BADIL proudly announces the release of its research project: One People United: A Deterritorialized Palestinian Identity
  
http://www.badil.org/en/badil-news/829-story-1

December 2012  

BADIL Survey of Palestinian Youth on Identity and Social Ties—2012

The violent birth of Israel in 1948 constituted a catastrophe - Nakba - for Palestinian aspirations for statehood. The implications of the Nakba on Palestinian society exceed violating their right to self-determination. Palestinian social fabric has been torn as a result of the mass forced displacement of the majority of the Palestinian people from their homeland.

Indeed, the implications of the Nakba on Palestinian society have yet to be fully studied and understood. No single research effort can cover the wide spectrum of issues that emanate from the Nakba. One of the most visible outcomes of the Nakba is the geographical dispersal of Palestinians, mainly across the Middle East, but also in the rest of the world.

 Today, nearly six and a half decades after the Nakba, it is possible to identify four main Palestinian groups: Palestinian citizens of Israel, who have become second class citizens; Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip under Israeli military occupation since 1967; Palestinian refugees living in the neighbouring Arab countries; and Palestinians in the rest of the world. These four categories denote, crudely, both to different political and social environments in which these groups live.

The question that arises is: if different Palestinian groups have existed for so many decades in different political, socio-economic and cultural environments, in isolation from each other, what can we say about Palestinian national identity, and movement, today?

In order to address this question, BADIL has conducted a survey focusing on identity and social ties among Palestinian youth residing in Mandate Palestine (West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and Israel), Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. This is an initial effort to begin to understand how youth (third or fourth generation of displaced Palestinians) of Palestinian heritage identify with  their ancestry. These issues are rendered increasingly relevant given the uncertainty of the continuation of the Oslo framework that has characterized the Palestine question for the past two decades.

It is important to note that the findings of this research are not, and cannot be, conclusive. Mapping Palestinian identity across multiple geographically-divided groups is a huge task and one which demands comprehensive quantitative and qualitative research. This paper, then, should not be viewed as definitive, but instead as a piece of preliminary research which can pave the ground for further, deeper and more comprehensive analyses. Accordingly, alongside each set of findings BADIL has hypothesized explanations for trends and variations encountered so as to assist any such future studies, but again, these 'explanations' must be investigated fully, and it is BADIL's opinion that this area constitutes a rich potential for future research.