Children of the “Idea of Palestine”1: Negotiating Identity, Belonging and Home in the Palestinian Diaspora

Abstract

Some 5 million people live in the Palestinian diaspora today, with the possibility of their 'return' to their homeland ever bleaker due to the failure of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. As a result of the nature of their dispossession from their homeland and their politicised exile, understanding the complexities of their lived experiences requires us to go beyond conventional notions of "first" and "second" migrant generations. This paper argues that the experiences of diaspora Palestinians are in many ways framed not so much by what "generation" they belong to in terms of migration, but by how many generations they have been in exile. It examines shifts in negotiations of concepts of identity, belonging and home for successive generations of diaspora Palestinians. It then explores these ideas through the case study of the community of Palestinians from Kuwait who relocated to Australia as a result of the 1990-91 Gulf conflict