Abdullah Abdullah, the Palestinian Authority’s newly-promoted ambassador to Lebanon, dropped a bombshell to the Daily Star on Thursday. His little-noticed interview by the Lebanese newspaper highlighted one of the most pressing questions about the PA’s bid for UN membership:
The ambassador unequivocally says that Palestinian refugees would not become citizens of the sought for U.N.-recognized Palestinian state, an issue that has been much discussed. “They are Palestinians, that’s their identity,” he says. “But … they are not automatically citizens.”
This would not only apply to refugees in countries such as Lebanon, Egypt, Syria and Jordan or the other 132 countries where Abdullah says Palestinians reside. Abdullah said that “even Palestinian refugees who are living in [refugee camps] inside the [Palestinian] state, they are still refugees. They will not be considered citizens.”
This flatly contradicts claims by Francis A. Boyle, former legal advisor to the Palestine Liberation Organization:
… the Declaration of Independence also provides that all Palestinians living around the world automatically become citizens of the State of Palestine—pursuant to my advice. So the Executive Committee of the PLO in its capacity as the Provisional Government for the State of Palestine will continue to represent the interests of all Palestinians around the world when Palestine becomes a UN Member State.
Hence all rights will be preserved: for all Palestinians and for the PLO. No one will be disenfranchised.
But the closest the Palestinian Declaration of Independence ever came to defining citizenship – a word it never used - was the poetic invocation of Palestinian identity, in diasporic terms reminiscent of the Zionist formulation of Israel as “the state of the Jewish people”:
The State of Palestine is the state of Palestinians wherever they may be. The state is for them to enjoy in it their collective national and cultural identity, theirs to pursue in it a complete equality of rights.
Thus we face two conflicting claims, Abdullah’s and Boyle’s. One comes from a current, high-level PA representative, while the other relies on a textual reference that is, at best, highly ambiguous. Considering these factors, the warning of Guy S. Goodwin-Gill, whose legal opinion Boyle intended to rebut, appears even timelier:
The significant link between the Palestinian National Council and the diaspora has been noted above … They constitute more than half of the people of Palestine, and if they are ‘disenfranchised’ and lose their representation in the UN, it will not only prejudice their entitlement to equal representation, contrary to the will of the General Assembly, but also their ability to vocalise their views, to participate in matters of national governance, including the formation and political identity of the State, and to exercise the right of return.
But the state Abdullah foresees would deny equal participation, and hence fair representation at the United Nations and other international bodies, not only to the 5.3 million refugees living outside historic Palestine, as Goodwin-Gill warned, but also to nearly two million inside the 1967 territories. These comprise 45% of the West Bank’s Palestinian population and a whopping 67% of the Gaza Strip’s, excluding a total of 56% of the proposed state’s residents from citizenship. And this does not count 1.6 million Palestinians inside Israel, including hundreds of thousands of internally-displaced refugees.
PA President Mahmoud Abbas has tweeted, “First we seek recognition of the #StateOfPalestine to receive international backing to build and reform the PLO.” Given that his proposed state would replace a body representative of all Palestinians with one answerable to a fraction of them, it is not unreasonable for those of us who support the rights of all Palestinians to ask whom he imagines participating in this building and reformation process. Barring satisfactory answers, we should support Palestinians opposing this initiative as another effort to divide them and their struggle.
Palestinian refugees from 1948 (the actual refugees and their progeny) will NOT be automatically granted (or forced!) citizenship in (new) Palestine.
Right! It is for each person to decide whether or not to relinquish refugee status (and accepting citizenship may well be counted as a relinquishment of refugee status). See my analysis.
I believe you missed this part:
“But the state Abdullah foresees would deny equal participation, and hence fair representation at the United Nations and other international bodies …”
Handing refugees a choice between relinquishing their status, and remaining unrepresented on the global stage as the SoP replaces the PLO as the Palestinian representative, isn’t a good thing, either.
Exactly right. No more than all Jews are automatically citizens of Israel.
I’m not clear on why you would declare all Diaspora Palestinians to be citizens of a new Palestinian state. For what purpose? They’re not all moving back. The Law of Return doesn’t declare all Jews citizens of Israel (much of all of you like to act as if it did by arguing that Jews who support Israel are guilty of dual loyalty). It simply gives Jews the right to obtain easy citizenship.
If this is indeed the Palestinian position, would that not instantly create dual loyalty problems for all Diaspora Palestinians?
That depends.
Dual loyalty has some context.
Our country is subjected to pro-Israel garbage in the MSM, which is institutional. I don’t think people can turn on the television and get a good understanding of the Palestinian experience.
So IMO, we should try to decide what American values are. Since you primarily identify as pro-Israel/Zionist – I don’t think your spittle about Palestinian citizenship or dual loyalty should matter.
American symbolism and values to me, mean standing up to tyranny and for the oppressed. That’s the best case scenario and I have to believe that. I have only lived in this country and I feel nothing almost, for india except that I have family there and it’s weird being somewhere where everyone looks like you.
Anyways, I think it’s possible to be supportive of another country if it is symbolic and bases on shared ideals.
If America were colonizing Iraq, people would be out in the streets protesting until it ended. If we were sending Christian colonists there to make the desert bloom and all the other bullshit I’m sure you eat up wth a spoon, people would be outraged.
There is more pressure here from the populace. In Israel, Israeli Jews overwhelmingly support the occupation and continuing colonialism, in spite of bs polls. Israel politicians lie all the time and no one cares. Israelis serve the occupation and see it all up front and don’t care. They live with arabs and the hate is casual.
There is no tension. Here, there is.
I’m sure israels would enslave the Palestinians if it were concealable or if they could essentially get away with it.
In Israel, Israeli Jews overwhelmingly support the occupation and continuing colonialism, in spite of bs polls.
this pretty much sums up the mentality of your movement. No matter what anybody says or does, they are still liars because they aren’t following my narrative.
Good luck with real life Cliff, it will hit you sooner than later.
Israel is a racist, apartheid State.
Most Israeli Jews supported Cast Lead. And in spite of the bullshit polling, the occupation chugs along, 40+ years on.
Zionists like you DBG argue in memes.
The people suffering are the Palestinians. Not Israeli Jews. The people losing everything are Palestinians. Not Israeli Jews.
When an anti-Zionist talks about Israel, people like you bring up Darfur, Sudan, blah blah blah to downplay/whitewash Israeli criminality.
THAT dishonest defines YOUR movement. That is why dialogue with people like you is utterly pointless.
And really, who are you kidding with your lame denunciations when in the REAL WORLD we have evidence of how dishonest Israel and it’s supporters are? The Palestine papers is just one in a mountain of incidents that build a context for anti-Zionist jadedness.
I could care less whether a Zionist thinks ill of me. That’s when you’ve done something right actually!
And other than this issue, I’m not political. In fact, the only time I comment on MW is when I’m not at school + have some free time.
The notion that being passionate about the Palestinian cause would disrupt someone’s chi is a bit naive. Although, I am certainly alienated by how the Zionist lobby gets away with lying. How people like you are presented as innocent victims when you’re really the problem.
I can’t imagine what it must be like to be Palestinian in the diaspora and at the mercy of our political culture and philo-semitic identity politics bullshit.
>> I’m not clear on why you would declare all Diaspora Palestinians to be citizens of a new Palestinian state. For what purpose? They’re not all moving back.
I would have expected all Palestinian refugees to be granted citizenship to “new Palestine” precisely because they are refugees from “old Palestine”. I do understand, however, that this could present a tremendous, perhaps even crippling financial burden to a new state, so perhaps there is some sense to limiting citizenship (at least initially) unless sufficient foreign aid is provided to temper the impact of potential mass immigration.
Denying citizenship to refugees in camps within the borders of “new Palestine” makes absolutely no sense to me.
>> The Law of Return doesn’t declare all Jews citizens of Israel (much of all of you like to act as if it did by arguing that Jews who support Israel are guilty of dual loyalty). It simply gives Jews the right to obtain easy citizenship.
The Israeli LoR is not about return, since it applies to foreign Jews, not to Israelis. It is also discriminatory because it applies only to Jewish non-Israelis and not to all non-Israelis.
>> If this is indeed the Palestinian position, would that not instantly create dual loyalty problems for all Diaspora Palestinians?
If all Palestinians were to receive automatic citizenship, dual loyalty would only be an issue, IMO, in cases where an “ex-pat” Palestinian places the good of “new Palestine” above the good of the state of which he is currently a citizen.
(I don’t believe people should hold more than one citizenship. If you like your country, you live there and you support it (generally-speaking). If you don’t like your country, you move elsewhere.)
Well, that’s pretty awful.
Who, then, would be a citizen of this new state of Palestine?
People who live in the West Bank and Gaza I would guess.
“…arguing that Jews who support Israel are guilty of dual loyalty”
The dual loyalty charge does not require anyone to be a citizen of Israel. It simply requires that person’s loyalty to Israel to be roughly equal to loyalty to his/her own country. It becomes blameworthy when that person’s support for Israel is to the detriment of his/her own country.
I think that if a PA representative said that the newly-recognized state of Palestine would automatically confer citizenship on the Palestinian refugees, there would be an outcry from exactly the same people who criticize them now for NOT automatically conferring citizenship on the refugees. The criticism in that case would be that giving them citizenship of a state recognized on the 1967 borders is undermining their right of return to their former homes inside Israel’s 1967 borders.
And certainly there would be an outcry that the PA is overstepping its bounds by conferring citizenship on the refugees at all, seeing as the refugees’ rights are explicitly individual rights that can’t be decided on their behalf by government. It’s up to the refugees themselves whether they would want to be citizens of Palestine in its 1967 borders.
Whether the PA did or did not confer citizenship, they would be criticized for it, and by the same people. Because the underlying argument isn’t about citizenship but about one state or two state. The PA’s campaign for international recognition of a Palestine formally limited to the 1967 borders is a moment of truth in that argument.