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Palestinian Refugees in Syria: Imagining Liberation and Return Beyond the Nation-State
Abstract
While more than six decades have passed since the traumatic events of the Nakba, Palestinian refugees have maintained a political discourse that insists on the right of return and advocates liberation from Zionist colonization. However, the Palestinian political discourse on return and liberation is not articulated homogeneously across Palestinian constituencies. By focusing on overlapping ideologies as well as lines of fracture in this discourse, I hope to produce a more complex picture of current Palestinian attitudes toward the notions of return and liberation. This paper is based primarily on fieldwork conducted in Palestinian refugee camps in Syria from 2004 to 2006 but also incorporates more recent fieldwork (summer 2012) conducted among Palestinians in France as a means of comparing attitudes about return among camp-based Palestinian refugees and Palestinians in the diaspora more broadly. I will show that among Palestinian refugees in Syria, return is primarily understood in terms of returning to one's actual home or hometown irrespective of national boundaries; I will also show that return was expressed in moral terms as a question of respect and dignity. Drawing on fieldwork conducted this past summer in France, I will show that while UNRWA is seen as a potential political ally in achieving return for Palestinian refugees living in camps in Syria, it was generally looked down on as a depoliticizing force by the Palestinians I interviewed in France. I will also show that while Palestinian refugees in camps in Syria drew on a very localized imaginary of what return would entail, their Palestinian counterparts in France offered a much broader and more flexible notion of what return would entail. These differences aside, both groups offered visions of return that question the notion of the nation-state as the ideal space through which return, and linked to it liberation, can occur.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Syria
Sub Area
Population Studies