The liminality of Palestinian refugees: betwixt and between global politics and international law

Into the abyss

As flagged above, UN General Assembly Resolution 194 of 1948 clearly states that Palestinian refugees are to be permitted to return to their homes ‘at the earliest practicable date’. The UN General Assembly has reaffirmed Resolution 194 ‘by overwhelming majority’ annually since 1948 (Akram, 2018b: 18). The Right of Return for refugees is also enshrined in the Convention and Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees (Refugee Convention); the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 13); the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (Article 12/4); the European Convention on Human Rights (Article 4/3); the American Convention on Human Rights (Article 22); and the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights (Article 12) (Akram, 2011). As Susan Akram (2018b: 18) summarises, the Palestinian Right of Return has:

an even more robust basis than other refugees, because their rights are recognized both in general international law as well as in the body of law confirmed in decades of UN resolutions specifically passed for their protection.

Furthermore, of the three durable solutions available for refugees under international law – voluntary repatriation; local integration in the place of asylum; and resettlement in a third country – voluntary repatriation (the Right of Return) is the only option that is an absolute right, ‘guaranteed under treaty and customary law and . . . a core obligation of all states of origin’ (Abu Zayd, 2014: 6). The Right of Return is also the norm in refugee practice. In the 1990s alone, some 12 million refugees were repatriated to their homelands, with this timeframe also witnessing a much fewer 1.3 million refugees resettled to states other than their place of origin (Akram, 2011: 28–9).

A month after the establishment of the state of Israel in May 1948, however, the Israeli cabinet barred the return of Palestinian refugees (Molloy et al., 2014: 192) and has since refused – often violently, as will be discussed later in this article – to allow any repatriation. More than 70 years after their original dispossession, therefore, around 11 million Palestinians remain in the exilic diaspora, and are ‘entitled to the right of return, property restitution and compensation guaranteed’ by the UN General Assembly in its resolutions. This right stems from them being:

former nationals of Palestine, a nationality which was recognized in 1924–25 as a matter of the Treaty of Lausanne…. The British passed Palestine citizenship legislation that conformed to the Treaty during the British Mandate. All Palestinians who had Palestinian nationality/citizenship under treaty and mandate law, and their descendants through today, are defined as Palestinian refugees if they were forced to flee during the conflicts of 1947 onwards, and remain as such until their rights embodied in Resolution 194 are realized. (Akram, 2018b: 18)

As Molloy et al. (2014) and I (Mason, 2007) outline, some of these Palestinians have managed to obtain residency or citizenship in the exilic diaspora, including in the Global North. For such Palestinians, arguably only a small number would choose to exercise their Right of Return in a permanent manner (Mason, 2007; Molloy et al., 2014). Even a 2003 survey in the West Bank and Gaza found that only 10 per cent of eligible Palestinians desired to physically return to their original homes. However, 95 per cent characterised the Right of Return as an inviolable right in itself, reflecting the importance of underlying intangible as well as material issues (Molloy et al., 2014: 196).

Of the 11 million Palestinians in the exilic diaspora, 5.15 million are classed as formal refugees. This status is conferred by UN agencies to:

persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict…. The descendants of Palestine refugee males, including adopted children, are also eligible. (UNRWA, n.d.)

The main agency with a mandate to provide assistance to Palestinian refugees is the UN Relief Works Agency (UNRWA), which was established in 1949 to ‘prevent conditions of starvation and distress’ among Palestinian refugees (UNGA, 1949). Some 70 years later UNRWA continues to provide health care, education and social services to Palestinian refugees. While the UNHCR was created in 1950, its mandate did not extend to refugees already receiving assistance from other UN organs or agencies, including UNRWA, meaning that the vast majority of Palestinian refugees are outside of the formal remit of UNHCR.

While UNRWA is responsible for assisting the 5.15 million Palestinian refugees who were displaced from their homeland in 1948 and 1967 and fled to Gaza, the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria, the UNHCR has responsibility only for the approximate 100,000 Palestinian refugees outside these areas. This anomaly within the refugee regime creates significant precarity as, while UNRWA provides services for Palestinian refugees, it is actually ‘legally constrained from providing the main international protection guarantees’ (emphasis added) or durable solutions such as repatriation, that UNHCR provides (Akram, 2011: 25). This means that the vast majority of Palestinian refugees are denied the ‘minimum protection guarantees’ available to all ‘other refugee populations in the world’ (Akram, 2011: 13). This extraordinary situation has created a liminal position of deep vulnerability for Palestinian refugees, with their experiences shaped by the geopolitical realities of their host state.

As a result of al Nakbah, around 400,000 Palestinians were dispossessed to the West Bank (controlled from 1949 to 1967 by Jordan – then known as Transjordan); 150,000–200,000 to Gaza (under Egyptian military rule between 1949 and 1967); 100,000–140,000 to Lebanon; 100,000 to Transjordan proper; 75,000 to Syria; 7,000–10,000 to Egypt and 5,000 to Iraq (Brand, 1991; Lindholm Schultz, 2003). Conflicts between Israel and neighbouring Arab states in 1967 and 1973 not only failed to regain Palestinian land, but the former resulted in the Israeli occupation of what remained of historic Palestine – the West Bank and Gaza Strip – and resulted in a second major Palestinian refugee flow.

As Abbas Shiblak (1996) outlines, Arab states pledged to provide shelter and equal rights to Palestinian refugees, but without seeking, or encouraging, their absorption (and thereby undermining their Right of Return), as they anticipated an imminent return of Palestinian refugees to their homeland (see also Brand, 1991). In reality, however, the presence of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees in Arab states, and the pressure this created in terms of resources, amenities and services, meant that the refugees were increasingly viewed as problematic and came to occupy precarious positions in most Arab states (Brand, 1991; Mason, 2011).

As one example, from the earliest days following al Nakbah, Lebanon feared that Palestinian refugees within its borders posed a threat to its already-fragile ethno-religious balance. This resulted in the Lebanese government enacting ‘an uncompromising policy of oppression and exclusion’ towards Palestinians, including their being confined to refugee camps and subject to harsh restrictions, such as being banned from working in some 70 occupations (Brand, 1991; Pappé, 2012; Shiblak, 1996). Even today, Palestinians in Lebanon have few civil or social rights, little access to government services, and in 2001 they were stripped of the right to own property or pass on existing properties to their children (Miller and Samuels, 2009).

At the other end of the spectrum, Jordan is the Arab state which a priori has accorded Palestinians the most rights, with most Palestinian refugees granted Jordanian citizenship. On closer examination, however, the position of Jordan is more complex, with the large influx of Palestinians resulting in concerns about the ‘Palestinianisation’ of Jordan, particularly following the Jordanian civil war of 1970, giving rise to periodic threats to revoke Palestinian citizenship (Brand, 1991; Lindholm Schultz, 2003; Miller and Samuels, 2009). Jordan is, moreover, one of the world’s top receiving countries of refugees per population, including hosting hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Syrian refugees in the last twenty years (Mason, 2011). Hosting such enormous numbers of refugees has placed significant pressure on Jordan, whose population is a mere 10 million people, is the fourth most water stressed country in the world, and faces considerable economic challenges (Akram, 2018a). Furthermore, periodic moral panics in relation to Palestinians are sparked by calls by Israeli politicians to expel Palestinians from the West Bank into Jordan (see, for example, Andoni, 2010).

Israel and its supporters argue that the Arab states which host Palestinian refugees should accept them on a permanent basis and naturalise them. However, under international law, ‘unlike the obligation on the state of origin to accept back the inhabitants of their territory, a country of asylum or resettlement is not legally obliged to accept an asylee or refugee permanently on its territory’ (Abu Zayd, 2014: 6). Under international law, it is Israel which has the obligation to repatriate refugees. With Israel refusing to accept them, and no effective pressure from the international community to enforce Israel’s responsibility, Palestinian refugees have been forced to exist within an abyss – as liminal, stateless individuals under the Mandate of a UN agency prohibited from seeking a durable solution. The result has been significant intergenerational injustice and violence for Palestinian refugees – both structural and direct.

For example, around a third of Palestinian refugees remain in 58 UNRWA camps, where ‘socioeconomic conditions . . . are generally poor, with high population density, cramped living conditions and inadequate basic infrastructure such as roads and sewers’ (UNRWA, n.d.). The liminal position their statelessness bequeaths has also resulted in many Palestinian refugees experiencing repeated dispossessions. For example, some Palestinians fled to the West Bank during al Nakbah, only to be dispossessed from there in 1967, at which point, many fled to Kuwait. As a result of the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, however, some 300,000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled from the emirate, many of whom sought sanctuary in Iraq (Mason, 2010). Palestinian refugees have also been attacked, murdered or displaced in the context of the conflicts in Iraq (since 2003) and Syria (since 2011). As UNHCR (2006) notes, persecution of Palestinians in Iraq ‘began almost immediately’ after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003, with Palestinians ‘subject to harassment, targeted attacks, kidnapping, abduction, torture and extra-judicial killings’. Amnesty International (AI) reports that two-thirds of Syria’s 530,000 Palestinian refugees have been displaced since the conflict began and, according to figures released by London-based human rights group ‘Action Group for Palestinians in Syria’, nearly 4000 Palestinian refugees have been killed as part of the intense violence in Syria, with many of the victims civilians (AI, 2014; Al Araby, 2018).

Palestinian refugees expected that an agreement concerning their return to their homeland would be central to any peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. The emergence of the so-called Israeli-Palestinian peace process (IPPP) in the early 1990s, however, only served to further marginalise the issue of Palestinian refugees. Under the IPPP, the Right of Return was reframed from a right under international law to an issue to be politically negotiated with Israel (Akram, 2011; Lindholm Schulz, 2003; Said, 2001). On top of this attempt to extricate the issue from the domain of international law, the IPPP moreover placed the issue of the refugees on the ‘backburner’ to be addressed in ‘final negotiations’ (which are yet to materialise). In the 26 years which have followed the initiation of the IPPP, Israel and its allies have argued that (a) Palestinian refugees were created through the ‘fog of war’, and are therefore not the responsibility of Israel, and (b) if Israel allowed the return of Palestinian refugees, this would shift the demographic balance such that it would cease to be a Jewish state, and is therefore untenable (TOI Staff and Cortellessa, 2018). Thus, the hegemonic position has become that Palestinians need to ‘compromise’ on the issue of return, and any repatriation of refugees should occur to the territory earmarked for a future Palestinian state (namely, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip).

The West Bank and Gaza Strip, however, comprise only 22 per cent of historic Palestine, meaning that for many returnees this would not actually constitute repatriation (Abu Zayd, 2014: 8). Even this deeply problematic proposal, however, has been revealed to be a façade. Under the IPPP the West Bank was divided into three areas: ‘Area A’, comprising around 18 per cent of the total land of the West Bank, and placed under the full authority (military and civil) of the Palestinian Authority (PA); ‘Area B’, incorporating 21 per cent of the West Bank – nominally under the civil control of the PA, but under the military control of Israel; and ‘Area C’, encompassing 61 per cent of the West Bank and its Palestinian population – including the most fertile and productive land and resources – remaining under full Israeli control (B’Tselem, 2010; Halper, 2000).

In conjunction with the creation of Palestinian enclaves and Israeli policies of closure, surveillance, violence and biopolitical control, it soon became clear that the IPPP was not designed to end the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, but instead to make Israel’s settler colonial project more effective and efficient (Halper, 2000; McMahon, 2010; Said, 2001). Today there are around 550,000–600,000 illegal Israeli settlers in the West Bank (including Occupied East Jerusalem), who, with their associated structures, control 42.8 per cent of the land (B’Tselem, 2010). As Abu Zayd (2014) summarises: ‘there is no longer sufficiently contiguous territory in the West Bank that can be considered, or even function as, a viable state’ and states that calls for refugees to ‘return’ to the West Bank and Gaza ‘do not take into account the fact of occupation, whereby the territory, the economy and the people’ are under the control of Israel.

The liminality and vulnerability of Palestinian refugees has also been greatly compounded by measures undertaken by the US Trump administration since it came to power in 2017, which aim to actually eliminate refugees from consideration as part of the IPPP. In late 2018 it was revealed that Jared Kushner – a ‘senior advisor’ to Trump (and his son-in-law) – proposed to strip the majority of Palestinian refugees of their refugee status through limiting recognition to those Palestinians directly displaced in 1948, and not their descendants (Amr, 2018; Lynch and Gramer, 2018). As Akram notes, this effort is completely at odds with basic refugee regime norms, whereby ‘refugee status is transferred through the generations’ and is retained by subsequent generations of refugees until individuals are able to avail themselves of a durable solution (Akram, 2018b; UNRWA, 2011). As such, it can only be described as a political move in support of the Israeli agenda concerning Palestinian refugees (Akram, 2018b).

A further prong of the Trump administration’s strategy has been a ‘sincere effort to disrupt’ the work of UNRWA, including cutting all US funding ($360 million annually) to the agency in late 2018 (Amr, 2018; Lynch and Gramer, 2018). As Akram (2018b: 18) notes, this decision is perplexing as the US can’t ‘will away’ the reality that there are 11 million Palestinians with a Right of Return, and over 5.15 million who formally meet the criteria of a ‘Refugee’. However, as she adds, this cut in funding ‘can bring misery’ to the most vulnerable of these refugees, decimating programs in essential areas such as health care delivery, ‘food subsistence to the most needy’ and infant mortality (Akram, 2018b: 18). The US administration argues that UNRWA ‘perpetuates’ the Palestine refugee problem and creates ‘dependency’, yet as former UNRWA Commissioner General Karen Koning Abu Zayd (2014) reminds us, precisely because of UNRWA, only ‘one-third of the refugees live in camps . . . and only 6% . . . are in need of social services’.

While these efforts by the US have been condemned by UNRWA and criticised by the UN Secretary-General and leading states in the Global North such as the UK and Germany (ABC, 2018; Sampathkumar, 2018), there have been no effective moves or efforts to redress this attack on Palestinian refugees. The lack of effective response, however, is consistent with the failure to disentangle the refugee question from the disingenuous IPPP and address the issue of Palestinian refugees through international law. In order to understand why this might be so, this article now briefly addresses the hegemonic discourses concerning both Palestinian refugees and wider Israeli-Palestinian relations, and how they have enshrined Palestinian liminality and enabled the Kafkaesque developments described above.

Discourses on Palestine

The issue of Palestinian refugees, and the question of Palestine more widely, are viewed very differently by the Global South and Global North. The Global South, for the most part, considers the Palestinian issue one of the most long-standing and significant injustices in the current global order. As Judge ad hoc of the International Court of Justice, John Dugard (2007: 733–5) argues, many in the Global South regard Palestine as an important ‘litmus test’ for emancipatory struggles. They expect the long-standing injustice and violence experienced by Palestinians to garner a response similar to South African apartheid – ‘with action through the United Nations, through governments, and through civil society’.

As a result, it is the UN General Assembly (UNGA) – the main UN forum enabling voice of Global South concerns – that has historically sought to address Palestinian injustice (including the yearly reaffirming of UNGA resolution 194) (Akram, 2018b: 18). Effective action to implement the recommendations and resolutions stemming from such efforts is, however, stymied by negative interventions and voting by the Global North, especially in the UN Security Council (UNSC), the only UN body with the authority to issue binding resolutions. The five permanent members of the UNSC, furthermore, can exercise a right of veto, which the US has utilised against the overwhelming majority of resolutions addressing the Palestine question and/or criticising the state of Israel – some 45 at the time of writing (UN Dag Hammarskjöld Library, n.d.).

It is necessary, then, to understand the hegemonic discourse within the Global North concerning Israeli-Palestinian relations. At the heart of this discourse is the notion that Palestinian resistance against Israel constitutes terrorism, with this terrorism being the root cause of the ‘conflict’ (McMahon, 2010). However, the ‘terrorist’ moniker occludes the root causes of Palestinian resistance in their experience of injustice and violence – including their Nakbah. As then Secretary-General of the UN Ban Ki-moon argued in 2015, Palestinian resistance is ‘the result of fear, humiliation, frustration and mistrust. It has been fed by the wounds of decades of bloody conflict’ (Dearden, 2015). According to established norms of international law, moreover, Palestinians, possess the right to resistance (ICRC, 1977: Article 1/4; International Court of Justice, 2004; Mason and Falk, 2016). While this resistance must adhere to international law, and certain acts (such as attacks on civilians) are prohibited and illegal (and in some instances do comprise terrorism), most acts of Palestinian resistance are legal under international law (Mason and Falk, 2016). Yet, as Saree Makdisi (2002: 266) reminds us, when an enemy is labelled as a ‘terrorist’, it is often an effort to ‘transform an enemy into an existential Other’. Israel’s use of the term as a ‘blanket description’ for Palestinian resistance aims to institute ‘terrorism’ as an ‘ontological category’ for Palestinians. It is, continues Makdisi, ‘only by identifying all Palestinians, and their collective being, with “terrorism” that Israel can justify its repression’.

Despite these realities, the hegemonic discourse within the Global North frames Israel as a bastion of democracy and liberal values. A critical lens, however, reveals that in practice Israel is an ethnocracy – a polity ‘where a dominant ethnos gains political control and uses the state apparatus to ethnicize the territory and society in question’ (Yiftachel, 2000: 730). Israel, as with other ethnocracies, possesses a ‘democratic façade’ with ‘visible democratic features’ alongside a ‘deeper undemocratic regime logic’, with the former securing legitimacy within the international arena, and rendering undemocratic regime elements largely invisible (Sen, 2015: Yiftachel, 2000). Thus, despite the last two decades seeing a significant rise of extremism within Israeli politics and a ‘tsunami’ of racist and undemocratic laws being enshrined (Adalah, n.d.; Beaumont, 2018; Benn, 2019; Blatman, 2011; Sasley, 2015; Sheizaf, 2013; Strenger, 2015), the ‘bastion of democracy’ discourse continues to be reproduced by Israel and its allies.

There is, of course, significant self-interest underlining the reproduction, among powerful states of the Global North, of Israel’s discourse relating to the Palestinians. As Omar Barghouti (2015: 129–30) reminds us, such states:

played a key role in establishing Israel as a colonial outpost in the region and continued to support it economically, diplomatically, culturally, academically and militarily to maintain its domination. Those powers have been coveting artificially low-priced energy sources and open access to a large, underdeveloped, structurally dependent market and are always keen to appease their guilt over the Holocaust.

Understanding the Global North’s discourse on Palestinians, however, must also consider what Edward W. Said (1979: 27) revealed as the ‘web of racism, cultural stereotypes, political imperialism, [and] dehumanizing ideology’ entrenched by Orientalism and Othering when it comes to Palestinians. As a result of this Othering, Palestinians have become framed as expendable from the properly human world, as lives ‘not fully grievable’, thereby justifying their relegation to liminal spaces (Butler, 2004, 2016). As Behar Rumelili (2012: 495) tells us, ‘those in liminal situations are represented as monsters’ who are blamed for their own predicament and must therefore accept ‘punishment without complaint’.

Revisiting al Nakbah

A central anchoring point of this hegemonic discourse concerning Israel and Palestine is the narrative ascribed to the Palestinian dispossession. According to the dominant narrative, the dispossession of two-thirds of the population of historic Palestine was ‘collateral damage’ resulting from ‘historical necessities’ – an unfortunate by-product of the ‘fog’ of a war which Zionists were forced into (Molloy et al., 2014; Zureik, 2016: 69). Meticulously documented archival research, however, reveals that the massive Palestinian refugee flow in 1947–49 was actually the outcome of a deliberate and pre-planned policy of ‘transfer’ (Khalidi, 1988; Masalha, 1992; Pappé, 2006). As Nur Masalha (1992: 1) argues, ‘transfer’ was a Zionist euphemism ‘denoting the organized removal of the indigenous population of Palestine to neighbouring countries’ to reduce the number of Arab Palestinians within the land of historic Palestine to a bare minimum. Under international law, as Ilan Pappé (2006) reminds us, ‘transfer’ constitutes ethnic cleansing – defined as ‘rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove from a given area persons of another ethnic or religious group’.

As scholars such as Pappé reveal, on 10 March 1948, two months before the end of the British Mandate in Palestine, leading Zionist figures and military officers put the ‘final touches’ on a document known as ‘Plan Dalet’ (or Plan D), which was effectively a blueprint for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

The orders came with a detailed description of the methods to be used to forcibly evict the people: large-scale intimidation; laying siege to and bombarding villages and population centers; setting fire to homes, properties, and goods; expelling residents; demolishing homes; and, finally, planting mines in the rubble to prevent the expelled inhabitants from returning. Each unit was issued its own list of villages and neighborhoods to target in keeping with the master plan. (Pappé, 2006: xii)

Thus, around one-third to half of the expulsions of Palestinians occurred when Palestine was still under British Mandate authority, before the declaration of state of Israel, and before the ‘war’ with neighbouring Arab states (Pappé, 2006). There is also no evidence to support the Israeli narrative that much of the displacement resulted from Palestinians fleeing their homeland on the orders of the Palestinian and wider Arab leadership (Pappé, 2006). Walid Khalidi’s (1988) thorough investigation of primary evidence reveals ‘not one single instance of an Arab evacuation order’ and a ‘stream of explicit Arab orders to the Palestinian civilians to hold their ground’. On the other hand, Khalidi found ‘countless broadcasts by Zionist radio which indicate deliberate psychological warfare’ against the Palestinians (cited in McMahon, 2010: 38). The ethnic cleansing of Palestine – including massacres (such as that at Deir Yassin), rapes, violent attacks and further seizing of land and resources – then continued apace with the declaration of the state of Israel on 15 May 1948, until the armistice with neighbouring Arab forces (Pappé, 2006: 393; Sen, 2015: 113). While Israel argues that Plan Dalet was a defensive blueprint, a closer examination reveals that it ‘sought to expand, through offensive measures, the geographic scope of the Jewish state’ (McMahon, 2010: 39).

Evidence also demontsrates that the 1947–8 dispossession occurred within a framework of a much larger project of Zionist settler colonialism in historic Palestine from the late 19th century. The principal aims of the Zionist movement were to reconstitute Jewish life on a national level, and to create a safe haven for Jews across the world. ¹ The latter became increasingly important as Jews in Europe faced virulent antisemitism and discrimination, eventually culminating in the Holocaust. However, evidence shows that ‘bi-nationalist’ Zionists – who posited the equality of Jews and Palestinians and wished to coexist with the indigenous Palestinian inhabitants – were in the minority and were marginalised by the opposing separatist state-building school of thought within the movement (Shafir, 2011; Zureik, 2016: 72). ² As scholars such as Elia Zureik, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Patrick Wolfe and Lorenzo Veracini evidence, this meant that Zionism energed as a settler colonial movement which aimed to fashion itself as indigenous through eliminating, erasing and replacing the indigenous Palestinian people (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2015; Veracini, 2006; Wolfe, 2006; Zureik, 2016). As Zureik (2016) summarises, in settler colonial enterprises, ‘eliminating’ aims to reduce – as much as possible – the number of indigenous people remaining on the land. The process of ‘erasing’ the native involves expunging the record and evidence of the indigenous presence; and ‘replacement’, the process whereby settler colonial societies style themselves, through historical, political and social discourses, as indigenous so as to bolster their claims to the land.

As such, the Zionist movement, from its inception, aimed to colonise historic Palestine, control most of its land and resources, and ‘ensure a substantial Jewish majority’ (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2015; Veracini, 2006; Wolfe, 2006; Zureik, 2016). Theodor Herzl, for example, who is considered the ‘father’ of Zionism, drew up meticulous plans to establish a ‘Jewish-Ottoman Land Company’ (JOLC) as a vehicle for mass acquisition of land in Palestine by Jews; the ‘resettlement’ of Palestinians outside of their homeland; and ensuring that ‘Jewish property is communally Jewish, state-owned, and expected to remain Jewish in perpetuity’ (Zureik, 2016: 62–5). While the JOLC did not eventuate in the form that Hertzl conceived, there is general agreement that the spirit of the JOLC ‘lives on in the institutional structure of key national Zionist organizations, particularly the Jewish National Fund’ (Zureik, 2016: 62). Initially, direct ‘elimination’ and ‘erasure’ of native Palestinians was not possible, so Zionists instead focused on ‘replacement’ through the mass immigration of Jews to Palestine, the creation of exclusive Jewish settlements, and replacing Palestinian labour with Jewish labour (Abowd, 2016: 696).

A key turning point for Zionist settler colonialism came when the movement secured direct support from the British – first in the form of the 1917 Balfour Declaration; and then through the colonial ‘umbrella’ it provided through British Mandate control of Palestine to facilitate Zionist immigration, land purchases, settlement and development (Khalidi, 2006; Pappé, 2012; Zureik, 2016: 54). British authorities furthermore recruited, trained and armed Zionist forces, which became seminal in the emergence of pre-state Zionist forces such as the Haganah (which after 1948 became the Israeli Defense Force) (Zureik, 2016: 59–63).

Following the Second World War, the newly formed UN established the Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), which then proposed the partition of historic Palestine: with the Zionist state allocated 56 per cent (despite Jews comprising just 30 per cent of the population); the ‘Arab’ state for the Palestinians allocated 43 per cent of the land (despite comprising 70 per cent of the population); and Jerusalem earmarked to be internationalised (Zureik, 2016). In November 1947, the UN voted and adopted the partition plan with UNGA Resolution 181 (UNGA, 1947). While resolution 181 fell ‘far short’ of Zionist aspirations for a state ‘encompassing all of historic Palestine, including Jerusalem’, the Zionist leadership regarded it as a stepping-stone to their greater territorial designs and accepted partition (McMahon, 2010: 36; Pappé, 2006; Shlaim, 1999: 25). In 1938, for example, Ben-Gurion argued that the Zionist state ‘will abolish partition of the country and we will expand to the whole land of Palestine . . . I see in the realization of this plan . . . the gradual conquest of all of Palestine’ (in McMahon, 2010: 40).

Palestinians and Arab states rejected UNGA Resolution 181 as a flagrant violation of the principles of self-determination enshrined in the new UN Charter. A violent civil war erupted within Palestine, and when British Mandate rule expired, Zionist leaders declared the establishment of the state of Israel. The following day, on 15 May 1948, as a result of a mutual defence pact, forces from neighbouring Arab states attempted to protect the remaining portions of Mandate Palestine. According to the dominant narrative, this conflict represented an existential threat for the one-day-old Jewish state and is known within Israel as the ‘War of Independence’. A more critical unpacking of evidence, however, demonstrates that the infant Zionist state knew their military was far superior to their neighbours (Morris, 2009) and King Abdullah I of Jordan (who was leading the Arab forces) entered Palestine having already secretly colluded with Zionist leaders (Shlaim, 1999). Israeli leaders therefore knew that they did not face existential danger (Shlaim, 1999). When the conflict ended in early 1949, Israel had conquered 78 per cent of historic Palestine.

Eliminated, erased and replaced

Immediately after the end of the war, Ben-Gurion (by now Israel’s first prime minister) approved measures ‘at all costs’ to prevent refugees from returning and classed those who attempted to return as ‘infiltrators’ (Zureik, 2016). As a result, thousands of Palestinian refugees attempting to return to their homes and land were shot and killed, while others were violently turned back to refugee camps (Masalha, 1992; Pappé, 2006; Sen, 2015; Zureik, 2016: 118). In 1950, Israel passed the ‘Absentees’ Property Law’, whereby every Palestinian who had left their usual place of residence in Palestine after the adoption of UNGA Resolution181 were classed as ‘Absentees’ and their land (some 2 million dunams, roughly equivalent to half a million acres) confiscated (Pappé, 2006). The settler colonial process of erasure and replacement then continued through the demolition of hundreds of towns and villages inhabited by Palestinians, and the systematic de-Arabification and subsequent Judaisation of lands conquered by Israel, including the removal of:

Palestinian names of streets, mountains, streams, and valleys. This Judaization was done in a deliberate way in which a governmental committee determined the naming process in order to eliminate Palestinian history or disguise Palestinian origins…. Palestinian culture that was rooted in identity and narrative came close to being a taboo. The name ‘Palestine’ was erased not only from maps, the media, and educational material, but also from public discourse; the ‘Palestinian people’ as a whole were made invisible by the Israeli establishment from the eyes of the Jewish public and replaced euphemistically with ‘Arab refugees’. (Rouhana and Sabbagh-Khoury, 2015: 210; see also: Khalidi, 2006; Pappé, 2006)

Alongside this erasure and replacement was a concerted effort to expunge the reality of the ‘original sin’ of the birth of Israel through framing the mass dispossession of Palestinians as the result of directions from the Arab leadership, or fleeing the ‘fog of war’, rather than the planned Zionist ‘transfer’. As Shay Hazkani (cited in Zureik, 2016: 73) outlines:

Under the leadership of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, top Middle East scholars in the Civil Service were assigned the task of providing evidence supporting Israel’s position – which was that . . . the Palestinians had fled of their own volition.

The expunging of this ‘original sin’ enabled Israel to decry its responsibility for the refugee flow and refuse to entertain any repatriation.

Conclusion: reclaiming the Right of Return

For over 70 years Palestinian refugees have lived in an abyss – betwixt and between the norms and conventions of international law and global politics, and consistently denied the minimum protections nominally offered to other refugee cohorts. While Israel and its supporters argue that any ‘return’ of the refugees should be to a future Palestinian state, Israel has, at the same time, expanded their settler colonial agenda through their occupation of Palestinian territory such that a viable Palestinian state cannot emerge under current conditions. Under international law, Arab host states are not responsible for absorbing Palestinian refugees permanently, and indeed, most of these states – particularly given current turmoil in the region – are unable to do so. As outlined by Abu Zayd (2014: 12), the position of the UN is that ‘a just and durable solution to the issue of Palestine refugees must be found in accordance with international law and existing UN resolutions, including Resolution 194’. Israel’s refusal to accept accountability for al Nakbah, and their responsibility under international law to repatriate the refugees, has been facilitated by the deeply problematic hegemonic discourses in the Global North concerning Israeli-Palestinian relations. It is therefore necessary to assess the issue of Palestinian refugees through a more critical lens; to de-politicise the question and extricate it from its hegemonic discourses; to disentangle the matter from what has been revealed as a disingenuous IPPP; and to place the issue of Palestinian refugees back within the orbit of international law. It is only on this basis that movement can be made towards a just outcome for the 5.15 million Palestinian refugees who continue to live in liminality between international law and global politics.