This article is part of Mafaza Digital Zine that explores the concept of survival. You can read also: The Republic of Wounded Bodies by Nabil Muhammad, The Governance of Hope by Hsain al-Shehabi, Apocalypse in the Body by Kinana Issa, Identity Survival in The Diaspora by Ola Barqawi, The World is Not a Small Village by Raja Salim, Living Wounds: Violations & Victimhood by Sasha Zack, To Be Understood Without Talking by Shaunt Raffi, and Furnishing Memory by Ali Zaraket.
Read the Arabic Issue here.
___________________________________
Nour Mousa
Palestinian Syrian Canadian writer and Global Studies graduate. She works on refugees and newcomers’ issues in Canada.
_____________
“The long-run goal is… the same for every human being, that politically he or she may be allowed to live free from fear, insecurity, terror, and oppression, free also from the possibility of exercising unequal or unjust domination over others”.
–Edward W. Said, The Question of Palestine
“Where are you from?” This simple question can create a tiny identity crisis whenever I hear it. If I say Palestinian, they will ask how life in Palestine is, and I’ll find myself covering over 76 years of history to explain why I’ve never seen Palestine and why I’m not allowed to visit or live there. So, should I say Syrian? There, I was born and grew up; there, I shaped my identity and shared a collective memory with its people without ever becoming a citizen. This tedious, anxious monologue comes to me whenever someone asks me: “Where are you from?”. It gets longer or more straightforward depending on the other person’s knowledge, origins, and familiarity with the reality of the Palestinian diaspora. My genuine answer to this question is that I am a Palestinian woman from Syria who recently became Canadian. I belong to Palestine, I belong to Syria, and I am deprived of both, trying to survive in this world with all the beauty, pain, and complications I inherited from these two places.
Meanwhile, I am trying to comprehend how I can shape an identity for myself that has been connected to Canada in these past few long years of my youth. The simple question comes upin any conversation with someone new, it demands you reveal an origin or a place of birth. Also integral to the answer is the question of citizenship, which may or may not play into how people define their identity, but very consequentially determines their relative rights and privileges in the modern world.
To precisely explain where I come from, I need to start with the story of my grandparents. My grandparents were forcibly displaced from Palestine to Syria in the 1948 Nakba, hence, I came to this world as a third-generation Palestinian refugee born in Syria. Displaced again out of Syria, I become a refugee one more time. I came to Canada and started to build a new life, especially after I became a Canadian citizen.
As a Palestinian of the third-generation since 1948, one who’s inherited and lived through displacement, my sense of what it means to survive has been distorted in many different ways; I needed to redefine it while I was redefining my sense of who I was and who I have been throughout my life and the lives of my parents and ancestors. In Syria, where my family took refuge to survive the ethnic cleansing during the Palestinian Nakba, my identity was celebrated some time and punished at others, depending on how much the dictator Assad regime could use the Palestinian cause to justify its oppressive and criminal practices against the people in Syria, including Palestinian Syrians. Palestinian refugees had access to most civil rights in Syria, but were punished as ungrateful guests whenever they opposed the Syrian regime’s crimes. Meanwhile, in Canada, where I took refuge from the war and fear of persecution that I faced in Syria, I found that my identity as a Palestinian was either completely rejected or, in the best cases, avoided altogether.
Therefore, wherever I took refuge from war, persecution, and violence, I have never felt the security of survival because I needed to justify my existence in every place I went, where my identity could be welcomed or rejected depending on the security situation in the region and the political mood of the authority of those in power. Surviving seemed like an exhausting task when it meant focusing on healing from trauma and violence,that healing had to happen while I received more trauma and violence for simply being a Palestinian.
Now, while witnessing a genocide happening in Gaza, I see a repetition of my grandparents’ experience of the 1948 Nakba. I fear that the curse of the Palestinians displaced and dispersed is spreading to another generation with new scars and renewed trauma. I fear that all the identity complications that started from the forced displacement of my grandparents will be nothing compared to what the current generation of Palestinians in Gazans endures, and what their children will have to contend with in the future. I fear that my fate, the fate of Palestinians, will always be trying to survive while fighting to claim our belonging to our story and our land.
From Palestinian Refugee in Syria to a Stateless Person in Canada
Growing up in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria should have made the idea of being a refugee somehow ordinary. Shouldn’t I be accustomed to being an out-of-place person who is lives wherever I live temporarily until the day I return to my homeland. However, the meaning of being stateless has never been as blunt as it became when I came to Canada. My ID in Syria stated that I was a Palestinian refugee and temporary resident. In Canada, my ID said I am a stateless permanent resident in Canada. It was the first time I saw my out-of-place identity named and made official. I learned that statelessness defines my very existence as a human being in this world when I received my Canadian Permanent Card, and where my nationality was designated as “xxx.” Being in Canada made me face the bigger world outside of my small geography. This world chooses to deny the existence of historical Palestine and find the very existence of Palestine problematic. I became part of the world that calls me a stateless person, a person who is denied belonging to any place on this earth. A person who needs to open the map to show someone the location of my wiped-out village in Palestine, to prove that my family has roots like any other family in this world.
According to the UNHCR, the international legal definition of a stateless person is “a person who is not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law.” There are two situations where a person can become stateless: De jure statelessness, when a person is not recognized as a citizen by any state’s laws; De facto statelessness is the state in which a person is legally eligible to citizenship but is not recognized as such due to the way the law is enforced. There are nearly 15 million Palestinians in the world, and the Palestinian diaspora represents the biggest stateless community in the world, where more than half of the 8 million Palestinians are considered de jure stateless persons (Canadian Council for Refugees). In Canada, Palestinians are considered stateless because Palestine is not recognized as a state. However, Canada goes too far in this, trying to deny that Palestine as a place has ever existed. Palestinians who were born in Palestine, or even Palestinians who were born in Palestine before the 1948 Nakba in what is known now as the Palestinian Territories (West Bank and Gaza), reported that they could not list their place of birth in Palestine in the official Canadian documentation such as passport or citizenship applications (CBC).
Israel was not only built on killing Palestinian people, but also, on erasing Palestine’s existence and denying Palestinians their right to claim their culture, history, and traditions. Therefore, Israel is purely the most recent settler colonial project. According to the Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute, Settler Colonialism “is a system of oppression based on genocide and colonialism, that aims to displace a population of a nation (oftentimes indigenous people) and replace it with a new settler population….an additional criterion that is the destruction and replacement of indigenous people and their cultures by the settler’s own to establish themselves as the rightful inhabitants.”
Israel left a whole population of Palestinians stateless after creating a national state on a populated land and denying the indigenous population any rights to belong to this land. The kind of statelessness that the Palestinian diaspora has faced and is still facing is the intentional and systematic erasure of our identity. Palestinian refugees born in the diaspora are denied their right to live in Palestine, they cannot even visit Palestine, and they are denied many of their civil rights due to their statelessness.
Statelessness and the Question of Claiming a Citizenship
Many Palestinians found that the only way for them to have a peaceful life where they can live in safety and dignity is to find some way to be naturalized in a country that will grant them citizenship, a country like Canada. In the case of Palestinian refugee in Canada, not having citizenship also means the country you’re in doesn’t recognize any place of nationality or origin because Palestinian identity is itself denied. The existence of the idea of historical Palestine is problematic in Canada and in all the other countries that do not recognize the identity of Palestinians; those from the West Bank or Gaza are marked as being from the ‘Palestinian Territories’, while those from 1948 Palestine are identified by the settlers dispossessing them and us, ‘Israel.’ In other words, any person who descended from the forcibly displaced Palestinian families in 1948 is considered a person who appeared out of thin air into this world and has no right to claim their roots in their land and family history.
Since the only path for a stateless person to access their basic human rights is through acquiring citizenship, Palestinians in Canada aspire to complete the pathway that can grant them Canadian citizenship because it might be their only chance at a life where they have basic rights like the freedom of movement, the right to live safely, and aspire for a future and stable life. The right to nationality or citizenship is also known as “the right to have rights.”
“Citizenship is a fundamental element of human security, as well as providing people with a sense of belonging and identity, it entitles the individual to the protection of the state and provides a legal basis for the exercise of many civil and political rights.” (UNHCR).
Almost all the official and academic literature that proposes a durable solution for statelessness addresses statelessness as a legal issue. Most of these proposals fail to address the human side of the story, the simple yet crucial need for individuals and communities to own and define their sense of belonging and ancestral history, their right to be part of their story. Thus, despite the criticality of the legal challenge facing the stateless people, the issue of statelessness cannot be limited to the workings of the law.
Despite that, Canada does not recognize the right of Palestinians to their homeland, Canada offers a pathway for Palestinian refugees and immigrants to be naturalized as Canadian citizens, which dismantles the legal barriers that Palestinian individuals face when their status remains “stateless.” Palestinians here face a personal dilemma in following the path of individual salvation. This solution grants them the legal solution while denying them belonging to their homeland. Statelessness here cannot be resolved by simply making a path for the Palestinian diaspora to acquire citizenship in any other state in this wide world. While alternative citizenship grants political and civil rights, the right to express belonging and emotional ties with Palestine is still in question, which makes surviving and healing complex and challenging. In other words, to survive as a Palestinian, you have to go through a process in which your ties to your place of origin are dismissed. Therefore, you survive without the right to claim your identity.
Citizenship and Human Value
The dilemma of identity and citizenship is not an attempt to create a dramatic situation where Palestinians in the diaspora refuse to be content with being granted citizenship. It is not a lack of ability to connect emotionally with new places. The rejection of the Palestinian identity is a real challenge that represents itself on many occasions. We are witnessing this rejection lately becoming more and more clear and brutal during the ongoing Israeli war on the Palestinian’s existence in Gaza.
In December 2023, the Government of Canada announced a Temporary Resident Pathway to facilitate Palestinians in Canada bringing extended family to the country from Gaza. The program offers visas to a maximum of 1,000 Gaza residents, allowing them to take refuge in Canada for three years if their families are willing to financially support them during that time.
According to the federal Immigration Minister Marc Miller, “144 temporary visa applications have been approved. According to the Vancouver Star, each applicant must go through a multi-level process and provide details including social-media accounts, scars on their bodies, and every passport they have ever held.” The government claims that the new measures will help Palestinian Canadians save their loved ones in Gaza. However, it is given to very few people, given that 30 thousand Canadians are from Palestinian backgrounds. Also, the measures represent a unique form of violence against the Palestinians, as it includes checking the social media accounts of the applicant and demanding them to list and show the injuries and scars of their loved ones to prove that they deserve a chance to escape genocide.
Surviving With Amputated Belonging
Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza will lead to a new Palestinian diaspora generation that might face the risk of becoming a stateless diaspora again. The world will deprive a new generation of Palestinians of their basic human rights. The continuous violence against Palestinians and all who stand in solidarity with Palestinians will have dire consequences for the people of Gaza for generations.
I am a Canadian citizen, born and raised in Syria, the granddaughter of grandparents born and raised in Palestine. My identity as a Palestinian is viewed as a troublesome issue, my existence itself treated as a problem. Moreover, my belonging to Syria and Canada is also questioned, any identity that I have will be questioned because it is out of the frame of official identifications, birth rights, or ancestral heritage. Today, I see the story of my grandparents happening again; I see Israel killing and trying to drive Palestinians out of Gaza. I experienced the damage of displacement, the damage of the massacre, the abuse, and the genocide, and I know that it will not stop when the bleeding stops. The damage will be long-lasting.
