Reconciling Return and Rights: Palestinian Refugees and the Emergence of a "Political Society"

For over sixty years, Palestinians have been unable to return to their original lands and/or to obtain any compensation for their material and human losses. Indeed, Israel has adamantly refused to be considered accountable for the tragedy of the Nakba, and had only been ready to accommodate, on historical Palestine, a symbolic number of first generation refugees. Simultaneously, many host countries have endorsed the idea that naturalization and access to full rights (tawtin) and even tatwir (development) would constitute a de facto assimilation of the refugee populations and would, eventually, undermine their right of return.[3] However in their daily existence, refugees question their status as an indistinct mass of beneficiaries, as stateless subjects, or as temporary citizens. Most significantly, they defy the opposition between return and rights, which they do not see as mutually exclusive political projects