National Identity Without Citizenship?

Professors Muhammad Ali Khalidi and Diane Riskedahl

The Institute for Palestine Studies and the Institut Français du Proche-Orient held its final workshop under the context of Palestinian identities and territories, which took place on December 14 in AUB's West Hall and was organized into a series of lectures.

The workshop was intended to examine the relationship between Palestinian citizenship and national identity. The debate about whether citizenship comes before nationalism or vice versa appears to be a complex issue concerning the Palestinians. Typically, social scientists contend that national identity emerges after the existence of citizenship. However, as the workshop highlighted, this cannot apply to Palestinians insofar as they do not share a common citizenship. This unusual observation has led many researchers to study the dynamic between Palestinian citizenship and identity.

The workshop consisted of a conglomeration of papers by anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and researchers in cultural and Middle Eastern studies. Their analysis shed light on the different aspects of the Palestinian issue. For example, one paper proposed the formation of a "refracted citizenship," which is a citizenship developed out of past and future notions of a Palestinian state and was born out of issues of sovereignty in Gaza after 1948.

Another paper critiqued the existence of closed Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon as a means for "disciplinary power, control, and surveillance, and for deploying the state of exception." According to Diane Riskedahl's opening remarks, investigating the complexity between Palestinian identity and citizenship could be understood as part of the analysis of the broader issue, "the future of Palestine."