:43). To most, life in Egypt was initially extremely hard. The majority was gathered in a military camp in al-Kantaara in the Sinai (Yasin 1999), while wealthy refugees found housing in Cairo. According to figures from the US Bureau of the Census, there were in the late 1990s between 50,000 and 100,000 Palestinians in Egypt (Takkenberg 1998:151). The Palestinians in Egypt were initially, as were the refugees in Gaza, provided with Egyptian identity cards that were later replaced by All Palestine Government travel documents (Brand 1988:50; Yasin et al. 1995). In 1984 legislation was issued which meant that Palestinians were not to be seen as Egyptian nationals. In order to re-enter Egypt, Palestinians must obtain a visa (Yasin 1999). Palestinians may only have temporary residence permits, valid for one to three years (Takkenberg 1998:152). Further, concerning Gazans carrying Egyptian travel

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documents, Egypt only allowed passage across Egyptian territory to those to whom the Israeli authorities had granted approval to return to the Gaza Strip (‘Palestinian Displaced of 1967 and the Peace Process’, al-Shaml Newsletter 1996, no. 2, March). In 1996 the Egyptian authorities announced that restrictions on Palestinian entry into Egypt would be eased (al-Shaml Newsletter, no. 4, September 1996:5). A few of the wealthier Palestinians in Egypt have managed to obtain citizenship, but most have not (Brand 1988:52). In the beginning there were severe constraints against the possibilities of working. These restrictions were eased as Jamal Abdel Nasser rose to power. Palestinians could now also engage in trade, and were allowed to practise as professionals, such as medical doctors and dentists, on the same basis as Egyptians. They were also permitted to take state-funded positions. Healthcare was free and Palestinians attended Egyptian universities (ibid.: 52f.). Migration from Gaza was restricted. However, many students from Gaza resided in Cairo due to the fact that there was no higher education in Gaza prior to 1967. During the 1967 war, members of the Gaza police and the Palestine Liberation Army retreated together with the Egyptian army, which doubled the amount of Palestinians in Egypt (ibid.: 46). ‘Since then, the borders have been kept generally closed to Palestinians’ (Arzt 1997:55). The Egyptian government has conducted resettlement plans and sent refugees from Egypt proper to the Gaza Strip. During the period of Jamal Abdel Nasser and the heyday of Arab nationalism, Palestinians were attracted to Arabism and engaged in various pan-Arab organisations. The Nasserite ANM was the most influential of such groups. With the organising of student’s unions and women’s movements, a basis for political establishments was laid, and although the Fateh movement was created in Kuwait its main founding fathers had studied in Egypt and belonged to the rank and file of student politicians. With the Sadat regime many of the benefits that the Palestinians in Egypt had enjoyed were cancelled (Brand 1988:61). In 1978 new legislation meant that Palestinians were not to have the same employment status as Egyptians. Palestinians were further barred from trade and commerce as well as from owning agricultural land. It also became more difficult to obtain higher education, and after the Camp David accords hundreds of Palestinian students were imprisoned. The PLO and the Palestinians wholeheartedly opposed the Camp David agreements, setting the Egyptian regime and the PLO further apart. Gradually, attitudes and political discourse became more anti-Palestinian. With the Mubarak regime, Egyptian—Palestinian relations changed for the better. When in

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the late 1980s Jordan and Syria manoeuvred against the PLO, the PLO and the Palestinians gravitated towards the Egyptians. During the 1990s President Hosni Mubarak endeavoured to be at the centre of peace efforts in the region. The situation of Palestinians in Egypt has been aggravated since the start of the Gulf crisis. Further restrictions have been imposed on schooling and education (Takkenberg 1998). The Gulf In 1990 there were nearly 400,000 Palestinian residents in Kuwait (Lesch 1991:42), the largest recipient of Palestinian migrants in the Gulf. Although Palestinian communities of considerable size exist in other Gulf countries, is a lack of sources on the situation in countries other than Kuwait. During the early years of the oil boom, Palestinians were able to benefit from the growth. Initially migrants to the Gulf were made up of skilled labour, members of the intelligentsia of lower- or middle-class origin. In the Gulf, Palestinian migration satisfied mutual needs. Demands for labour in the expanding economies coincided with migrants’ quest to sustain their families. In the beginning there was a lack of regulations in Saudi Arabia, which made it possible for Palestinians to invest in commerce and trade. Many of the early migrants were professionals, physicians, teachers, accountants, engineers, managers and consultants (ibid.: 42), providing for a high percentage of public servants. In 1966–7, 49 per cent of Kuwait’s teachers were Palestinian (ibid.: 43). Toward the end of the 1950s Palestinians in Kuwait were the wealthiest in the diaspora (Smith 1984: 127). The second major group of Palestinians arrived in the early 1950s and belonged to the peasantry: ‘They were transformed into an urban proletariat or an urban lower class’ (Ghabra 1987:63). Palestinian labour was used to build ports, rail and residential facilities, and to work as seamstresses, tutors and personal maids in private homes. Personal ties and family connections were often used to find labour opportunities. Migrants meeting each other on their trek to Kuwait formed bases for social networks (ibid.: 38ff.) to assist each other in finding housing, jobs, etc. New arrivals found housing with family and village networks, creating new forms of social-security net. Nationalisation efforts Although the Palestinians in the Gulf have for the large part been well off, the early ‘El Dorado’ was soon transformed as regimes initiated stricter

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regulations. Some of these changes in government policy were induced by the political discontent that was growing among Palestinians in the late 1950s. Strikes and demonstrations took place in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and Saudi Arabia (Smith 1986) as workers demanded the right to form trade unions, improvement in housing conditions and more equitable distribution of oil revenues. The turbulence led to worries among the Gulf regimes and consequently to a reduction in the importation of foreign labour as a whole (Smith 1984:173). At the same time, the local bourgeoisie had begun to expand and thus to challenge the position of the Palestinians. This implied a nationalisation policy in the Gulf countries at large. In Kuwait, residency regulations for non-Kuwaitis were established. Palestinians have not been allowed citizenship in Kuwait—as no foreigners can be citizens—but have nevertheless been able to benefit from the socialwelfare system (Brand 1988). Furthermore, foreigners cannot own property or businesses. After the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, Palestinian migration to the Gulf intensified (ibid.: 116), now also including whole families (Ghabra 1987:125). In 1968/9 a guarantor system was introduced, so that Kuwaitis were responsible for their non-Kuwaiti employees, in order to control the massive influx of Palestinians following the 1967 war. Residency could only be found through a Kuwaiti employer, and as soon as a job ended residence ended. Access to free public education was restricted. The PLO was, however, allowed to use public school buildings after hours and the PLO paid the teachers. Immigration policies also hardened in relation to the economic recession in the 1970s, the civil war in Jordan in 1970–1 and the inception of civil war in Lebanon in 1975. In 1976 the PLO schools were closed, leading to pressure on the official education system, which was then restricted to expatriates who had lived in Kuwait since 1963 (Lesch 1991:44). As a substitute, Palestinian women’s organisations started to organise education. The politics of ‘Kuwaitisation’ largely depended on the feelings of threat perceived in Kuwait, which was heavily dependent on foreign manpower, causing fears of the effects of being a minority within their own country. Relations between Kuwaitis and Palestinians were, however, relatively harmonious (Brand 1988:122) until the outset of the Gulf war in 1990/1. Although Palestinians have felt themselves discriminated against in the Gulf (Hovdenak 1997:47ff.)—migrant workers have for example been removed once a local person is available for a job—many Palestinians see Kuwait prior to the Gulf War as a paradise of sorts (ibid.: 51).

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Connections with Palestine In terms of politics, the PLO has in a sense been able to function with fewer restrictions in the Gulf countries, because of the fact that Gulf states do not have an issue of contention of their own with Israel. However, although it is true that al-Fateh was originally founded in Kuwait, the diaspora in Kuwait has not been crucial in political mobilisation. The PLO has always been cautious about Kuwait’s sensitivity to unrest and has therefore sought to prevent radical Palestinian groups from taking root. In addition, the PLO and the Palestinians have supported the Kuwaiti regime in times of external threat (Iyad 1978: 38). Connections with Palestine have therefore largely taken the form of social and cultural gatherings, remittances and support of institutions in the West Bank and Gaza. The Kuwaiti regime has, however, been wary of the Palestinian left. In the late 1980s Kuwait and Saudi Arabia increasingly came to support the major contender against Fateh’s dominance in the West Bank and Gaza, namely Hamas. The Gulf War The Gulf War of 1990–1 dramatically altered Palestinian existence in the region. The Palestinian community in Kuwait was longstanding; many had lived there all their lives and formed a semi-permanent community of ‘denizens’ (Van Hear 1998:82). The PLO distanced itself from the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait. With the increased American military build-up, attitudes shifted in favour of Saddam Hussein, who challenged US interests and military strength. Also, the connection made by Saddam Hussein between the Iraqi occupation and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank was supported not least by West Bank/Gaza Palestinians. The PLO advocated an ‘Arab solution’ and abstained in vote on the Arab League decision in early August 1990. As the Gulf states accused the Palestinians and the PLO of supporting Iraq, PLO assets in Gulf bank accounts were frozen, diplomatic relations were severed and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians left the region. After the liberation of Kuwait, Palestinians were subject to violent attacks (Lesch 1991:47) and PLO offices were closed. Many lost assets and savings. In fact, the Palestinians in Kuwait differed towards the Iraqi occupation. To be sure, some were enthusiastic over the regional ramifications of the invasion. Others, however, were in shock. Some Palestinians even joined in Kuwaiti resistance organisations, and there was a split between the PLO

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office in Baghdad and that in Kuwait as to whether to join Iraqi security units (ibid.: 46). However, members of the Arab Liberation Front and the Palestine Liberation Front Abu Abbas group joined with the Iraqi forces. During autumn 1990 more than half of the Palestinians in Kuwait fled as a result of fear or persecution (Van Hear 1998:83). Detention, harassment and human rights abuses of various sorts continued after the restoration of the al-Sabah regime. Regulations on residence were considerably tightened and the general environment of insecurity triggered a continuous Palestinian exodus. Toward the end of 1992, it is estimated that only 30,000 Palestinians remained in Kuwait; the majority of those were holders of Egyptian travel documents, originally from Gaza. The bulk of the Palestinians leaving Kuwait went to Jordan, as most of them were Jordanian citizens, although from the West Bank. Also, holders of Egyptian travel documents from Gaza ended up in Jordan. Some had property to return to. The West Bank also received a partial in-gathering of exiles. Many also went to the USA. For Jordan, the influx of Palestinians from Kuwait in the short term meant increased strains in an already precarious economic situation. The arrival of returnees eventually created a building boom, leading to economic growth in Jordan. Returnees also invested savings in small business units, often in commerce. In the mid 1990’s Palestinians formerly working in Kuwait to an increasing extent resettled in the West Bank and Gaza instead. Although most returnees found work in Jordan, they were paid considerably less than in Kuwait and were able to enjoy fewer benefits. Most were dissatisfied and longed for Kuwait as their lost paradise (Le Troquer and Hommery 1999:42). Some were able to recover assets left behind in Kuwait, which helped make establishment in Jordan less painful. However, savings and assets were rapidly diminishing (Van Hear 1998: 157). According to the data presented by Le Troquer and Hommery (1999), slightly more than half of the returnees wanted to return to Palestine. Those over 30 had a higher tendency to say they wanted to return, while young people dreamed of returning to Kuwait or emigrating to the West. Highly Westernized consumption patterns—more than lifestyles—and a diminishing political activisim in recent years— could account for the lessening of the old ideal of ‘return’ to Palestine. (Le Troquer and Hommery 1999:48)

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In March 2000 Kuwait declared that it had started accepting job applications from Jordanians, Palestinians and Yemenis for the first time since the Gulf War (‘Peace Monitor’ 2000). Gaza/West Bank Although the refugees in the West Bank and Gaza are part of a Palestinian community and share experiences related to the land and the occupation, refugees have also been regarded with social distrust in the West Bank and Gaza. In the West Bank in 2001 there were 608,000 registered refugees and in Gaza 853,000 (UNRWA 2001), out of a population of 2.2 million in the West Bank and 1.2 million in Gaza.14 Similarly to other contexts, West Bank residents intially sometimes saw the refugees as ‘defeaters’, and sometimes as themselves responsible for their plight (Bisharat 1994:174). A study conducted by Shamir in the Jalazoun refugee camp in the 1970s lay bare the insecurity sensed by refugees due to the fact that losing land meant a loss of social status and position (Shamir 1980). This subordination because of land lost was most accentuated among the older generation and did not carry the same significance among younger generations. Refugees in the early 1990s were still seen as ‘guests, and certainly not as genuinely belonging’ (Rubinstein 1991:35), although the overall discourse of national identity has attempted to conceal such fissures. On the other hand, refugees have defined themselves as representing the purified essence of Palestinian identity through their loss and their sorrow, which made them different from the muwatineen, or natives (Hass 1996:175). Social tensions have existed throughout the occupation between muwatineen and muhajireen, meaning that it is, for example, highly uncommon for nonrefugees in Gaza to marry refugees (Hass 1996; Tuastad 1997). Refugees have also perceived themselves as more part of the struggle, and, although we cannot know this for sure because of lack of data, it appears to be true that refugees have more frequently been active in different forms of struggle, evident as early as the late 1960s as well as in the first intifada (cf. Yahya 1990). In the late 1960s the PLO and the fedayeen made attempts at organising resistance cells in the West Bank. These efforts were largely unsuccessful, but the mobilisation that did occur was to a large extent based on the refugee population. Still, in the early 2000s the refugee camp population is worse off than non-refugees when it comes to unemployment and economic opportunities. Refugees have also been subject to imprisonment and Israeli repression to a greater extent than nonrefugees (al-Qudsi 2000).

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West Bank The Jordanian influence in the West Bank continued to be considerable also after the Israeli occupation (e.g. Ma’oz 1984). The traditional moderate elite, the West Bank mayors, in general favoured Jordanian rule rather than liberation. Gradually, social processes—in the form of increased education and new employment opportunities in Israel undermined the influence of the traditional elite. Student movements, women’s movements and trade unions were founded—the latter strongly influenced by the Communist Party.15 Healthcare institutions, development organisations, agricultural institutions and self-help organisations were also formed and served as a counter-structure to the occupation power in the absence of a real state. New ideological currents gained in influence after the occupation, such as Marxism—Leninism as well as al-Fateh’s ‘Palestinianism’ (e.g. Sahliyeh 1988). West Bank political figures called for some kind of entity to be established in the occupied territories (cf. Ma’oz 1984; Brand 1988). These political developments influenced the PLO’s adoption of such a strategy in 1974. Palestinians in the occupied territories from early on leaned more towards a political solution than exile. The Palestine Communist Party (PCP) advocated a Palestinian state in the occupied territories, alongside Israel, as did the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) (cf. Sahliyeh 1988). The PCP opposed the Jordanian annexation in 1950 and advocated instead ‘the establishment of a separate Palestinian State in part of Palestine, according to the 1947 UN Partition Plan’ (Ma’oz 1984:10). The PCP was further influential in the Palestine National Front (PNF), established in order to assimilate the PLO and the occupied territories (see Cobban 1984; Ma’oz 1984). A split developed, however, between the PNF in the West Bank and the PLO outside regarding legitimacy and representation, as the inside structure was seen as a challenge to the PLO outside (Litvak 1997:175). In the municipal elections of 1976, the pro-Jordanian elite was swept away from municipal office and was replaced with nationalist, pro-PLO mayors (Maoz 1984:145). After 1976, no elections were held under Israeli occupation. Most mayors and members of municipal councils were fired in 1982 due to their refusal to cooperate with the newly installed Civil Administration. Since then, and until the implementation of autonomy agreements, the towns were run by Israel, with the exception of Bethlehem, whose mayor, Elias Freij, remained in office until his death in 1998. The early 1980s witnessed a harshening of Israeli politics as the Likud government implemented its ‘iron fist’ policy.

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Gaza According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, Gaza’s population in 2001 was 1.2 million (al-Quds, in Arabic, 11 January 2002). Gaza is thus one of the most densely populated areas in the world. Seventy per cent of the total Gaza population are registered refugees. As has been stated, ‘Gaza is fundamentally a large but confined refugee camp’ (Weighill 1999:26). Most refugees in Gaza originate from the Gaza and Lydda Districts. In December 1949 it was estimated that 200,000 refugees had entered Gaza (Cheal 1988:139). The massive influx forever changed the character of the Strip. Prior to 1948 Gaza City had been a market town, selling citrus, wheat and other crops from the Gaza district as a whole. After 1948 Gaza was cut off from its supply sources as well as its markets. The economy was ravaged: within a few months the strip had come to depend almost entirely on imports. (Cheal 1988:139) As in many other places (e.g. Lebanon), poor indigenous residents resented the fact that only the refugees were provided with relief efforts. In contrast to the West Bank, the PLO and Fateh were already successful in Gaza in the 1960s. Gaza has been a symbol of thriving Palestinianism from early on. This is dependent partly on the large number of refugees and Gaza’s confinement from other areas, as well as its relations with Israel and the large number of labour migrants entering Israel from Gaza. Gaza was administered by Egypt between 1948 and 1967 (with a four-month interruption during the Israeli occupation in 1956). The Student’s Union, whose base was Cairo, in 1956 established an underground resistance movement in Gaza, called the Popular Resistance. Ideologically, the Popular Resistance was a combination of sentiments from the Muslim Brotherhood and Ba’athism, competing with the leftist-oriented National Front, led by Haidar Abdel-Shafi.16 Both organisations suffered from the harsh Israeli occu pation, along with a subsequent Egyptian clampdown, when Gaza was again returned to Egypt (Cobban 1984:180f). Fateh became the dominant organisation in the 1970s. There have been no elected municipalities. Politically, Gaza suffers from its isolation from the Arab world at large as well as from the West Bank. The Israeli government has pursued large-scale resettlement schemes, such as Sheikh Radwan in Gaza City in the 1970s, in order to control the refugee population and prevent militant activism (B.Schiff 1995:197). The

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idea was to move residents out of the camps to better housing. Camp areas could be redeveloped and improved. Those who were made to move had their homes demolished as part of security policies and rebuilding was not permitted. During the same period, a project of road widening and security measures left refugees in Rafah camp homeless. These were provided housing in Canada camp, which, when Sinai was returned to Egypt, came to be situated in Egypt. The rebuilding of homes and/or their expansion have in all of the West Bank and Gaza, for refugees and natives alike, been subject to permits, which has not been easy to acquire. Many eventually ignored regulations, meaning that they risked having their homes demolished. It is thus no coincidence that it was in Jabalyia refugee camp in Gaza that the intifada commenced in December 1987. A disillusioned and frustrated young generation, who had grown up with the occupation and for whom the military repression had become commonplace, no longer feared the Israeli army and authorities. Moreover, they had lost patience with the diplomatic turns of the PLO and confidence in the capability and willingness of the Arab states to assist. Previous tensions between the West Bank and Gaza were—initially—bridged by the intifada and its creation of greater cohesion. Daily labour migration With the land alienation that followed upon the Israeli occupation and the expropriation of land, the Palestinian peasantry was turned into a cheap labour force in Israel, working largely in the agricultural and construction sectors. Prior to the Gulf War in 1990–1, 35–40 per cent of the Palestinian labour force, or approximately 110,000 people (Jerusalem Post, 26 October 1990), commuted each day to Israel for work.17 A new social class was created, the daily or weekly Palestinian guest workers. Since 1993, the number of Palestinian labourers in Israel has diminished. In March 1993 the Israeli government directly linked their dependency on the Palestinian workforce to security and sealed the occupied territories for an ‘indefinite time’ after an increase in violent incidents. Since then, there has been permanent closure of the West Bank and Gaza from Israel, meaning overall restrictions on the movement of labour, goods and factors of production. In order to enter Israel from the West Bank or Gaza (or the West Bank from Gaza and vice versa), any individual needs a permit, which is hard to come by. In addition to this general closure, total closure refers to absolute banning of any movement. This type of closure is imposed in relation to security threats or attacks against Israel. A third type

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of closure is ‘internal closure’, meaning restriction of movement between localities within the West Bank, which was made possible by the Interim Agreement of 1995 dividing the West Bank into different zones (cf. Roy 1999). When there is not a total closure, the following categories may apply for a permit to enter Israel: ‘workers with steady jobs in Israel, truck owners importing or exporting goods (but only with an Israeli military escort), businessmen, sick people, those with special permits for “personal reasons”…and high-ranking Palestinian officials and police’ (Hass 1996: 235). Men need to be married and over a certain age limit, which varies between 25 and 40. The Gaza Strip especially has become a fenced-off, locked, confined, isolated camp, from which there is no exit and to which there is no entry.18 Gazans often describe the Gaza Strip as a prison. Passing the security zone at Eretz checkpoint between Israel and the Gaza Strip is an act of humiliation. Workers have to queue for hours to pass through the barbed wire, the security checks, the control of ID cards and permits. Permits to go to Israel were, after the establishment of the PNA,19 to be sought from the Palestinian National Security Police at Eretz. The closure means that it is impossible for the vast majority to travel between the West Bank and Gaza. The Israeli siege of the West Bank and Gaza during the al-Aqsa intifada has been particularly harmful in this regard. In principle, however, closure has been part of Israeli policy since 1991, when closure was first introduced as a larger strategy in relation to the Gulf War. The closures effectively demonstrate the complicated nature of mobility for the Palestinians. Voluntary movement is curtailed to the extent that it is sometimes outright impossible, while forced movement continues to define Palestinian existence. Amira Hass calls it a ‘theft of space and time’ (Hass 2002:10). Movement has been turned into a luxury for which one has sometimes to beg (ibid.). The closures had a devastating impact on the Palestinian economy. Estimated unemployment in the West Bank and Gaza for 1996 was 31.5 per cent, compared to 18.0 per cent in 1993 (Middle East Economic Digest, 22 August 1997). Throughout 1998 and 1999 the economy recovered as the number of closures decreased (UNSCO 1999; World Bank Group 2000). Occupation as ‘diaspora’ The occupation in itself and its consequences could be read as a ‘diasporic’ condition, in the sense that for West Bank and Gaza residents too there has been a process of alienation from land, with implications for feelings of meaningful belonging (Hanafi 2001). Israel has regarded the Palestinians

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not as ‘citizens’, but as ‘foreign residents’. As a population under occupation, West Bank and Gaza Palestinians have lacked nationality, although many, especially West Bankers, have Jordanian citizenship. Since 1967 the Israeli authorities have confiscated land amounting to 79 per cent of the West Bank and Gaza territory (PASSIA Diary 2001). Property that was registered in the name of non-residents has been termed abandoned and turned into Israeli property. Land of which there was no resident owner was in 1980 turned into ‘state land’, and other land was expropriated for public use. Land could also be labelled a ‘closed area’ for military use, or combat zones. Major construction was prohibited on land close to main roads, military installations and settlements. Settlements remain one of the most thorny issues in the continuous displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Initially, under the Labour government which was in office immediately after the occupation in 1967, settlements were established for alleged ‘security reasons’. When the Likud government came to power in 1976, the settlement policy became increasingly ideologicaly motivated and more aggressive. Israel issued identity cards in a system ultimately geared towards exclusion and categorisation. East Jerusalemites had blue identity cards, West Bankers orange, while Gazans were required to carry magnetic ID cards from 1988 onwards. These identity cards needed to be carried at all times and closely guarded for display at numerous checkpoints and controls of various sorts. Former prisoners have their term in prison marked on their identity card, meaning that they are seen as presenting a continuous security risk from Israel’s perspective. Amira Hass describes how the Israeli system of categorisation has worked so as to erase Palestinian identity officially If a holder of a Gaza ID was born in what has since become Israel, the only word in the space for ‘place of birth’ is Israel (Hass 1996:179)—so that if you were born in Burayr in 1930 you were, accordingly, born in Israel, although Israel did not exist at the time. The most typical site of Palestinian-Israeli encounter is the checkpoints, the locations where within the 1949 armistice agreements Israel and the West Bank/Gaza are to diverge. Here, car registration plates have been signs of separation and exclusion, as West Bank, Gaza and Israeli licence plates have different colours. During the intifada, intense stone-throwing incidents against cars meant Jerusalem Palestinians risked having their windows smashed by stones, and so a sign of identification became the kefiya placed in the window. In the catch-22 situation defining Palestinian mobility, it has been as difficult to travel as it has to stay To obtain a travel document or a laissez-

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passer, the West Bank/Gaza applicant must pass through several phases. Palestinian holders of foreign passports can only stay on tourist visas or other temporary visas. Many holders of foreign passports simply extend their stay in the West Bank/Gaza illegally in order to be able to stay without the risk of having their application turned down by Israeli authorities: I had been in the West Bank without a valid tourist visa since May 1995 and no matter how much I tried to get some form of residency approved by the Israelis, they always had an excuse for delays. In the end, I stopped caring whether they gave me residency or not. I mean, I was born in Jerusalem and considered living in Palestine my right. I didn’t need Israel to legalize my residency there. I already existed there, with or without their consent. True, I couldn’t travel to Gaza or abroad, but I existed nonetheless. Of course, I can’t deny that the notion of paying a fine or being prevented from leaving the country terrified me. Friends loaned me money for the fine, just in case, but I didn’t believe that the Israelis deserved to take the money. In principle, I was against having to pay a fine for staying in ‘my’ country It just defeated logic. Any kind of logic. (Hamzeh 2001) Israeli citizens: ‘refugees in the homeland’ Today, there are approximately 1.2 million Palestinians residing in Israel and with Israeli citizenship.20 After the war, those who had remained in what became Israel were turned into a minority in their own homeland. In 2001, between 200,000 and 250,000 of these belonged to the category ‘internally displaced’ in the 1948 war. Internal displacement was contingent on destruction of villages as well as on legislation. Even if one left one’s village only for a brief time during the war, one was labelled an ‘absentee’ and one’s property was termed ‘absentee property’, meaning that rights to home and land were lost. For the internal refugees, exile was not to some far-off place; it was exile within their own homeland. It does not require a great deal of sensitivity to understand the intensity of their everyday pain and frustration. (Benvenisti 2000:209)

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The Palestinians in Israel lived under military rule until 1966. As a result of land confiscations, discrimination, exclusion, lower education, higher unemployment and lower income there has been a proletarianisation of Palestinians in Israel (Zureik 1979). There is discrimination in all regards. Palestinians were banned from obtaining membership in Israeli parties until 1952. Labour only opened up to Palestinian membership in 1973. However, until the mid-1990s most Palestinians in Israel voted for Labour or other Zionist parties. Active mobilisation occurred mostly among left-wing parties. The Israeli Communist Party managed to muster support through Rakah (the ‘Arab’ party that was the result of the split of the Communist Party in the mid-1960s).21 Also, the Democratic Arab Party (DAP),22 which was formed in 1988 by MK Abdalwahab Darawshe as a response to Israel’s treatment of the intifada going on in the occupied territories, became a vehicle for political mobilisation. There were also ‘lists’ of various sorts linked to Labour and other major parties, but created in order to attract Arab voters. Rakah formed the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality (Hadash), which attracted a number of Palestinian voters. In the 1970s the nationalist Abna al Balad (Sons of the Village) gained in prominence. The organisation boycotted Knesset elections as a consequence of its nationalist outlook. Another nationalist organisation is the Progressive Movement, later the Progressive List for Peace, calling for full equality for Palestinians in Israel. Since the beginning of the 1980s the Islamic Association has increased in assertiveness, concentrating largely on the municipal level. In the 1996 elections Palestinians increased their representation in the Knesset. The National Democratic Alliance (NDA), led by university professor Azmi Bishara, represents a novel form of political mobilisation in the sense that it maintains the possibility of preserving Palestinian identity while claiming full civil and political rights as Israeli citizens. In 1999 Azmi Bishara decided to run in the prime ministerial elections as a token of the aspirations of equality among Palestinians in Israel. Subsequently, he withdrew his candidacy. The slogan of NDA is a state for all its citizens. In the 1999 elections the DAP and the Islamic Movement formed a common platform (as they had done since 1988) and managed to receive 31 per cent of the Palestinian votes, whereas NDA gained 17 per cent and the Democratic Front 22 per cent. In 1999 Labour received only 8 per cent of Palestinian votes, which is a considerable decline since the early 1980s, when 29 per cent voted for Labour. In 1999 22 per cent voted for other Zionist parties (Ghanem 2001). In February 2001, 82 per cent of the Palestinians in Israel boycotted the prime ministerial elections.

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Apart from political parties, other specific organisations have been mobilised, such as for example the Association of Forty, concerned with the unrecognised villages of the Galilee. In 1992 a Committee for the Defence of the Rights of the Displaced in Israel was formed. Land/place On the question why he chose to stay during the fighting in 1948, one Palestinian living in Nazareth explains: Why should I go into exile? I’ve never dreamt of it. I would die if I went into exile, like a fish on the shore. I never thought of this. Why should I go? These theories were inserted into our minds by Zionism, that one can choose his homeland. They not only choose their homeland, they change their names as well…. It is a very natural thing to stay in one’s homeland. (quoted in Slycomovics 1998:130) One account of the specific relationship to land is that of Susan Slycomovics, who writes of the village Ein Houd, whose inhabitants fled in 1948. Most were forced into exile, while others remained in the vicinity of the village. Ein Houd was taken over by Israel and subsequently made into a Jewish artists’ town. Members of the most important clan in Ein Houd built a new village—Ein Houd al-Jadidah —which was not recognised until 1995 by the Israeli authorities (Slycomovics 1998:127). Many deserted towns, villages and houses have been turned into tourist sites—for example the creation of artists’ colonies in Safed, Ein Houd, Old Jaffa and other locations. Deserted houses have become restaurants and summer homes (ibid.; Benvenisti 2000). Israeli legislation has been a key tool in gaining control over land. A number of laws have been designed for this purpose, most significantly the Absentees’ Property Law of 1950, which transferred the right of possession of refugees’ property to the Custodian for Absentees’ Property, who is allowed to sell it only to the Development Authority. Abandoned land was acquired through the Land Acquisition Law of 1953. The land and the landscape have changed completely The most devastating blow to the landscape has been the actual destruction of villages that was conducted in the aftermath of the flight with the purpose of barring a return. Furthermore, the moving in of immigrants, the creation of kibbutzim and moshavim with entirely different modes of cultivating the land has also altered the landscape. Thus, the loss was not

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only due to detachment, but the destruction of what once was. Benvenisti speaks of the ‘disappearance of the landscape’ (Benvenisti 2000:231): ‘But the olive and pomegranate trees of the “primitive” Arab village were no more’ (ibid.: 216). One hundred villages are named ‘unrecognised’ (cf. Schechla 2001: 25), meaning that there is no basic infrastructure or municipal services. Construction outside villages is illegal, and there are also other restrictions on building. An example of the ordeals suffered by inhabitants of unrecognised villages is that they do not have an address. Officially those villages do not exist. The mailing address is ‘travelling post’, and inhabitants of unrecognised villages have to pick up their mail at nearby kibbutzim or villages (‘Ayn Hawd and the “Unrecognized Villages”’ 2001: 41). Confiscation of land continued on massive scale until 1976. On 30 March 1976 Palestinians in Israel launched a heavy protest against the confiscations, declaring the ‘Land Day’. Six people were killed in confrontations with Israeli police. Ever since, Land Day has been one of the important days in the Palestinian national political calendar, commemorated each year. The Land Day implied that massive expropriations were brought to an end, but other means of Judaising the land were applied instead. More than 90 per cent of the land in Israel is owned by the Jewish National Fund or the state. Judaisation has also occurred through official Israeli practices of differentiating place as well as (re)inventing it. Arab towns and villages are, for example, marked differently on road signs. While Israeli Jewish sites are marked with large green signs, Arab villages are given small, white signs. Meron Benvenisti describes in detail the intricate ways in which Zionism and Israel have taken possession of the land. Places have been changed and renamed. Existing villages are not always placed on the map and traces of destroyed villages have been erased. For example, efforts have been made to find biblical-sounding names that could be regarded as ancient (Benvenisti 2000:20). There are even stories of replanting olive trees uprooted from Palestinian areas in order to nourish a tale of antiquity. Identity dilemma Identity has been and continues to be problematic. In official categorisations, such as the Israeli census, the Palestinians in Israel are categorised in religious subcategories, i.e. Muslims, Christians and Druze. In Israeli discourse, Palestinians in Israel are called Israeli Arabs or ‘Arabs’. Here, we will use the categorisation ‘Palestinians in Israel’, since that is a way

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in which Palestinians in Israel actually define themselves (Rouhana 1997: 8). Since Jewishness remains the most salient criteria in defining Israeli citizenship, Palestinians have a hard time gaining such citizenship if they do not already hold it. The Nationality Law of 1952 barred many Palestinians in Israel from citizenship due to its restrictions for Arabs. The law was altered and some of the conditions were eased in 1980. The Law of Return of 1950 (amended a number of times) is especially enigmatic for the Palestinians, since it provides people born of a Jewish mother or converters to Judaism the right to migrate and settle in Israel, but excludes that right to Palestinians. The Law of Return also provides the right of citizenship to newly arrived Jews. This is not the place to repeat the scholarly debate on the identity of Palestinians in Israel, although some features should be mentioned. Although Palestinians in Israel identify as Palestinians or Arabs politically and culturally, Israeli citizenship is also important (Smooha 1989, 1992). To some, this is taken as a sign of integration in Israel. Sammy Smooha has argued that Israelisation and Palestinianisation occur simultaneously. According to Smooha and others, Palestinians in Israel are gradually integrated into the state. To some extent, there is certainly some kind of integration taking place, evident in Palestinians participating in institutes of higher education, mobilisation for Knesset participation and for their rights, in popular culture, in the labour market, etc. However, it remains true that Palestinians in Israel are still excluded from most important positions, that the investment level in Palestinian-populated areas is much lower than in Jewish areas, that Palestinians lag behind when it comes to income, education, health standards, social welfare and participation in the labour market, and thus virtually all political and socioeconomic indicators. One account of how the identity of Palestinians in Israel is ques tioned in relation to moving/travelling is the following, by Mahmoud Darwish: You want to travel to Greece? You ask for a passport, but you discover you’re not a citizen because your father or one of your relatives had fled with you during the Palestine war. You were a child. And you discover that any Arab who had left his country during that period and had stolen back in had lost his right to citizenship. You despair of the passport and ask for a laissez-passer. You find out you’re not a resident of Israel because you have no certificate of residence. You think it’s a joke and rush to tell it to your lawyer

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friend: ‘Here, I’m not a citizen, and I’m not a resident. Then where and who am I?’ You’re surprised to find the law is on their side, and you must prove you exist. You ask the Ministry of Interior, ‘Am I here, or am I absent? Give me an expert in philosophy, so that I can prove to him I exist’ Then you realize that philosophically you exist but legally you do not. (Darwish 1973, Journal of an Ordinary Grief, in Arabic; quoted in Muhawi 1995: xiii) Palestinians in Israel have also been regarded with suspicion by exiled or West Bank/Gaza Palestinians. Elias Chacour recalls how his identity was questioned when travelling from Israel to Beirut in 1975, which he was allowed to do because he was a priest. Chacour was stopped by a PLO cadre: I could see malevolence and scorn cross the man’s face when he examined my Israeli passport. My heart sank to my shoes. How can I explain to this man that I am an Arab Palestinian with Israeli papers? How can I tell him I am not his enemy, despite my identity as an Israeli? How insane my life is, I thought. The Jewish Israelis see me as an Arab and an enemy despite my papers. Arabs see me as an Israeli and an enemy because of my papers. No wonder we Palestinians inside Israel hardly know who we are anymore. (Chacour 1990:108) In October 2000, after the outbreak of the al-Aqsa intifada, massive demonstrations took place among Palestinians in Israel—especially in the Nazareth area—leading to harsh reactions by Israeli police. Thirteen Palestinians were shot dead by Israeli security forces. Not since 1976 had the relations between the state and the Israeli Palestinians been that violent. Already prior to the uprising and the intensified violence, Palestinians in Israel had begun to assert Palestinian-ness as important to their identity. In 1999, 32.8 per cent of Palestinians in Israel described themselves as ‘Israeli’, compared with 63.2 per cent in 1995 (Ghanem and Smooha 2001; cited in Shafir and Peled 2002:129). Latin America Migration to the Americas has a long history, but there is very little scholarly knowledge on the Palestinian communities there. Migration to

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the Americas has been constituted by family-related chain migration and is not directly related to the nakba like that of most other migratory processes. Apart from the USA, sizeable communities reside in Chile, Sao Paulo and Buenos Aires, Uruguay, parts of Central America, and in particular Honduras (González 1992:63f.). The Palestinian community there is almost exclusively made up of Christians from Bethlehem, Beit Jala and Beit Sahour. The communities in Latin America are among the wealthiest in the diaspora (Smith 1986:91). In terms of relations with Hondurans, there has been a considerable degree of hostility vis-à-vis Palestinians. Palestinians have frequently been called ‘Turcos’, stemming from their early migration during Ottoman rule. Resentment has also grown in relation to the economic fortunes of Palestinians. For example, González states that ‘the most desirable residential neighbourhood in San Pedo Sula is inhabited almost exclusively by Arabs’, causing resentment (González 1992:143). With increasing international focus on the Israeli—Palestinian conflict, there has also been increasing tension between Palestinians and others in Honduras (ibid.: 143). There has been envy of Palestinian economic success as well as growing fears of terrorism (ibid.: 169). Palestinians, for their part, in the beginning viewed Hondurans with contempt. In comparison with Bethlehem, Honduras was a ‘wild’ and ‘primitive’ place. In the 1990s, however, this was reversed, as those born in Honduras, as well as many newcomers, thought of Palestine as more ‘primitive’ in comparison (ibid.: 170). The Latin American diaspora has not been so active in nationalist politics (Smith 1984; González 1992), but according to González has been fairly accommodationist, and, despite noticing resentment vis-à-vis the Palestinian community, González and others also emphasise integration as a defining characteristic of Palestinians in Latin and Central America. The USA In 2001, Christison extrapolates the figure of 200,000 Palestinians in the USA (Christison 2001:74).23 As in Central America, many of the Palestinians in the USA are Christians, originally migrating from the towns of Ramallah, Bethlehem and Beit Jala. Ramallans especially have constituted a close-knit community in certain American cities (Christison 1989). Hammer estimates that around half of the Palestinians in the USA are of Christian origin (Hammer 2000). Although a number of immigrants arrived after 1936 and 1948, the bulk of Palestinians in the USA arrived after the June

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War of 1967. Furthermore, tens of thousands of West Bankers and Gazans and other members of, for example, the Gulf diaspora study in the USA, and many of them decide to remain after finishing their studies (Turki 1994:9). Also a large number of Palestinians left for the USA because of the civil war in Lebanon. The largest concentrations of Palestinians in the USA are to be found in Detroit, Chicago and Los Angeles. Migration is frequently constituted as chain migration, i.e. migration is facilitated by relatives already settled in the USA. To promote the Palestinian cause has primarily been the work of Arab— American organisations. The foremost of these has been the American— Arab Anti Discrimination Committee, founded in 1980, and working to change negative stereotypes of Arabs in the USA (Shain 1999). Other organisations, such as the National Association of Arab Americans, emphasise the need to present the Palestinian cause to the American public opinion and to counter the powerful Jewish lobby in the USA. The PLO had a Palestine Information Office that was registered with the Justice Department as a foreign agent until 1988, when it was closed. As a result of the initiation of a US-PLO dialogue in the late 1980s, the office was reopened in 1989, now called the Palestine Affairs Center. The USA only officially recognised the PLO in 1994. The PLO office is called the PLO mission and has quasi-embassy status. The Gulf War and, even more so, the peace process have contributed to a split in the Arab-American community between an integrationist approach and a more radical line of opinion (ibid.). The main purpose of many of these organisations has been to influence American foreign policy. To Palestinians in the USA, American policy vis-à-vis the Palestinian— Israeli conflict (Christison 2001:79) has been a cause of constant tension. Western Europe There is still a lack of sources on Palestinians in Europe, but an important contribution is being made by Abbas Shiblak, who has collected a number of descriptions on different European contexts to be published by the Institute of Palestine Studies. There are no definitive accounts of the number of Palestinians in Europe, but Shiblak mentions a figure of 177, 000, the vast majority having arrived from Lebanon. The majority are also stateless holders of refugee travel documents (Shiblak forthcoming). Migration to Western Europe was initiated during the British mandate, and made up of students, civil servants and advisers to the Mandatory government (Shiblak 2000). There are also Palestinian communities in Russia and Eastern European countries. Due to political sympathies and

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alliances during the Cold War, a fairly large number of Palestinians received scholarships to study in the socialist countries.24 Migration patterns changed during the 1970s and 1980s, when large numbers of Palestinians left an insecure situation in Jordan or Lebanon for Europe. Business communities started to migrate to Britain or the USA rather than staying in Lebanon, where economic potential had been ruined by the civil war. Engineers, doctors and teachers also went to the USA or Europe. The largest group of Palestinians is the community in Germany, consisting of approximately 80,000 (ibid.). There are only a few accounts of the Palestinians in Western Europe. One rare description is provided by Ghada Karmi (1999a), who left Palestine for Great Britain with her family in 1949. One thing that is revealed is how difficult it was to settle in London, especially for Ghada Karmi’s mother: My mother made no secret of the fact that she resented being in London. She complained endlessly that there was no decent food to cook, none of the vegetables we were used to. Even garlic, the staple of all Arabic cooking, was a luxury. She hated the cold weather and the rain and complained that she could scarcely keep the house warm. She was lonely and longed for company…. In London, she had no neighbors she could talk to, no family beyond her immediate family, and few friends. In the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, there was only a small number of Arabs in England and hardly any Palestinians besides us. (Karmi 1999a:53) Abdulrahim (1993), who has studied Palestinian women in West Berlin, reveals how women were very much ‘re-traditionalised’ and domesticated. The close neighbourhoods of the camps of Lebanon, where women had a sphere of control of their own, were lost. Instead, women became isolated. As was the case for the refugees in the Arab world, kinship and family structures were strengthened, but in Europe this meant that women were more confined to their homes than previously. Ghada Karmi’s mother eventually compensated for her loneliness through an intense socialisation with other Arabs in London, and in particular Palestinians. Her mother also made a strong effort to live Arabic’ by, for example, cooking Arabstyle (Karmi 1999a:55). Ghada’s parents clung to the ‘Arabic/Palestinian culture’ that contributed to their further isolation.

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Sweden In Sweden, as in other Western European countries, Palestinians arrived because of the civil war and Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. The Palestinian experience in Sweden has to a large extent been flavoured by Swedish policies in the Middle East. Swedish foreign policy changed from a fairly staunch support of Israel in the aftermath of the war in 1948 to a more pro-Palestinian line during the 1970s with the Olof Palme regime (Bjereld 1989). Swedish Social Democratic governments have, however, maintained cooperative relationships with the Israeli Labour party Although Palestinians have been subject to suspicion of terrorist activities by the Swedish security police (Säpo), Palestinians have felt that they are among friends in Sweden. With Göran Persson as Sweden’s prime minister, a shift occurred in Sweden’s policy after 25 years of fairly consistent politics. Göran Persson’s international profile centred around his efforts to create an official international commemoration of the Holocaust and a large Holocaust conference was held in Stockholm in 1999. A follow-up was held 2002. Persson also initiated a policy that was more friendly to Israel than that of previous Social Democratic governments. When the violent demonstrations in the West Bank and Gaza in autumn 2000 met with deadly use of heavy artillery by Israel, Sweden was one of few countries to abstain in the vote in the UN Security Council. Resolution 1322 of 7 October 2000 condemned acts of violence and particularly excessive use of force by Israel (UNSC 1322 2000), but Sweden refrained from voting. During 2001, the cleavage within the Social Democratic Party became obvious, as the former minister of foreign affairs, Sten Andersson, who also worked as the special envoy of the government in Middle East affairs, openly criticised the prime minister. In March 2002 Sten Andersson noted that after the party congress of the Social Democrats in autumn 2001 he and Göran Persson now agreed on fundamental points concerning, for example, international law and the Israeli occupation (Andersson, 2002). In early 2002 the Swedish position vis-à-vis the Israeli government became more critical (see Chapter 6). The very first group of Palestinians arrived in Sweden in 1962. They were students and came to Sweden in order to receive supplementary education. Most of them returned to Lebanon, Jordan and West Bank after completing their education. Another group arrived after the civil war in Jordan in the early 1970s (SIV 1991:63). The largest group arrived, however, in the early 1980s. There were reportedly 13,000 Palestinians in Sweden in the late 1990s. Statistics are uncertain, since Sweden does not

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register refugees according to ethnic identity but according to the country that they came from, meaning that most Palestinians are registered as ‘stateless’ or with ‘unknown’ citizenship. It is therefore not possible to know either the exact number of persons of Palestinian origin residing in Sweden or the number of Palestinians seeking asylum each year. The category ‘stateless’ or ‘unknown citizenship’ in Swedish statistics, however, is largely composed of Palestinians. Since the Ta’if accords of 1989, Swedish official policy does not acknowledge the refugee status of most Palestinians, whether from Lebanon or elsewhere. The paradox is thus that Palestinian refugees in Lebanon are refugees with no protection in Lebanon, but could not be considered refugees from Lebanon and therefore not as in need of protection in a third country. During the late 1990s there was a slight increase in the number of asylum-seekers of Palestinian origin. According to Birgitta Elfström at the Migration Authority (interview, 21 January 2001), more arrived from the West Bank and Gaza than before. This was a new phenomenon. It remains difficult to know why people chose to migrate during the years of the peace process, but reasons given relate to opposition to the Oslo process as well as the precarious situation in Lebanon. Some claimed political reasons, i.e. that since they identified themselves with the Palestinian opposition they were fearful of staying in the West Bank and Gaza under the Palestinian Authority (PA) regime. Most of those who arrived were UNRWA-registered refugees, but holders of Palestinian passports also sought asylum. With the escalating violence in 2001–2, the number of stateless asylum-seekers to Sweden increased somewhat (www.migrationsverket.se). Sweden pursued a strict policy when it came to granting Palestinians visas to Sweden. One example of the ramifications of this is when the Ramallah-based theatre group Al Kasaba was to visit Sweden to participate in an international dance and theatre festival in August 2002. The members of the group were first denied visas. After lobbying, the decision was changed. The PLO office in Stockholm was opened in 1976. Various groups have been formed. For some time, the most prominent was the Union for Palestinian Workers, closely associated with the PLO and cooperating with the Swedish Social Democratic Party. There has been close cooperation between the youth branch of the Social Democratic Party and the Fateh Shabiba movement in various activities, such as summer camps. Such activities have served as a habitat of Palestinian-Swedish relations. The leftwing party has also supported Palestinians and Palestinian groups, as have smaller leftist parties. There are a number of smaller organisations working

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to promote the Palestine cause. Swedish organisations working in solidarity with the Palestinians have been found on the left in Swedish political society. The Palestine group is the largest explicitly Swedish-Palestinian non-governmental organisation (NGO), working with, for example, healthcare projects in Lebanon and in the West Bank and Gaza, and trying to give voice to the Palestinian perspective in Sweden. In 2000 the Association for the Palestinians’ Right of Return was formed in Göteborg, with a similar organisation in Stockholm, inspired by the Return Centre in London. This association was independent from the PLO and political groups. Like many other migrant communities in Sweden, Palestinians suffered from the decline in the Swedish labour market during the 1990s. Although there are no figures, a fairly high percentage of Palestinians are unemployed. Employment and the labour market are important factors for integration, and a lack of opportunities to participate effectively in the labour market has amplified feelings of isolation. Some notice acute apathy and difficulties in adjusting. Hence, Palestinians are truly a dispersed nation. The experiences of Palestinian lives include ultimate destitution in Lebanese refugee camps and relative affluence for intellectuals and representatives of Palestinian diaspora capital in the West and in the Gulf. As with any other nation, there is a gulf between lived experiences related to class. However, the catastrophe of 1948, the refugee status and the statelessness of Palestinians add up to a shared reality.

4 STATELESS, ROOTLESS, HOMELESS Meanings of homeland in exile

Lost Paradise! You were never too small for us, But now vast countries are indeed too small. Torn asunder your people, Wandering under every star. (Mahmud al-Hut)1 On the move The exile condition is by necessity a rootless condition, a condition of ‘wandering’ and unwanted ‘mobility’. Rootlessness has a tendency to trigger sometimes desperate searches for roots that have been lost. A state of nostalgia, of sad interrogation of the past, of the homeland that is grieved and longed for is very much true of the Palestinian diaspora, nurturing a constant dream of reversing the present condition of denial, exclusion, humiliation and estrangement into a triumphant return. This chapter intends to investigate narratives related to place and homeland within Palestinian discourse. Palestinian narratives abound with descriptions of an identity that is out of place,2 without centre and on a constant journey. One quite typical story of deportees3 reads: I was deported in 1988 to South Lebanon. I was taken from Jneid prison in Nablus by helicopter together with a group of others. We were picked up by two Mercedes that drove to Beirut, where we were taken to the International Red Cross. I was in Lebanon only two months; thereafter I went to Tunis, to be near our leadership. Then

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I went to Geneva for two years, where I was advisor to the PLO representative to the UN. (Ahmed Aldiik, Fateh-member, Ramallah, 27 October 1994) Stories like the one above accentuate the fact that the Palestinian experience implies not movement to one place, but each and every individual (potentially) finds herself/himself in many different settings.4 Narratives are framed by journeys from one place to another. This constant flux on a collective, as well as individual, basis has led to shattered families and communities. Our family is scattered. I have a son in Abu Dhabi. I have brothers in Libya. I have sons in America. I have to travel to see my kids. When I am in Lebanon, I can’t stop thinking about what’s happening to my kids in America. The day I get to America and see my kids, I start thinking, how are they doing back in Lebanon? I don’t find anybody with anyone else any more. (Um Ossama, in Lynd et al. 1994:105f.) The very lifestyle becomes shattered as families are spread across the Arab world, the Americas and Europe. In one family, there might be stateless refugees as well as people with Jordanian, German and American citizenship. The condition of being Palestinian is, then, to move. And if a person does not move much by her- or himself, then almost certainly he/she will have friends, family and kin who lead travelling lives, and family members residing elsewhere will come to visit. All these examples underline the profound meaning of such metaphors as ‘wanderers of the earth’, coined by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.5 Palestinian identity is constituted in these journeys, but also through the suspicion, mistrust and outside catgorisations (cf. Daniel and Knudsen 1995) with which Palestinians are met because of this homeless wandering. The Palestinians are, indeed, ‘victims of the map’ (Darwish et al. 1984). Shut out ‘We are thrown from one airport to another and no-one wants to accept us’, said a Palestine People’s Party (PPP)6 sympathiser in the West Bank to portray this aspect of Palestinian identity (interview, Ramallah, 4 September 1994). ‘I am nobody. I want to be somebody’, is the way another Palestinian political activist expressed the feelings connected to the

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statelessness7 and rootlessness of the Palestinian predicament (interview, Ramallah, 27 September 1994). Such statements indicate the constitution of identity by difference as well as by outside ascription and labelling. The Palestinians are constantly faced with suspicion, harassment and exclusion because they cannot prove a national identity, a citizenship legally inscribed in their passports.8 Concrete de facto and de jure rejection and exclusion force continued unsettlement and are thus unceasing reasons behind the prolonged journey. Khalidi persuasively elucidates this part of Palestinian identity: The quintessential Palestinian experience, which illustrates some of the most basic issues raised by Palestinian identity takes place at a border, an airport, a checkpoint: in short, at any one of those modern barriers where identities are checked and verified. What happens to Palestinians at those crossing points brings home to them how much they share in common as a people. For it is at these borders and barriers that the six million Palestinians are singled out for ‘special treatment’, and are forcefully reminded of their identity: of who they are, and why they are different than others…. As a result, at each of these barriers which most others take for granted, every Palestinian is exposed to the possibility of harassment, exclusion and sometimes worse simply because of his or her identity. (R.Khalidi 1997:If.) Palestinian difference is created at such borders and crossing points. The very boundary of the ‘Other’ reinforces the articulation of Palestinian-ness. It is here that the peculiarity of not belonging to any one particular state becomes painfully clear. It is at the border and through the sharing of harassment and injustice that it becomes obvious what it means to be a Palestinian. It is thus the ‘wandering’, the denial and the exclusion which to the Palestinians represent their (unwanted) pilgrimage, described by Anderson (1991) as constitutive of the imagined community. It is this journey that is the common experience forming the basis of a shared identity. ‘Wherever he is, a Palestinian is homeless’ (quoted in R.Sayigh 1977a:21). Or, as a Palestinian woman living in Sweden said: In my dream, Jaffa is home, but in reality, I have no home. I belong to nowhere, and it is so difficult, not to have a place. (Fadwa, Göteborg, 26 February 2001)

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Palestinian narratives are composed of myriad stories of what happens at different kinds of borders and crossings. Tawfiq Sayigh9 describes the trauma of lacking a valid passport, of being singled out as ‘special’ at international crossing points, of being questioned and suspected because of this simple fact alone: Edging closer, but without admission, it goes on and you never reach your aim. Your lacking a passport means statelessness, no entry. (Tawfiq Sayigh, 1923–70, ‘To Enter a Country’, translated by Adnan Haydar and Jeremy Reed; in Jayyusi 1992:286ff.) The journey is portrayed as endless. Since the Palestinians do not carry passports, and since the international system does not regard them as belonging anywhere in particular, they cannot belong—in a nutshell capturing the catch-22 of being a stateless refugee. Since you do not have a home you cannot have one, is the rationale. This condition of ‘passportlessness’ is described in myriad ways by Palestinians (cf. Farsoun with Zacharia 1997:159f.). The author Fawaz Turki10 describes an episode of striking familiarity to a great number of Palestinians. I get off the plane at Frankfurt. I have no visa. Only my stateless travel document. ‘You have no visa. You can’t enter the country,’ I am told by the immigration officer. ‘You are stateless; a visa is necessary’ Help me, man, ignore my little document of disgrace. You go back to Saudi Arabia, he says. Fuck you, I say. I don’t care where you send me. Send me to heaven. I have been to hell already. (Turki 1972:93f.) Turki’s story moves on: the official told him that he could go to England, where he had been visiting before. He could get a visa at the German embassy there and then come back. Turki flew to London and back without leaving the airport. He was not allowed entrance to Great Britain, since he was considered ‘of dubious nationality’. Back in Germany, he was put on a plane to Beirut (ibid.: 94). On another occasion, Turki, after several trips throughout the world, tried to go back to Beirut, where he grew up in the refugee camp Burj alBarajneh, but was denied entrance. The reason was that his Australian

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passport, acquired during a long sojourn in Australia, said that he was born in Haifa, Israel. The Lebanese official at the airport asked: ‘Are you an Israeli,’ he says with horror. ‘No! I am a Palestinian.’ He points to my passport and tells me that it says Israel there. I tell him that although Australians believe I was born in Haifa, Israel, he and I know that I was born in Haifa, Palestine. (Turki 1972:163) It needs to be repeated that camp refugees are not the ones leading extravagant, travelling lives. However, for Palestinians in Jordan there are of course travels to the West Bank, for those who are allowed, but the procedure at the Allenby Bridge keeps many from making them. Palestinians are forced to travel, to move, not to be settled, but are at the same time restricted from travelling, from exiting and entering countries. This is how the trip to the West Bank across the Allenby Bridge was described by a Palestinian woman: You leave at four o’clock in the morning and then you are there at six or seven, and then you stand in line at the Jordanian border. Then you get your papers in order and the stamps and everything. You get on the bus and you think that you are on the first bus, but when you look ahead you see that there are five buses and you are sweating inside the bus. And you are number six. And you wait and it is very hot and you are hungry and thirsty and you sit on the bus and wait for your turn. After a few hours, it is your turn and you feel relieved, finally it is our turn. And the bus drives a little bit and then it stops and then the soldiers—the Israeli soldiers—arrive and they tell you to get off the bus. So we get off the bus and they get inside and search the bus. Then we show them our IDs. After that, we get on board the bus again and we go to the Israeli border. There it is another control. Then we walk into the building, clothes and bags go by themselves. You sit there and wait and then you get your stamp and your papers and you walk out and then you have to wait for the bags and the clothes. They check every item and you just want to walk away Sometimes you can’t even close the bag afterwards. Maybe you have to tie a rope or something. And then you wait for your papers again; they have to be controlled by the security. If you have letters or photos or gold, that also needs to be checked. Then you walk out from there and you think, finally. Then they check your body, you have to take off your clothes. One time I had to

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change the diapers of Leyla in front of this police, they search the diapers also. Then you come home, well, at seven in the evening. A whole day Sometimes, if there are a lot of people, in the summer, you have to sleep there, at the border, two, or three days. (Intisar, Irbid, 6 June 2001) Concrete mechanisms of exclusion at borders and crossing points are equally felt by West Bank and Gaza Palestinians. When entering or departing from Ben-Gurion airport in Tel Aviv, Palestinians are singled out for special treatment, meticulous security controls and questioning. Restrictions on mobility in the form of Israeli military checkpoints mean that life is hindered to such an extent that it is seen as a prison. The numerous checkpoints separating Jerusalem from the West Bank and the Eretz Checkpoint between Gaza and Israel are other border localities where Palestinians are reminded of the formal fragility of their identity. West Bank and Gaza Palestinians always nervously check that their IDs and their permissions are in order. Checkpoints as well as arbitrary controls on the street turn life into a Kafkaesque experience. Raja Shehadeh recalls his preparation for a daytrip: In the morning, I checked the most important item of all, my identity card—without it I could end up in jail—and set off. (Shehadeh 1982:20) One incident during the 1990s further illustrates the absurd tragedy of the condition of simultaneous enforced movement and restriction. As part of a political ploy in September 1995 Libya’s president, Mu’ammar alQaddafi, expelled Palestinians from Libya.11 The motive was to manifest what Qaddafi saw as the dysfunction of the Oslo agreement. The Arab states from which these Palestinians had once emigrated to Libya and for which they held travel documents refused to permit their entry. Israel refused them entry to the Gaza Strip. Thus the Palestinians were left on a bizarre journey between checkpoints. Many were stranded in no-man’s land on the Libyan-Egyptian border until Libya consented to their return. Others were left on ferryboats in the harbours of Cyprus. Syria eventually allowed many of those to enter (e.g. Shiblak 1995; Nasrallah 1997; Farsoun with Zacharia 1997:160). During the 1990s the Arab world became more closed to the Palestinians. What these examples illustrate, then (whether taken from poetry, real politics or individual memory), is that an essential way of experiencing Palestinian-ness is as a journey without end. There is no point of arrival,

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except through returning to the homeland. There is no waiting home except for Palestine, which has been lost and is therefore not quite there any longer. Palestinian-ness is constituted through and in an endless— but not aimless—journey Life as prison or no life at all Border procedures are often situated within a discourse of life as ‘prison’. The journey is forced. Being on a ‘journey’, or the travelling condition of the Palestinians, is confined and restricted. ‘Prison’ is therefore a forceful metaphor signifying the plight of exile. For Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, the occupation restricts life to such an extent that the metaphor of the prison is often found to be the most appropriate symbol of how life is controlled, checked and coerced. Another meaning of the prison metaphor is found in the ways that authors residing in Israel have been described as ‘captive writers’, as Israel is depicted as a big jail. The land itself is imprisoned. Also, camp life is frequently equated with a jail experience since the camps were, at least initially, heavily confined and restricted. Being away from the homeland is equal to finding oneself in a prison. Another similar analogy is life as a ‘graveyard for the living’ (interview, Rania, Rusaifah camp, May 2001) or ‘no life at all’. One woman of Burj el-Shemali, a ‘special hardship case’, described that she had ‘no life at all’ and that she and her family were ‘forced to exist, not to live’. Of particular difficulty were the housing situation and the restrictions on building permits (Kamila, 15 August 2001). Maissoun, in Ein al-Hilweh, said that life is just ‘wait[ing] for our time to come’, i.e. for return, and that the ‘family just tries to survive, what can we do?’ Further: ‘When someone lives in his homeland, he will be content with life. Here, in exile, we are always depressed’ (Maissoun, Ein al-Hilweh camp, 13 August 2001). Missing home: estrangement, victimisation and suffering The term that the Palestinians have employed for their diaspora is ‘ghurba’, signifying estrangement from home and meaningful belonging. Loss, denial and injustice have produced a self-image partly constituted by suffering and vulnerability. One side of Palestinian self-identity is as the ‘victim’. Siddiq explains: ‘a passive victim of malicious circum stances he neither controls nor comprehends. To be a refugee is to be deprived not only of home and country but also of individuality and all attributes of

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personal identity’ (Siddiq 1995:94). The ‘victim identity’— although continuously relevant (cf. Lindholm Schulz 1999)—was particularly manifest in the immediate aftermath of the nakba and therefore among the generation experiencing the exodus first hand. The feeling of immense injustice caused by the catastrophe occupies a central place in Palestinian narratives of selfhood. There has been a continuous disbelief that something like the nakba could really happen and that the world did not act more forcefully to restore justice. Julie Peteet (1991, 1995) reveals the anxieties of exile’s early years. Social relations until then had to a large extent been connected to village life. Being transformed from peasants to ‘refugees’ implied a feeling of a shattered identity Shamir’s field study in the 1970s discovered that what refugees lacked most in life was istiqrar, a sense of ‘stability, security, and peace of mind’ (Shamir 1980:148). In addition, as refugees the Palestinians were now subject to charity and international relief, further adding to a loss of self-confidence. Rosemary Sayigh’s fieldwork revealed the same kind of sorrow. Al-nakba represented an end to something, a finality of life as it had been unfolding until then. In describing their first years as refugees, camp Palestinians use metaphors like ‘death’, ‘paralysis’, ‘burial’, ‘non-existence’, ‘we lost our way’, ‘we didn’t know where to go’, ‘what to do’, ‘we were like sheep in a field’. Thirty years after the uprooting, the older generation still mourns. (R.Sayigh 1979:107) Shamir’s field study in the West Bank found similar results. The trauma of being deprived of land must also be situated in relation to the concept of honour, so important in structuring social status in Palestine and large parts of the Eastern Mediterranean world. The honour of the family is strongly connected to the land. A Palestinian/Arab proverb states: ‘He who has no land has no honour.’ Suffering became ‘a core element of identity, a mode of perceiving the world and of acting toward it’ (R.Sayigh 1998:49). The nakba meant the end to something, to a way of life, but it was also the birth of the Palestinian nation; it was a beginning of a story (R.Sayigh 1998). The suffering is dated to a particular time, the nakba, which represents the ‘birth’ of Palestinian misery. This departure, the abrupt breaking point in history, is recollected by Turki:

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A breeze began to blow as we moved slowly along the coast road, heading to the Lebanese border—my mother and father, my two sisters, my brother and I. Behind us lay the city of Haifa, long the scene of bombing, sniper fire, ambushes, raids, and bitter fighting…. Before us lay the city of Sidon and indefinite exile. Around us the waters of the Mediterranean sparkled in the sun. Above us eternity moved on unconcerned, as if God in his heavens watched the agonies of men, as they walked on crutches and smiled. And our world had burst, like a bubble, a bubble that had engulfed us with its warmth. From then on I would know only crazy sorrow and watch the glazed eyes of my fellow Palestinians burdened by loss and devastated by pain. (Turki 1972:43f.) To leave the homeland—one’s source of security and belonging—is thus thought of as an end-station, as a final point. When one was actually leaving the homeland life was ‘ending’. Forced exile means an abrupt disruption between real, meaningful life and a condition of grief and waiting—the liminal condition (Hanafi 2001). In Palestinian exile, home is where you are not and where you cannot be. Home is somewhere else, from where you once came or where you originated, but where it is impossible to reach. The misery inherent in this condition is related to the significance of ‘home’ (cf. Chapter 1). In Lebanon as a refugee, Darwish continues, ‘you know for the first time what home is. It’s the thing that is lost, the awaited return’. (McKean Parmenter 1994:96) Life in liminality Exile means place-disorder, as home is out of reach and the exile is placed where home can never be restored. This disarray also denotes a temporal confusion, adding up to a limbo condition, a state of not really being in the world. Life in exile has to the Palestinian refugees implied a temporal situating of meaning in the past and future tenses. In the tradition of Van Gennep (1960) and Victor Turner (1969), Nels Johnson has described Palestinian society as a ‘liminal body’, as an ‘anti-structure’, ‘defining its presence in terms of its past and its future in terms of inversions of normality and with reference to what it has lost’ (Johnson 1982:65). Finding oneself as a community scattered and detached from the homeland means new negotiations of the meaning not only of ‘place’, but

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of temporal constructs (cf. Babha 1990). To Palestinians in the diaspora, a process of temporal alienation has materialised; both from the past, from what used to be, and from the present, from the host society. Thus, the future must be described as a reversal of the present, which in turn is merely a transitionary period, a ‘rit de passage’. As Fawaz Turki has phrased it, ‘Our present is intolerable’ and ‘Only the future matters’ (Turki 1994:38). The present must be defined as temporary; it is too replete with suffering to be defined as normality. The Palestinians ‘are’ what they have lost and what they will become, not what they experience in the present. Time is thus structured in relation to the land. Fawaz Turki12 again illuminates how Palestinian identity is caught between these temporal and spatial constructs: With our memories of places and times we had known before, rational and good, floating in the space around us and within us, we existed not in the present tense, the tense of reality, but the future imperfect, when next year, next time, next speech, the wrongs will have been righted, the grievances removed, and our cause justified. We lay, as it were, supine under a tree; but, in a world where men will calmly use historical reality to suit their own issues, Godot, for whom we waited, never arrived. (Turki 1972:16) The Palestinian intellectual Hisham Sharabi, who lives in Washington, DC, says the following about the condition of not really living, but waiting: I left the country in 1949 but in reality I did not emigrate. Migration means uprooting and the start of a new life. But I never cut my roots from the homeland and I did not start a new life. My roots stayed implanted in the soil I was so far away from. Until today I am a stranger in this country in which I spent the most part of my life. Every morning in summer and fall I sit on the balcony overlooking our small garden and smell the perfume of the flowers my wife planted according to my wishes. Close my eyes and imagine that I am smelling the roses in Akka. And when I pick a leaf off the green thyme that my wife planted for me and roll it between my fingers I smell its perfume and I see myself in the mountains of Lebanon, at Suq al-Gharb and higher. And when my wife offers me the last grapes of the season I remember the taste of the golden grapes from Ramallah which they would bring to us upon our return

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to the Friends School in the beginning of the fall. And in summer, at the seashore of Virginia, everything that surrounds me, the water of the sea, the sand of the beach, the distant horizon and the air full of the smell of the sea, all that is turned into images and sensations I remember from the seashores of Jaffa, Akka and Beirut. The reality I have been living here for the last forty years is not in my possession. I am like the traveler whose heart is full of longing since the minute he lost the coast of his country from his sight. And he lives a transitory life, his suitcases always packed, awaiting the hour of return. (Sharabi 1998a:26; translated by Juliane Hammer) The present is often portrayed as a condition of ‘waiting’, a condition that is not really lived, but a predicament that could only be endured through biding one’s time: ‘We only live on the hope that we will get our country back’ (Amira, Ein el-Hilweh, 13 August 2001). This position is defined by the sense of injustice. The wrongdoings can simply not be true, and therefore the injustice must be undone. The Palestinians persist by steadfastly waiting for the future to arrive, for return to be realised and for home to be re-established. Since the present has meant such violent societal transformations and such immense injustice, the future must mean that what was will become so once again. The violent destruction of the past is unacceptable. My grandfather died with his gaze fixed on a land imprisoned behind a fence. A land whose skin they had changed from wheat, sesame, maize, watermelons, and honeydews to tough apples. My grandfather died counting sunsets, seasons, and heartbeats on the fingers of his withered hands. He dropped like a fruit forbidden a branch to lean its age against. They destroyed his heart. He wearied of waiting here, in Damur. (Darwish 1995:88) Palestinian identity is therefore described as not yet really fulfilled, or as interrupted. Identity can only be fully expressed in the future, when the terrible present has been changed, when the Palestinians have achieved what others already have, i.e. a state, a passport, a place to call home, when waiting has delivered. The Palestinians are to endure, to go through this process of waiting, and be transformed in the process. In a way, the transformation has occurred already when in exile, as Palestinians have gone through a period of mourning to a sequence of struggling (see further

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Chapter 5). A Fateh activist in the West Bank expressed this achievementoriented aspect of national identity. To be a Palestinian is To have a state, a land and a passport, because they stop the Palestinians everywhere. To have a country To have watan, homeland, to be able to go everywhere. And to be related to somewhere and not all the time being kicked out from everywhere. (Fateh activist, West Bank, 16 November 1994) Palestinian identity is thus strongly oriented towards the future (Boullata 1999:165). Despite this discursive rejection of the present, the current does contribute to both the suffering and the struggling of Palestinian identity On the one hand, identity is not yet, and cannot yet be, fulfilled. The loss leaves the Palestinians in a floating concept of identity. On the other hand, and despite the denial of the present, the construction of meaning built around loss as a shared experience takes place in the present and through the absence of land. The contemporary experience of continuous exile and the near impossibility of return has proven to be a stable and durable condition. It is not what was before al-nakba, but the nabka itself that signifies what the Palestinians have in common. It was not in the ‘rootedness’ and peasant past that Palestinians sensed a particular form of Palestinian-ness. Only when they were forced to leave did Palestinian-ness and Palestine acquire their profound contemporary meanings. It was thus not by staying put, but by being expelled to homelessness that Palestinian-ness was ultimately formed (cf. R.Sayigh 1977b:22f.; Peteet 1995). However, it needs to be underlined that a Palestinian identity was emerging in the 1910s in the form of peasant as well as elite resistance against Zionism and against emerging land alienation (R.Khalidi 1997). However, a national identity did not gain mass loyalty until later. One could thus say that Palestinian identity and society are, on the one hand, severely disrupted by the dispersal and the conflict and, on the other, constituted in that damage-causing loss—‘dispersion unites’ (R.Sayigh 1977b:23). Land of longing What has a man but his God in heaven above and his land on the earth below? (Palestinian peasant saying; quoted in Rubinstein 1995:17)

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Usually a man lives in a certain place in the world, but for the Palestinian the place lives in the man. (Shalhat 1987; cited in Rubinstein 1991:7) Even if she or he is born in Jabaliya refugee camp in Gaza or Burj elBarajneh in Lebanon, a Palestinian refugee is still from Acre, Haifa or Jaffa. Locality, the specific village of one’s parents, is still how one defines oneself in terms of origin. Knowing the origins of a person is to know the most important piece of information about someone (cf. Rubenberg 2001) apart from family connections. In exile, homeland takes on new and specific meanings in composing grounds for community, solidarity and in narrating identity. The remembered Palestine is a glorified, romanticised dream Palestine (see Abu el-Sa’ud 1994; Agha 1994). It is where home is situated, where the past occurred and where futures are to be realised. The land is still the old land despite pawned trees on the hillsides despite green clouds and fertilized plants and water sprinklers spinning so efficiently. On the startling road seized from the throat of new accounts the trees were smiling at me with Arab affection. In the land I felt an apology for my father’s wounds and on all the bridges, the shape of my Arab face echoed here in the winding rings of smoke. Everything is Arabic still, despite the change of language despite the huge trucks, and foreign tractors. Each poplar and the orange grove of my ancestors laughed to me, my God, with Arab affection. (Layla ‘Allush, ‘The Path of Affection’ , translated by Lena Jayyusi and Naomi Shihab Nye; in Jayyusi 1992:106f.) Remembrance and longing imply a fixation of the land; the homeland in the mind remains forever as it was.13 There is no change. The land is capable of resisting the transformation that it is superficially undergoing because of Israeli modernisation, and becomes an actor in itself. It is a subject of its own, which is ‘smiling’, and ‘singing’ ‘with affection’. Land has been bestowed with personal qualities, with emotions and a potential for action. Kanafani’s Land of the Sad Oranges (Kanafani 1978) talks about a land that is sad, a land in which the orange trees would die and cease to bear fruit when its native people had been forced to leave (Bardenstein

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1999). The land and the landscape mourn the fact that its people have been dispersed. One aspect of this was conveyed by a Palestinian filmmaker, who said that while Israeli Jews call Palestine their homeland, to the Palestinians it is the land which owns the people and not the other way around (Seminar at the Göteborg Film Festival, January 2002). Furthermore, the exile’s relationship to the land is described in organic terms. The land is portrayed as ‘primordially’, essentially Arab, and, despite the forced expulsion, there is an almost enigmatic relationship between the evicted people and the land that has stayed within its geographical confines. This romantic style has its clear counterpart in official ideology and formal definitions of the nation, as evident in the following excerpt from the Palestinian Declaration of Independence of 1988: Palestine, the land of the three monotheistic faiths, is where the Palestinian Arab people was born, on which it grew, developed and excelled. The Palestinian people was never separated from or diminished in its integral bonds with Palestine. Thus the Palestinian Arab people ensured for itself an everlasting union between itself, its land and its history. Resolute through that history, the Palestinian Arab people forged its national identity, rising even to unimagined levels in its defence, as invasion, the design of others, and the appeal special to Palestine’s ancient and luminous place on that eminence where powers and civilisations are joined…. All this intervened thereby to deprive the people of its political independence. Yet the undying connection between Palestine and its people secured for the land its character, and for the people its national genius. (The Palestinian Declaration of Independence, Algiers, 15 November 1988; quoted in Lukacs 1992:411) The union between the land and the people is ‘ancient’ and ‘everlasting’. This essentialism has almost biological connotations, as if the people grew from the land. Expulsion has distorted this natural state of affairs. Quite contrary to the ways in which landscape is recollected, the Israeli conquest has resulted in change beyond recognition through the destruction of villages, the establishment of kibbutzim, the transformation of sites into artists’ centres or tourist places (cf. Slycomovics 1998). Israel’s and Zionism’s drive to create hegemony over the landscape has meant Judaisation in the form of naming, mapping and representation to the extent that the Palestinian part of the past is effectively erased. In order to assert Israeli dominance over the landscape, all symbols of the ‘other’s’

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relation to the land have had to be replaced or destroyed. Raja Shehadeh recounts how Jaffa has been completely changed: directly after parking the car, I ran into a tourist group and heard the guide’s explanations. And I saw through his listeners’ eyes the ‘cute’ Israeli ‘reconstructions’ of Old Jaffa: the site of my romantic longings, plastered over into art galleries, discos, expensive restaurants, fancy shops. No tourist or Israeli my age could ever guess that thirty-five years ago this was the vibrant, flourishing Arab centre of Palestine. No trace of it is left; its people are scattered all over the world. (Shehadeh 1982:21) Jaffa used to be one of Palestine’s prime seaports, a centre of trade and travel, of landing missionaries and travellers. Since 1948 Jaffa has come under Tel Aviv municipality, and its importance in trade and as a gateway to the world is no more. Instead, ‘old Jaffa’, as it is called today is a Jewish artists’ centre, made attractive to tourists. In oral history, land is as present as it is in poetry and official discourse: I returned to my village after the ’67 war. A military base prevented us from getting close to it. I brought back some dirt and I let my kids step on the dirt so that they can be tied to the land. (Khaled; quoted in Lynd et al. 1994:33) The concrete soil, the earth, the dirt was imbued with meaning. To feel it would supposedly create connections also for the generation that had never set foot in Palestine and on the land. To feel and sense the land gave comfort. When Israel withdrew from south Lebanon, in May 2000, many Palestinians travelled to the zone in order to meet with relatives and penpals and to actually see the homeland. Some received gifts in the form of food, olives and olive oil from kin in the Galilee. Relatives found each other and kissed and hugged through the barbed wire. Those on the Lebanese side of the border collected dust from the other side of the fence. When Manar, living in Deheishe, visited the village of her pen-pal Muna, living in Shatila, in order to tell her something of what the village looked like, she gathered earth in a little plastic bag and sent it to Muna, in order for her to connect with the homeland (Masri 2001). Commemoration and the rhetoric of geography also express a highly emotional relationship to the land. Palestinian poetry often expresses a ‘love’ for the homeland, for particular villages and cities, for Jaffa,

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Jerusalem and Haifa. In much of the poetry, ‘love’ is a frequent theme, such as in myriad hymns and elegies for the landscape, and as in the titles ‘A Lover from Palestine’, ‘Love Palestinian Style’, ‘Dearest Love’, and ‘I Love you More’. Amongst our people, we talk more about our love for our land than we talk about our hatred of our enemy. That is significant. That means our motive is love, even if we are not aware of it. (Salah Tama’ari; quoted in Lynd et al. 1994:108) In the Palestinian case, Anderson’s (1991) explanation of nationalism as a form of political self-love and narcissism comes forward as love of the land. Idealistic assessments of Palestine are also revealed in folk culture. One such