Responding to Displacement: Bringing Together Palestinians across the Green Line and Beyond

Abstract

In this interview, Amahl Bishara speaks with Nidal Al-Azza, director of Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights, based in Bethlehem, and Rula Nasr-Mazzawi, a psychologist and founding member of Addar for Culture and Art, based in Nazareth, about their organizations’ collaborative initiatives. Al-Azza and Nasr-Mazzawi address displacement as an experience shared by most of the Palestinian people, including refugees and internally displaced people. They discuss their organizations’ innovative joint work to bring together Palestinian youth from across colonized Palestine, and the importance of connecting youth in face-to-face encounters to combat the fragmentation imposed upon Palestinians and to challenge stereotypes they may have of each other. Finally, they share how the Dignity (Unity) Intifada of 2021 heightened awareness for Palestinians across many locations about the unity of the Palestinian struggle and the role that Palestinians with Israeli citizenship play in Palestinian uprisings. Conducted in Arabic in December 2022 via Zoom, the interview was translated and edited for length and clarity. Reflecting the language of the interviewees, it uses ‘48 territories to refer to the lands Israel occupied in 1948.

Keywords:

• refugee rights
• internally displaced people
• youth activism
• Dignity Intifada
• Unity Intifada
• right of return
• ‘48 territories
• Green Line
• West Bank
• Gaza
• Jerusalem

Notes

1 For more information on Badil, see https://www.badil.org/.

2 For more information on the International Law and the Rights of Palestinian Refugees Course, see https://www.badil.org/programs/103.html.

3 For more information on al-Awda Training School for Palestinian Youth, see https://www.badil.org/programs/5.html.

4 For more information on Addar for Culture and Art, see https://www.facebook.com/addar.org/.

5 For more information on the Palestinian Youth Forum, see Badil: Resource Center for Palestinian Residency & Refugee Rights, news release, 2022, “The Palestinian Youth Forum (PYF) Completed a ‘Strategic Planning Workshop,’” https://badil.org/press-releases/13387.html.

6 Those who lost their homes and lands in what became Israel but did not cross international borders are regarded as internally displaced persons.

7 These are annual events organized by ADRID each spring at the site of a depopulated village to commemorate the Nakba.

8 For more on Jerusalem residents who lack legal status, see Human Rights Watch, Israel: Jerusalem Palestinians Stripped of Status, Discriminatory Residency Revocations, August 8, 2017, https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/08/08/israel-jerusalem-palestinians-stripped-status.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amahl Bishara

Amahl Bishara is an associate professor of anthropology at Tufts University and the author of Crossing a Line: Laws, Violence, and Roadblocks to Palestinian Political Expression (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2022), about the different conditions of expression for Palestinians with Israeli citizenship and Palestinians in the West Bank, and Back Stories: U.S. News and Palestinian Politics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), an ethnography of the production of US news during the second intifada. With youth and leaders at Lajee Center in Aida refugee camp, she has collaborated to produce two bilingual children’s books.