The Case for Palestinian Nationality

Summary

Nadim Bawalsa’s Al-Shabaka policy brief argues that over seven million Palestinians in exile have a right to Palestinian nationality under international law, and that British mandate and then Israeli authorities have denied that right by deliberately conflating nationality — innate, and defined by the “genuine link” of bloodline, birth or long-term residence to a territory — with citizenship, a state-conferred status that states can vet and strip (The Case for Palestinian Nationality, lines 141-143, 183-185). The Treaty of Lausanne enshrined Palestinian nationality in 1924, but Britain’s 1925 Palestine Citizenship Order-in-Council 1925 prioritized naturalizing Jewish settlers over the tens of thousands of Palestinian migrants in the Americas, rendering them stateless Palestinian nationals, and Israel’s 1950 Law of Return, 1952 Nationality Law and 2018 Jewish Nation-State Law reset the system to secure a Jewish state whose Palestinian citizens can never become its nationals (lines 145-147, 197-199, 211-217). Bawalsa’s remedy is for exiled Palestinians and the PLO, as guarantor of the right, to set nationality criteria in forums of their own, issue a population registry, draft a comprehensive nationality law, win host-state recognition as Palestinian nationals, and demand accountability for the expulsions of 1948 and 1967 (lines 151-163, 243-251).

What the file is

• An Al-Shabaka policy brief (topic: Politics), published Sep 29, 2022 as displayed in the text copy (lines 133-137), “15 min read”, downloaded from https://al-shabaka.org/briefs/the-case-for-palestinian-nationality/ (access basis: NGO). The original is the HTML page; the text copy supplied with it (about 4,705 words, 427 newline-terminated lines plus a trailing blank line counted as line 428) is a plain-text rendering of that page, with no page markers, so locators are line numbers.
• The text copy includes the site’s frame around the brief: navigation and featured items at lines 1-128 and 259-428, including items dated September 2026 that belong to the page as captured, not to the 2022 brief. The brief itself runs lines 129-257: header and Executive Summary (lines 129-167), Overview and the five body sections (lines 169-251), its three footnotes printed after the body (lines 253-257, checked against the original HTML, where each footnote marker’s title gives the same text), related-item links (lines 259-265) and the author’s biography (lines 267-269).
• Text quality: the brief’s prose is clean and complete in both copies. Three pull-quotations in the text copy are followed by “Share on X” page controls (lines 181, 207, 223), which are not part of the sentences; the line 207 and line 223 pull-quotations repeat sentences from lines 189 and 239 in shortened form. The text copy gives the publication date as Sep 29, 2022, and the original HTML’s structured data gives datePublished as 2022-09-28T16:36:09+00:00 and dateModified as 2024-08-02T18:00:49+00:00; the displayed and structured dates differ by one day (see Open questions). Footnote 3 prints the book’s citation as Transnational Palestine: Migration and the Right of Return before 1948, (Stanford University Press, 2022), with a comma after the closing parenthesis, as printed (line 257).

Section by section

• Executive Summary (lines 139-163): as in the Summary — the right of Palestinians everywhere, including over seven million in exile, to Palestinian nationality; the citizenship/nationality distinction as the basis of the response; the Lausanne, Mandate and Israeli history in compressed form; the Mandate-era petitions and the largely absent decades that followed; the failed 2012 PLO push after UN recognition of Palestinian de jure sovereignty; and the five recommendations to exiled Palestinians and the PLO, including its diplomatic corps (lines 141-163).
• Overview (lines 171-175): nationality is innate and protected outside the purview of the state, citizenship a formal arrangement with a state government; since 1948 the Israeli apartheid regime has manipulated the two to deny exiled Palestinians, and other oppressed Palestinian communities, their rights to Palestine from wherever they may be. Over seven million exiled Palestinians — five million refugees registered with UNRWA, plus several million others with secondary citizenship or residency — have the legal right to be considered nationals of Palestine by birth and/or bloodline, and activating that right from exile would challenge Israel’s apartheid policies and lay the groundwork for future legislation. The brief’s scope is the diaspora; it does not focus on Palestinians inside colonized Palestine, whose rights are dictated by the Israeli regime in 1948 territories and by the PA and the Israeli regime in the West Bank and Gaza (line 175).
• Nationality, Citizenship, and International Law (lines 179-185): the Right of Return of refugees is enshrined in UN resolutions, but the right of all exiled Palestinians — refugees and those naturalized elsewhere alike — to be considered nationals, and thus to demand legal representation and rights as Palestinians from abroad, must be activated. Citizenship is conferred by place of birth, parents’ nationality, or naturalization through residency, is vetted by governments, and can be stripped under stipulations; nationality cannot be taken away — it is the link between an individual and a territory, the “genuine link” of the International Court of Justice since 1955, determinable by jus sanguinis, jus soli or jus domicile, innate and unchangeable, protected by article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (lines 183-185).
• Palestinians’ Historical Right to Palestinian Nationality (lines 189-201): the right has been recognized since the ratification of the Treaty of Lausanne on August 6, 1924; the 1869 Ottoman Nationality Law of 1869 had first conferred nationality on residents of Palestine by all three principles, and when Britain laid siege to Jerusalem in December 1917 residents of Palestine were Ottoman Palestinian nationals, as were the tens of thousands who had been emigrating to the Americas since the 19th century. The treaty, signed July 24, 1923, ended that Ottoman status, and its article 34 enabled individuals to declare the nationality “of the territory of which they are natives”, but Britain — bound by its 1917 Balfour Declaration promise to the Zionist Federation of a Jewish “national home” — legislated the first Palestinian citizenship ordinance to naturalize Jewish settlers through residence, as article 7 of the Mandate for Palestine directed. The July 1925 Palestine Citizenship Order-in-Council 1925 prioritized tens of thousands of incoming Jewish settlers (jus domicile) over tens of thousands of Palestinian migrants (jus sanguinis and jus soli), justified by “absorptive capacity”, inadequate proof of intent to reside permanently, absence since before 1920, or “patent undesirability”. The Government of Palestine’s March 8, 1937 report: more than 28,000 Jews issued citizenship documents between 1931 and 1936; of 4,941 documents granted in 1936, 4,847 were for Jews; of about 9,000 applications from Palestinians in Latin America alone by 1937, not more than 100 were accepted; the roughly 40,000 Palestinian migrants across the Americas by 1936 became stateless Palestinian nationals carrying obsolete Ottoman documents. The League of Nations left Palestine entirely to the British Crown, so its governance effectively fell outside international law (lines 189-201).
• Palestinian Nationality Under the Israeli Regime (lines 205-217): the new regime swiftly denied the 750,000 Palestinians exiled in 1948 their rights to Palestinian nationality, and did so again after its expulsion of 300,000 Palestinians in 1967. The manipulation is obscured by the 1950 Law of Return, which offered every Jew worldwide the right to immigrate, and the 1952 Nationality Law, which confirmed nationality for Jews worldwide under it — in 1952 Israel effectively promulgated Jewish nationality globally. Non-Jews may acquire Israeli citizenship by birth in 1948 territories, but the state remains one for Jewish nationals above all, reaffirmed by the 2018 Jewish Nation-State Basic Law’s reservation of national self-determination as “unique to the Jewish people”, so Palestinian citizens can never become incorporated as nationals, making them easier to denaturalize. The 1952 law retroactively repealed any citizenship conferral before May 1948, rendering obsolete all documents of Palestinian nationality and citizenship — illegal, Bawalsa argues, because a “successor state” must confer the nationality of a territory on the peoples connected to it — and its residence route (inhabitants of 1948 territories by March 1, 1952, remaining inhabitants continuously from the state’s establishment to the law’s passage) is one none of the Palestinians expelled in 1948 can meet (lines 205-217).
• In Defense of the Right to Palestinian Nationality (lines 221-233): the birth and blood rights of Palestinian nationals remain intact, and their Mandate-era predecessors knew it: petitions went repeatedly to the Government of Palestine and the League of Nations. On February 23, 1927, Palestinians in Monterrey, Mexico — a six-page petition drafted by members of the Centro Social Palestino and signed by over 300 Palestinians residing in Mexico — addressed the high commissioner, Herbert Plumer, demanding recognition of their rights to Palestinian nationality and threatening resort to the League. In June 1927 a delegation of Palestinian nationalists from Bethlehem and Beit Jala that formed the Committee for the Defense of the Rights of Palestinians Residing in Foreign Countries petitioned the Government of Palestine in Jerusalem on article 34. The petitions set a precedent for demanding justice on international legal treaties, and the mandate regime disregarded them with impunity (lines 221-233).
• Seizing on Statehood and the Treaty of Lausanne (lines 237-251): until the UN recognized Palestine as a de jure sovereign state in 2012, exilees had limited resources; that year the PLO drafted a citizenship law grounded in Lausanne — “Palestinian citizens are those persons who acquired or had the right to acquire Palestinian nationality as of 6 August 1924” — but the Palestinian Legislative Council never considered it, because of the complexities of conferring citizenship on a fragmented refugee population and on occupied nationals in the West Bank and Gaza with varying residency statuses, and because under the Oslo Accords the PA regulates West Bank and Gaza statuses with all residency conferrals approved by the Israeli regime. The PLO must act as guarantor, and must first work with the Palestinian people to create a population registry, starting with UNRWA-registered refugees; Karma Nabulsi’s 2006 project was a significant step toward that connection and must be continued. The section closes with the five steps in full form, including the forums step’s argument, through Christina A. Li, that assigning indigeneity through blood reifies a colonial practice and that lived experience, cultural connection, pre-colonial knowledge production and blood-based classifications must be weighed together in dialogue (lines 237-251).
• Footnotes and author biography (lines 253-269): footnote 1 is the French-translation note (line 253, marker at line 171); footnote 2 records that the legal and political analysis is in part based on an interview with human and refugee rights expert Susan M. Akram, transcribed and edited by the author, and thanks Akram and Kate Rouhana (line 255, marker at line 173); footnote 3 records that the historical sections reflect research in the author’s book Transnational Palestine: Migration and the Right of Return before 1948 (Stanford University Press, 2022) (line 257, marker at line 175). The biography presents Bawalsa as Associate Editor with the Journal of Palestine Studies, Al-Shabaka’s commissioning editor from 2020-2023, a historian of modern Palestine, with a joint doctorate in History and Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies from New York University (2017), a Master’s in Arab Studies from Georgetown University (2010), and a PARC-NEH fellowship in Palestine in 2019-2020 (line 269).

Key passages

• “Citizenship and nationality are not the same.” (line 143)
• “States, however, cannot denationalize a national.” (line 185)
• “everyone has the right to a nationality. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.” (article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as quoted by Bawalsa, line 185)
• “We were born in that territory; have always wished to be Palestinians; and we are sure, if as a last resort, it shall become necessary to carry our petition before the League of Nations, that august body will grant us the right to consider ourselves nationals of Palestine.” (the Monterrey petition of February 23, 1927, as quoted by Bawalsa, line 227)
• “The logical conclusion to be deduced from the stipulations of the article is that the emigrants of this land who belong to the majority, enjoy the right to Palestinian nationality.” (the Bethlehem and Beit Jala delegation’s petition of June 1927, as quoted by Bawalsa, line 231)
• “Palestinian citizens are those persons who acquired or had the right to acquire Palestinian nationality as of 6 August 1924.” (the PLO’s 2012 draft citizenship law, as quoted by Bawalsa, line 237)
• “better acknowledge the roles lived experience, cultural connection, pre-colonial forms of knowledge production, and blood-based classifications all play in shaping indigeneity” (Christina A. Li, as quoted by Bawalsa, line 243)

Evidence the work relies on

• The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne — its ratification on August 6, 1924, and its article 34 provision for declaring the nationality “of the territory of which they are natives” — as Bawalsa presents them (lines 189-193). The treaty’s text is not reproduced beyond those fragments.
• The 1869 Ottoman Nationality Law of 1869, as the first law conferring nationality on residents of Palestine by jus sanguinis, jus soli and jus domicile (line 189). Its text is not reproduced.
• Article 7 of the Mandate for Palestine, quoted at line 195 for its direction that a nationality law facilitate acquisition of Palestinian citizenship by Jews taking up permanent residence. The mandate’s full text is not reproduced.
• The Government of Palestine report of March 8, 1937 and the application figures Bawalsa draws from it — more than 28,000 Jews issued documents in 1931-1936; 4,847 of 4,941 documents in 1936 for Jews; about 9,000 Latin American Palestinian applications by 1937, not more than 100 accepted; roughly 40,000 Palestinian migrants across the Americas by 1936 (line 199). No report title or page is given.
• The Israeli laws of 1950, 1952 and 2018, as Bawalsa characterizes them — the Law of Return’s worldwide immigration right for Jews, the 1952 law’s confirmation of Jewish nationality, retroactive repeal of pre-May 1948 conferrals, and March 1, 1952 residence conditions, and the Nation-State Law’s “unique to the Jewish people” clause (lines 211-217). None of the three laws’ texts is reproduced beyond that clause.
• The Mandate-era petitions: the Monterrey petition of February 23, 1927 (six pages, over 300 signatories, drafted by Centro Social Palestino members) and the June 1927 Bethlehem and Beit Jala delegation’s petition, each quoted in part at lines 227 and 231. No archive, file or published edition for either petition is named.
• The PLO’s 2012 draft citizenship law, quoted at line 237 for its August 6, 1924 rule. The draft is not reproduced or cited to a publication.
• An interview with Susan M. Akram, transcribed and edited by the author, on which the legal and political analysis is in part based (footnote 2, line 255); and the author’s own book Transnational Palestine: Migration and the Right of Return before 1948 (2022), from which the historical sections are drawn (footnote 3, line 257).
• Figures given without a cited source in the brief: over seven million exiled Palestinians, including five million UNRWA-registered refugees (lines 141, 173); the 750,000 exiled in 1948 and 300,000 expelled in 1967 (line 205).

Analysis

• Method: a policy brief built on one conceptual distinction — citizenship as state-conferred and revocable, nationality as innate and protected — applied in two parallel historical sequences (Britain’s 1925 citizenship ordinance against Lausanne; Israel’s 1950, 1952 and 2018 laws) and then converted into a five-step program for the diaspora and the PLO. Its historical evidence is illustrative rather than archival in presentation: the 1937 government report, the two 1927 petitions and the 2012 draft law carry the argument, each quoted briefly and none cited to an edition, archive or page in the brief. Its legal analysis rests in part on the author’s interview with Susan Akram, as footnote 2 states.
• Perspective and limits: the brief is written from an explicitly anti-colonial position — its terms are “the Israeli apartheid regime”, “colonized Palestine” and “the Israeli regime’s racist policies” — and it does not present an opposing account of the Mandate or Israeli laws it discusses. Its stated scope excludes Palestinians inside colonized Palestine, so its claims about Palestinian citizens of Israel rest on the 2018 law’s self-determination clause as quoted, not on a separate treatment. Several central figures (seven million in exile, five million UNRWA-registered, the 1948 and 1967 expulsion figures) are stated without sources in the brief.
• Support: the comparative claim — that both regimes secured a Jewish national project by controlling the citizenship gate while Palestinian nationality subsisted underneath it — is supported within the brief by the dated legal sequence and by the paired 1937 figures (4,847 of 4,941 documents for Jews against not more than 100 of about 9,000 Latin American Palestinian applications accepted) and the two 1927 petitions invoking article 34. The conclusion that activating nationality from exile would challenge Israeli apartheid policy is the brief’s program and prediction, presented as recommendations, not as a documented outcome.

People, organizations, places and events

Nadim Bawalsa, Susan M. Akram, Karma Nabulsi, Herbert Plumer, Al-Shabaka, Centro Social Palestino, Committee for the Defense of the Rights of Palestinians Residing in Foreign Countries, Committee for the Defence of Arab Emigrant Rights to Palestinian Citizenship, Palestine Liberation Organization, Palestinian Authority, Palestinian Legislative Council, UNRWA, League of Nations, International Court of Justice, Balfour Declaration, Treaty of Lausanne, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Transnational Palestine: Migration and the Right of Return before 1948, Palestine Citizenship Order-in-Council 1925, Ottoman Nationality Law of 1869, Law of Return, Citizenship Law (1952), Nation-State Law, Oslo Accords

Concepts

Palestinian nationality, Right of Return, Apartheid, Settler Colonialism, Self-determination, Indigeneity, Palestinian Arab diaspora

How it relates to other sources

• With Rethinking Statehood in Palestine: direct agreement and a shared source. Chapter 8 of that volume, by Susan M. Akram — the expert whose interview in part grounds this brief (line 255) — argues Palestinian nationality was formed under Lausanne on August 6, 1924, remains legally intact despite Israel’s 1952 denationalization, and grounds the Right of Return as a national’s right. Bawalsa’s brief is that legal account converted into a diaspora program: the same Lausanne date rule appears as the PLO’s 2012 draft (“as of 6 August 1924”, line 237), the same 1952 retroactive repeal and March 1, 1952 residence bar appear at line 215-217, and where Akram’s chapter is doctrinal, Bawalsa’s contribution is the institutional sequence — forums, registry, draft law, host-state recognition, accountability — and the Mandate petition exhibits.
• With The Invention of Palestinian Citizenship, 1918–1947: agreement on the Mandate mechanism, with different exhibits and figures held side by side. Banko traces the 1925 Order’s more favourable acquisition for Jewish immigrants and its Article 2 bar on Palestinians abroad, and records the Peel report’s figures of approximately 40,000 emigrants who had lost their chance and over 9,000 applications with only 100 accepted; Bawalsa gives the same 9,000 / not more than 100 and roughly 40,000 figures from the Government of Palestine’s March 8, 1937 report (line 199), adds the 1931-1936 and 1936 document totals Banko’s summary does not carry (more than 28,000; 4,847 of 4,941), and quotes the February 1927 Monterrey petition and the June 1927 Bethlehem and Beit Jala delegation, where Banko’s emigrant campaign is organized around the Committee for the Defence of Arab Emigrant Rights to Palestinian Citizenship formed in Bethlehem in 1927 (see Open questions).
• With Stateless Citizenship (2013): agreement in structure. Molavi argues Palestinian-Arab citizens of Israel are stateless through their inclusion in its citizenship regime; Bawalsa’s version is the nationality side of the same structure — Palestinian citizens “can never become incorporated as nationals of the state, making it easier to denaturalize them” (line 213) — extended outward to the exile population Molavi’s book does not center.
• With Palestinian Right of Return: Sacred, Legal, and Possible: agreement that the claim to Palestine survives exile. Sitta’s ground is the refugees’ Right of Return as sacred, legal and possible; Bawalsa expressly separates the two rights — return is enshrined in UN resolutions, while the nationality right of all exilees, including those naturalized elsewhere, “must be activated” (line 179) — and supplies the Lausanne nationality basis and the registry and draft-law machinery Sitta’s case does not propose.
• What is new: the wiki’s first source devoted to activating Palestinian nationality from exile as a program — the nationality/citizenship distinction as the stated basis of a Palestinian response, the 1937 document totals, the two quoted 1927 petitions, and the five steps (forums, registry, nationality law, host-state recognition, accountability) addressed to the PLO and its diplomatic corps.

Open questions

• The text copy displays Sep 29, 2022 (lines 135, 273), while the original HTML’s structured data gives datePublished as 2022-09-28T16:36:09+00:00 and dateModified as 2024-08-02T18:00:49+00:00. The displayed date is used for the page’s date and file name; the two forms are held side by side, not reconciled.
• Bawalsa names the June 1927 Bethlehem and Beit Jala delegation’s body the “Committee for the Defense of the Rights of Palestinians Residing in Foreign Countries” (line 229). Banko’s account of the 1927 Bethlehem emigrant campaign names its central body the Committee for the Defence of Arab Emigrant Rights to Palestinian Citizenship (DAER), formed in 1927 by Isa Bandak and others, and records a DAER memorandum to Plumer. Whether Bawalsa’s committee is the same body under another name, or a distinct delegation, is not stated in either source as presented here and is held open, not merged.
• The brief’s central population figures — over seven million exiled Palestinians, five million of them UNRWA-registered refugees (lines 141, 173), and the 750,000 exiled in 1948 and 300,000 expelled in 1967 (line 205) — are given without sources in the brief and stand beside the other sources’ figures, not reconciled with them.
• Bawalsa calls the 1952 law the “1952 Nationality Law” and says it “confirmed nationality for Jews worldwide” under the Law of Return (line 211); other sources in the wiki record “Nationality Law” as the law’s official English name while treating it in reality as a citizenship law (Citizenship Law (1952)). The naming and characterization are held as each source presents them.
• The ICJ’s “genuine link” reference is dated only “since 1955” (line 185); no case name or citation is given in the brief.
• Karma Nabulsi’s 2006 project is described only as marking “a significant step toward establishing this type of connection between exiled Palestinians and the PLO” (line 239); its name, form and record are not given in the brief.
• The four related items listed after the brief (lines 259-265) are given by title only, without authors or dates, in the text copy; their contents are not ingested here.

Coverage

lines 1-428 of 428, read in full