Description:
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.
Review Quotes: "Bawalsa's book is a significant contribution to the field of Palestinian, migration, and diaspora studies in Latin American and the Middle East. It challenges the traditional view of the Palestinian national movement as a monolithic entity rooted in the exodus following 1948. Instead, Bawalsa shows that the Palestinian struggle for self-determination has a long and transnational history. Grounded in his own family's history and struggles, Bawalsa's book is also timely and relevant to the current political climate, serving to further complicate and contextualize our understanding of contemporary events."--Mark Overmyer-Velázquez, The Americas