Refusing Refusal
Palestinian statehood and citizenship are considered weak. Further, a United
Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East
(‘UNRWA’) registration as a ‘Palestine refugee’ is not sufficient for a person to
be declared a ‘Convention refugee’, as the UN 1951 Convention Relating to the
Status of Refugees precludes persons receiving assistance from any UN institution
that is not the UNHCR from obtaining refugee status. 84 The claimant must prove
that assistance from UNRWA has ‘ceased’. 85 In fact, Palestinians are frequently
excluded from refugee status, due to the fact that they are registered as ‘Palestine
refugees’ and their actual status is that of double or multiple refugees. 86 There are
also cases where the SMA maintains that asylum seekers are actually Palestinian
citizens, although they only carry 00-passports, and thus deny their statelessness. 87
My interlocutors have told me that their stateless conditions were evoked in the
decisions and definitions by the SMA, rather than resolved. 88 Fadil, a man in his
50s, who served as a medical doctor for the Syrian authorities, as well as on
international missions, and is seeking refuge in Sweden from the Syria war,
explained: ‘I had never thought of that before. That I am stateless. It was
humiliating’. 89 Hamid, an engineer in his 40s, who previously lived in Syria said:
‘I have always identified myself as Palestinian. But legally, I am stateless’. 90
Similarly, in a study on stateless Palestinians in France, Gabiam found that
statelessness is not a term that is used or accepted. 91 For Palestinians, statelessness
is connected to the fact that they, as a collective people/self, do not have a state,
and that their statelessness is a collective experience 92 derived from the fact that
they were displaced from their homeland in 1948.
Thus, the identities that stateless asylum seekers actively embrace (Palestinian,
Palestinian refugee) are repressed and new categories are created (stateless,
asylum seeker, uncertain identity, deportee, undocumented) in a bureaucratised
subjectification from the outside. 93 To my interviewees, it was the conditions of
Palestinian refugeeness and the protracted displacement 94 that should be default
for their asylum claims. They interpreted the Swedish migration politics as
denying their preferred narrative and identity of loss and erasure. 95 In resisting
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, opened for signature 28 July 2951, 189 UNTS
37 (entered into force 22 April 1954) art 1(A).
MIG 2013 (n 80). This is based on the Court of Justice of the European Union case, El Kott v
Bevándorlási És Állampolgársági Hivatal [El Kott, A Radi and Ismail v Office of Immigration
and Nationality] (Court of Justice of the European Union, C-364/11, ECLI:EU:C:2012:826,
19 December 2012). According to praxis, the SMA considers protection to have ‘ceased’
when a person has been ‘forced to leave the operational areas of UNRWA due to external
conditions outside of this person’s control’ and then ‘he or she shall instead automatically be
provided the benefits of the Geneva convention’.
Fiddian-Quasmiyeh (n 43) 279.
According to interviews and conversations with stateless Palestinians participating in a sit-in
strike in Gothenburg, January–February 2020.
According to interviews and conversations held between 2018–20.
Interview with Anonymous (Helena Lindholm, Abed, Småland, August 2018).
Interview with Anonymous (Helena Lindholm, Firas, Halland, February 2019).
Gabiam (n 15) 481.
ibid.
Stierl (n 2).
According to interviews and conversations held between January 2018 – March 2020.
See generally Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National
Consciousness (Columbia University Press 2010); Helena Lindholm Schulz, The
Reconstruction of Palestinian Nationalism: Between Revolution and Statehood (Manchester
University Press 1999); Gabiam (n 15).
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