Palestinian Arab diaspora

Summary

The Palestinian Arab diaspora (mahjar) and its emigrants (muhājarīn), especially in Latin America and the Americas, presented in Banko’s book as major makers of a counter-definition of Palestinian citizenship linked to Arab nationality — a role historians of Palestine have long neglected, and central to the book’s thesis that citizenship was forged in the diaspora as well as in Palestine (The Invention of Palestinian Citizenship, 1918–1947, PDF p.27-28 / printed p.16-17).

Details

• The narrative of Palestinian Arab émigrés in the decades before 1948 has been crucial to the civic identity of Palestinian refugees post-1948; the book attempts to shine light on these Ottoman and interwar Palestinian emigrants and their citizenship status (PDF p.8-9 / printed p.vii-viii).

• Palestine’s educated Arab nationalist leadership, both in Palestine and in the diaspora, were well-versed in the meaning of citizenship and its associated rights in the Western European context, and in the meaning of a particular Arab-Ottoman nationality; multi-faceted acts of resistance on the part of Arab nationalist and populist leaders as well as émigrés outside the territory were directed against Britain’s legislative constructions of the national and the citizen (PDF p.16-17 / printed p.5-6).

• Arab emigrants have been almost entirely left out of the historical discourse of national politics in the Levant. The political agency of the Palestinian Arab emigrants (muhājarīn) is significant in connection with ‘making citizens’ during the mandate period, particularly through links of civic associations (PDF p.27 / printed p.16).

• The Palestinian Arab diaspora (mahjar), especially the emigrants in Latin America, played a major role in crafting a counter-definition of Palestinian citizenship intimately linked with that of Arab nationality. Historians have long neglected the role played by Ottoman emigrants from southern Syria in ideological and political movements against the mandate government and its support for the Jewish national home (PDF p.27-28 / printed p.16-17).

• The emigrants’ ‘outside-in’, ethnically segregated existence in the Americas allowed them to make clear the realities of the British administration to their families, to the national movement and to socio-political organisations in the homeland. The diaspora offers a third community through which the impact of British policies in Palestine can be understood, and the history of the mahjar is crucial to contemporary understandings of Palestinian statelessness and refugee status (PDF p.28 / printed p.17).

• Chapter 4, as outlined in the Introduction, contextualises the diaspora (particularly Latin America) and home in the years leading up to and just after the 1925 Citizenship Order, offering a new history of the emigrants’ counter-definitions of the legal and apolitical nationality and citizenship officials attempted to craft, and framing the introduction in Palestine of demands such as the ‘right to return’ and letters of protest by emigrants who lacked citizenship (PDF p.30 / printed p.19).

• Palestinian Arab emigrants, especially those in the Americas, saw themselves as Palestinian nationals entitled to Palestinian citizenship, whether they chose to return to reside in the territory or not. “The unavoidable displacement of these native Palestinians due to the 1925 Citizenship Order-in-Council is an unspoken yet crucial element of the Palestinian Arab diaspora today as well as during the interwar years.” (PDF p.32 / printed p.21)

• The Arabic sources for citizenship in the diaspora — letters, files of civic associations and newspapers printed in the Americas, the Caribbean and the Philippines — are numerous and widespread, but a number of those outside the Levant and Great Britain were not consulted for this book (PDF p.28 / printed p.17).

• Banko’s Chapter 2 completion quantifies the Order’s effect abroad: an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 Palestinian-born individuals lived abroad by 1925, composed in the majority of Arab Christians and Muslims including students and merchants, and Samuel’s November 1925 retroactive amendment left them less than one year to opt for citizenship; in mid-1923 the Foreign Office reported that in the region south of Peru alone up to 600 Palestinians held a British laissez-passer identifying them as Ottoman nationals (The Invention of Palestinian Citizenship, 1918–1947, PDF p.62-63 / printed p.51-52).

• Chapter 4 opens with the British Legation at La Paz, Bolivia in 1927 rejecting Sari Ismael and others who applied under Article 2, assessing a lengthy absence as severed connection and assuming Turkish nationality by default, leaving them stateless in Bolivia, although Ismael produced a laissez-passer from the Military Governor of Jerusalem proving he was in Palestine as recently as 1920 (PDF p.95 / printed p.84).

• A Foreign Office official noticed the Article 2 / Lausanne Article 34 deadline conflict two months before the Order was published, but the Office took no decision, believing it ‘unlikely that there will be many applicants falling under Article 2 of the Order’; Article 2 in fact caused many years of controversy and constant protests by the mahjar and their supporters at home (PDF p.96 / printed p.85).

• The mahjar maintained its connection to Bilād al-Shām through the press: Akram Khater counts twenty-one new Syrian Arab dailies, weeklies and monthlies in the US from 1892 to 1907; from 1860 to 1914 between 600,000 and one million Arabic-speaking Ottomans born in Greater Syria left for the Americas, about one-third returning, and a large majority of southern Syrian migrants came from the Bethlehem and Jerusalem environs (PDF p.97-98 / printed p.86-87).

• From 1918 emigrants identified themselves as ‘Palestinians’ and former Ottoman subjects in protest letters, petitioned as ‘the Palestinian Colony’ of their host country — the San Salvador community signing a November 1918 protest to King George simply as ‘the Palestinians’ — and by the early 1920s voiced national ‘duties’, sent money home through mutual aid societies, and, in the Palestine Renaissance Society in New York in 1923, appealed for support of the jihad against colonialism in Palestine (PDF p.100-102 / printed p.89-91).

• Chapter 4’s completion follows the protection crises: Honduras’s 1924 civil war (more than 5,000 deaths; the La Ceiba community’s shops and homes damaged or destroyed) brought no British assistance despite appeals as Palestinian citizens, and the Port-au-Prince, Haiti merchants in 1925 were warned no protection would follow until they proved Palestinian citizenship rather than expired Ottoman papers (The Invention of Palestinian Citizenship, 1918–1947, PDF p.103-106 / printed p.92-95).

• After the Order, emigrants and their supporters at home generated the demand for a ‘right to return’ (haqq al-‘awda): ‘Isa Bandak put the unprotected emigrants at no less than 20,000 in 1926, letters from El Salvador claimed automatic ‘rightful nationality’ and descent under Ottoman law, and Mexico’s Society for Palestinian Unity was forwarded to the Foreign Office as representing 3,000 to 4,000 Palestinians in Mexico alone (PDF p.106-112 / printed p.95-101).

• The Committee for the Defence of Arab Emigrant Rights to Palestinian Citizenship (DAER), formed in Bethlehem in 1927, claimed to represent an (over-estimated) 50,000 natives denied nationality, stated approximately 9,000 of approximately 30,000 emigrants in the Americas and Europe had requested citizenship by the end of 1927, and carried the claim to the British public in its 1928 Appeal to the Noble British People (PDF p.113-117 / printed p.102-106).

• The July 1931 amendment gave ‘treaty nationality’ ipso facto only to Palestinians resident abroad between 1924 and 1925; in early 1933 Sawt al-Sha’b reported large numbers of natives taking Turkish citizenship for protection and a recognised passport, and from 1927 to 1937 the stated number registered as resident abroad rose by approximately 10,000 to in the region of 40,000 (PDF p.121-122 / printed p.110-111).

Related pages

The Invention of Palestinian Citizenship, 1918–1947, Palestinian nationality, Palestine Citizenship Order-in-Council 1925, Provisional Palestinian nationality, Right of Return, Committee for the Defence of Arab Emigrant Rights to Palestinian Citizenship, Palestine Citizenship Order (Amendment) 1931