During a television address in 2012, Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Pal­estinian Authority, declared, before reconsidering his words a few days later, that he did not want to return to live in his childhood home, in Safed, now in Israeli territory.¹ These words triggered strong reactions, particularly from the Palestinian people, as they were seen as an abandonment of the “right of return.” The following comes from Article 11 of United Nations General Assembly Resolu­tion 194, adopted on 11 December 1948, which states:

The General Assembly.

Having considered further the situation in Palestine,

[...]

11. Resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible; Instructs the Conciliation Commission to facilitate the repatriation, resettlement and economic and social rehabilitation of the refugees and the payment of compensation, and to maintain close relations with the Director of the United Nations Relieffor Palestine Refugees and, through him, with the appropriate organs and agencies of the United Nations.²

This decision was confirmed by several others that followed, notably resolutions 394, 513, and 3236, adopted on 22 November 1974, which reaffirmed “the inalienable right of the Palestinians to return to their homes and property from which they have been displaced and up­rooted, and calls for their return.”³

This right, therefore, relates to the situation of Palestinian refugees. Refu­gees being the nearly 800,000 individuals who left their homes to join neighbouring countries and regions of Palestine un­der British mandate between 1948 and 1949 after the proclamation of the State of Israel and the ensuing war with the Arab states, as well as their descendants with the political status of refugees be­ing transmitted from father to son. As early as 1949, the Arab League forbade granting citizenship to Palestinian refu­gees in order to preserve their right to re­turn. Today, the nearly 7 million Palestin­ian refugees are subject to different legal frameworks depending on the country in which they reside: “temporary citizens” in Jordan, socially and economically discriminated against to a greater or lesser extent in Syria and Lebanon. The United Nations created the “temporary” branch of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) in December 1949 to meet their primary needs, but also to manage new flows of Palestinian refugees, such as the 300,000 who arrived in 1967 during the Six-Day War.⁴

Since then, Palestinian refugees have been perceived as an “obstacle” to peace in the Near and Middle East, often with­out their knowledge, as researcher Jalal Al-Husseini explains.⁵ Their management in their host countries and their potential return to their homeland have been a ma­jor issue. In all peace negotiations relating to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, partic­ularly since the 1993 Oslo Accords, the question of the right of return has exacer­bated divisions: the story of Palestinians expelled from their homes and that of Israelis deconstructing the idea of refu­gees by particularly arguing that they have been integrated within the country for a long time.

Abundantly analysed and docu­mented, to the point of becoming a “paradigmatic”⁶ issue, the question of the Palestinians’ right to return is inherent to the resolution of the conflict and con­stitutes, within the refugee groups, an active principle of their collective psyche and behaviour. In what way, despite a progressive distancing from the hope of an effective return, has the identity of Palestinian refugees been built from 1948 to today around a transgenera­tional narrative linked to this “right of return”?

I will first look at the generational distance from hope around the right to return among Palestinian refugees, before considering its remaining major role in their collective and individual construc­tion.

I - The right to return as an evolving transgenerational norm

A) The role of narrative in the construc­tion of an identity based on nostalgia

The political status of a Palestinian refugee is transmitted from generation to generation. Thus, the number of Palestin­ian refugees has increased from 800,000 to nearly 7 million. It is precisely the role of the transmission of the history of the Nakba and its repercussions that we will study here. As researcher Bernard Botiveau explains, “the non-fulfilment of the right to return home, common to many refugees from serious political conflicts, was an often-expressed pain for the Palestinian exiles of 1948.”⁷ In exile, they passed on to their descendants the experience of this acquired frustration. There is a continuation of this frustration from generation to generation, although it manifests itself differently from one to the next. Indeed, the first generation of refugees, who lived through the Nakba, sees the unfulfilled right of return translated into a constant “romanticization of the past”⁸ as researcher Sophie Rich­ter-Devroe sees it. She explains that there is a “strongly emotional narrative of the past (often omitting social, political, or economic stratifications and tensions), refugees from this generation, however, mainly want to make a comment on the difficult situation they find themselves in now, as refugees in the camps.”⁹

The second generation, on the oth­er hand, breaks to some extent with the romanticized stories by constructing an identity more rooted in the reality of the camps: they “do not have these concrete memories of the village of origin and they often disapprove of their parents’ (per­ceived to be) apolitical, romantic view on the right of return.”¹⁰ There is, however, a desire to keep and pass on these memories of the parents, thus transforming the real­ities, places of belonging, and identities of the previous generation into symbols and facts to be claimed by the new one. These memories are thus transmitted to the third generation, which is less nos­talgic for the land itself since they have never lived there, but which seeks the political fulfilment of the right to return. For example, Ali, in Sophie Richter-Devroe’s survey, does “not necessarily follow their grandparents’ ‘romantic’ notions of home and belonging, nor do they confine their narratives to a legalist rights-based approach as their parents do. For them, the right of return is first and foremost a political project: return means choice, and regaining ownership and control of the land of Palestine, the homeland.”¹¹ Today, according to Najeh Jarras, a large major­ity of Palestinian refugees are ready to renounce the “strict” right of return, i.e., the return to the same lands as in 1948, in exchange for the recognition of a Pales­tinian state and thereby the possibility of settling there, thus assuaging a more flexible, more political right of return.¹² Thus, narration plays a major role in the construction of the Palestinian identity of the refugees: the romanticised memories of exile and life before the Nakba are transmitted to future generations, who, although they no longer recognize them­selves in these testimonies, use them as a driving force to claim the right of return.

B) The retreat of the claim to the tempo­rary nature of exile as a tool for a nourished hope of return

The common demand for the fulfil­ment of the right to return has resulted in the absence of the permanent settlement that Palestinian refugees wanted in their host country, especially for those in camps. Indeed, as Jalal Al-Husseini explains, “the camps had to remain tem­porary places, statutorily isolated from neighbouring municipalities. The prohi­bition imposed on refugees to build any floor in the housing units illustrates this desire to preserve the temporary nature of the camps.”¹³ However, this norm of the right to return, which has been imposed in the camps and has been a source of precariousness, is changing, as the exam­ple of the fifty-nine refugee camps in the Middle East shows. By ensuring that they are free of any political considerations related to the right of return, camp resi­dents are carrying out rehabilitation and renovation initiatives, “provided that this improvement does not aim at dismantling or dissolving the camps, or even less at undermining their temporary character or UNRWA’s mandate”¹⁴ as Jalal Al-Husseini explains. Without this right to return being called into question, we can observe an evolution in the techniques of its preserva­tion and attempts to apply it, from a total denial of the refugee condition in the long term to an organisation that allows the precariousness of refugees to be reduced.

In the Jordanian case, Jalal Al Husseini notes “a more pragmatic attitude towards improving the living conditions”¹⁵ of refugees, who reconsider their refusal to integrate into the society of their host country with the “gradual normalisation of the Palestinian presence” in Jordan. This gradual decision is correlated with the move away from the concrete hope of fulfilling the right of return, leading to a desire to “live their lives as human beings to the fullest” for the refugees. As Pales­tinian author Samir El Youssef tells us in The Illusion of Return, “[w]e should be realistic and forget about the idea of the right to return; the only return we should think of is one of a more symbolic val­ue”:¹⁶ the refugees’ right to return is so often seen as an unfulfillable dream that it is pushed off the agenda. Seen as a “con­firmation of the political maturation of the Palestinians,” this reorientation of the Pal­estinian refugee position has given way to more pragmatic goals around sovereignty and self-determination.

II - The multiple meanings of the right of return as a vector of a diverse Palestinian identity construction

A) The transformation of the right of return from an individual right to a col­lective right

In its recurrent references to the right of return, the United Nations presents it as an individual right: thus, in resolution 3236 of 22 November 1974, and in its res­olution 3376 of 10 November the follow­ing year, the UN affirms that:

(a) the exercise by the Palestinian people of their inalienable rights in Pal­estine, including the right to self-determi­nation without external interference and the right to national independence and sovereignty;

(b) the exercise by Palestinians of their inalienable right to return to their homes and properties from which they were displaced and uprooted.¹⁷

However, as Sylviane de Wangen explains:

these two resolutions mark the dis­tinction made by the UN between, on the one hand, the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people, collective rights that cannot be exercised by any other collective entity, in particular the right to self-determination and inde­pendence, and, on the other hand, the Palestinians ’ inalienable right to return, an individual right that concerns the persons themselves and cannot be trans­mitted to others or exercised by others .¹⁸ 

However, the question of the right of return evolved from an individual issue to a collective claim with the emergence of the Palestine Liberation Organisation in the 1960s. Having become a defender of the Palestinian national construction, it built an “ideology of return” by “nationalising” the refugee issue, which was then placed under the responsibility of the PLO. However, this understanding of the right to return persists at the individual level with the transmission, in the fami­ly heritage, of the identification of each Palestinian refugee with “his home, his village or his town of origin.”¹⁹ According to Jalal Al-Husseini, this is a local patrio­tism that is both enriched by the extension of family networks and the identification with a larger geographical territory consti­tuting Palestine. Thus, both collective and personal, the right to return among Pales­tinian refugees is recognized as a principle that conveys a Palestinian identity marker and allows the preservation of a common identity.

B) The perpetuation of a desire for the right of return which is also expressed through individual commitment

The right to return is expressed by today’s Palestinian refugees in various ways. It is therefore interesting to look at a study conducted among Palestinian refu­gee communities in the West Bank, Jor­dan, and Lebanon between 2008 and 2011 by Sophie Richter-Devroe, to compare the construction of the political cultures of these groups and their relationship to the right of return according to their host country. To this end, she poses two main questions:

1. What does return (and/or the village/place of origin) mean to differ­ent refugees? Is it considered a place of belonging, a home, a specific identity, or does it stand (symbolically) for the polit­ical project of returning to and regaining the homeland?

2. How exactly do different refu­gees envisage returns, and thus their “Palestineprojects”? Do they aim for a permanent return, a transnational dimension of life, or something else? Would they accept to return to an Is- raeli or a bi-national State, or does “etom ’’ mean the political project of regaining all of historical Palestine?²⁰

The answers, which differ from one per­son to another, give the impression of a united demand for the recognition of the right to return as an inalienable right, but of different proposals for the application of this right: indeed, the very notion of the place of return differs from one per­son to another, according to the stories told and the imaginations constructed. Palestinian refugees refer to “Palestinians from Lebanon” or “from Jordan”, which shows the “importance of locality” in the construction of their identity. This identity remains in Jordan separate from Jordanian culture and strongly insists on the idea of returning to Palestinian land, as the survey shows, in fear of the scenario of the coun­try becoming an “alternative homeland” (al-watan al-badil). The socio-economically integrated refugees use the privilege of their status as a basis for their claim to rights, in a global initiative of the people in the face of political inaction.

To conclude, the issue of the right of return within Palestinian refugee com­munities remains central insofar as Pal­estinian identity has been built around it, evolving from the real frustration of the loss of property to the narration of mem­ories of a life before the Nakba, which is passed on from generation to generation. As the hope of an effective right of return fades, there is an acceptance of the situa­tion by Palestinian refugees, particularly those living in the camps, who are begin­ning to develop their camps with a view to a more sustainable home. However, the resilience of the communities does not lead to the abandonment of the right to return, which, along with the Palestinian political organisation, becomes a collec­tive right, “nationalising” the situation of the refugees. The latter remains, depend­ing on their situation, inclined to claim, on a personal level, this right of return. In rhetorical opposition to this, Israel denies any possibility of exercising this right of return and counterbalances it with its own right of return, allowing any Jew to make Aliyah and settle in Israel.

 

Bibliography

 

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