Asylum for Palestinians? The theory and practice of a response

Abstract

This paper examines the history of the concept of “protection” for Palestinian refugees, looking at the different approaches taken by international, regional, and local actors facing the political realities of mass Palestinian displacement after 1948. It suggests that Palestinian refugees were absorbed in several different regional and local regimes of asylum that differed substantially from international legal visions, and often provided only very limited and fragile kinds of protections for individual Palestinian refugees. Nevertheless, the international legal system itself developed to ensure that its primary architects and its signatories would be under no obligation to provide Palestinians with any protections at all, leaving these more local and regional visions of asylum as the only ones to which Palestinian refugees could look for support.

Keywords

• Palestinian refugee
• Refugee Convention
• UNRWA
• UNHCR
• Arab League
• asylum law