Beyond labels: Memory, identity, and the Palestinian experience

By Dr. Shahd Qannam

Ask a Palestinian if they are “stateless,” and the answer is never straightforward. The international system loves its labels. Stateless. Refugee. Displaced. Resident. Citizen. Each one neatly defined in treaties, UN Reports, and bureaucratic manuals. 

These labels are the currency of policy papers, conferences, and donor reports. These categories are not neutral; they are instruments of control, part of the apparatus that perpetuates Palestinian forced displacement and denial of rights, rather than capturing the political, historical, and lived reality of our existence as a nation. They are, in fact, part of the machinery that produces our “statelessness.” 

Textbooks will tell you statelessness is a technical condition, measurable by the absence of nationality under the operation of a state’s law. For Palestinians, however, statelessness is not an accidental gap in the law. It is the direct outcome of a settler-colonial project first enabled under the British Mandate, brutally actualised in the Palestinian Nakba of 1948, intensified by the occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem in 1967, and persisting today through territorial and political fragmentation, illegal settlement expansion, and the systematic denial of return. 

Palestinian “statelessness” is, therefore, neither technical nor incidental. It is structural, deliberate, and maintained through manipulation of passports, residency statuses, and administrative classifications. 

States of statelessness

For us Palestinians, the labels blur, overlap, and fracture into absurdities that say less about us and more about the colonial world that produced them. We live across every category, often several at once; stateless but documented, citizens without equality, residents without permanence, refugees in perpetuity. These labels are supposed to give meaning to our legal position, but in reality, they strip meaning from our history.

I have been asked before, by researchers, acquaintances, well-meaning colleagues, “Do you identify as stateless?” And every time, I pause. Not because I am unsure of the answer, but because the question itself feels too shallow for the truth. The reality of being Palestinian cannot be captured by a simple “yes” or “no.”

What does “stateless” mean when you are Palestinian? Does it refer to the Gazan living under siege and ongoing genocide, carrying a travel document that opens no borders? Or the Palestinian refugee in Lebanon, banned from dozens of professions and from owning property? Or the Palestinian in the West Bank carrying a Palestinian Authority passport, a document that says “State of Palestine” but cannot guarantee you entry to or exit from your own homeland without the permission of your coloniser?

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Or perhaps it means the Jerusalemite Palestinian holding the surreal status of “permanent resident” in their own city — a legal fiction that treats them as foreign nationals in their own birthplace, revocable if you live abroad too long, work in another country, or even marry outside the city? Or could it be the Palestinian in Jordan carrying a temporary passport — a document that lets you cross borders but grants no political rights in the place that issued it — a limbo masquerading as nationality? 

And then there are the Palestinians who hold Israeli citizenship. Citizens, yes, but of the state that forcibly displaced their ancestors and continues to discriminate against them. Their citizenship is not a guarantee of equality, but a constant reminder that they live under, and are answerable to, a system that ranks them as less. 

Lastly, the Palestinians in exile, holding foreign passports. They live in the paradox of being fully documented but forcibly displaced. They might be “stateless” only in the political sense, and their papers may open any borders, except those that could return them home. 

The limits of legal frameworks

Each of these realities wears a different legal name, yet they all point to the same deliberate system that fragments us as a nation, restricts our movement, and intentionally targets our national movement. In the language of international law, statelessness is a defect, a legal gap to be fixed with the right paperwork. In the language of Palestinian history, statelessness is a political tool, an enforced condition that serves colonial, military, and geopolitical agendas. 

International law, as applied, may recognise the fact of our “statelessness” but seldom the cause. Our statelessness, our refugeehood, our revocable residencies, our temporary passports, our second-class citizenships, all of it, is not an accident of history or law. They are the deliberate products of settler colonialism, designed to further an imperialist political agenda at the expense of the people and the land they illegally occupy.  

So, when someone asks me if I am “stateless”, my answer will always be I am Palestinian. That is the only political identity that matters to me. It is not a romantic declaration or a symbolic gesture; it is the only accurate descriptor of our political and historical reality. The world may insist on measuring me by what papers I hold, but those papers have never determined who I am. For that, it is crucial to always remind the world that every document we carry, every status we hold, is provisional, conditional, and often revocable. Only the assertion of our identity as Palestinians withstands these manipulations.

I understand the need to use it strategically. The international system responds to categories. Statelessness is recognised, documented, counted. It can be invoked in legal claims and UN resolutions. However, using it comes at a cost. It forces us to translate our struggle into the grammar of victimhood, trading the political for the administrative. 

The Palestinian experience exposes the limits of international legal frameworks. Legal instruments classify us, track us, document us, yet fail to dismantle the systems that produced our “statelessness.” Article 1 of the 1954 Statelessness Convention may formally recognise some of us as “stateless,” but it does not address the political theft underpinning our marginalisation. 

Temporary passports, permanent residencies, or UNRWA registration are treated as solutions, but they are not. They are forms of containment and mechanisms created by institutions to manage a population whose destruction they continue to facilitate. A nation whose very existence challenges the settler-colonial order.

If we are to use this language, it must be on our own terms. Statelessness, for us, is not just a lack of nationality. It is the legal face of a political crime. It is the checkpoint that stands between a mother and her child’s school. It is the siege that turns the Mediterranean into a wall. It is the bureaucrat’s stamp that decides whether you can attend your father’s funeral. It is, above all, the refusal to let us live as a nation in our homeland, which was forcibly stolen from us. 

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I am Palestinian

So, what does “statelessness” mean to me? It means carrying my identity in memory, in family stories, in the stubborn and relentless refusal to forget. It means knowing that the papers in my pocket are not my freedom. It means belonging to a geography that has been mapped into fragments but still exists, and will always be whole in our collective national consciousness.

I end with a poem I wrote in January 2024, after Israeli officials called us “children of darkness” at the start of the ongoing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. I called my poem “Child of Darkness,” a reminder that no label, no legal definition, no international category will ever matter more than the truth we carry: we are Palestinian. This is the only absolute, and everything else is temporary.

I’m a child of darkness

a human animal

an uncivilised

I’m a child of darkness

a third-generation refugee

a stateless

My skin is brown

My passport a haunting testament

to my journey through the shadows

of statelessness

of otherness

of exile

My birthright legacy: forced displacement and dispossession

My roots: intertwined with colonialism, racism and iniquity

My struggle: for survival, for dignity, began long before I was

I am a child of darkness

Yet colonial stereotypes will never, not ever define me

or my people

We may be voiceless to those who try to drown us out

We may be invisible to those who paint us into a corner

We may be powerless to those who only see strength in oppression

But we will never bow to their kings

We will never be bound by their chains

We are speakers of our truth

“Yousef, my son, 7 years old, curly hair, light-skinned, and handsome.”

“يوسف ابني عمره ٧ سنين شعره كيرلي وأبيضاني وحلو”

“This is my mum; I recognise her by her hair.”

“هاي أمي بعرفها من شعرها”

“My children died before they could eat.”

“أولادي ماتوا بدون ما ياكلوا”

“The soul of my soul.”

“هادي روح الروح”

“My three children, please search. Maybe I can find one of them alive.”

“أولادي ثلاثة يا عالم دوروا بلكي بلاقي واحد عايش”

“Visit me in my dreams. I swear to God, I miss you”

“تعالولي في المنام، والله بشتاقلكم”

“I was planning to throw her a birthday party”

“كنت ناوي اعملها عيد ميلاد”

We are 2.3 million in Gaza

We are 14 million in the world

We each are a story, stories, galaxies, the universe

The horrors we’ve endured surpass lifetimes, stretch imaginations

But we still are

I am no poet

nor am I a writer

I am a human burdened with anger and grief, seeking refuge in the fragile art of translating these emotions into words

The echoes of injustice have become my pen, and the cries of the stateless have become my ink

My story

Our story

The Palestinian story

Is not one of defeat

It is a story of triumph against all odds.

Let me tell you Hind Rajab’s story.

The innocent bloom cut before her time

Refaat Alareer wrote, “If I must die,

you must live”

And for that we rise from the ashes of oppression

Our story will be written in the annals of justice.

I am not, we are not, Palestinians are not

defined by the wounds inflicted upon us

but by

the courage with which we rise above them.

As the echoes of my words fade into the silence,

remember this

When the world dares to refer to us as

Uncivilised

human animals

children of darkness

remember this

Within this child of darkness, the olive tree still takes root in the heart,

Within this child of darkness, the keys to stolen homes are held close in the palm

Within this child of darkness, memory carries us over stone and sky.

(GlobalVoices/NS)

This article is republished from GlobalVoices under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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