Palestinian refugees. The right to stay and the right to return

If national emancipation, in the form of an emancipated sovereignty, is the historical foreseen outcome of anticolonial struggles seeking to end colonial domination, liberation from settler colonialism requires frameworks other than the nationalist ones. A vision for radical justice and reparation for Palestinian refugees and displaced requires that we move on from flat conventional international law approaches based on national frames and that we engage in a decolonial (and feminist) understanding of the losses that Palestinians endured and continue to endure because of settler colonial violence, as well as a result of nationalist or sectarian exclusionary projects in the 'host' countries where refugees fled and lived for decades. Indeed, Palestinian refugees and displaced have not been deprived merely of an abstract homeland but of home, as the political and affective sites of continuous presence against erasure. Homes have been rebuilt in exile as refugees struggled to remain alive and provide safety for themselves and a future to their children, while maintaining a sense of their presence as the indigenous people of Palestine. Indigeneity in this context does not equate with nativism or with exclusionary nationalism nor does it build on an anteriority thesis. Shifting the focus from rights and states to the more intimate and no less political site of homes forces us to ask: what is lost in decades long displacement and under settler colonialism? How do people endure a condition of permanent temporariness over generations? What would justice look like for the victims and survivors? To begin answering these questions, we must attend to the critical mass of ideas, practices and imaginaries about return and rights formed through the many decades of displacement by refugees and their descendants. Can return be conceived anew as a politics that aims at a project of radical democracy and justice rather than of national liberation? We need novel answers to questions about what hat has been lost and how can it be repaired?