Nationality and Cases of Statelessness in the Middle East and North Africa of a state to recognize that a people belong, does not mean they do not. Overall then, the MENA region lacks a common language on statelessness which may have contributed to the fact that these groups are often discussed in isolation of one another and there is little sense of a shared cause between the Bidoon of the Gulf and the Maktoumeen of Syria. This can obstruct opportunities to address the issue regionally and has also created several additional problems in the statelessness discourse in the region. Often, there is a misunderstanding as to what the word stateless means. Even when there is an attempt to inject the internationally recognised and apparently neutral term adim aljinsiya into the discourse, it can be met with some resistance as the affected population express their unwillingness to be called stateless – believing it to be attacking their identity as people who belong to the country in which they live in.21 Additionally, the largest stateless group in the world, the Palestinians, have rarely been discussed in the context of debate on solving “statelessness”. In the discourse on their situation in different states and in the region generally, it is apparent that the severe 21 - This lack of understanding was highlighted in 2013 where there was an attempt in Kuwait, using the First Conference for the Stateless in Kuwait; Situation and Solutions conference to push for the usage of this word, but was met with resistance 24