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: "Transnational Palestine tells of the painful struggle of loyal sons and daughters of Palestine against Britain's theft of their national identity, decades before 1948, the first group of marooned, stateless, Palestinian exiles. It's a story of British perfidy and Palestinian persistence, which Bawalsa says no previous book has told. Moreover, he shows how the dogged and sophisticated resistance campaign of these Palestinians contributed to their nation's political organization and identity formation during the British Mandate period."--Steve France, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs