To be denied a homeland

Abstract

Chile is home to the largest Palestinian diaspora outside of the Middle East. When and how did this community form? This chapter explores the history of Palestinian migration to and settlement in Latin America, with a focus on Chile. Beyond migration, it examines Arabic periodicals from 1920s Santiago de Chile to demonstrate how Palestinian migrants responded to the British Mandate’s 1925 Palestinian Citizenship Order-in-Council, through which British authorities denied Palestinian citizenship to tens of thousands of Palestinian migrants throughout the interwar period, effectively rendering them stateless, with no legal representation or claim to Palestine. The chapter argues that Palestinian migrants developed into a political and national collective through their transnational activism in this new world order, distinct from their Syrian and Lebanese counterparts with whom they migrated from Greater Syria before the First World War as Ottoman Syrians. It therefore posits that exclusionary British Mandate citizenship legislation was a critical component in the Palestinian migrant community’s formation into a diaspora, one that continues, to this day, to be defined by an ongoing exclusion from a historic homeland.