On the Violence of Self-Determination: The Palestinian Refugee as the Ontological Other

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/arabstudquar.42.3.0181
• Pages: 181-225
• Published date: 01 January 2020
• Date: 01 January 2020
• Author: Muna S. Tareh

ASQ 42.3 Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals

Muna Tareh is an independent scholar and holds a Master in Public Administration from Michigan

University and a Master in Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies from Columbia University

ON THE VIOLENCE OF SELF-DETERMINATION:

THE PALESTINIAN REFUGEE AS THE

ONTOLOGICAL OTHER

Muna S. Tareh

Abstract: The discourse on migration and refugee studies continues to be framed around

two main principles: sovereignty and identity. In contemporary politics, however, the ref-

ugee subject is defined and managed from a universal framework where the language of

rights elevates the potency of liberalism as both a discourse and an instrument of domi-

nation. This article examines refugeehood from a framework that transcends the sover-

eignty/identity dichotomy. It offers a more nuanced contextual approach through which

this mass socio-political phenomenon can be better understood. To validate the article’s

new methodology, it sets out to examine the Palestinian refugee question, the oldest

unresolved refugee problem in the history of the modern Middle East. The article makes

visible the performative role of question framing by giving particular attention to histori-

cal transfigurations in the conceptualization of the people’s right to self-determination.

As a discourse-based analysis, the article demonstrates how current discursive forma-

tions produce colonial knowledge that can facilitate the development of new social and

political tools of population control. The article concludes by showing how conceptual

transfiguration of the right to self-determination incited the orientalist scholarship on

the Palestinian refugee question in the interest of legitimizing and normalizing Israel as a

Western colonial establishment.

Introduction

Refugeehood marks a new development in social and political struggle in human

history. The modern phenomenon of refugeehood has ushered in a profusion of

scholarship approaching the question from various perspectives (legal, sociologi-

cal, political). Yet contemporary scholarship on refugeehood is fashioned in a way

that lends unequal attention to different refugee cases in different conjunctures of

history.1 In doing so, it risks describing everything and nothing. Some scholars,

for example, have argued that the phenomenon can be viewed as an “identity dis-

course” as opposed to “a type of population dispersal.” Others have suggested that

it might be more productive to consider the diaspora as something that “creates

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the homeland” instead of the other way around.2 The refugee question, nonethe-

less, is not only one of identity but also one of political recognition. Political rep-

resentation, Neil Lazarus informs us, does not come on one’s own terms (in this

case, terms defined by refugees themselves) but on the terms and conditions of the

powerful.3 By making refugeehood the subject and object of study, a new disci-

pline is produced in which the universal refugee law as stipulated in several UN

charters and treaties emerges as the unique authoritative discourse through which

various refugee cases continue to be defined and managed. Aside from reifying

the category of the “legal,” or positing as problematic the notion of the “legal” in

the sense that it assumes a separation of powers, a standardized approach to solv-

ing the problem of refugeehood is all but impossible. In this respect, the following

analysis will take Michel Foucault’s theory on discourse and the discursive dis-

continuity of transformations as a mechanism through which the hypothesis will

be leveraged.4

Anchored in Michel Foucault’s understanding of how knowledge and power

are implicated in one another, the article argues that converting United Nations



Israeli War (the Nakba) and the 1967 War (the Naksa) into qualified authority

and law produced colonial knowledge on the Palestinian refugee question. This

new knowledge facilitated the reproduction of Palestinian refugee identity as the

“other” in both political and discursive categories. Subsequently, the contempo-

rary discourse provided for an alternative framework that obscured the colonial

origins of the Palestinian refugee problem in the interests of solidifying the state

of Israel as a western colonial establishment. International refugee law, then, is

implicated in the liquidation of the internationally sanctioned Palestinian refu-

gees’ right of return. As such, the article suggests that the new discipline can be

thought of as a modern mode of biopower, a concealed state mechanism whereby

the spatiality and temporality of the neocolonized Palestinian refugee subject

is appropriated.

From this premise, the article sets out to trace the United Nations resolutions

concerning the Palestinian refugee crisis post-Nakba and Naksa. Positioning the

universal right to self-determination at the forefront, it points out contextual ambi-

guities and contradictions in the way the Palestinian refugee has been defined and

managed.5 To further solidify the article’s central hypothesis, the contextual ambi-

guities and contradictions in the legal lexicon in United Nations resolutions, in the

aftermath of the Nakba and Naksa, are then correlated with shifts in global power

relations demonstrating their structural rather than incidental nature. The contra-

dictions in UN resolutions then linked to shifts in the conceptualization of the

people’s right to self-determination. Moving forward, the article sets out to tell the

story of Palestinian refugeehood and how it acquired its position in history from

ON THE VIOLENCE OF SELF-DETERMINATION 183

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orientalist and universal frameworks on rights. It will progress by demonstrating

how relocating the Palestinian refugee question from its colonial materiality to the

abstract realm of refugee rights was a necessary precondition for the liquidation of

the Palestinian refugees’ right to self-determination.

Two main aspects, the theoretical and the structural, underpin the central argu-

ment of this study. The first half will broadly trace the ways refugeehood was

framed during the de-colonization era, highlighting the historical moments of

transformation that set in motion conceptual shifts pertaining to the right to self-

determination. The second half will be organized around a serious of proposals for

a more critical examination of the material ramifications that pertain to conceptual

shifts and structural contradiction. As a discourse-based analysis, the article will

deconstruct the relationship that binds together the structural formation of the sov-

ereign state, the production of the refugee subject, and liberalism as both a shared

founding ideology and a discourse of domination. It will then demonstrate how

Israel, through its elevation of liberalism as a rational methodology, was able to

produce the Palestinian refugee as the “other” in history of refugeehood, providing

Israel with the foundation needed to deny the Palestinian refugees their right to

return to their homes.

The article concludes by showing how the production of colonial knowledge on

the Palestinian refugee question is a platform for state “reform”—a modern tech-

nique of biopower purposely engineered to obscure Israel’s settler colonial nature

and disarm and direct mass grievances through a legal and orderly discourse that

is itself contained in the nation-state paradigm. Ultimately, the analysis demon-

strates the performative role of question framing as a mode of biopower.

Mapping the Historical Contours of Refugeehood

This part of the study will broadly trace the origins of refugeehood in national his-

toriography. It seeks to identify the historical moments of transformations when

the dominant framing of the refugee question began to shift from its colonial ori-

gins and ethnic-based understanding that accompanied fall of empire and nation-

state building throughout the 1930s and 1940s to the abstract realm of universal

rights and international refugee law where it currently remains.6 The historical

moments of transformations are then highlighted by juxtaposing United Nations

   

our findings, the contextual and structural contradictions in UN resolutions are

then linked to shifts in power relations at the time.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Europe was faced with a significant refugee

crisis. The majority of the displaced population was of European descent as Europe

itself had been the site of displacement. At that time, refugeehood was viewed as