Palestinian Refugees of the Oslo Generation: Thinking beyond the Nation?

Abstract

This article analyzes the political narratives and critiques of young Palestinian refugees who have grown up in the bleak post-Oslo period. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews conducted with refugee youth in Jordan and the West Bank between 2009 and 2014, I show that this generation of refugees endorses a collective Palestinian identity and peoplehood with claims to the (home)land while also narrating their identities and relations to land, nation, state, and rights as complex, multifaceted, and fractured. Their political imaginaries do not limit the political and epistemic project of decolonizing Palestine to the classic paradigm of a territorialized nation-state as enshrined in the Oslo two-state agenda. Rather, they point to a creative and radical, post-nation-statist, translocal politics for Palestine.

Keywords:

• generation
• decolonization
• nation-state
• Oslo Accords
• Palestinian refugees
• translocality
• sovereignty
• territoriality

In December 2010, in the context of the popular uprisings beginning in several Arab countries, a group of young Palestinians from Gaza published the Gaza Youth Manifesto. It begins: “Fuck Hamas. Fuck Israel. Fuck Fatah. Fuck UN. Fuck UNWRA. Fuck USA! We, the youth in Gaza, are so fed up with Israel, Hamas, the occupation, the violations of human rights and the indifference of the international community!”¹ The manifesto denounces Israeli settler-colonial violence and the political impasse in Palestine, calling for a reorganization and rethinking of existing political structures and agendas. Such calls for radical political renewal are common among young Palestinians who have grown up in an increasingly bleak political context.² Voicing their anger at the evermore encroaching settler colonization of their lands and livelihoods, these youth also criticize the older generation of Palestinian activists and politicians for factionalism and clientelism. Most importantly, they have no trust in the mainstream peace and negotiations agenda—the “peace orthodoxy”³ established with the 1993 Oslo Accords and its two-state framework.

This is particularly true of young refugees, those most excluded and sidelined by post-Oslo politics. Misrepresented and marginalized by their national leadership—the Palestinian Authority (PA), which has abandoned the refugee question and their rights—many have lived all their lives in neighboring host countries. There, they are subjected to different forms of instability, violence, and discrimination enshrined in legal stipulations or enacted through everyday political practices. Although there are important specificities to the political cultures in each diaspora and displacement context, the young Palestinian refugees of the Oslo generation, the “jil Oslo,”⁴ share both an interest and an aim in searching for, thinking through, and proposing new political paradigms for Palestine as well as the wider region.

In this paper, I trace such alternative proposals, analyzing the political identities, cultures, and imaginaries that young, politically active Palestinian refugees in Jordan and the West Bank articulate and practice. This young generation of refugees, I argue, questions the “national order of things.”⁵ This does not mean that they abandon their Palestinian identity or “think beyond the [Palestinian] nation.”⁶ Rather, for them, it is the territorialized nation-state, as enshrined in the failed two-state framework, that needs rethinking and questioning. In their translocal, post-nation-statist political imaginaries, they foreground the multiple places and localities where they grew up, and to whose histories and peoples they feel intimately and affectively connected. It is the refugee camps, towns, neighborhoods, and villages in the (home)land, the Bilad, of historic Palestine, as well as the wider Bilad ash-Sham region, that mark their alternative political imaginaries as “counterhistories” and “counteridentities”⁷ to the classic notion of the territorialized citizen and nation-state.

This paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the West Bank and Jordan over the course of several fieldtrips between 2009 and 2014.⁸ From this broad fieldwork material, I draw on a specific set of individual interviews and group discussions with young jil Oslo Palestinian refugee activists: those born in the 1980s or early 1990s who grew up in the shadow of the 1993 Oslo Accords. Additionally, I rely on extensive informal conversations with young activists and participant observations at different local events, meetings, and gatherings.⁹ All interlocutors are third- or fourth-generation descendants of Palestinians who were displaced from their homes, towns, and villages in the 1948 Nakba or the 1967 war and, as such, all hold refugee status. Most of the interviewees in Jordan have Jordanian citizenship and live in the urban neighborhoods of Amman, while the majority of interviewees in the West Bank live in refugee camps. I focus in particular on two initiatives involving jil Oslo refugees: Campus in Camps at Dheisheh camp in the West Bank, and Taghyir wa Tahrir (change and liberation) in Amman.

I first engage with the conceptual literature on youth and generation, on the one hand, and nation, rights, and political identities, on the other, contextualizing this scholarship within the specific framework of Palestinian displacement, refugeehood, and statelessness. I then focus on political representation and questions of sovereignty, tracing the critiques and calls for radical change that jil Oslo refugees articulate vis-à-vis the current status quo, the PA, and other governing structures. This generation’s political agenda, however, goes beyond demanding an overhaul of representative structures. As I show in the penultimate section of this article, they advance a deeper critique of established political frameworks in/for Palestine. Young refugees’ identifications and loyalties with “home” and “host” are complex, multiple, and might sometimes appear contradictory: this is particularly true in the West Bank, which although nominally under formal PA jurisdiction is subject to omnipresent Israeli settler-colonial control, but also in Jordan, where the majority of Palestinian refugees hold Jordanian citizenship. This generation upholds and confirms a collective Palestinian identity and peoplehood with claims to the (home)land, and they also narrate their relations to land, nation, and rights as multifaceted, hybrid, and “fractured.”¹⁰ In their political imaginaries, the decolonization of Palestine cannot be limited to a territorialized nation-state. Rather, it necessitates a creative and radical post-nation-statist and translocal politics.

Generation and Nation

The emergence of new radical political cultures among young Palestinian refugees points to generational shifts in the Palestinian political landscape rather than constituting youth politics, per se. “Youth” is not a “natural” or biological category; it is socially and culturally determined. It indicates a socialized life cycle and way of living with specific social and economic responsibilities.¹¹ In the Palestinian refugee context, due to unemployment and delayed marriages, youth has undefined boundaries and can extend up to thirty-five- or even forty-year-olds.¹² The literature on youth and youth cultures in the Middle East has seen a surge since the Arab uprisings.¹³ But rather than identifying specific characteristics and cultures often associated with youth (youthfulness, fun, and so forth), I work here with the notion of generation, tracing how young people’s socialization during a specific historical period influences their collective politics, especially in relation to previous generations.

Generation has always played an important role in Palestinian politics. Generational naming practices, such as jil al-Nakba (the Nakba generation), jil al-thawra (the revolution generation), or jil al-intifada (the intifada generation), demonstrate that context-specific historical events influence the political cultures of a specific generation and—relatedly—strengthen generational group identification.¹⁴ Karl Mannheim theorized generation as a collective identity of people who share a “common location in the historical dimension of the social process.”¹⁵ Having lived through particular historical events, especially crises, a generational group constructs a shared “consciousness” as “the basis of their group solidarity.”¹⁶ This does not mean that certain trends appear exclusively or homogenously within one generation. In Palestine, the jil Oslo, as Sunaina Maira showed, is shaped in the post-Oslo moment, bringing young people together in their quest “to engage in protest politics, to publicly confront the PA and the framework of post-Oslo politics, and to mobilize outside of the established parties and factions in the West Bank, Gaza, and in Israel.”¹⁷ These political imaginaries are expressed through political practice and discourse, and they also take shape in Palestinian cultural and aesthetic production.¹⁸ Still, differences remain, as I elaborate further below, owing to legal status (refugees/non-refugees); residence (camp/town, Jordan/West Bank); and access to citizenship or rights.

As stateless refugees, jil Oslo youth did not grow up within the confines and attributed rights of a sovereign, bounded nation-state. In addition to the threat of erasure by the Israeli settler-colonial state, refugees are precariously situated at the margins of the Palestinian (and other surrounding) nation-state project(s). Certainly, they identify individually and collectively as Palestinians, thus confirming their membership in the Palestinian nation and upholding the Palestinian national imaginary and consciousness across generations.¹⁹ But in parallel to, or indeed as part of, their firm commitment to Palestinian peoplehood and nationhood grounded in the struggle for justice, decolonization, and liberation, they have also developed attachments to the places, institutions, and communities of the countries where they grew up in exile and where they have sometimes also gained citizenship and demand political rights.

Thea Renda Abu El-Haj, in her study on Palestinian youth in the United States, argues that “citizenship and belonging for these young people involves civic and political practices shaped in transnational fields that are not, and cannot be, restricted to the borders of any one nation.”²⁰ Such a life across (“real” and imagined) borders and boundaries—that is, in a “transnational social field,”²¹ where people entertain simultaneous material, political, and symbolic relations with different places—might reflect the experience of many young people in today’s age of globalization and migration.²² Scholarship on transnationalism and globalization has demonstrated that rights, citizenship, and national belonging no longer necessarily coincide with the format and boundaries of the territorialized nation-state.²³ Indeed, Arjun Appadurai has argued that “loyalty often leads individuals to identify with transnational cartographies, while the appeals of citizenship attach them to territorial states.”²⁴

Such a privileged and flexible relation to citizenship, mobility, and rights, however, is not afforded to most young Palestinian refugees. West Bank refugees hold very limited rights as residents of a quasi state, nominally governed by the PA,²⁵ and their movement remains restricted by the Israeli border and checkpoint regime. In Jordan, the raqm watani (national ID number) gives Jordanian Palestinians only partial access to rights and global mobility. Despite these exclusions, the grammar of rights has impacted and shifted contemporary Palestinian political discourse, threatening to reconfigure the Palestinian struggle for decolonization and liberation as one of territorial statehood. But the precarious positioning that Palestinians—especially Palestinian refugees—inhabit as stateless, colonized people, and that Palestine inhabits as an occupied nation without territorial sovereignty, also perpetuates a certain “cynicism” ²⁶ toward the rights framework. Palestinian refugees’ complex relations to land, nation, and sovereignty go beyond, and cannot be accommodated by, the liberal statist politics of rights and recognition.²⁷

A discussion of the politics of young Palestinian refugees therefore should neither territorialize their complex narratives through a liberal rights and statehood discourse nor delink them from the bordered realities of colonized life through a celebratory, transnational perspective. Jil Oslo refugees are not hyphenated, mobile, transnational subjects, and they are also not citizens of a nation comfortably rooted in a sovereign state. Rather, their critical perspectives on political collectivity, representativity, sovereignty, and territoriality—as the following discussion will show—stem from their specific subjectivity as stateless refugees, precariously situated at the margins of the nation-state.

Calling for Reform of the National Leadership

In an official 2012 TV interview, PA president Mahmoud Abbas renounced his right to return to Safad, his village of origin in historic Palestine. Arguing that “it’s my right to see it, but not to live there,” Abbas also made clear that “Palestine now for me is ‘67 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital. This is now and forever. . . . This is Palestine for me. I am (a) refugee, but I am living in Ramallah.”²⁸ His statement caused a furor and was met with strong opposition from the Palestinian refugee community worldwide.

During fieldwork in Dheisheh camp at the time, young refugees criticized Abbas’s statement, often framing it within a wider critique of the PA’s claim to represent all Palestinians. Located in the Bethlehem area and established shortly after the Nakba as one of nineteen camps administered in the West Bank by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), Dheisheh today is characterized by high population density and unemployment rates.²⁹ Due to its robust political and social identity, it is often considered the “de facto leader of the West Bank’s refugee camps.”³⁰ Among many initiatives, the camp hosts the Campus in Camps (CIC) project.³¹ CIC brings together young refugees in a two-year program to encourage critical debate on the representations and roles of the refugee camp and its residents. One of the aims of CIC, as described on its website, is to “explore and produce new forms of representation of camps and refugees beyond the static and traditional symbols of passivity and poverty.”³²

In one discussion group with CIC participants, all agreed that Abbas had betrayed and sold out refugees’ rights—not just with his statement on Safad, but more generally with his politics. Ali, an outspoken and eloquent young resident of Dheisheh, said: “We all know the Oslo Agreement . . . so we are not discussing something new. We already finished it. When he [Abbas] is saying that we can’t return to our villages now, because we will have a state in the ’67 borders . . . he is trying to say something without [saying] anything.”³³

The CIC participants could relate to Ali’s disillusionment with the Oslo paradigm, its abandonment of the refugees’ right to return, and the impasse it has caused in Palestinian politics. But some put their frustration with Abbas’s statement more bluntly. One participant remarked: “When he mentioned the refugees, he said, ‘I am a refugee, but I live in Ramallah.’ And here comes the difference. He is a refugee who lives in Ramallah. In Ramallah! I live in a fucking shitty hole in a refugee camp, and this is the difference!”³⁴ Juxtaposing Ramallah, a symbol of the well-to-do urban middle class, with the camp, he highlighted the stark class differences between a privileged political elite and deprived camp residents. When another participant in the discussion argued that we should understand Abbas’s statement as the decision of an individual, “his own choice,” the rest of the group vehemently disagreed. They insisted that “he is representing something,” that “he is the head of the PA . . . he is not like a normal [Palestinian].”³⁵ The young refugees identified Abbas’s statement for what it unmistakably was: the national leadership’s abandonment of the refugees’ right of return.

All participants in the CIC discussion group insisted that Abbas did not have the right to speak on behalf of refugees. Mahmoud, another young Dheisheh resident, asked:

Did you [Abbas] ask the seven million refugees who live in and outside of Palestine and the two million who live in Israel, did you ask them? Or did you give them up? Have you given up Haifa and Jaffa and Acre? You are giving up the people of ’48 who migrated and had their houses destroyed and were imprisoned for the Palestinian cause. And what are you saying to their youth? Enlist in the military and live like the Israelis? . . . There are nine million Palestinians who can’t give up the right of return. It’s a debt to them. Did you, as the president of the PA, before you issued that statement, think about those nine million? That’s what I’m asking. . . . I’m waiting for the refugees themselves to come out with the final decision.³⁶

Young refugees like Mahmoud feel abandoned and misrepresented by the PA. They criticize its lack of political autonomy, exemplified by submission to Israeli and international conditions in the negotiations, and question its legitimacy and authority as their political representative. For them, “Abu Mazen [Abbas] says randomly whatever comes to his head,”³⁷ listening only to Israel and the international community, rather than the Palestinian people, let alone refugees. The discussion stressed the PA’s lack of popular legitimacy to the point that some of the participants even advocated its end. Marwan, for example, remarked: “We have an internal issue here. It is not a problem of the refugees with the PA—it is about all the Palestinians with the PA. . . . If we want to go forward, even if just one step, we have to deal with the PA, and to stop it, and to destroy it. Then we can do something alone, or something concrete.”³⁸

Such dissatisfaction with the PA’s political agenda and role in the so-called peace process is ubiquitous among Palestinians. But the PA’s legitimacy as national representative is especially questioned by refugees, whose rights the PA signed away in Oslo. The situation is further complicated in the West Bank, where the PA acts as host government to Palestinian refugees but also claims and performs the role of political sovereign—albeit with limited de jure (but never de facto) sovereignty—including representing Palestinians politically. Refugees in the West Bank are governed by several other international and local bodies in addition to the PA. First and foremost, they are subject to Israel’s omnipresent control under a settler-colonial regime whose civil and military law classifies Palestinians—both refugees and non-refugees—as resident aliens in the occupied West Bank.³⁹ Then there is UNRWA, the sole legal administrator of the camps in the West Bank. Lastly, camp refugees’ lives are subject to actions and decisions by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), different Palestinian political parties and factions, local camp committees, and the PA’s local municipalities.⁴⁰ Ali, whose critical views on Abbas’s 2012 statement opened this section, provided the following reflection: “[It is] the mix-up between the PLO, the PA, Fatah, and the other political parties within the PLO [that] is causing all this discussion when we are talking about the popular committees in refugee camps [being] part of the PLO. Also, the municipalities are part of the PLO, but through the PA. So . . . it [the PA] is a Palestinian host government. . . . It is important to understand that there is a difference between the PLO and the PA, and who is your representative.”⁴¹

Aside from highlighting the maze of different institutional bodies through which Palestinian refugees in the West Bank are governed and (mis)represented, Ali’s emphasis on the need to differentiate between the PLO and PA is crucial. Most West Bank refugees would agree that the PLO constitutes the sole legitimate national representative body for all Palestinians, and that the PA functions merely as their host government in the West Bank, not their representative.⁴² With settler-colonial annexation of Palestinian lands ongoing and evermore encroaching, the PA lacks political and territorial sovereignty in the West Bank. It is not an autonomous political entity; does not hold the Weberian monopoly on legitimate violence; cannot control its (fragmented) occupied territory or (never clearly defined) borders; and consequently is unable to administer, let alone protect, its quasi citizens and the refugees it hosts.⁴³ While much of refugees’ criticism centers on the fact that the PA has sold out refugee rights, it also highlights the PA’s lack of political autonomy in the West Bank. Many accuse the PA of acting as Israel’s security enforcer, clamping down on and targeting its own population, refugees in particular.⁴⁴ Several of the young refugees in CIC mentioned that they had experienced discrimination and mistreatment by PA police and officials.

Most young West Bank refugees thus refuse to recognize the PA as their legitimate sovereign and representative. Jumana, another CIC participant, declared, “The PA doesn’t apply to me, I’m outside the jurisdiction of the PA. . . . The PA doesn’t rule over me!”⁴⁵ She rejected the notion that PA sovereignty and jurisdiction extends to her, even as a host government. She is not alone in this view. Contrary to Palestinian political elites, most young Palestinians did not need to see the arrival of the so-called Deal of the Century (the Middle East peace plan devised by the administration of former U.S. president Donald Trump), unveiled at the beginning of 2020, to demand the dismantling of the PA.⁴⁶ Young refugees in Dheisheh mentioned the need to disband the PA as far back as 2012. Some said that going back to pre-Oslo Israeli military rule in the West Bank would be better than living under the PA. Mohammad, for example, argued that “it was better [before Oslo]. You know why? People used to live in dignity. If an Israeli soldier came, we knew who the enemy was!”⁴⁷ Several participants concurred, adding, “[We] want the Israelis back here.”⁴⁸ Such statements need not necessarily be taken at face value. Rather, they should be understood in the context of recent decades, during which young Palestinian refugees’ disillusionment with the political impasse and their anger at the specific discrimination they experience as refugees in the West Bank have grown immensely.

Others are responding to the PA’s failure to adequately represent them and their rights not by calling for a reinstatement of past arrangements (sole Israeli military rule) but by thinking about alternative, new structures of political representation for refugees. Marwan, cited earlier, for example, envisaged that once the PA was “destroy[ed],” the refugees “can do something alone, or something concrete,” and Mahmoud, also quoted earlier, is “waiting for the refugees themselves to come out with the final decision.”⁴⁹ Thinking out loud along similar lines, Jumana argued that refugees are “still here [in the West Bank], like guests. In my opinion we need a leader from the refugees to honor us, to represent us, because the [current] leader or the government doesn’t represent refugees.”⁵⁰ Some young refugees are thus calling for and thinking about refugee-specific representative structures, which could, for example, take the form of a refugee political party and would allow them to formulate their demands separately. It would challenge the PA’s failed two-state program, which, through its territorial focus and abandonment of the right of return, works on the basis of excluding refugees and their demands.

While such proposals offer interesting insight into post-Oslo refugee politics, they by no means elicit consensus among refugees, nor are they formulated in coherent political strategies, vocabularies, or agendas. Ilana Feldman has described Palestinian refugee politics as “multivocal and frequently discordant,”⁵¹ arguing that they “do not comprise a single practice, agenda, or ideology. They are different, and differently evaluated across geography and across generations.”⁵² Indeed, generation, geographical location, citizenship status, camp or urban residence, and other factors matter.⁵³ Rosemary Sayigh’s observation that the refugee camps are crucial markers of group identities and play an important role in sustaining democratic nationalism, especially in times of crisis, confirms this.⁵⁴ Yet, among the jil Oslo, I would argue, a specific generational politics is increasingly embraced across different locations and contexts. This jil Oslo refugee politics is distinct in its opposition to the PA, Oslo, and two-state approach—a politics the young strongly associate with previous generations. Importantly, this generational stance is sustained transnationally: already in 2011, young refugees worldwide played a crucial role in the initiative to revive the Palestinian National Council (PNC),⁵⁵ and more recently, in May 2020, the transnational Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) issued a fierce and uncompromising statement, calling for “the ‘Palestinian leadership’ to go!”⁵⁶

Such transnational generational refugee politics stem from young refugees’ shared experiences of the post-Oslo period. Across different contexts, the lives of Palestinian refugee youth have been marked by persistent and growing marginalizaton, discrimination, and disillusionment with the PA and its national politics. It is this “common location in the historical dimension of the social process,”⁵⁷ that has brought this generation closer as a political community with a shared political consciousness, group identity, and paradigm-shifting political agenda.⁵⁸ Feldman, studying different temporalities lived and experienced by Palestinian refugees across time and space, identified “tensions across generations about how to understand the past and how to prepare for a different future.”⁵⁹ Indeed, jil Oslo refugees experience the post-Oslo context differently than older generations. While the latter inhabit and interpret the present aided by their memories of different political pasts, the young confront the bleak present in a more immediate way, thus envisioning different, potentially more radical, decolonial politics and futures.

This includes critical engagement with the notions of political representativity and sovereignty. For jil Oslo refugees it is clear: the PA with its two-state program has failed to accommodate their voices and demands. Consequently, they have started to search for alternative representative structures as well as political formations and agendas that think and reclaim sovereignty and self-determination beyond and differently from the Westphalian territorialized state. Refugees’ widespread nonrecognition of the PA as their representative highlights that a state’s sovereignty requires not only political and territorial autonomy and control but also the recognition of that sovereign’s authority by its people. In such conceptions of “popular sovereignty,”⁶⁰ which are more democratic as they center people rather than states as the locus of sovereignty,⁶¹ new notions of peoplehood, governance, and territoriality might emerge. The following section will trace the contours and contents of such post-nation-statist political imaginaries.

Questioning the Nation-State Paradigm

Young refugees of the jil Oslo engage critically with the classic nation-state paradigm and its nexus of nation, state, and territory. These critiques stem from their lived experiences of settler colonialism, statelessness, transnational im/mobility, and marginalization as Palestinian refugees.

In the West Bank, refugees are painfully aware of the restrictions that settler-colonial and national borders and boundaries set, not only on their right to return but also on their daily life choices and possibilities. Until the start of the Second Intifada in 2000, many were able to regularly visit ad-dakhil—places inside the 1949 armistice lines currently delineating Israel. These de facto returns and the close proximity to their villages and towns of origin enabled them to maintain simultaneous feelings of belonging and active links to the “here” (the West Bank) and “there” (ad-dakhil). Refugees’ places of origin, the West Bank as host/home country, and the refugee camp thus all hold multiple meanings. Among the young refugees interviewed in Dheisheh, most considered the camp not an abject, transient place to be abandoned for a return to origins or roots, nor merely a humanitarian space of dependency, but rather a “political [and] emotional space.”⁶² Nasser Abourahme has argued convincingly that “it is the camp that most forcefully returns the home . . . back to politics.”⁶³ Indeed, the camp-as-home (one among many) is where refugee political subjecthood is formed. Accordingly, return is claimed neither as a homecoming to one specific place (the iconic village of origin) nor as a restitution of a specific time—or a “museumification,” as Rana Barakat terms it, “where a not-so-distant past is preserved as utopia.”⁶⁴ Rather, by insisting that any future scenario must speak to the ways in which they inhabit multiple temporalities and spaces simultaneously, young refugees envisage return as a living, ongoing project of decolonization, one where, according to Feldman, “the future is not just another time, whether near or far, but also another geography—open rather than closed.”⁶⁵

Such multifaceted politics of belonging and return were also articulated by the young Palestinian refugees interviewed in Jordan. Many have lived most if not all their lives in Jordan (often not in camps), or indeed between Jordan and Palestine. Stressing “decentered, lateral connections”⁶⁶ for young Jordanian Palestinians is, however, less a question of identity than one of political positioning and activism. Legally categorized as “refugee-citizens,” most Palestinian refugees in Jordan hold Jordanian citizenship, but they still experience forms of exclusion and discrimination in the Jordanian system.⁶⁷ The political imaginaries of jil Oslo refugees in Jordan thus combine a Palestinian politics of return and liberation with that of domestic reform and rights in Jordan.

The movement Taghyir wa Tahrir provides a good example. In 2013, a group of young leftist activists, Jordanians and Jordanian Palestinians, came together to organize this movement, which they hoped to further develop into a political party. It has since lost momentum, but Samir, a young Jordanian Palestinian founding member, when interviewed around six months after the movement launched, enthusiastically stated: “We’re now working on a party called Taghyir wa Tahrir. . . . Change in Jordan and liberation of Palestine. That’s the discourse we’re working on now, which is ultimately one mission, not two. One mission—change in Jordan and liberation of Palestine—together.”⁶⁸

Samir saw Jordanian and Palestinian politics as interconnected: “Change in Jordan,” as he put it, “is a step towards Palestine,”⁶⁹ not away from it. A similar understanding was expressed by Samira, a young Palestinian refugee with Jordanian citizenship who lives in Amman. In a 2011 interview, just after she had participated in the 15 May return march,⁷⁰ she stressed that her political activities in Jordan and as a Jordanian citizen are linked to Palestine. Placing her activism within the wider context of the popular uprisings that swept across the Middle East from 2011 onward, she argued,

Now, after what was happening in Egypt, Tunisia, and the revolutions, [we say,] “No, you can’t solve the Israel-Palestinian conflict on its own.” It is not a Palestinian-Israeli [issue], it’s a Palestinian-Arab issue. . . . It’s a package. If you are living in Jordan, you are asking for citizenship and the things related to your being here. And as a Palestinian, or working for the Palestinian cause, you should go to the border and support the Palestinian people. . . . I don’t think you can separate things.⁷¹

For young Jordanian Palestinian activists like Samira and Samir, using their political and economic integration within Jordan to demand rights does not constitute the normalization of the Jordanian state’s watan al-badil (alternative homeland) scenario, nor does it contradict their Palestinian identity or right of return. Rather, they understand their transnational citizenship practices in Jordan as constitutive of and closely connected to the Palestinian struggle for liberation and decolonization. Indeed, similarly to the young Palestinian Americans Abu El-Haj interviewed, “rather than being a primary source of belonging . . . citizenship was a valued asset through which people leverage rights to economic, social, political, and cultural resources across transnational fields.”⁷² Young Jordanian Palestinians, like Palestinian American youth, draw “a distinction between citizenship and a sense of national belonging—between ‘having’ US [or Jordanian] citizenship and ‘being’ Palestinian.”⁷³ Jordanian Palestinians, in contrast to young Palestinian Americans, however, also stress the interconnectedness of Palestine and Jordan as political, social, and territorial entities.

Given the discrimination that Palestinians with Jordanian citizenship face through, for example, exclusion from political positions or selective, arbitrary denationalization through revocation of their citizenship,⁷⁴ domestic reform emerges as a crucial element in their struggle. Many young Palestinians in Jordan are engaged Jordanian citizens. Their hybrid and fractured political identity does not limit them to a “politics of being ordinary,”⁷⁵ but rather gives rise to radical paradigm-shifting politics. They consider their political activism for equality, reform, and democratization of the Jordanian political system an integral part of their struggle for Palestinian liberation and their right to return.⁷⁶ Jordanian and Palestinian pasts, presents, and futures are thus viewed as relational and connected.

In this, they argue, lies the difference with previous generations. Samir explained that the political agenda of Taghyir wa Tahrir constituted an important break from the way, in his view, Palestinians in Jordan previously understood and did politics:

My problems with my mother and father were always about [them saying]: “This country is not ours. We have nothing to do with it. Why do you want to take to the streets? Cause a stir in the country? We have nothing to do with this country. We want to return to Palestine.” When I was imprisoned, my father didn’t come to the police station. He didn’t even ask about me. . . . There’s no problem if you are detained for [political activism on] Palestine. But there’s a problem if you’re detained for Jordan. . . . The older generation doesn’t think about Jordan at all. To them, Jordan is [Black] September. [They say/think:] “This regime, this country is not ours. We have nothing to do with it.” But our generation, especially the leftist youth, [is different].⁷⁷

In his view, by shifting the focus to internal Jordanian politics and linking this to the broader struggle for Palestine, Taghyir wa Tahrir proposed a political culture that differed from the classic Palestinian and Jordanian nationalist agenda pursued by the political elites of previous generations. It is worth quoting Samir’s narrative at length:

The Palestinian nationalist culture is with Fatah, but the Front [Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)] is the same. The Front has a nationalist education: Palestine. Palestine. Palestine. . . . When the protests happened, they [the PFLP and Fatah] couldn’t get their youth to join, because their youth weren’t interested in Jordan. They just wanted something Palestinian. . . . The Left and the Islamic movement had the same problem: they didn’t work on Jordan for fifty to sixty years. When the movement started, they told their youth: “We want to work on Jordan.” But the youth weren’t interested. They were interested in Palestine, the Wall, return. . . . And the [Jordanian] regime also wants [us] to work like this: on the right of return, on the intifada. [They say:] “Do as you please. . . . Talk about the return. . . . Talk about anything you want. But don’t talk about the increase in electricity prices or changes in the country [Jordan]. You don’t have anything to do with this.” This was a major problem.⁷⁸

Samir highlights party politics and generational differences, but there have always been Palestinians in Jordan who have simultaneously called for equal rights as Jordanian citizens and their right to return as refugees. As the governance, jurisdiction, and relations of the East and West Bank went through different historical phases, the political agendas of Palestinians in Jordan shifted.⁷⁹ With Jordan’s 1988 disengagement from the West Bank, the regime changed its previous assimilationist slogan, “Jordan is Palestine and Palestine is Jordan,” to a separatist, nationalist one: “Jordan is Jordan and Palestine is Palestine.”⁸⁰ The Jordanian political discourse, but also that of the PLO and various Palestinian political parties, thus shifted to casting Palestine and Jordan, the East and the West Bank, as separate and incommensurable national entities, each with their own territories, peoples, and political agendas.

Samir’s statement might risk homogenizing the varied political cultures of previous generations. However, by highlighting that young activists today are moving away from the separatist, nation-statist framework, he identifies an important generational shift in how the decolonization of Palestine is envisaged. Young Jordanian Palestinians’ lives, their material and affective belongings to land and people, cannot be accommodated in separatist, statist frames. For young activists like Samir, the struggle to decolonize Palestine thus requires the decentering and querying of the “national order of things,”⁸¹ the “naturalness” of national dividing lines—territorial, political, and identitarian—between “Jordanians” and “Palestinians.”

This does not mean that this generation’s strong attachment and commitment as stateless refugees to the (home)land of historical Palestine, al-Bilad, are weakened. Indeed, given geographical proximity, most uphold and renew their bonds to different places in Palestine through regular travel between the East and West Bank. While most are prevented from accessing ad-dakhil, their journeys back to the West Bank (not necessarily their families’ places of origin) sustain—similar to the case of young Palestinian Americans—“an affective rootedness to place and people, one that engender[s] a sense of belonging to the bilad.”⁸²

The narratives of young Jordanian Palestinians, however, speak less to singular roots in national territory and more to mobility and routes⁸³ that connect multiple places, peoples, and contexts across Jordan and Palestine—and beyond. Samir explained that, as a Palestinian refugee who grew up in Amman with Jordanian citizenship, he feels closest to the urban cultures of Damascus and other cities in the wider Bilad ash-Sham. Many others, too, spoke of translocal identities and feelings of belonging that cannot easily fit into neat nationalist cartographies. And for some, the reference to Bilad ash-Sham, a shared past before national borders and territories were entrenched⁸⁴ and histories nationalized,⁸⁵ constitutes an inspiration for possible futures. Samira offered the following thoughts: “I want to go to Palestine, to see my village. . . . I wish I [could] go. But for me, I feel that the solution for Jordan and Palestine is to come back as it was, as one country. Because they are not two countries. They are one, one entity, and they should come back as this.”⁸⁶

Samira here acknowledges the historical relations and unity between the East and West Banks before bordered colonial and nationalist cartographies were mapped onto people’s interconnected lives. For many young Palestinian refugees in Jordan, national borders constitute false dividing lines that obstruct the shared histories and lived presents of people in the region. Border restrictions are a harsh reality these young refugees face daily. They understand them as colonial and nationalist mechanisms of control, as measures to divide and rule the native population, not as a given. Their own lived, embodied, and affective geographies thus challenge state border regimes and territorialized notions of belonging and political subjectivity. With family histories of multiple forced uprootings and displacements, they demand mobility across borders, as well as access and political participation in different places and political entities. The political subjecthood and forms of claim-making expressed here by young Jordanian Palestinian refugees are thus decidedly different from those captured in the classic notion of the territorialized citizen.⁸⁷

Young refugees’ political imaginaries also construct the (home)land as something other than state space. Territoriality here is not defined through notions of property (land owned by the state) or jurisdiction (land governed by the state). They certainly stress their attachments to the (home)land, the Bilad, but in their narratives, the Bilad and its people are not singularly anchored in the bordered territory of the state, nor is it the state that produces a sense of collective belonging, emplacement, and peoplehood. Rather the land itself, the Bilad is core to Palestinian peoplehood, and sovereignty over this land belongs to the people rather than the state. Speaking more to Indigenous understandings of sovereignty, landedness, and peoplehood than to Westphalian state sovereignty and citizenship,⁸⁸ the political imaginaries of jil Oslo refugees view the Bilad and Palestinian peoplehood as engendered through collective, decolonial modes of place-making and inhabitation, but also through their (quest for) movement on the land.

Toward a Post-Nation-Statist, Translocal Politics for Palestine?

As a settler-colonial, ethnonationalist state, Israel presents the right of return for Palestinian refugees as a threat to its existence. The two-state Oslo formula builds on this construct by proposing a territorialist state model, which, at its core, excludes Palestinian refugees and their rights. Young Palestinian refugees grew up witnessing this model fail: the post-Oslo quasi-Palestinian state never gained territorial or political sovereignty, and it also perpetuated the marginalization of refugees and their demands. For the young, the two-state project cannot advance their cause as Palestinians, nor will it gain them their rights as refugees, improve their lives in exile, or restore their dignity.⁸⁹ They know all too well that as refugees they constitute the needed surplus in this model: the ones excluded to legitimize those included. Threatened by settler-colonial erasure, and critically positioned at the margins of different nation-statist projects in the region, jil Oslo refugees stress that the struggle against settler colonialism in Palestine cannot be limited to the classic model of the territorialized nation-state.⁹⁰

Their critiques take different angles according to their specific positionings (as West Bank refugees, as Jordanian citizens, as camp residents, and so forth). While young West Bank refugees center their critique on the PA, whose representativity and sovereignty, both as host and national government, they reject, young Jordanian Palestinians call for and try to leverage their rights as Jordanian citizens in their struggle for Palestine and return. Despite these differences, the two groups share a generational politics: they claim rights “here” and “there,” criticize the factional politics of the “old guard,” and reject Oslo’s failed two-state paradigm. Moreover, they all endorse a collective Palestinian peoplehood with claims to the (home)land. As such, this generation does not “think beyond the nation” but rather beyond the nation-state.⁹¹ Their nationhood and peoplehood is not produced, bound, or territorialized by the Westphalian state model. Rather, it emerges from and in relation to the land, the Bilad, which belongs to the people, not the state. Their critiques thus unmask two entrenched political tropes that are foundational to Israeli settler colonialism and also to the Palestinian and Jordanian nation-state project: a nostalgic primordialist notion that binds people to singular roots in national territory; and a statist model that anchors and reduces sovereignty and territoriality to the state and its borders.

When imagining decolonial futures, many young Palestinian refugees stress that they would like to maintain their attachments to different local places, each of which holds specific meanings for them. Young refugees’ worlds are constituted not by the abstract notion of national territory but rather by specific localities, forms of belonging, and inhabitation of the local across national borders: their camp, their neighborhood, specific towns or villages in historic Palestine, and the wider Bilad ash-Sham region. Their translocal political proposals connect these specific localities—places they may never have been able to access but to which they nevertheless feel intimately and affectively related.

Appadurai argued that such local attachments often contribute to a crisis of state sovereignty, leading to the emergence of “postnational” or “counternational cartographies” that challenge “the idea of separate and bounded territorial entities on which our current nation-state cartography relies.”⁹² In these alternative cartographies, “counterhistories” and “counteridentities” are used to envisage a politics outside and beyond neat national imaginings.⁹³ Young refugees’ translocal attachments and post-nation-statist imaginaries indeed run counter to state sovereignty claims (by Israel, but also by the PA, Jordan, and so forth) and the statist logic enshrined in the Oslo framework. Their alternative “counteridentities” and “counterhistories” stress the region’s pre-nation-state past—the Bilad ash-Sham—and pay tribute to their multiple, fractured, and dynamic allegiances to localities and peoples across and beyond bordered national territories.

However, contrary to Appadurai’s starting point, these young refugees’ translocal political imaginaries do not emerge from a nation-state in decline⁹⁴ but from one that never was constituted and recognized as a sovereign political entity. Celebrations of transnational, globalized life hold true for few, and certainly not for Palestinian refugees in the West Bank and Jordan. For them, settler-colonial and national borders constitute very real obstacles whose impact they face and negotiate daily. In the West Bank, the Israeli regime has locked people down in fragmented enclaves, turning even the smallest movement across the land into a struggle for life and existence. And while crossing the Allenby Bridge between the East and West Bank might be (mis)construed as transnational mobility, such border crossings are in fact always strongly controlled, and those crossing are subject to arbitrary entry denial by the Israeli state, while Jordanian Palestinians face the withdrawal of their Jordanian papers by the Jordanian regime. Young refugees have never practiced mobile, transnational lives. They have, all their lives, been caught up in the borders and orders of the Israeli settler state and of the region’s nation-state projects. Trapped within and embargoed by settler-colonial closures and evermore encroaching borders, checkpoints, and movement restrictions, for this generation, the violence of the territorialized state is all too apparent. While the nation-state might constitute a central pillar of Palestinian political culture, for jil Oslo refugees it has not offered a paradigm with which to confront Israeli settler colonialism in Palestine. Thus, for them, the epistemic and political project of decolonizing Palestine must also mean thinking beyond the classic frames of the territorialized nation-state.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sophie Richter-Devroe

Sophie Richter-Devroe is associate professor in the Middle Eastern Studies Department at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Doha and honorary fellow at the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter. Her research interests are in the field of everyday politics and women’s activism in the Middle East. She is the author of Women’s Political Activism in Palestine: Peacebuilding, Resistance, and Survival (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2018), which won the National Women’s Studies Association/University of Illinois Press First Book Prize.

Notes

1 “B2. Gaza Youth’s Manifesto for Change, December 2010,” JPS 40, no. 4 (Summer 2011): pp. 211–12, https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2011.XL.4.211.

2 On Palestinian youth politics, see Sunaina Maira, Jil Oslo: Palestinian Hip Hop, Youth Culture, and the Youth Movement (Washington, DC: Tadween Publishing, 2013); Lynn Welchman, Elena Zambelli, and Ruba Salih, “Rethinking Justice beyond Human Rights. Anti-colonialism and Intersectionality in the Politics of the Palestinian Youth Movement,” Mediterranean Politics 26, no. 3 (2021): pp. 349–69, https://doi.org/10.1080/13629395.2020.1749811; and Jacob Høigilt, “The Palestinian Spring That Was Not: The Youth and Political Activism in the Occupied Palestinian Territories,” Arab Studies Quarterly 35, no. 4 (Fall 2013): pp. 343–59, https://doi.org/10.13169/arabstudquar.35.4.0343.

3 Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappé, On Palestine (London: Penguin Books, 2015), p. 7.

4 Maira, Jil Oslo.

5 Liisa H. Malkki, “Refugees and Exile: From ‘Refugee Studies’ to the National Order of Things,” Annual Review of Anthropology, no. 24 (1995): pp. 495–523, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2155947.

6 Arjun Appadurai, “Sovereignty without Territoriality: Notes for a Postnational Geography,” in The Geography of Identity, ed. Patricia Yaeger (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 40–58.

7 Appadurai, “Sovereignty without Territoriality,” p. 51.

8 I thank everyone who participated in and facilitated our fieldwork and interviews in Palestine, Jordan, and Lebanon. This ethnographic research, including the interviews cited here, were conducted jointly with Ruba Salih (SOAS, University of London) on several field trips from 2009–14 for a larger project on Palestinian refugees. It was funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation and the Council for British Research in the Levant. Parts of the paper were presented at a 2015 workshop in Athens titled Palestine beyond National Frames: Emerging Politics, Cultures, and Claims. I am grateful to Ruba Salih, Diana Allan, and all workshop participants for their insightful comments. I also thank Dana Olwan, the JPS editorial team, and the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback.

9 Out of a much larger set of ethnographic material, I rely in this paper on a specific set of approximately twenty interviews and ten group discussions with young refugees. These lasted one to three hours, were conducted in Arabic, and later transcribed and translated into English. I have changed all interviewees’ names to protect their anonymity. While diverse in terms of class, gender, legal status, residence, and other variables, the interviewee sample is not intended to be representative of “Palestinian youth.” Rather, my aim is to provide nuanced and in-depth insights into the political worldviews, narratives, and political imaginaries of refugee political activists of jil Oslo. As researchers, we might not fully grasp such emic worldviews, as our knowledge production always remains partial. Rather than upholding binaries between “outsider” versus “insider,” or “West” versus “East,” I consider a politics of solidarity crucial for research in, on, and for Palestine. See Sophie Richter-Devroe, Women’s Political Activism in Palestine: Peacebuilding, Resistance, and Survival (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2018), pp. 20–27.

10 I borrow this term from Thea Renda Abu El-Haj, Unsettled Belonging: Educating Palestinian American Youth after 9/11 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), p. 46.

11 See Ted Swedenburg, “Imagined Youths,” Middle East Report, no. 245 (Winter 2007): pp. 4–11, https://merip.org/2007/12/imagined-youths/.

12 Randa Farah, “Palestinian Refugee Children and Caregivers in Jordan,” in Children of Palestine: Experiencing Forced Migration in the Middle East, ed. Dawn Chatty and Gillian Lewando Hundt (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), p. 112.

13 See the following indicative works: Pamela Abbott, Andrea Teti, and Roger Sapsford, “The Tide That Failed to Rise: Young People’s Politics and Social Values in and after the Arab Uprisings,” Mediterranean Politics 25, no. 1 (2020): pp. 1–25, https://doi.org/10.1080/13629395.2018.1482124; Linda Herrera and Asef Bayat, eds., Being Young and Muslim: New Cultural Politics in the Global South and North (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Linda Herrera, “Youth and Citizenship in the Digital Age: A View from Egypt,” Harvard Educational Review 82, no. 3 (Fall 2012): pp. 333–52, https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.82.3.88267r117u710300; Mona Christophersen, Jacob Høigilt, and Åge A. Tiltnes, Palestinian Youth and the Arab Spring, Noref Report (Oslo: NOREF—Norweigan Peacebuilding Resource Centre, February 2012), https://ciaotest.cc.columbia.edu/wps/noref/0026077/f_0026077_21367.pdf.

14 Rosemary Sayigh and Julie Peteet, studying refugees in Lebanon, further identify the term jil Filastin (the generation of Palestine) for those a little older than the jil al-Nakba. See Rosemary Sayigh, “Palestinian Refugee Identity/ies: Generation, Region, Class,” in Palestinian Refugees: Different Generations, but One Identity (Birzeit: Birzeit University, 2012), p. 15; Julie Peteet, Landscape of Hope and Despair: Palestinian Refugee Camps (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), p. 98. On generational differences in relation to return narratives, see Sophie Richter-Devroe, “‘Like Something Sacred’: Palestinian Refugees’ Narratives on the Right of Return,” Refugee Survey Quarterly 32, no. 2 (June 2013): pp. 92–115, https://doi.org/10.1093/rsq/hdt002.

15 Karl Mannheim, “The Problem of Generations,” in Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, ed. Paul Kecskemeti (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952), p. 290.

16 Mannheim, “The Problem of Generations,” p. 290.

17 Maira, Jil Oslo, p. 53. On Palestinian youth politics after Oslo, see also Welchman, Zambelli, and Salih, “Rethinking Justice”; Høigilt, “The Palestinian Spring That Was Not.”

18 Zionist settler colonialism and Palestinian territorialized statehood, sovereignty, and borders are critically engaged with in the artworks of, among others, Mona Hatoum, Larissa Sansour, Yazan Khalili, Raeda Saadeh, and Decolonizing Architecture Art Research (DAAR). See Hanan Toukan, “Picasso Is Mightier Than the M16: On Imaging and Imagining Palestine’s Resistance in the Global Community,” Cultural Politics 13, no. 1 (2017): pp. 101–23, https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-3755216; Nayrouz Abu Hatoum, “Unsettling Visual Politics: Militarized Borders in the Work of Palestinian Artist Raeda Saadeh,” American Quarterly 71, no. 4 (December 2019): pp. 1059–67, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/744973.

19 Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Juliane Hammer, Palestinians Born in Exile: Diaspora and the Search for a Homeland (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005); Abu El-Haj, Unsettled Belonging, p. 47.

20 Abu El-Haj, Unsettled Belonging, p. 43.

21 Peggy Levitt and Nina Glick Schiller, “Conceptualizing Simultaneity: A Transnational Social Field Perspective on Society,” International Migration Review 38, no. 3 (September 2004): pp. 1002–39, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-7379.2004.tb00227.x.

22 See Abu El-Haj, Unsettled Belonging; Georges E. Fouron and Nina Glick Schiller, “The Generation of Identity: Redefining the Second Generation within a Transnational Social Field” in The Changing Face of Home: The Transnational Lives of the Second Generation, ed. Peggy Levitt and Mary C. Waters (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002), pp. 168–208.

23 This scholarship has traced the “deterritorialization of nation-states” and the ways in which “transnational villagers” and diaspora groups increasingly practice “flexible citizenship.” See Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina Szanton Blanc, Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments and Deterritorialized Nation-States (London: Routledge, 2005); Peggy Levitt, The Transnational Villagers (Oakland: University of California Press, 2001); Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999).

24 Appadurai, “Sovereignty without Territoriality,” p. 57; and Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

25 See Terry M. Rempel, “Palestinian Refugees in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip,” Wayback Machine, Internet Archive, accessed 15 April 2021, http://www.forcedmigration.org/research-resources/expert-guides/palestinian-refugees-in-the-west-bank-and-the-gaza/fmo043.pdf; Sophie Richter-Devroe, “‘I’m a Refugee, but I Live in Palestine, My Homeland’: Narratives of Home, Camp and Identity among Palestinian Refugees in the West Bank,” in UNRWA at 70: Palestinian Refugees in Context (London: Palestinian Return Centre and Al Jazeera Center for Studies, 2020).

26 Lori Allen, The Rise and Fall of Human Rights: Cynicism and Politics in Occupied Palestine (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013).

27 In his critical engagement with the apartheid and settler-colonialist framework in Palestine, Mark Rifkin, drawing on Indigenous studies, shows the limitations of a nation-statist rights framework for Palestinian self-determination. See Mark Rifkin, “Indigeneity, Apartheid, Palestine: On the Transit of Political Metaphors,” Cultural Critique, no. 95 (Winter 2017): p. 28, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/663843.

28 See Dan Williams, “Abbas Hints Has No ‘Right of Return’ to Home in Israel,” Reuters, 1 November 2012,

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-palestinians-israel-abbas-refugees/abbas-hints-has-no-right-of-return-to-home-in-israel-idUSBRE8A01IL20121101.

29 More than eight hundred thousand UNRWA-registered Palestinian refugees reside in the West Bank, making it the third largest refugee community in the UNRWA-operated areas after Jordan and Gaza. Almost one quarter of all West Bank refugees live in camps, with the remainder living in Palestinian towns and villages. Overall, refugees comprise about one quarter of the total population in the West Bank. See “Where We Work, West Bank,” UNRWA, accessed 20 May 2020, https://www.unrwa.org/where-we-work/west-bank; and “The International Day of Refugees, 2019,” Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, accessed 20 May 2020, http://www.pcbs.gov.ps/site/512/default.aspx?lang=en&ItemID=3486. See also Rempel, “Palestinian Refugees.” For an in-depth discussion of Dheisheh camp, see Maya Rosenfeld, Confronting the Occupation: Work, Education, and Political Activism of Palestinian Families in a Refugee Camp (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004); and Nasser Abourahme and Sandi Hilal, “The Production of Space, Political Subjectivication and the Folding of Polarity: the Case of Deheishe Camp, Palestine,” Camp Improvement Program, CIC website, 2012, http://www.campusincamps.ps/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Nasser-Abourahme-and-Sandi-Hilal_Deheishe-Paper.pdf.

30 Abourahme and Hilal, “The Production of Space,” p. 34.

31 CIC is hosted at the Phoenix Center in Dheisheh and was founded by Alessandro Petti and Sandi Hilal. It is supported by Al-Quds University (Al-Quds Bard), the German Foundation, GIZ, and UNRWA’s Camp Improvement Program. For more details, see CIC’s website: http://www.campusincamps.ps/; Alessandro Petti, “Campus in Camps: Knowledge Production and Urban Interventions in Refugee Camps,” in The Routledge Companion to Planning in the Global South, ed. Gautam Bhan, Smita Srinivas, and Vanessa Watson (London: Routledge, 2019), pp. 334–44; Abourahme and Hilal, “The Production of Space”; Ilana Feldman, Life Lived in Relief: Humanitarian Predicaments and Palestinian Refugee Politics (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), pp. 208–21; and “What Is a Camp? Legitimate Refugee Lives in Spaces of Long-Term Displacement,” Geoforum, no. 66 (November 2015): pp. 244–52, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2014.11.014; Qussay Abu Aker and Ahmad Al Lahham, The Suburb: Transgressing Boundaries (Dheisheh: Campus in Camps Initiatives, 2013), http://www.campusincamps.ps/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/The-Suburb_web.pdf.

32 See CIC website, About page, http://www.campusincamps.ps/about/.

33 Ali, CIC focus group, Dheisheh, 2012.

34 CIC focus group, Dheisheh, 2012.

35 CIC focus group, Dheisheh, 2012.

36 Mahmoud, CIC focus group, Dheisheh, 2012. I have translated the Arabic yahud as “Israeli,” not “Jew,” because here Mahmoud refers to the national rather than religious group.

37 CIC focus group, 2012.

38 Marwan, CIC, focus group, 2012.

39 Rempel, “Palestinian Refugees,” p. 5.

40 Space does not allow me to further elaborate on the complex positioning of refugees vis-à-vis each of these sovereignties. See Rempel, “Palestinian Refugees,” for an overview of the situation of refugees in the West Bank, and Abu Aker and Al Lahham, The Suburb, for refugees’ own narratives on their relations with these different political bodies.

41 Ali, CIC focus group, Dheisheh, 2012.

42 See also Feldman, Life Lived in Relief, pp. 115–17.

43 Amahl Bishara “Sovereignty and Popular Sovereignty for Palestinians and Beyond” Cultural Anthropology 32, no. 3 (August 2017): pp. 349–58, https://doi.org/10.14506/ca32.3.04.

44 For a detailed analysis of the PA’s security sector and its cooperation with Israel, see Laleh Khalili, “The Location of Palestine in Global Counterinsurgencies,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 42, no. 3 (August 2010): pp. 413–33, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40784820; Mandy Turner, “Peacebuilding as Counterinsurgency in the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” Review of International Studies 41, no. 1 (January 2015): pp. 73–98, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210514000072.

45 Jumana, CIC focus group, Dheisheh, 2012.

46 With the fallacies of the two-state paradigm laid bare in the “Peace to Prosperity” plan, several commentators (including Abbas himself) have discussed the proposal to disband the PA and its post-Oslo framework. See Tareq Baconi, “The Oslo Accords Are Dead: Should the Palestinian Authority Live On?” Foreign Policy, 18 February 2020, https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/02/18/the-oslo-accords-are-dead-should-the-palestinian-authority-live-on/.

47 Mohammad, CIC focus group, Dheisheh, 2012.

48 CIC focus group, Dheisheh, 2012.

49 CIC focus group, Dheisheh, 2012.

50 Jumana, CIC focus group, Dheisheh, 2012.

51 Feldman, Life Lived in Relief, p. 22.

52 Feldman, Life Lived in Relief, p. 159.

53 For studies that compare more systematically the differences between Palestinian refugees’ contexts and politics in Jordan and the West Bank, see Laurie A. Brand, Palestinians in the Arab World: Institution Building and the Search for State (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); Are Knudsen and Sari Hanafi, eds., Palestinian Refugees: Identity, Space and Place in the Levant (London: Routledge, 2010); and Jalal Al Husseini and Riccardo Bocco, “The Status of the Palestinian Refugees in the Near East: The Right of Return and UNRWA in Perspective,” Refugee Survey Quarterly 28, nos. 2–3 (2009): pp. 260–85, https://doi.org/10.1093/rsq/hdp036; Richter-Devroe, “‘Like Something Sacred.’” Here, I am interested in how jil Oslo refugees formulate a somewhat shared politics grounded in their challenge to the nation-state.

54 Rosemary Sayigh, “Palestinian Camp Refugee Identification: A New Look at the ‘Local’ and ‘National,’” in Palestinian Refugees: Identity, Space and Place in the Levant, ed. Are Knudsen and Sari Hanafi (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 50–64.

55 In the name of the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS), Palestinian students in the United Kingdom made a public call in January 2011 for direct PNC elections. PYM also called for direct elections to the PNC at that time. See Høigilt, “The Palestinian Spring That Was Not,” p. 355; Rana Barakat et al., “An Open Debate on Palestinian Representation,” Al-Shabaka, 1 May 2013, https://al-shabaka.org/roundtables/open-debate-palestinian-representation/; Naseer Aruri et al., “Roundtable on Palestinian Diaspora and Representation,” Jadaliyya, 11 September 2012, http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/6082/roundtable-on-palestinian-diaspora-and-representat. See, also, Omar Shweiki “Palestinian Civil Society and the Question of Representation,” Bulletin of the Council for British Research in the Levant 7, no. 1 (2012): pp. 36–41, https://doi.org/10.1179/1752726012Z.0000000005; Osamah Khalil, “‘Who Are You?’: The PLO and the Limits of Representation,” Al-Shabaka, 18 March 2013, https://al-shabaka.org/briefs/who-are-you-plo-and-limits-representation/; Noura Erakat, “Beyond Sterile Negotiations: Looking for a Leadership with a Strategy,” Al-Shabaka, 1 February 2012, https://al-shabaka.org/briefs/beyond-sterile-negotiations-looking-leadership-strategy/; Jamil Hilal, “Palestinian Answers in the Arab Spring,” Al-Shabaka, 5 May 2011, https://al-shabaka.org/briefs/palestinian-answers-arab-spring/.

56 PYM, “Palestinian Youth and Student Organizations: It Is Time for the ‘Palestinian Leadership’ to Go!” 7 May 2020, https://www.pymusa.com/youth-on-palestinian-leadership. For a detailed analysis of the PYM and its politics, see Welchman, Zambelli, and Salih, “Rethinking Justice.”

57 Mannheim, “The Problem of Generations,” p. 105.

58 Ruba Salih, drawing on Partha Chatterjee, argues that Palestinian refugees form “a ‘political society,’ composed of new claims, narratives and political practices.” See Ruba Salih, “From Bare Lives to Political Agents: Palestinian Refugees as Avant-Garde,” Refugee Survey Quarterly 32, no. 2 (June 2013): pp. 69–70, https://doi.org/10.1093/rsq/hdt005; Partha Chatterjee, “Beyond the Nation? Or Within?” Social Text, no. 56 (Autumn 1998): pp. 57–69, https://doi.org/10.2307/466770.

59 Feldman, Life Lived in Relief, p. 117.

60 Bishara, “Sovereignty,” p. 349.

61 See, for example, Margaret Moore, A Political Theory of Territory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 28.

62 Feldman, “What Is a Camp,” p. 245.

63 Nasser Abourahme, “The Camp,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 40, no. 1 (May 2020): pp. 42, https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-8186016.

64 Rana Barakat, “Lifta, the Nakba, and the Museumification of Palestine’s History,” Native American and Indigenous Studies 5, no. 2 (Fall 2018): pp. 1–15, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/721563.

65 Feldman, Life Lived in Relief, p. 221. On return and decolonization, see also Barakat, “Lifta,” p. 2; and on return imaginaries and dreams, see Peteet, Landscape, pp. 217–18.

66 James Clifford, “Diasporas,” Cultural Anthropology 9, no. 3 (August 1994): p. 306, https://www.jstor.org/stable/656365.

67 The 1954 Jordanian citizenship law granted citizenship to Palestinian refugees, thus creating a “new type of refugee: ‘the refugee-citizen.’” See Al Husseini and Bocco, “The Status,” p. 263. This naturalization process was largely formalistic: major political power remained in the hands of Jordanian nationals, and Palestinians in Jordan remained subject to arbitrary discrimination. Holding citizenship does not impact their refugee status. Today, more than two million UNRWA-registered Palestinian refugees live in Jordan, making it the largest refugee community in UNRWA-operated areas. See “Where We Work, Jordan,” UNRWA, accessed 20 May 2020, https://www.unrwa.org/where-we-work/jordan.

68 Samir, interview with the author, Amman, 2013.

69 Samir, interview with the author, Amman, 2013.

70 The return march has become a landmark in Palestinian street politics, particularly the Great March of Return in Gaza. Here I am referring to the 2011 march of return in Jordan, when demonstrators marched to the Allenby Bridge Crossing. See BBC News, “Israeli Forces Open Fire at Palestinian Protesters,” 16 May 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-13373006.

71 Samira, interview with author, Amman, 2011. Quoted also in Richter-Devroe, “Like Something Sacred,” p. 110.

72 Abu El-Haj, Unsettled Belonging, p. 4.

73 Abu El-Haj, Unsettled Belonging, p. 97.

74 For a concise discussion of discrimination against Palestinian Jordanian citizens, see Sawsan Ramahi, “Palestinians and Jordanian Citizenship,” Middle East Monitor, 9 December 2015, https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20151209-palestinians-and-jordanian-citizenship/. See also Salih, “From Bare Lives,” pp. 71–75; Randa Rafiq Farah, “Popular Memory and Reconstructions of Palestinian Identity, Al-Baq’a Refugee Camp, Jordan” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2000), http://hdl.handle.net/1807/13422; Mohammad Khaled al-Aza’r, Arab Protection for Palestinian Refugees, working paper no. 8, (BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights, November 2004), https://www.badil.org/phocadownloadpap/Badil_docs/Working_Papers/wp-8%20khalid%20al-azare.pdf.

75 Luigi Achilli, “The Politics of Being ‘Ordinary’: Palestinian Refugees in Jordan after the Oslo Agreement,” in From the River to the Sea: Palestine and Israel in the Shadow of “Peace,” ed. Mandy Turner (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018).

76 For more on contemporary political activism by Palestinians in Jordan, see Oraib Rantawi and Oroub el-Abed, “Modest but Powerful Activism for Palestinian-Origin Jordanian Rights,” Al-Shabaka, 1 October 2012, https://al-shabaka.org/commentaries/modest-but-powerful-activism-for-palestinian-origin-jordanian-rights/. See also Salih, “From Bare Lives.”

77 Samir, interview with the author, Amman, 2013.

78 Samir, interview with the author, Amman, 2013.

79 For a detailed historical analysis of Jordanian politics on Palestine, Palestinians, and the relationship between the East and West Banks, see Joseph A. Massad, Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); Avi Shlaim, Lion of Jordan: The Life of King Hussein in War and Peace (London: Penguin Press, 2009).

80 Shlaim, Lion of Jordan, p. 463.

81 Malkki, “Refugees and Exile.”

82 Abu El-Haj, Unsettled Belongings, p. 3.

83 James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).

84 Lauren Banko argues that in the early twentieth century, inhabitants of the Arab Eastern Mediterranean “conceived of nationality as a choice,” thus producing “transnational, flexible identit[ies].” This argument provides an important historical grounding for the political imaginaries and identities of young Palestinian refugees presented here. See Lauren Banko, “Claiming Identities in Palestine: Migration and Nationality under the Mandate,” JPS 46, no. 2 (Winter 2017): pp. 26, 40, https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2017.46.2.26.

85 Beshara Doumani speaks of a nationalist rewriting of Palestinian history that marginalized more relational, pan-Arab or Pan-Islamist frames through which the Palestinian struggle had also been articulated. See Beshara Doumani, “Rediscovering Ottoman Palestine: Writing Palestinians into History,” JPS 21, no. 2 (Winter 1992): pp. 5–28, https://doi.org/10.2307/2537216; Salim Tamari, Mountain against the Sea: Essays on Palestinian Society and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Zachary Lockman, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906–1948 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Lori Allen “What’s in a Link?: Transnational Solidarities across Palestine and Their Intersectional Possibilities,” South Atlantic Quarterly 117, no. 1 (2018): pp. 111–33, https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-4282064.

86 Samira, interview with author, Amman, 2011. Quoted also in Richter-Devroe, “Like Something Sacred,” p. 109.

87 Recent literature in critical migration studies has highlighted how migrants’ mobile political subjecthood and claim-making challenge the classic political figure of the territorialized citizens in paradigm-shifting and “ambiguous” ways. See Anne McNevin, “Ambivalence and Citizenship: Theorising the Political Claims of Irregular Migrants,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 41, no. 2 (January 2013): pp. 182–200, https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0305829812463473.

88 Indigenous scholarship has shown that Indigenous sovereignty, peoplehood, and relations to the land cannot be accommodated by the classic political formations of statehood, national territory, and citizenship. See Rifkin, “Apartheid”; Aileen Moreton-Robinson “Writing Off Treaties: White Possession in the United States Critical Whiteness Studies Literature,” in Transnational Whiteness Matters, ed. Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Maryrose Casey, and Fiona Nicoll (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), p. 87.

89 The notion of human dignity and humanity is stressed by Salih, who argues that Palestinian refugees “call . . . for humanity as the condition for existing as political subjects,” and thus are “exiting the classic national framework.” See Ruba Salih, “Refugees and Cathartic Politics: From Human Rights to the Right to Be Human,” South Atlantic Quarterly 117, no. 1 (2018): p. 150, https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-4282073.

90 Diana Allan, Refugees of the Revolution: Experiences of Palestinian Exile (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013) also shows that political practices and imaginaries among Palestinian refugees in Lebanon are not always rooted solely in a narrow nation-statist framework. For further interrogations of the territorialized nation-state paradigm in the Palestinian context, see the introduction and contributions in “Palestine beyond National Frames: Emerging Politics, Cultures, and Claims,” ed. Sophie Richter-Devroe and Ruba Salih, special issue, South Atlantic Quarterly 117, no. 1 (2018): pp. 1–20, https://www.dukeupress.edu/palestine-beyond-national-frames-emerging-politics-cultures-and-claims.

91 Appadurai, “Sovereignty without Territoriality,” p. 40.

92 Appadurai, “Sovereignty without Territoriality,” p. 51.

93 Appadurai, “Sovereignty without Territoriality,” p. 51.

94 Appadurai, “Sovereignty without Territoriality”; Appadurai, “Modernity at Large.”