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Refugee
The sun crosses borders
without any soldiers shooting at it
The nightingale sings in Tulkarm1
of an evening,
eats and roosts peacefully
with kibbutzim birds.
A stray donkey grazes
across the firing line
in peace
and no one aims.
But I, your son made refugee
-O my native land-
between me and your horizons
the frontier walls stand.
Salem Jubran
The year 1948 marks the beginning of al-ghurba (exile or diaspora) and al-nakba (disaster or calamity), words intensely resonant in the Palestinian lexicon. After this decisive date, one can affix "pre-" or "post-" as markers of an apocalyptic moment.2 In this cultural and political orbit, a new spatial world took shape. Violently crafted and maintained borders that locked Palestinians in and kept them out became features of quotidian life. In 1948, through a combination of expulsion and flight, around 750,000 Palestinians became refugees in neighboringArab countries.About 100,000 Palestinians remained in their homeland. The core issue, however, is not conditions of departure but denial of an internationally recognized right of return, as elaborated in United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194.
In recent scholarship, Palestinians have been included in a panoply of groups with putative diasporic status.3 Indeed, the new Encyclopedia of Diasporas includes an entry on the Palestinian diaspora. Hanafi's contention that Palestinians are an "unachieved" diaspora or "partially diasporized"4 opens the way for a critical discussion of this concept. Within that framework, this paper problematizes the notion of a Palestinian diaspora by exploring how it conforms to the current scholarship of diaspora. In doing so, it brings into relief some of the complexities and ambiguities of the concept and its contemporary circulation.
The goal is not to determine whether Palestinians are diasporic.Atypology of diaspora is neither theoretically nor empirically practical in the contemporary period with its dizzying kaleidoscope of displacements, and would fix diasporas in a template that might not have the capacity to account for historical changes in form and parameter. The more relevant questions are Nonini's "When does one know whether a diaspora exists?" and Cohen's "Why these sudden proclamations" of diasporic status?5 Indeed, they are rarely asked, particularly the former. Moreover, the methodological issues surrounding diaspora, from the qualitative to the empirical and demographic, are hardly ever elaborated.
This paper ultimately...