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PROBLEMATIZING A PALESTINIAN DIASPORA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 October 2007

Julie Peteet
Julie Peteet
Affiliation:
Julie Peteet is Chair and Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology, University of Louisville, Louisville, Ky. 40292, USA; e-mail: jpeteet@louisville.edu.
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Extract

The year 1948 marks the beginning of al-ghurba (exile or diaspora) and al-nakba (disaster or calamity), words intensely resonant in the Palestinian lexicon. After this decisive date, one can affix “pre-” or “post-” as markers of an apocalyptic moment. In this cultural and political orbit, a new spatial world took shape. Violently crafted and maintained borders that locked Palestinians in and kept them out became features of quotidian life. In 1948, through a combination of expulsion and flight, around 750,000 Palestinians became refugees in neighboring Arab countries. About 100,000 Palestinians remained in their homeland. The core issue, however, is not conditions of departure but denial of an internationally recognized right of return, as elaborated in United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194.

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International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 39 , Issue 4 , November 2007, pp. 627 - 646
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© 2007 Cambridge University Press

Refugee

The sun crosses borders

without any soldiers shooting at it

The nightingale sings in Tulkarm1

Tulkarm is a Palestinian town on the West Bank. Salma Khadra Jayyusi, ed., Lena Jayyusi and Naomi Shihab Nye, trans., Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 190.

of an evening,

eats and roosts peacefully

with kibbutzim birds.

A stray donkey grazes

across the firing line

in peace

and no one aims.

But I, your son made refugee

—O my native land—

between me and your horizons

the frontier walls stand.

Salem Jubran

The year 1948 marks the beginning of al-ghurba (exile or diaspora) and al-nakba (disaster or calamity), words intensely resonant in the Palestinian lexicon. After this decisive date, one can affix “pre-” or “post-” as markers of an apocalyptic moment.2

The Palestinian lexicon is full of pre- and post- prefixes: pre-/post-1967, pre-/post-1982, pre-/post-intifada, post-Oslo, pre-/post-Authority in reference to the Palestinian National Authority.

In this cultural and political orbit, a new spatial world took shape. Violently crafted and maintained borders that locked Palestinians in and kept them out became features of quotidian life. In 1948, through a combination of expulsion and flight, around 750,000 Palestinians became refugees in neighboring Arab countries. About 100,000 Palestinians remained in their homeland. The core issue, however, is not conditions of departure but denial of an internationally recognized right of return, as elaborated in United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194.

In recent scholarship, Palestinians have been included in a panoply of groups with putative diasporic status.3

See, for example, Avram Bornstein, Crossing the Green Line Between the West Bank and Israel (Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London: Routledge, 1996); James Clifford, “Diasporas,” Cultural Anthropology 9 (1994): 302–38; Samih Farsoun, “Palestinian Diaspora,” Encyclopedia of Diasporas: Immigrant and Refugee Cultures Around the World, vol. 1. Overviews and Topics, ed. Melvin Ember, Carol Ember, and Ian Skoggard (Norwell, Mass.: Kluwer Academic, 2005): 233–44; Sari Hanafi, “Rethinking the Palestinians Abroad as a Diaspora: The Relationship between the Diaspora and the Palestinian Territories,” International Social Science Review 4 (2003): 157–82; Walid Khalidi, Before Their Diaspora. A Photographic History of the Palestinians 1876–1948 (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1984); Cecilia Rothenberg, “Proximity and Distance: Palestinian Women's Social Lives in Diaspora,” Diaspora 8 (1999): 23–50; Helena Schultz and Juliane Hammer, The Palestinian Diaspora. Formation of Identities and Politics of Homeland (London: Routledge, 2003); Anton Shammas, “Palestinians Must Now Master the Art of Forgetting,” New York Times Magazine, 26 December 1993, 32–33; Ted Swedenburg and Smadar Lavie, Displacement, Diaspora and Geographies of Identity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996), among others.

Indeed, the new Encyclopedia of Diasporas includes an entry on the Palestinian diaspora. Hanafi's contention that Palestinians are an “unachieved” diaspora or “partially diasporized”4

Hanafi, “Rethinking the Palestinians Abroad as a Diaspora,” 2.

opens the way for a critical discussion of this concept. Within that framework, this paper problematizes the notion of a Palestinian diaspora by exploring how it conforms to the current scholarship of diaspora. In doing so, it brings into relief some of the complexities and ambiguities of the concept and its contemporary circulation.

The goal is not to determine whether Palestinians are diasporic. A typology of diaspora is neither theoretically nor empirically practical in the contemporary period with its dizzying kaleidoscope of displacements, and would fix diasporas in a template that might not have the capacity to account for historical changes in form and parameter. The more relevant questions are Nonini's “When does one know whether a diaspora exists?” and Cohen's “Why these sudden proclamations” of diasporic status?5

Donald Nonini, “Diaspora and Globalization,” Encyclopedia of Diasporas, 559–70, 560; and Robin Cohen, “Diaspora and the Nation-State: From Victims to Challengers,” International Affairs 72 (1996): 507.

Indeed, they are rarely asked, particularly the former. Moreover, the methodological issues surrounding diaspora, from the qualitative to the empirical and demographic, are hardly ever elaborated.

This paper ultimately raises the issue of the political ramifications of assuming a Palestinian diaspora. Does Palestinian insistence on the right of return represent a refusal of diaspora? Hall writes that diaspora refers to the “scattering and dispersal of peoples who will never literally be able to return to the places from which they came.”6

Stuart Hall, “New Cultures for Old,” in A Place in the World?: Places, Cultures and Globalization, ed. D. Massey and P. Jess (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 206.

Although recognizing that mass return is highly unlikely, the right of return remains central to Palestinian politics and collective consciousness. In short, can diaspora accommodate or coexist with a politics of return? Disaggregating exile and “refugeeness” from diaspora may be more appropriate to encompass the Palestinian situation.

The first part of this article provides an abbreviated review of the range of conceptual frameworks for studying diaspora. The second part is organized as a series of provocations that push for a more critical engagement with the implications of assuming a Palestinian diaspora. A more critical use of this freighted term, along with an exploration of its political ramifications, will facilitate an examination of how Palestinians, with their multiplicity of displacements in time and space and transnational modes of life, might, and might not, be diasporic. Moreover, to the extent that they are, what are the political implications for their aspirations for self-determination and statehood? Classifying and categorizing are hardly neutral processes7

See Hanafi, 2; Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

: what we call things matters.8

Julie Peteet, “Words as Interventions: Naming in the Palestine–Israel Conflict,” Third World Quarterly 26 (2005): 153–72.

Although this article is concerned with the theoretical and methodological aspects of diaspora, the thinking behind this exploration is grounded in several decades of ethnographic research on Palestinians in Lebanon and the West Bank.

The academic popularity of the term diaspora coincided with the end of the Cold War, widespread ethnic/nationalist conflict in the 1990s, historically unparalleled mobility, academic critiques of nationalism, and a globalization discourse that initially assumed a dilution of state control over movements of people, capital, goods, and information. Tölölyan pinpoints 1968 as the year diaspora began to take on new meanings, and it is probably no coincidence that in the mid-1960s the United States opened its doors to substantial immigration from Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America.9

Khachig Tölölyan, “Rethinking Diaspora(s): Stateless Power in the Transnational Moment,” Diaspora 5 (1996): 3–36, 9–10.

Romanticization of living beyond the nation-state or at unease in host states was also integral to the turn to diaspora, as was an enhanced concern with subjectivity and identity in transnational situations. In the closing years of the millennium, state controls over mobility, particularly the flow of labor, remained intact and since September 11 have been tighter than ever.

Despite the current popularity of diaspora studies,10

Like refugees, diaspora has become an “independent research domain with its own institutions, journals and discourse.” Osten Wahlbeck, “The Concept of Diaspora as an Analytical Tool in the Study of Refugee Communities,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 28 (2002): 221–38, 253. Indeed, the journal Diaspora, founded in the early 1990s, is devoted to the subject, as is a Routledge series on global diaspora, which has nearly ten titles. There is now an Encyclopedia of Diasporas as well.

there are few ethnographic accounts; diaspora studies are “more focused on social theory than on ethnographic description,” notes Stoller,11

Paul Stoller, “Review Essay. Writing Diasporas,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 31 (2002): 758–64, 759.

prompting his call for longitudinal field studies to link theory and narrative. The concept of diaspora appealed to anthropology, in part, because it wedded probing critiques of the assumed relationship among culture, identity, and place with a simultaneous recognition of continuing attachments to particular places and their role in identity formation. Diaspora, as well as transnationalism, does embody the capacity to capture this seeming paradox. However, the anthropologist is still left with an ethnographic quandary: not all displacements and mass movements are diasporic.

In the semantic domain of human mobility, diaspora circulates simultaneously with a host of terms, such as migrants (voluntary and forced), internally displaced persons, refugees, exiles, guest workers, seasonal workers, overseas labor, expatriates, settlers, jet-setters, and tourists, to capture a broad range of mobilities. However, diaspora often encapsulates a wide variety of movements and has been generalized to encompass what were once dubbed exiles, minorities, ethnic groups, and immigrant communities. Does collapsing specific categories of mobility and dispersion open a new analytical space, or does it blur the specificity of types of movement and the role of coercion? For example, Cohen distinguishes between “victim diasporas” (Armenian, African American, Irish, Jewish, and Palestinian) and diasporas arising from colonial-labor arrangements and overseas communities, such as the Chinese,12

Cohen, “Diaspora and the Nation-State,” 513, 514.

underscoring the complexity of the diasporic category. He further argues that the “victim tradition,” central to the definition of diaspora, must be transcended.

Disaggregating diaspora would facilitate more precise and complex understandings of different types of movements, their historical and political origins, and the role of violence. In short, fluidity and inclusivity may dilute diaspora of specific meanings. It may be semantically overloaded and thus risk losing precision as an analytical tool for understanding contemporary human mobility. Clifford suggests that “a polythetic field would seem most conducive to tracking (rather than policing) the contemporary range of diasporic forms.”13

Clifford, “Diasporas,” 307.

The list of diasporas is now so extensive that stock taking is in order; if not, the term risks describing everything and nothing. The sheer speed and scope of contemporary human movement, propelled by conflict or economic pressures or the advantages of wealth, are unparalleled. Finer distinctions can alleviate essentializing and depoliticizing mobility.

Can diaspora, with its ancient Greek etymology14

The eighth edition of The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines diaspora as “the dispersion of the Jews among the Gentiles mainly in the 8th–6th BC” and “Jews dispersed in this way.” With a small d, diaspora refers to “any group of people similarly dispersed.” The Greek origin of the word is diaspeiro, meaning dia/through and sperio/scattering, 322–23. See also Cohen, “Diaspora and the Nation-State,” 507–508.

meaning to scatter over multiple sites from a particular place, as well as a social condition and consciousness, be applied to historically recent cross-border movements and coerced mass displacement? Terms certainly take on new meanings. Indeed, that is the power inherent in symbols—novel situations can infuse words with new meanings, highlighting their adaptability. At its broadest, diaspora designates those “loose in the world”15

Clifford, “Diasporas,” 306.

and encapsulates multiple historical, political, and cultural contexts.16

See Tölölyan, “Rethinking Diaspora(s),” for an exposition and analysis of diaspora's many definitions and usages throughout history.

Contemporary notions of diaspora, Tölölyan17

Tölölyan, “Rethinking Diaspora(s),” 12–15. The six characteristics of a classical diaspora are a traumatic displacement and resettlement, a group identity, collective memory, community boundaries, the perception of connectedness to other diasporic communities, and the desire for return.

claims, extend well beyond the classical, Jewish-oriented ones and are more “accommodating” of a multiplicity of experiences.18

Ibid., 15.

In the literature on diaspora, whether the Armenian, Haitian, Palestinian, Italian, Korean, or Cuban, and so on, places of origin and departure are explicit if not indeed defining. Most significantly, diaspora assumes an identifiable and already constituted ethnic or national group at departure and in exile, which then structures the way we approach and understand diaspora. Safran's19

William Safran, “Describing and Analyzing of Diaspora: An Attempt at Conceptual Cleansing.” Paper presented at the conference Diaspora: Transnational Identities and the Politics of the Homeland, University of California at Berkeley, 12–13 November 1999, 1.

place-bound definition focuses on return, and home is defined as from where one came. It includes dispersal from an original homeland, a collective memory of the homeland, a belief that one cannot be fully accepted into the host society, a desire for return and restoration of the homeland, and maintaining ties to the homeland. The key issue is the tie to the homeland. The often uncritical prominence of place in diaspora studies has led to an “essentialization of origins and fetishization of what is supposed to be found at the origin.”20

Brian Keith Axel, “The Diasporic Imaginary,” Public Culture 14 (2002): 411–28.

In his work on the Sikhs, Axel concludes that “rather than conceiving of the homeland as something that creates the diaspora, it may be more productive to consider the diaspora as something that creates the homeland.”21

Ibid., 426.

Challenging the pivotal homeland, Clifford22

Clifford, “Diasporas,” 306.

claims, “Decentered, lateral connections may be as important as those formed around a teleology of origin/return.”

Recent scholarship has focused on identity, institutions, and connections. Shifting from place to identity, Klimt and Lubkeman23

Andrea Klimt and Stephen Lubkeman, “Argument across the Portuguese-Speaking World: A Discursive Approach to Diaspora,” Diaspora 11 (2002): 145–62, 150.

write that diaspora is a type of “identity discourse” more than a “type of population dispersal.” Tölölyan contends that connections among diasporic formations and between each and the homeland give diaspora its contemporary meaning; institutions express a collectivity's interests and connections with each other and the homeland.24

Tölölyan, “Elite Institutions in the Armenian Transnation,” Diaspora 9 (2000): 106–36.

Werbner25

Prina Werbner, “Diasporic Political Imaginaries: A Sphere of Freedom or a Sphere of Illusions,” Communal/Plural 6 (1998): 12.

defines diaspora as “communities of co-responsibility, recognizing not simply their loyalty but their existential connection to ‘co-diasporans’ elsewhere, or in a home country.” At its broadest, we encounter Brah's26

Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora, 181.

conceptualization of “diaspora space,” which includes those who “stay put” because of their “entanglement” with those outside. Whereas Safran27

Safran, “Describing and Analyzing of Diaspora.”

includes alienation and nonintegration into a host state as criteria of diaspora, Brah stresses integration.

Contemporary diaspora studies have been more concerned with subjectivity and identity, with less attention paid to social formations.28

Tölölyan, “Elite Institutions in the Armenian Transition,” 28.

Indeed, Klimt and Lubkeman argue for a distinction between an approach to diaspora that focuses on “a particular way of imagining, inventing, constructing, and presenting the self” and diaspora's sociological parameters—its “institutional contexts, material conditions, or relations of power…“29

Ibid.

Werbner argues against such a separation and for recognition of the “mutually constitutive” relations among the material, organizational, moral, and aesthetic.30

Werbner, “Introduction: The Materiality of Diaspora—Between Aesthetic and ‘Real Politics’” Diaspora 9 (2000): 5–21, 7.

In sum, definitions of diaspora and conceptual frameworks for its study are quite broad and highly inclusive. It is difficult to speak of diasporas in modular fashion. A critical politics of mobility and transnationalism, grounded in longitudinal ethnographic studies, could break open the term and more sharply distinguish among migrants, ethnic minorities, refugees, exiles, and diasporics. This approach preserves an awareness of the ways these different kinds of mobility and transnationalisms occur in concert and sustain one another—in short, their simultaneity and, yet, distinction. In late capitalism, a critically unexamined and ethnographically ungrounded deployment of diaspora can obscure the specificities of mobility and the conditions propelling it. The much vaunted term “globalization” often supplanted “imperialism” or “advanced capitalism” and thus shifted the agenda away from political economy frameworks. Whereas cultural studies brought a concern with culture into a political economy focus, some versions, particularly that of the post-Birmingham school, marginalized rather than complemented political economy frameworks. The terms refugee, internally displaced, and forced migrant by definition embody a sense of violence and political and economic upheaval and insecurity. Uncritical invocations of diaspora risk minimizing the range of traumatic conditions that fuel displacement and the way these shape sociocultural formations and subjectivity.

How is the concept of diaspora related to ethnicity and minority? According to Clifford, diaspora “appears to be replacing, or at least, supplementing minority discourse.”31

Clifford, “Diasporas,” 311.

There is a qualitative difference between diasporic and ethnic identity. One refers to movement and social relations stretched across multiple borders, and the other to a sense of self and group identity that differentiates communities. In the past, distinctions between ethnic or minority groups and diaspora were usually attributed to the latter's continuing connections with the homeland, with an elite, and with institutions connecting the community to the homeland and to other diaspora communities. Yet, as a result of enhanced communication technologies and the relative ease of international travel, ethnic communities now have similar sorts of connections. However, states (and colonial regimes) often construct ethnic categories, both through exclusion and classification projects. Unlike ethnicity, diaspora has no official recognition by the state. Although diaspora and ethnicity may overlap, state practices may endow ethnicity with a sociomaterial reality (e.g., in the census).

Minorities and ethnic groups may be increasingly rearticulated as diasporic by both scholars and groups themselves.32

See Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora, 186–90, for a discussion of “minority” discourse as a British postcolonial code for “colored people.” See Tölölyan, “Rethinking Diaspora(s),” 19–28, for a discussion of how the term diaspora has achieved its new status and prevalence; he provides a lengthy overview of how dispersals may become rearticulated as diasporas.

For example, with easier access to the Caucasus, Circassians in Jordan now perceive themselves as diasporics as well as a minority.33

Seteney Shami, “The Little Nation. Minorities and Majorities in the Context of Shifting Geographies,” in Nationalism and Internationalism in the Post-Cold War Era, ed. Kjell Goldmann, Ulf Hannerz, and Charles Westin (London/New York: Routledge, 2000): 103–26.

Diasporic communities have what Werbner calls a “dual orientation” constituting a minority that organizes and struggles for equality while maintaining transnational connections and loyalties to the original homeland. Thus, they are “both ethnic–parochial and cosmopolitan.”34

Werbner, “Introduction,” 5.

Shami argues that diaspora articulates with nationalism in complex and unexpected ways—what she refers to, in the Circassian context, as “inchoate nationalism.”35

Shami, “The Little Nation,” 114.

Shami contends that when Circassians and Chechens in Jordan and Turkey adopted the language of diaspora, minority and diaspora discourses coexisted and sustained one another. Thus, Clifford's notion that diaspora was replacing minority discourse may have been a stretch. Rather than being different categories, diasporic, minority, and refugee discourses and social formations may coexist and sustain one another; a framework of both/and rather than either/or polarities captures the fluidity, complexity, and intertwining of minority and diasporic status and consciousness.

A PALESTINIAN DIASPORA

A critical engagement with the question of Palestinians as a diaspora can contribute to our understanding of the term itself. Palestinians do not always fit easily into contemporary theoretical frameworks. In an era of postcolonial studies, they remain firmly in the grip of modern colonialism. Thus, they provide an opportunity for a probing engagement with theory, its possibilities and limitations, and an opportunity to critique, challenge, and/or carry in new directions contemporary theoretical themes such as postcoloniality, nationalism, the nomadic subject, diaspora, and transnationalism, among others.

Demographics, Space, and Time

The literature on diasporas rarely engages with spatial depth (an exception is the Black Atlantic diaspora) or demography. Questions of how many reside inside and outside the homeland are rarely posed when framing Palestinians as diasporic. The vast numbers of displaced, what Said called the “arithmetic abstractions of mass politics,”36

Edward Said, “The Mind of Winter. Reflections on Life in Exile,” Harpers Magazine (September 1984): 50.

are often ignored. Yet, the spatial and demographic profile of the Palestinian population puts these factors into striking relief. Is the appellation diaspora appropriate when the bulk of the population resides inside historic Palestine or in proximity? The majority of the Palestinian population of 10,091,98537

“Projected Population in the End Year by Region, 1997–2006,” Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (2005), 13, http://www.pcbs.gov.ps (accessed May 2007).

resides in Israel, in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, and in border states Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. Significantly smaller numbers reside in the Gulf and abroad (in Europe, North America, and South America).38

Ibid.

According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the figures for the Palestinian population in 2005 were 1,133,980 in Israel, 3,825,149 in the West Bank and Gaza, 2,968,052 in Jordan, 434,896 in Syria, and 405,425 in Lebanon.

Over half the population resides in historic Palestine or is spatially proximate (in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan). In other words, this population may be more appropriately termed proximate exiles rather than diasporics. Farsoun's39

Farsoun, “Palestinian Diaspora,” 234.

statistical table on the Palestinian diaspora classifies the population as “In Historic Palestine” or “In Diaspora.” The latter includes all Arab countries of refuge, from Egypt to the Gulf as well as Europe and America. However, if we spatially rearrange the categories to move Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria to a category of proximate exile or refuge, the “In Diaspora” category becomes demographically shallow.

Highlighting demography as well as spatial distance provides a new perspective in making diasporic determinations. UNRWA lists 4,375,050 Palestinians as registered refugees.40

“Palestine Refugees Registered with UNRWA” (March 2006). United Nations Relief and Works Agency, http://www.un.org/unrwa/publications (accessed May 2007).

The other nearly 5 million Palestinians are not registered with UNRWA but consider themselves de facto refugees or exiles. Denied return after 1948, most registered refugees resided in refugee camps established by the United Nation in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank, located within a hundred miles or so of their former homes, many even closer. For example, ʿAin al-Hilwa and Rashidiyyeh camps are about sixty and twenty-five miles, respectively, from the Israeli-Lebanese border. In South Lebanon, 101,000 Palestinian refugees live in camps not far from the Israeli border. In Jordan nearly three million Palestinian refugees live in camps only a very short distance from historic Palestine, with even more Palestinians living in cities and villages. Within Israel the 100,000 Palestinians who remained after 1948 have grown to well over a million, or about 20 percent of the Israeli population. This suggests that we need to question the role of spatial depth in casting a society as diasporic.

By and large, displaced Palestinians share with their host populations the Arabic language, the general contours of culture, a common historical experience, a memory of empire, the era of colonialism, the advent of nationalism, and often religion. In host Arab states, they constitute a national, noncitizen group (except in Jordan) rather than an ethnic or religious minority. Instead of local integration, in Lebanon, for example, the Palestinians became the Other, exceedingly vulnerable to host populace and government hostility. Despite over fifty years of exile in Lebanon, the host state refuses refugee integration as citizens or residents with civil and political rights, and there remains an unsettling temporariness to their presence, hardly the stuff of diaspora. Paradoxically, Palestinians can be situated simultaneously as the Other (nonnational) and, due to linguistic and cultural similarities, not the Other.

The paradigmatic Jewish, Armenian, and Black Atlantic diasporas are temporally deep and demographically and spatially extensive, but Palestinian displacement is, comparatively speaking, historically immediate and ongoing, and the bulk of the displaced are spatially proximate. Marienstras claims that “time has to pass” before a diaspora has formed.41

Richard Marienstra, “On the Notion of Diaspora” in Minority Peoples in the Age of Nation States, ed. Gerard Chaliand (London: Pluto Press, 1989), quoted in Cohen, “Diaspora and the Nation State,” 516.

A putative Palestinian diaspora would have minimal temporal depth and memory—around sixty years. Refugee status indicates an impermanency that may not be consistent with diaspora's connotations of temporal depth and integration. By definition, refugees live in temporary abodes. A foreboding sense of temporariness, and concomitant insecurity, is pervasive among Palestinian refugees. Even though many camps now resemble small towns or are vibrant extensions of urban centers, there is still an uneasiness over their future.

The term diaspora conjures up parallels with a paradigmatic 3000-year-old Jewish diaspora and the more historically recent Armenian diaspora. With the advent of a Jewish state, the issue of the Jewish diaspora becomes highly problematic. Cohen points out that for a Palestinian diaspora, “Ironically and tragically, the midwife was the homecoming of the Jewish diaspora.”42

Cohen, “Diaspora and the Nation State,” 513.

Some of the differences between the two displacements further illuminate problems associated with claiming the Palestinians as diasporic. Geographic points of departure, how the homeland is remembered, and the current relation to that place are key. Jewish spiritual and metaphysical memory, politically charged mythicohistories mobilized as a charter for modern statehood, and yet vast spatial and temporal distance can be juxtaposed with Palestinians' temporal and spatial shallowness where memory derives from knowing and experiencing firsthand. It is axiomatic that memory of the past is positioned from the perspective of the present, yet the past is fifty years distant in one case and 3000 years in the other. Palestinians live the existential conditions of exile and grapple with the perils of statelessness daily. With often firsthand knowledge of their homes, memory is certainly more recent and visceral. Collective memory may be tinged with nostalgia and mediated by memories inherited from kin and by experiences of home and community elsewhere, but it is equally based on the reality and immediacy of homes and towns lived in and lands tilled. Hanafi writes that a diaspora has a “center of gravity,” a geographic or social place to meet and/or a central point from which communications flow.43

Hanafi, “Re-thinking the Palestinians Abroad,” 17.

For Palestinians, historic Palestine is off limits as a center of gravity, as most are unable to travel there.

The displaced have a deep and everyday connection to past time, place, and social relationships. Sometimes, neighboring villages in Palestine became neighbors in exile (e.g., al-Zeeb and al-Bassa, small neighboring villages near ʿAkka, occupied adjacent areas in Lebanon's ʿAin al-Hilwa camp). Referred to as “al-Bassa/al-Zeeb,” this designation shrinks geographical space and connotes close ties. Neighborliness, with intensive visiting, intermarriage, and the exchange of goods and services, cemented this long-term relationship. Thus, Palestinian camp settlement by villages, however partial, asserted an intimate claim to now distant, relandscaped, and occupied space, forging a connection between time and space that was inherited by successive generations through dwelling in these camp areas and being part of a social world organized, in large part, on a village model. In a sense, village areas have been the physical and symbolic memory, transporting the space of Palestine to the present.

This raises issues of indigenousness and “natural” claims to land. Palestinian poet Mahmud Darwish asserts a profound distinction between memory as a project, an objectification in which laborious efforts are invested, and memory in a phenomenological sense. Palestinian refugees claim rights to place both by virtue of a modernist national identity and historical narrative and by rights of continuous inhabitation—in other words, by simply having been there and nowhere else. Darwish eloquently conveys the difference between the Zionist relation to the land, which he claims is a carefully crafted project, with the Palestinian, which he relegates more to immediacy and intimacy of the everyday, thus obviating the need for a “project”:

The true home is not that which is known or proved. The land that emerges as if from a chemical equation or an institute of theory is not a homeland. Your insistent need to demonstrate the history of stones and your ability to invent proofs does not give you prior membership over him who knows the time of the rain from the smell of the stone. That stone for you is an intellectual effort. For its owner it is a roof and walls.44

Darwish, as quoted in Barbara McKean Parmenter, Giving Voice to Stones: Place and Identity in Palestinian Literature (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1994), 1.

Difference centers on indigenousness versus the settler project—between being inside and of the land and coming to it from elsewhere in the context of a project of colonial modernity and self-remaking. This juxtaposing of memories is possible only because of a temporal dimension; proximity and distance are played off in Darwish's vision.

The degree of separation from the homeland, and firsthand knowledge of it, further compounds the matter of spatial depth. After the 1967 Arab–Israeli war and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war residing in these areas were able to cross into Israel and visit their former homes, lands, and villages. However, their actual connections, financial or social, were hardly pronounced. Rothenberg's45

Rothenberg, “Proximity and Distance.”

ethnographic analysis of women in two Palestinian settings—Amman and Canada—teases out the connection between proximity and feelings of connectedness to the original home in the West Bank. As distance from home increases, as in the Canadian case, community ties ease and relations to place shift to a more imaginary level; the proximity of Amman, which facilitates periodic visits, allows for closer social relations and sentiments of belonging. With the Israeli policy of closure severely restricting Palestinian access to Jerusalem and Israel (and within and between the West Bank and Gaza), Palestinians outside are increasingly unable to maintain social ties with Palestinians in Israel.

In relation, the idea of homeland and a desire to remain connected to it—what Brah calls a “homing desire”—are critical to conferring diaspora status.46

Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora, 193.

For Safran,47

Safran, “Describing and Analyzing of Diaspora,” 1.

a desire to return to the homeland is a defining criterion of diaspora. If indeed so, Palestinians outside historic Palestine or in proximity would certainly resemble a diaspora. It is now almost a cliché in reports on Palestinian camps that refugees punctuate narratives of exile by displaying the key to their former homes. However, house keys and deeds to lands do lend an immediacy that may not be as pronounced in the classic and defining instances of diaspora.

This references issues of shallow temporal depth and spatial proximity. Although diaspora encompasses a homing desire and provides a critique of notions of identity as overly fixed in place (one reason it was adopted so enthusiastically in the 1990s), so does the concept of refugee. In my research I have observed that Palestinian identity is highly referenced to place, both places of origin and places of exile,48

Julie Peteet, Landscape of Hope and Despair. Palestinian Refugee Camps (Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005).

and the right of return remains a common denominator of Palestinian politics. In his attempt to “re-think diaspora studies” Axel argues that diaspora studies usually “conceptualizes the homeland as a place of origin and site of departure that constitutes a certain people as a diaspora.”49

Axel, “The Diasporic Imaginary,” 425–26.

Following his belief that the diaspora produces the homeland, he calls for unsettling the role of place and location in coming to grips with diasporas. For the majority of Palestinians, the homeland has been viscerally experienced and is close either in time or space, or both. Elsewhere I have critically explored the idea of a Palestinian romanticization of the past, past places, and the possibility of return:

The relationship between place and identity is more about the future than the past, more about where they are now and where they are going than simply about where they have been.… Recovering the past is not always an object of desire. What the past does represent, however, is what has been denied—a safe location, recognition of rights, and a sense of belonging in one's own homeland, and a process of justice.50

Peteet, Landscape of Hope and Despair, 216.

An exploration of Palestinians as diasporic inserts another dimension into the complex issue of homeland and the desire for return. For many, it is a homeland close by and is often known firsthand or via inherited memories. Echoing Darwish's argument and Jubran's poem, spatiotemporal and experiential distances are problematic in diasporic classifications. In Lebanon especially, identity is structured through the refugee community and its particular experiences rather than being directed, in an unmediated fashion, toward the homeland.51

Ibid., 205.

REFUGEES: LAW, POLICY, AND COMMUNITY

The juridical status of the refugee is pivotal in problematizing a Palestinian diaspora. How are the concepts refugee and diaspora articulated? How would diaspora encapsulate the varied juridical categories of Palestinian belonging and identity (from stateless refugees to citizens to residents to the complex array of legal identities of those under occupation)? Does classifying Palestinians as diasporic risk rendering less resonant and appropriate the internationally determined and recognized legal category and identity of “Palestinian refugee”? Scholars of Palestine have asked the same question. Hanafi52

Hanafi, “Re-thinking the Diaspora,” 10.

has argued that “diaspora need not be regarded as the negation” of the refugee, and he asserts that acquiring nationality in another country does not nullify refugee status.

However, there is a distinction between de facto and de jure refugees. Palestinians registered as refugees can risk losing their de jure refugee status if they become naturalized citizens of another country. While carrying out ethnographic research in Lebanon in the mid-1990s, rumors were rampant that UNRWA was cutting from its lists those refugees who had acquired citizenship elsewhere. Hundreds of Palestinians living abroad returned to Lebanon in the summers to ensure that their refugee status remained valid. Some lost it; others did not. In Jordan, however, which granted citizenship to Palestinian refugees in the 1950s, they have retained their refugee status. Hanafi argues for shifting the focus from a discussion of the legally framed right of return to a sociological focus on the modalities of return. However, the juridical weight of this right is a point of departure for exploring these modalities.

The 20th-century emergence of the internationally recognized legal category of refugee has implications for the way we use diaspora. The Palestinian right of return has four sources in international law: human rights law, humanitarian law,53

See John Quigley, “Displaced Palestinians and the Right of Return,” Harvard International Law Journal 39 (1998): 193–98.

refugee law, and United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194 (III) of December 1948. Unlike immigrants, refugees have some rights, claims, and a voice, however marginal, in the international arena. Brah contends that diaspora is permanent: it is “essentially about settling down, about putting roots ‘elsewhere.’”54

Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora, 182.

Refugee status is supposed to be temporary, and most host countries strive to prevent permanent integration.

Assigning Palestinians diasporic status could risk diluting concerns with policy and long-term, equitable solutions. This political dimension suggests a careful reading of the concept, in particular its flexibility and thus widespread currency. The modern concept of the refugee arose from the displacement that followed the breakup of empires, the emergence of the nation-state, wars, and the nationalist impulse that excludes particular groups on the one hand and, on the other, from the subsequent emergence of administrative regimes that observe, enumerate, manage, and govern the displaced and in so doing construct them as a legal category and subjects of intervention. In the world of nation-states, refugees are unable to effectively claim the protection of a state. In its very usage, refugee calls for international intervention and solutions.

The term refugee has a political–legal dimension that diaspora does not, but it is also limited. One can call oneself a refugee and live a refugee-like existence, but to have access to the interventionary services and resources of the international community, one should be a member of a group officially declared refugees by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and should fit the definition stated in the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (or, in the case of Palestinians, UNRWA's definition). Is diaspora the most appropriate term to describe the situation of internationally recognized refugees with a right of return? Approximately half the population has refugee status, and over half resides in historic Palestine. Diaspora may describe a way of being in the world and the process of identity formation, but it can hardly account for the varying legal positions that are critical in refugee identity formation.55

A seldom discussed issue in the social science and humanities literature on identity is the role of law. See selected articles in David Kairys, The Politics of Law: A Progressive Critique, rev. ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990), and Jill Norgen and Serena Nanda, American Cultural Pluralism and Law (New York: Praeger, 1988).

We need to pose this question: does subsuming Palestinians under the rubric of diaspora dislodge the politics of refugee return? Diasporic has no legal meaning; the legal designation of refugee can be a strategic asset. It identifies a homeland and/or country from which one has been displaced and to which one may be entitled to return, and it activates the aid machinery. In an international legal context, refugee status is vital in pressing claims for justice and thus is a central reason Palestinian refugees are reluctant to cede their UNRWA registration. Palestinians in Lebanon initially vehemently disliked being called refugees; when the Palestinian resistance movement controlled the camps and politically mobilized large sectors of the population, Palestinians referred to themselves in more active terms, as revolutionaries, militants, and strugglers.56

Julie Peteet, Gender in Crisis. Women and the Palestinian Resistance Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).

Since the 1982 departure of the PLO and the collapse of the social safety net it once provided, camp Palestinians have not hesitated to invoke the term refugees in referring to themselves.57

Peteet, Landscape of Hope and Despair.

Continued access to United Nations resources and the right of residency in Lebanon are contingent upon refugee status.

Thus, we need to explore if diaspora embodies the potential to dislodge the politics of return. Could a diasporic status become part of the argument for dissolving UNRWA and integrating Palestinians into host states or resettling them in third countries? Furthermore, we need to question whether endowing Palestinians with a diasporic status may deflect attention from their protracted struggle for self-determination. Does a diasporic status assume irreversibility? For some, forcible dispersion has been followed by well-organized demographic projects of population replacement: Armenians by Turks (or Kurds), Palestinians by Jewish settlers, and Bosnian Muslims by Serbs in some areas.

Can diaspora encompass the politics of return? The celebratory aspects of diaspora revolve around the creative and hybrid mergings that occur in the interstices of multiple cultural contexts, the relationships to multiple places, and the position of both vis-à-vis identity formation. Palestinians in exile certainly are part of this global trend, which coexists with the politics of return and the prominence of place of origin in identity formation and expression. Territory of origin, particularly when it has been claimed and occupied by another, remains critical to nationalist imaginings and a sense of justice. This does not necessarily imply a linear or unmediated orientation to past place; the intervening years have profoundly reshaped these communities, social relationships, and the way the homeland is imagined. When the PLO promoted the idea of a democratic secular state in Palestine, this futuristic vision could hardly be characterized as a return to the past, mythic or otherwise. Developed in exile, its standpoint was the “outside,” and it reflected a modern, cosmopolitan conceptualization of place, polity, and identity. In this way, those outside the geographic space of Palestine created an imaginary homeland as Axel proposed for diasporic Sikhs.

The refusal to allow a Palestinian return assumes a unilinear view of history in which they will assimilate elsewhere and posits an exclusivist ethnoreligious state as an ideal. It also selectively denies continuity between past and present. This has been consistently rejected by Palestinians who can imagine a future in continuity with the past but with a clear trajectory of intervening experiences and places. At the very least, active Palestinian resistance to displacement compels us to probe the role of political movements of return in assigning membership in a diaspora.

Refugees cannot be disentangled from the modern state and its bureaucratic control over immigration, naturalization, visas, and the granting of asylum and refugee status. In a world of nation-states, a Palestinian diaspora that encompasses host states would have to include as a critical component being without the protection of a state. For Palestinian refugees, daily life is hedged by restrictions on residency, mobility, work, education, legal rights, and political expression and organization, hardly Brah's state of permanence and integration. In general, refugees, often propelled by state violence, are distinguished legally and analytically from migrant flows attributed to the structural violence of poverty, underdevelopment, and discrimination, or the seeking of new opportunities. Both migrants and refugees elucidate a global–local intersection that heavily implicates the nation-state. Migrant flows suggest weak economies unable to ensure adequate employment, a living wage, and new opportunities, and refugees indicate unstable political conditions and a state that cannot or will not provide protection for its citizens and inhabitants. Unlike the migrant, the refugee is an object of intervention and discursivity by international aid institutions, which administer to them as an aggregate with basic human needs. They are simultaneously inside and outside of the national. However vulnerable, legal and illegal migrants usually retain citizenship until, and unless, they apply for naturalization in another country.

Brah conceptualizes diasporas as simultaneous sites “of hope and new beginnings.”58

Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora, 193.

That the displaced suffer trauma goes without saying, yet they often begin lives anew and craft highly creative responses to dislocation. As I observed during extended fieldwork, Palestinian refugee camps hardly constitute an environment of creative new beginnings. In Lebanon, they conceivably were places of creativity in the 1950s and 1960s, when UNRWA education offered hope for the future and return seemed possible, and from 1968 to 1982, when they enjoyed a modicum of internal autonomy. Then, they could be described as highly empowered sites where a vision of the future was incubating.59

Peteet, Landscape of Hope and Despair.

This short-lived period was undercut by the Lebanese civil war (1975–91) and the Israeli invasion of 1982. Impoverished and tightly controlled by the Lebanese government, they became places of despair and hopelessness. A similar environment of hopelessness, despair, and anger characterizes the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Another key element of diaspora that does not resonate with the Palestinian experience concerns community. Community formation in new places and the “communal elites and the institutions they develop” are defining components of diasporic societies60

Khachig Tölölyan, “Elites and Institutions in the Armenian Transition,” Diaspora 9 (2000): 106–36, 108.

— indeed, for some they are the “seminal moment in diaspora.”61

Kim Butler, “Defining Disapora, Refining a Discourse,” Diaspora 10 (2001): 204.

Tölölyan argues that for the Armenians relationships and exchanges between elites and institutions in different diasporic locales and their relations with the homeland construct common interests between the components of this dispersed group.62

Tölölyan, “Elites and Institutions.”

Although Palestinian elites and exile institutions are underresearched,63

See Sari Hanafi and Linda Tabar, Emergence of a Palestinian Globalized Elite: Donors, International Organizations and Local NGOs (Ramallah/Jerusalem: Muwatan/Institute of Jerusalem Studies, 2006).

we can begin by asking about linkages among communities outside Palestine, between the inside and the outside and about sectors (economic, social, political, intellectual, etc.) and the location of the leadership. The Palestinian political leadership has moved to Palestine from an exilic trajectory that took it from Amman to Beirut to Tunis. Although supportive, Palestinians in the Arab world and abroad are not the financial or political backbone of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination, nor is there an identifiable Palestinian elite that takes corporate action in a transnational, national, or institutional context. In the wake of Oslo and the leadership's return from exile, political decisions now emanate from inside Palestine.

Palestinian institutions are not necessarily linked across national borders, and communities often have little detailed knowledge of one another, let alone sustained and intimate contact. Indeed, even within one locale, such as Lebanon, the pre-1948 class cleavage was transposed in radically visible and experiential ways to a camp/urban division in exile. During field research, I was often struck by how little those in the West Bank knew of the experiences of Palestinians in Lebanon and vice versa. The media, in particular the Qatar-based al-Jazeera and the Dubai-based al-Arabiyya, have more recently crafted a public space in which Palestinians all over the world can view events in the West Bank and Gaza in graphic detail. The media may strengthen the transnational ties of Palestinian communities in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Australia with the West Bank and Gaza; however, each of these communities has a set of experiences and lives governed by radically different structures of governance that render their day-to-day experiences closer to each other than to those at home or elsewhere.

Palestinian sociopolitical institutions run the gamut from students, writers, and women's unions to several human rights organizations, local and foreign-based nongovernmental organizations, and development and research agencies. However, one must probe the complexities of their simultaneous transnationality and their local groundings, a task far beyond the exploratory scope of this article. At this stage, identifying avenues of further inquiry and research are called for. Is there an identifiable Palestinian financial and mercantile sector linked transnationally? What are the roles of philanthropic institutions and intellectuals in constituting a Palestinian diaspora? Are transnational linkages becoming hallmarks of diaspora, or are they a sort of affiliation signifying new kinds of relations that call for a new lexicon and analytical tools?

In the United States, Palestinian communities have formed village-based associations, such as the Ramallah Federation or the al-Bireh Club, that are social and cultural organizations with a membership, as their names imply, drawn from a highly localized segment of a population that is place and nation based; in other words, these organizations are both local and global. Organizations that address their concerns as residents of the United States tend to be Arab-based rather than Palestinian, such as the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the Association of Arab-American University Graduates, or the American-Arab Institute. Identity in America revolves around the cultural and religious as well as the nationalistic. One would be hard-pressed, however, to identify a cohesive and overarching Palestinian organization in exile, aside from the PLO, the strength of which has been considerably weakened and its influence marginalized. A cohesive leadership in exile, or in Palestine, would be even harder to identify.

SEMANTICS, IDENTITY, AND BELONGING

The Arabic term ghurba is often translated as diaspora but does not embody the English connotations, which closely associate it with a Jewish diaspora, now universalized, along with the Armenian and the Greek. Contemporary invocations of diaspora include a social condition and consciousness,64

Floya Anthias, “Evaluating Diaspora: Beyond Ethnicity?” Sociology 32 (1998): 557–80, 560.

along with the classical meaning of scattering. Clifford cautions that although recognizing the “strong entailment of Jewish history on the language of diaspora,” it should not be “a definitive model.”65

Clifford, “Diasporas,” 306.

Suffice it to say, there has been a “discursive shift, an impulse to re-imagine a wide variety of types and experiences of population movements as being similar enough to have the same terminology applied to them.”66

Jon Stratton, “(Dis)placing the Jews: Historicizing the Idea of Diaspora,” Diaspora 6 (1997), 302.

Stratton argues that the term diaspora (from the Greek) as applied to the Jews refers to their displacement from the Pale of Settlement and is thus fundamentally modern,67

Ibid., 306.

whereas galut (Hebrew for exile) refers to the premodern Jewish dispersal.

In Arabic, ghurba implies travel, being away from one's homeland, in the West or in a foreign place. The Hans Wehr Arabic–English Dictionary translates ghurba as “absence from the homeland; separation from one's native country, banishment, exile; life, or, place, away from home.”68

Hans Wehr, A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, ed. J. Milton Cowan (Beirut/London: Libraire du Libant/Macdonal & Evans Ltd, 1974), 668.

To translate it as diaspora is a linguistic stretch. The root, gh-r-b, means west (where the sun sets) and foreign. Parmenter notes that it is often translated as diaspora but that it refers more specifically to “the experience of being a stranger separated from one's familiar home.”69

Barbara McKean Parmenter, Giving Voice to Stones: Place and Identity in Palestinian Literature (Austin, Tex: University of Texas Press), 48.

In refugee camps in Lebanon, political rhetoric and everyday discourse initially tended to use the term lujūء (refugeeness) to describe their social state. As the reality of long-term displacement set in, shutāt (fragmentation or scattering) became more prevalent in describing social reality and may be a more appropriate translation of diaspora in the Palestinian context. Accordingly, ghurba might be better translated as exile, or being out of one's home and in the domain of foreigners. For example, Palestinians in Lebanon perceive themselves as a fragment of a community in exile, and their particular community is undergoing a process of further fragmentation, as increasing levels of out-migration are reducing their numbers.

Some Palestinian writers do use the term ghurba; in an early work Fawaz Turki describes his years in the ghurba as a Palestinian diaspora.70

Fawaz Turki, The Disinherited. Journal of a Palestinian Exile (New York/London: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 167.

Others have made frequent reference to manfā (exile), including Mahmud Darwish, in his poem “Risala min al-Manfa” (Letter from the Exile). In his poem for Edward Said, entitled “A Contrapuntal Reading,” Darwish writes, “The outside world is exile/Exile is the world inside/and what are you between the two.”71

Mahmud Darwish, “Alan min al-Manfa” (Now in Exile); “Risala min al-Manfa” (Letter from Exile); and “Tabaq” (A Contrapuntal Reading), trans. Muna Anis in al-Ahram Weekly On-line, 30 September–6 October 2004, 710, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2004/710/cu4.htm (accessed September 2006).

In Palestinian literary landscapes, the desert, camp, and city are symbols of exile, underscoring nonbelonging and detachment rather than belonging.72

Parmenter, Giving Voice to Stones, 48–69.

Palestinian poet Abu Salma pens plaintively of Palestine: “What horizon but this one defines my world?”73

Salma Khadra Jayyusi, Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature, trans. Sharif Elmusa and Naomi Shihab Nye (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 97.

Thus, Palestinians deploy a range of terms to describe their displacement and social condition.

Although Palestinians may be both diasporic and refugees, the former may be an ideological invocation that some Palestinians reject. For example, ethnographic research on Palestinian refugees in Lebanon illustrates that they often refer to themselves as refugees, depending on the current nature of their relations with their Lebanese hosts.74

Peteet, Landscape of Hope and Despair.

Their material and political vulnerability renders this a strategic necessity, because refugee status provides access to some resources from the international community. Palestinians in Europe or the United States often refer to themselves as exiles or diasporic. Although still potent as a mobilizing frame, the right of return does not mean they would repatriate if given the possibility; the return of refugees would be tightly tied to their degree of economic, political, and social integration in their host communities and the extent and nature of their social relations with people in Palestine.

Unlike diasporics, who often experience multiple places as home and carry citizenship in at least one, for Palestinians home and belonging are more complex and ambiguous. The bulk of Palestinians in geographic proximity to Palestine live with varying degrees of belonging—from marginality and nonbelonging in Lebanon to a modicum of belonging in Syria, where they hold substantial civil rights (within a Syrian context of limited rights for citizens as well), to economic integration in Jordan, where they are citizens. For Palestinians, the homeland and relation to it constitute a primary facet of collective identity. One might be from a place but formed by another.

An example of the primacy of place of origin is the cognitive map of a camp. The camps are spatially organized by villages such that they resemble microcosms of pre-1948 Palestine. Villages are metonyms for places that exist in memory, yet they have a contemporary social existence. Each generation lives in a web of village-based social relations within the spaces in which they have been reconstituted. These cognitive and social maps facilitate location of self and others and conform to what Pile and Thrift call “wayfinding,”75

Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift, eds. Mapping the Subject: Geographies of Cultural Transformation (London: Routledge, 1995), 1.

the positioning of self and others in a spatially meaningful way. During fieldwork in ʿAin al-Hilwa camp in Lebanon in the late 1990s, I was joined by a group of friendly, rowdy young boys. When I asked where they were from, they yelled in unison, “We are from al-Bassa!” Pointing to one boy who rather sheepishly stood aside, they shouted, “But he is from Ras al-Ahmar!”

Identity is a process of becoming and being and, for those on the move, involves multiple places. For Palestinians in exile, identity is multiply referenced spatially. However, the spatial point of departure in formulating identity remains the homeland. Various places in an exilic trajectory intervene to further complicate an already heavily imbricated identity (by gender, region, class, religion, age, and kinship).

The diaspora label usually assumes cultural and linguistic difference between places that give form to a diasporic consciousness and identity and places of origin. Indeed, in this conceptualization, diasporic identity is constructed through difference. Disaporic peoples are often constituted as an ethnic minority, such as Armenians or Chinese in the United States. However, for most Palestinians, difference and alienation, and indeed vulnerability, derive from their political–legal status (registered refugees and de facto refugees) more so than from ethnic identity. Within the Arab Middle East, Palestinians are not an ethnic group with a distinct language, religion, or culture, and their sense of history and collective identity, although distinctly Palestinian, is embedded in the complex web of a regional history of Islam, empire, colonialism, and Arab nationalism. This is not to gloss over regional cultural differences or to essentialize Palestinian culture but simply to acknowledge that Palestinian exile unfolds in a terrain of generalized cultural familiarity, where they are coethnics. They are simultaneously same and different, inside and outside, and part of and yet excluded from on the basis of citizenship, nationality, and legal status.

If we insert power and differential positioning into the host–refugee relationship, the issue of difference is complicated. Through processes of exclusion and a restrictive legal status, host countries have constituted Palestinian refugees as different from citizens. Lebanon, for example, has imposed severe restrictions on Palestinian employment, mobility, and access to health care and education. In Jordan, difference, and thus vulnerability and marginalization, was substantially minimized through the granting of citizenship to refugees but remains a critical feature of social relations, economic and political organization, and identity. East Bank or West Bank origins do carry socioeconomic and political significance. The private sector tends to be dominated by Palestinians while East Bank Jordanians are more heavily represented in the government and military. Palestinians as a community are construed as potentially subversive by the regime, which keeps careful control over their representation in government and military service and their political activities. Although granted citizenship, registered refugees continue to receive UNRWA services, and many still reside in its camps. In other words, these are refugee/citizens—both/and rather than either/or. Thus, the question of difference between Palestinians and host Arab states takes on heightened meaning, but not for reasons of cultural or ethnic difference. Indeed, this shifts the focus to the national and the legal—issues of citizenship; belonging to a state; and having access to the privileges it confers, such as passports, representation in the state, and access to public education, health care, and social security.

For many Palestinians, border crossings, checkpoints, and travel documents are loaded with meaning—actually dread—in daily life and, concomitantly, in subjectivity and cultural expression. In literature and poetry, themes of discrimination, vulnerability, and, most significantly, a keen sense of injustice hardly convey a diasporic situation in which communities are an integral part of a larger society or, at the least, possess citizenship. Palestinian poet Tawfiq Sayigh's poem “To Enter a Country” eloquently evokes the despair of statelessness and nonbelonging.

Edging closer, but without admission,

it goes on and you never reach your aim.

Your lacking a passport means

statelessness, no entry…

a face that's terrified you before

in a thousand ports,

a thousand countries…

he bellows:

“Your passport?”

No passport—

No entry

If you don't have it,

get out…

Passports are stamped.

Everyone hurries in:

murderers, traitors and spies,…

You cry out, pray, supplicate:

“My papers are in order;

I have a degree in every pocket,

Why have they not issued my passport?

Who or what informed on me?

What are the charges against me?

I can answer to anything.

There are no embassies in the ocean.”

“And which is your embassy?”76

Jayussi, Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature, 286–88.

Pan-Arabism and Arab nationalism and identity provide another critical dimension of diaspora as applied to Palestinians. Otherness for Palestinians can be contingent on particular configurations of power and juridical status. “Palestinianism” comes to the fore when Arab states appear to have abandoned the Palestinian cause, as in 1982, when Israeli troops and their right-wing Lebanese Christian allies entered Beirut and a massacre ensued in the Sabra–Chatila camps. I recall Palestinians screaming, “We are not Arabs!” Thus, the Other is a shifting constellation of others who, at times, coalesce into a singular regional and Israeli opposition to Palestinian national aspirations. At one point, Palestinians strategically deployed the discourse and narrative of Arab nationalism, with their inclusiveness and sense of rights and obligations, while maintaining Palestinian national distinctiveness. In short, they appropriated the logic of Pan-Arabism to achieve a specific national project. If an Arab nation was imagined as the domain of all Arabs, could the Palestinians be diasporic while residing as refugees in Lebanon, Syria, or Jordan? The Arab nation I refer to here is the imagined one, and its ideological expansiveness quickly gave way to narrowly conceived state interests. Ironically, Pan-Arab discourse has long appealed to Zionist argumentation that Palestinians have a homeland in a geographically expansive Arab world.

In reality, mobility in the Arab world is tightly constrained by state borders and citizenship, particularly for Palestinians. Indeed, they caustically note, they often face more difficulties traveling among Arab countries than they do traveling abroad. A Palestinian rhetoric of Arabism is a kind of critical chorus that makes demands on Arab states and provides a trenchant critique of failings. The Palestinian cause was a litmus test of Arab nationalism, illuminating its rhetorical and imaginary nature and exposing its limitations, theoretical and practical.

CONCLUSION

With the maxim “maximum land, minimal population” as a guiding principle of Israeli policy, Palestinian displacement remains an ongoing process. The intent behind the network of strategically located settlements in the occupied territories and the eight-meter-high cement wall encircling Palestinian localities in the West Bank, part of the policy of closure, is to unilaterally draw a border, to enable land acquisition, to obstruct Palestinian statehood in a contiguous territory, and to strangle Palestinian communities in anticipation of steady, but slow-motion, emigration.

Celebrations of unrooted, denationalized cosmopolitanism have been confronted by reminders of the violence and trauma involved in displacement and the continuing primacy of the state in determining the nature of mobility. The universalizing discourse of diaspora, which in the 1990s assumed an emerging postnational world, occluded and undercut the seriousness of the violence that often precedes and propels mass displacement and the suffering and mutilations it effects. The mutilations of exile have not always been put into relief—and indeed in the face of an often vibrant creativity they sometimes recede to recesses of private memory. Relatedly, uncritical deployment of diaspora and rootlessness diverts attention from examining borders that exclude and/or lock in people and the legal structures that determine juridical–political identities. Those seeking asylum in the United States who end up in detention awaiting a judicial hearing or deportation or Palestinians confined in refugee camps in Lebanon or behind a cement wall in the West Bank hardly fit the profile of the diasporic cosmopolitan traveler traversing borders at will with recognized, valid, legal identity papers. The latter image is more appropriate to academics, financiers, new global “security” forces, tourists, and the literati—the privileged and well-endowed travelers—what one Palestinian, in a moment of despair over a lack of travel documents, referred to as the “super citizens” of the world.

In the contemporary world, diaspora cannot be a modular concept. Polysemic approaches may be more useful, providing flexibility and ambiguity in face of the ever-expanding variety of mobilities and displacements. Although this may be the case, we need to be attuned to the potential ramifications of its application. Even though Palestinians can be both diasporic and refugees, the term embodies the potential to eclipse the legally derived term refugee.

Palestinians are conceivably diasporic by some measures and not by others; some of them may be in “diaspora moments” or have “diasporic dimensions,”77

Clifford, “Diasporas,” 306.

particularly those with citizenship in the West. The term diaspora may not appropriate to the present situation, with its spatial and temporal proximity of place of exile and homeland, and the active resistance displacement has generated. Terms heard more frequently are refugeeness and fragmentation. Furthermore, Palestinians are not as homogeneous as the term diaspora implies. The distinction between refugee and nonrefugee, a legal one that can also translate into one of less or more capital, opportunities, and security, is significant, and so are attitudes toward return. Always vulnerable, by and large, the former can envision a return (they are well aware of the transformations in their homeland and have few if any illusions of a return to an imaginary past), but the latter, integrated into host states, would not so easily leave for an uncertain future. Return would not obviate diaspora. Indeed, it would only make it a less problematic term to describe the Palestinian case. Armenians and Jews are prime examples of the possibility of return not signaling the end of diaspora.

Clearly, Palestinians are in some senses of the word diasporic. However, one can mount a vigorous critique that suggests they may not belong unequivocally in the category. The category would be best served not by designing stricter and more detailed typologies but by holding it up to other terms of analysis that may be more characteristic of particular groups. Not every displaced group, however sustained and demographically large, is diasporic. Inclusivity can risk diluting the term of meaning and can overrun other categories, such as refugee and migrant, the specificity of which becomes occluded and depoliticized. A new lexicon is needed to capture the variety of contemporary mobilities and displacements. Refugees, exiles, immigrants, proximate exiles, nation in exile, or emergent diaspora may better encompass the current spatial, demographic, social, legal, and subjective realities of Palestinians outside and inside their homeland.

Author's note: A previous version of this paper was first presented at the conference Diasporas: Transnational Identity and the Politics of the Homeland, University of California, Berkeley, 12–14 November 1999. Revised versions were presented at the Conference on Refugee Repatriation, Processes, Patterns and Modes of Transnationality: A Comparative Perspective, Palestinian Diaspora and Refugee Center (Shaml), and International Migration, Spaces and Societies (Migrinter), in Ramallah, Palestine, March 2004. I thank participants at both conferences for their insightful comments. In addition, I am grateful to Seteney Shami, Shawn Parkhurst, Anne-Marie Pederson, Beshara Doumani, and Sari Hanafi for their thoughtful discussions of the topic and appreciate the insightful suggestions and comments by anonymous reviewers.