Statelessness & Citizenship Review 2021 3(2) also be understood by their reflections on how they were treated as ‘nearly’ Syrian. ‘Palestinian Syrian’ was a bureaucratic label that led to the ‘quasi-parity’ between Palestinians and Syrian citizens, derived from the status imposed upon the population by Law No 260 of 10 July 1957. 42 Many of the participants recalled how they were not fully Syrian citizens, yet had a form of Syrian citizenship that granted them rights beyond those offered to other foreigners who were legally and permanently residing in the country. We note that none compared their situation to other refugees or stateless people with temporary or informal residency rights. The participants conceptualised their situation as living between Syrian citizenship and the denizenship of other ‘privileged’ non-citizens. In sum, while many of the participants had internalised the labels of their refugeeness (only in relation to Israel) and Palestinianness (though not statelessness), they had also internalised their Syrian ‘denizenship plus’/‘citizenship lite’. This was reflected in Zahra’s claim that she did not consider herself Palestinian or Syrian, but ‘Palestinian-Syrian’, 43 with the two labels being inseparable and meaning that she had a distinct and privileged status in Syria. B The Palestinian Camps as Home and Homeland Fiddian-Qasmiyeh cautioned that we may limit our conceptualisation or theorisation on statelessness if we do not acknowledge the role of the homeland. 44 One can see the value of doing so when considering the relationship between the stateless/Palestinian, refugee and Palestinian Syrian labels for the PRS. Rarely in the interviews was Palestine referred to as their home or where they belonged. When it was, it was qualified with references to it being an idealised or imagined notion of what Palestine was, is or could be in the future. Instead, it was the Palestinian camps within Syria that featured most prominently when discussing what their Palestinian label meant, as Hania reflects: The average European by age twenty five has already travelled the world. There are people who are sixty years old and they’ve never left Yarmouk. This shapes your identity. It’s your mental identity as a Palestinian, you’re feeling that you’re always oppressed and constrained. It’s not like a racist thing from Syrians, but the Palestinian-Syrians always belonged to a one-kilometre-squared patch of land in Syria: the camps. It’s like the romanticised alternative to the lost home; an alternative to or a compensation for Palestine. So, I would imagine that anyone that has lived through this and lived in that environment has a specific personality linked to their circumstances. 45 Regarding the connection of the Palestinians in Syria with their camps, Elia Zureik claimed that the camps had become ‘symbol[s] of severance from one’s homeland … [becoming] the site for the social construction of memory and 42 43 44 45 See Law No 260 of 10 July 1957 (Syrian Arab Republic); Husseini and Bocco (n 12); Szydzisz (n 10). Interview with Zahra, 24 years old from Yarmouk (Tom Rollins, 29 April 2017). Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (n 7). Interview with Hania, 53 years old from Yarmouk (Tom Rollins, 25 April 2017). 338