By Nadim Bawalsa, Stanford University Press, 2022, paperback, 297 pp. MEB $35
Reviewed by Steve France
IT’S IMPOSSIBLE to say who among the Palestinian people were first to realize that the 1917 Balfour Declaration was a death warrant issued against them by their British allies in the ongoing war against the Ottoman Empire. What Nadim Bawalsa’s new book makes clear, however, is that the first Palestinians to have their national identity legally erased to make way for a Jewish state were the tens of thousands of prosperous economic migrants who were residing in foreign lands.
Transnational Palestine tells of the painful struggle of loyal sons and daughters of Palestine against Britain’s theft of their national identity, decades before 1948, the first group of marooned, stateless, Palestinian exiles. It’s a story of British perfidy and Palestinian persistence, which Bawalsa says no previous book has told. Moreover, he shows how the dogged and sophisticated resistance campaign of these Palestinians contributed to their nation’s political organization and identity formation during the British Mandate period.
Before the arrival of the British, Palestinians had been voyaging westward in large numbers for decades to make their fortunes as merchants, notably in Latin America. All they needed to set forth (or to return), Bawalsa tells us, were tickets to travel. In 1918, they cheered from afar the victory of their British allies and envisioned an independent Arab state or states, which Britain had solemnly promised as the means to secure the armed support of the Arabs against the Turks.
Ironically, the first sign of trouble was Britain’s insistence that Palestine become a separate mandate territory (along with another mandate for Jordan, and the French mandates for Syria and Lebanon), rather than a small part of Greater Syria, as it had been traditionally considered. This carving out of Palestine, of course, was intended to facilitate the empowerment of Jewish immigrants. Both Palestinians and Syrians protested this partition at the post-war peace conferences and before the newly founded League of Nations, and they denounced the Balfour Declaration. Their petitions were ignored and their delegations were sent away, despite meticulous presentations and overwhelming arguments on the basis of the Wilsonian right of self-determination—allegedly the League’s most fundamental principle.
The instrument that legally severed transnational Palestinians from what they considered their true homeland was the 1925 Palestinian Citizenship Order-in-Council, a law tightly focused on the importation of Jewish immigrants to be specially privileged citizens of Palestine. Bawalsa says that the British had scarcely considered the legal status of those living abroad, who had maintained extensive economic, familial and cultural ties with Palestine in what were basically Palestinian communities. In fact, most of these transnationals were from Bethlehem and the adjoining towns of Beit Jala and Beit Sahour. They made their living largely by marketing Holy Land products abroad. Their children continued to marry Palestinians back home, or other Palestinians traveling overseas. Few possessed citizenship in their Latin American host countries.
The Citizenship Order gave British officials virtually unreviewable authority to deny the citizenship applications of non-Jews and included absurdly tight deadlines and other onerous and arbitrary provisions to serve as pretexts to deny applications. Less than one percent of citizenship applications were granted to the overseas Palestinians over the course of the British Mandate.
The book draws on thousands of applications, appeals, protests and personal correspondence, in addition to a constant stream of articles in the lively Arab press of Latin America and Palestine. From sophisticated legal and political protests to the raw, anguished and angry cries of people amputated from their roots, British officials heard it all over and over again, in Jerusalem, London and Geneva (the headquarters of the League of Nations). Blatantly unfair, the citizenship process violated Britain’s obligations under the Treaty of Lausanne, which established the rights of former Ottoman subjects in mandate territories.
Bawalsa’s family was not among those exiled tribes of Latin America. He grew up in a Jordanian-Palestinian family in Amman and Cairo. What led him to chronicle the plight of these exiles says a lot about the hidden sympathies that link the millions of diasporic Palestinians and draw the empathy of others. Bawalsa wrote the book, he says, partly “to understand how I see myself and why I continue to identify fundamentally as a Palestinian.” In a moving personal prologue and epilogue, he recounts how a visit to Chile with its 500,000 enthusiastic “Palestinos–Chilenos” intertwined with his own patchwork family narratives to reveal a nation that still strives to be welcomed back to its rightful place among nations.
Steve France is an activist and writer affiliated with Episcopal Peace Fellowship, Palestine-Israel Network.
