Nadim Bawalsa's Transnational Palestine is a significant contribution to the history of Mandate Palestine, and illuminates the role of British citizenship laws in the dispossession of Palestinians. By exposing the ways Palestinians living abroad (referred to as the mahjar) were denied citizenship by the British Empire during their mandate over Palestine, Bawalsa effectively reframes the fight for right of return of Palestinians both historically and geographically, and reveals its emergence as a response to British imperial governance. Transnational Palestine underscores citizenship as a tool in settler colonial projects where relationship to land does not guarantee rights within it or to it.
Palestinians demand the right of return to their homeland, and cite the Geneva Convention's 1949 and 1972 resolutions, which “reaffirm . . . the inalienable right of the Palestinians to return to their homes and property from which they have been displaced and uprooted, and calls for their return.”Footnote 1 Bawalsa further reveals that Palestinians were articulating their right to return far earlier than 1949. When the British established control over Palestine after World War I, they created citizenship laws that would give Palestinians and Jewish immigrants citizenship to Mandate Palestine. Palestinians in the mahjar could only gain citizenship through intentionally complicated and confusing procedures, effectively leaving them without any state representation. Combining archival research in Chile, Mexico, England, Palestine, and Israel, Bawalsa shows that ensuring Palestinian citizenship for Palestinians living abroad became a key issue both in Palestine and its diaspora, and helped form a cohesive identity through already established social and historical connections to the land and a belief in the Wilsonian logic of self-determination.
Bawalsa builds his argument in several chapters on the mahjar, their activism around their relationship to Palestine, and finally Palestine's relationship with them. His first chapter on the mahjar is perhaps oversimplified: glossing over intracommunal discord and the sometimes precarious relations with the nations in which they newly resided. However, Bawalsa does effectively relate the establishment of communities across the South American continent and the transnational sociality of peoples of Greater Syria during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As he insightfully explains, mobility did not contradict their investment in their homeland. In his next chapter, he shows that when the British took control of Palestine with the intent of creating a Jewish state, Palestinians’ transnational lifeways became a means to deny them citizenship rights. Bawalsa shows that despite fluid and overlapping political opinions about the future of their home, Palestinians abroad cohered around the issue of citizenship rights to Palestine.
Palestinian activism abroad and its role in the formation of a cohesive Palestinian identity is largely the subject of the next three chapters. Palestinians protested mainly through writing and circulating petitions throughout both Palestine and the diaspora. Bawalsa's archival sources are primarily newspapers printed in different countries in the diaspora and circulated globally. He makes great use of this understudied archive, and carefully reads the newspapers not only for news of and about petitions but also for the changing discourse around Palestinian identity. He shows how a distinct Palestinian audience was created through the fight for citizenship. Reading newspapers from different points of the diaspora underscores how transnationalism was a critical part of the development of nationalism in Palestine. In his last chapter, Bawalsa explains that Palestinians in Palestine also protested against the dispossession of Palestinians abroad, further solidifying a Palestinian identity. In this way, Bawalsa demonstrates that relationship to land was fundamental to Palestinian identity years before the Nakba. Transnational Palestine ultimately teaches us about citizenship within a settler colonial project: it can be used as another mechanism of erasure and dispossession. Bawalsa shows the failures of Wilsonian logics of self-determination for people living under settler colonialism.
Because of its focus on the limits of citizenship, it is surprising that Bawalsa omits gender as a key analytic. What did the right of return, for example, mean to women, particularly when citizenship was tied to their husband's status? Could single women abroad gain citizenship? And how did the push for citizenship affect gendered identity as a whole? It would be helpful if Bawalsa's study of identity formation in the mahjar was extended to explain how notions of gender and citizenship codeveloped through protest and dispossession.
One of Transnational Palestine's greatest strengths is the number of fields to which it speaks. It adds significantly to the study of the mahjar, as scholars have paid less attention to Palestinians than they have the Syrian and Lebanese mahjaris. The book intervenes in histories of Palestine and transnationalism, describing how, since the end of the Ottoman Empire, Palestinians abroad and in Palestine have worked together to ensure self-determination. Bawalsa's argument also broadens our understanding of what “right of return” means: not only a right to resettle, but the right to legalize a connection to Palestine, whatever it may look like. In this way, Transnational Palestine adds important complexity to both the history of Palestine and the history of being Palestinian.
