ABSTRACT
ABSTRACT For the past 60 years Palestinians have been positioned in a liminal political zone in a global system of nation-states. Although the Palestinian refugee crisis is the oldest and largest in the world, Palestinians are also relegated to a liminal legal zone in that the UN-established institutions such as the UNRWA to deal with the Palestinians’ needs and demands through exceptional channels outside the jurisdiction of the UN’s human rights regime. As a consequence, Palestinians’ rights are always open to question and frequently violated, whether they are living under occupation, as second class citizens in Israel, or as refugees in surrounding Arab countries. Although the Palestinian diaspora is situated in a variety of countries, legally the Palestinians are nowhere. This article examines the liminal legal zone to which Palestinians have been exiled, particularly in regard to refugee rights, but also in the context of international humanitarian law and international prosecution of war crimes committed against Palestinians. In examining this liminal legal zone, the article also notes that in the age of the global ‘war on terror’, we are all at risk of becoming Palestinians as legal guidelines and guarantees are eroded.
As a diaspora of over nine million people, Palestinians are everywhere: second-class citizens of Israel, stateless residents of fragmented and walled-in Bantustans in the occupied West Bank, refugees residing inside and outside of camps in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan; and immigrants, students, professionals and nationalised citizens in virtually every country in the world.4 Palestinians dwell in the ‘First’ as well as the ‘Third’ worlds, economically speaking. Among the far-flung Palestinian diaspora are some of the poorest as well as some of the wealthiest people in the world. In the framework of international law, however, Palestinians are virtually nowhere. As stateless persons they occupy a liminal and interstitial space in the international legal and political order, an order that (contemporary discourses of cosmopolitanism, globalisation and emergent transnational organisations aside) remains founded upon and grounded in the interests of sovereign nation-states rather than in the claims of sub-or transnational actors, whether individuals or groups.5
