By the end of British rule in Palestine on 14 May 1948, Palestinian nationality had become well established in accordance with both domestic law and international law. Accordingly, the legal origin of Palestinian nationality lies in this nearly thirty-year period as the status of Palestinians has never been settled since. Hence, any legal consideration on the future status of individuals who once held Palestinian nationality should start from the point at which the British rule over Palestine was terminated. This work provides a legal basis for future settlement of the status of Palestinians of all categories that emerged in some sixty years following the end of the Palestine Mandate: Israeli citizens, inhabitants of the occupied territory, and Palestinian refugees. In conclusion, nationality as regulated by Britain in Palestine represents an international status that cannot be legally altered except in accordance with international law.

"The quest for an inclusive and independent state has been at the center of the Palestinian national struggle for a very long time. This book critically reexamines this quest by exploring the meaning of Palestinian statehood and the challenges that face alternative models to it today. Rethinking Statehood in Palestine gives prominence to a young set of diverse Palestinian scholars, both men and women, to show how notions of citizenship, sovereignty, and nationhood are being currently rethought within the broader context of decolonization. Bringing forth critical and multifacetted engagements with what Palestinian self-determination entails within a larger regional context, this groundbreaking book sets the terms of debate for the future of Palestine beyond partition"--

The Palestinian conflict has produced one of the most tragic refugee crises since World War II, with the number of refugees caused by the violence associated with the creation of the State of Israel numbering around 11 million in 2011. The much lauded first edition, in 1998, of The Status of Palestinian Refugees in International Law was the first book to comprehensively analyse the legal aspects of the Palestinian refugee crisis, yet the last two decades have seen multiple developments. New waves of conflict and displacement have affected Palestinian refugees in the Middle East, and there has been Israeli encroachment on Palestinian territory. Hamas has grown, and a schism has formed within the first Palestinian government. The so-called "Arab Spring" has impacted the life, fate, and legal status of thousands of Palestinian refugees. In international legal jurisprudence, change has been similarly rapid. In 2004, the International Court of Justice delivered a crucial advisory opinion on the Separation Wall, authoritatively elucidating the international legal framework applicable to the Israeli occupation. Numerous international human rights bodies and UN fact-finding missions have added their analysis to the mix. The possibility of the State of Palestine joining the International Criminal Court has spurred discussion relating to the applicability of international criminal law to Palestinian refugees. Clear, compelling, and authoritative, Lex Takkenberg and Francesca Albanese discuss the status quo both on the ground and in the courts, and pose future scenarios to come.

The core of this edited volume originates from a special issue of the Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association (JOTSA) that goes well beyond the special issue to incorporate the stimulating discussions and insights of two Middle East Studies Association conference roundtables and the important work of additional scholars in order to create a state-of-the-field volume on Ottoman sociolegal studies, particularly regarding Ottoman international law from the eighteenth century to the end of the empire. It makes several important contributions to Ottoman and Turkish studies, namely, by introducing these disciplines to the broader fields of trans-imperial studies, comparative international law, and legal history. Combining the best practices of diplomatic history and history from below to integrate the Ottoman Empire and its subjects into the broader debates of the nineteenth-century trans-imperial history this unique volume represents the exciting work and cutting-edge scholarship on these topics that will continue to shape the field in years to come.

Millions of people are today forced to flee their homes as a result of conflict, systematic discrimination, or other forms of persecution. The core instruments on which they must rely to secure international protection are the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol. This book, the leading text in the field, examines key challenges to the Convention such as the status of refugees, applications for asylum, and the international and domestic standards of protection. The situation of refugees is one of the most pressing and urgent problems facing the international community and refugee law has grown in recent years to a subject of global importance. In this long-awaited fourth edition each chapter has been thoroughly revised and updated and every issue, old and new, has received fresh analysis. The books includes: analysis of internally displaced persons; so-called preventive protection; access to refugees; safety of refugees and relief personnel; the situation of refugee women and children; a detailed examination of the role of the UNHCR and the Palestinian situation; and an assessment of the protection possibilities (or lack of them) in the European Convention on Human Rights. This new edition has been expanded with coverage of forced migration and displacement as a result of disasters and climate change. It is once again an unmissable reference work for practitioners and students in the field.

'.. this work is intended to provide an in-depth analysis of each and every provision of the 1951 Convention and its 1967 Protocol. Special contributions on topics that cut across various provisions or that provide an overview over developments in certain regions of the world complement this Commentary.'

This collection offers a postcolonial critique of the ostensible superiority or originality of ‘Western’ political theory and one of its fundamental concepts, ‘citizenship’. The chapters analyse the undoing, uncovering, and reinventing of citizenship as a way of investigating citizenship as political subjectivity. If it has now become very difficult to imagine citizenship merely as nationality or membership in the nation-state, this is at least in part because of the anticolonial struggles and the project of reimagining citizenship after orientalism that they precipitated. If it has become difficult to sustain the orientalist assumption, the question arises; how do we investigate citizenship as political subjectivity after orientalism? This book was originally published as a special issue of Citizenship Studies.

This book aims to bridge the scientific gap that exists with regard to Palestine’s membership of the UN as a State. As international law cannot operate outside the context of the global political atmosphere, the book focuses on the international legal dimension as well as the political/practical aspects of UN statehood recognition. With chapters written by leading international scholars, this collection is directed to those concerned with the strengthening of international law and the UN. Complex issues of representation and the confusing situation of citizenship, given the multiple residential circumstances in which Palestinians are forced to live, are explored with unsurpassed clarity. This invaluable contribution to the scholarly literature offers an ideal point of departure for understanding the core issues as they exist at this time. In this volume, Dr Qafisheh and eighteen other contributors go beyond the direct implications of Palestinian statehood within the UN to consider the prospects for a resolution of one of the longest conflicts in history. The UN statehood resolution of November 2012 reaffirms the two-State consensus which increasingly seems to be a desert mirage without any prospect of being realized. What self-determination might mean in light of this background, where the two-State solution seems to be nearing the end of its sunset phase, is explored in creative ways throughout the book. The book consists of three parts. Part I presents the framework of Palestine’s UN membership, its legal and political foundations, its implications for PLO representation, Palestinian refugees and population status, and its impact on concerned parties. Part II focuses on selected issues that arise in relation to Palestine’s UN membership, including human rights, humanitarian law, international criminal law, prisoners, Jerusalem, water and the accession to the WTO. Part III connects the history with future solutions for Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Palestine as a territorial entity has experienced a curious history. Until World War I, Palestine was part of the sprawling Ottoman Empire. After the war, Palestine came under the administration of Great Britain by an arrangement with the League of Nations. In 1948 Israel established itself in part of Palestine's territory, and Egypt and Jordan assumed administration of the remainder. By 1967 Israel took control of the sectors administered by Egypt and Jordan and by 1988 Palestine reasserted itself as a state. Recent years saw the international community acknowledging Palestinian statehood as it promotes the goal of two independent states, Israel and Palestine, co-existing peacefully. This book draws on evidence from the 1924 League of Nations mandate to suggest that Palestine was constituted as a state at that time. Palestine remained a state after 1948, even as its territory underwent permutation, and this book provides a detailed account of how Palestine has been recognized until the present day.

Tens of thousands of Palestinians migrated to the Americas in the final decades of the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth. By 1936, an estimated 40,000 Palestinians lived outside geographic Palestine. Transnational Palestine is the first book to explore the history of Palestinian immigration to Latin America, the struggles Palestinian migrants faced to secure Palestinian citizenship in the interwar period, and the ways in which these challenges contributed to the formation of a Palestinian diaspora and to the emergence of Palestinian national consciousness. Nadim Bawalsa considers the migrants' strategies for economic success in the diaspora, for preserving their heritage, and for resisting British mandate legislation, including citizenship rejections meted out to thousands of Palestinian migrants. They did this in newspapers, social and cultural clubs and associations, political organizations and committees, and in hundreds of petitions and pleas delivered to local and international governing bodies demanding justice for Palestinian migrants barred from Palestinian citizenship. As this book shows, Palestinian political consciousness developed as a thoroughly transnational process in the first half of the twentieth century—and the first articulation of a Palestinian right of return emerged well before 1948.