Children of the “Idea of Palestine”1

1. This phrase has been taken from Mureed al-Barghouti's “Songs For a Country No Longer Known” pp. 60–61.

: Negotiating Identity, Belonging and Home in the Palestinian Diaspora

Abstract

Some 5 million people live in the Palestinian diaspora today, with the possibility of their ‘return’ to their homeland ever bleaker due to the failure of the Israeli–Palestinian peace process. As a result of the nature of their dispossession from their homeland and their politicised exile, understanding the complexities of their lived experiences requires us to go beyond conventional notions of “first” and “second” migrant generations. This paper argues that the experiences of diaspora Palestinians are in many ways framed not so much by what “generation” they belong to in terms of migration, but by how many generations they have been in exile. It examines shifts in negotiations of concepts of identity, belonging and home for successive generations of diaspora Palestinians. It then explores these ideas through the case study of the community of Palestinians from Kuwait who relocated to Australia as a result of the 1990–91 Gulf conflict.

Keywords:

• Belonging
• Diaspora
• Exilic Generations
• Home
• Palestinians

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editors, reviewers and Kynan Gentry for their comments on drafts of this paper.

Notes

1. This phrase has been taken from Mureed al-Barghouti's “Songs For a Country No Longer Known” pp. 60–61.

2. As part of a wider PhD thesis on the experiences of Palestinians from Kuwait as a result of the 1990–91 Gulf conflict, in-depth oral history interviews were undertaken with members of the community in Jordan, Australia and Britain. The interviews relevant here, with individuals in Australia, were undertaken between June 2000 and August 2003 (with a number of interviewees re-interviewed after particular situations such as 9/11). In total I interviewed 3 individuals in Perth, 21 in Melbourne and 14 in Sydney. Interviewees were identified through a number of processes which included: establishing links with key individuals and groups within the Arab and Islamic communities in each locality, the process of “snowballing” and complimenting this with my personal contacts within the communities. Respondents were selected in order to present as broad a spectrum of experience as possible in terms of gender, age, religion and socio-economic background. The general demographics of the interviewees were 23 males and 15 females. Thirty were Muslims, five were Christians and three were agnostic or declined to reveal their religion. In order to categorise people into exilic generations, I analysed the background of each to determine where their formative experiences had occurred. According to this categorisation 14 interviewees were from al nakba, 18 were from the first exilic and 6 were from the second exilic generations.

3. Examples include protests at the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA), planting trees or building more permanent housing structures in the refugee camps (Slyomovics; Turki “To be a Palestinian” 5–6).

4. Due to the political implications of Palestinian identity in the push for a Palestinian state and the right of return (Lavie and Swedenburg).

5. Particularly those who carried only Egyptian Travel Documents (ETDs). EDTs were granted to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip (when it was controlled by Egypt between 1948 and 1967) and Egypt, but did not necessarily ensure the holder's entry even into Egypt (unless they satisfied particular criteria) and thus effectively rendered their holders stateless. As a result ETD holders were largely unable to flee Kuwait during the invasion and war and also faced the full brunt of the Kuwaiti backlash against the Palestinian community (who they regarded as “collaborators”) after liberation (Brand 12; Graham-Brown).

6. This transfer of “traumatic memory” resonates with work by Holocaust scholars such as Susan Brison and Marianne Hirsch.

7. There is a burgeoning literature about the impact of transnational technologies (particularly the Internet) for refugee and migrant communities (see, for example: Khalili; Stamatopoulou-Robbins; Hanafi; Holmes; Escobar; Panagakos and Horst; Van den Bos and Nell; Bernal; Hiller and Franz; Baldassar, Baldock and Wilding).

8. Baldassar describes visits home for Italian-Australian second generation as a rite of passage involving a transformation in identity that results in increased identification with both Italy and Australia.