Relived Vulnerabilities of Palestinian Refugees

Abstract

The international refugee protection regime failed in protecting millions of refugees during the current Syrian conflict. However, for more than half a million Palestinian refugees who have resided in Syria since 1948, this failure has been persistent since such time as they were never protected by the international protection regime. These Palestinian refugees are now reliving the trauma of their statelessness through the current Syrian conflict. Their lack of protection reveals a complex layering of the failure of the legal framework of refugee protection. This case demonstrates the limits of an international protection regime that was initially formulated to address a Eurocentric set of concerns. This article links the current protection gaps for Palestinian refugees from Syria with the structural flaws of the international refugee protection regime. The article argues that the particular legal frameworks that were established to govern the statelessness of Palestinian refugees since 1948 have contributed in prolonging this unresolved crisis and pushed stateless Palestinians into a new cycle of displacement and victimization.

Keywords

Exclusion journey Palestinians protection refugees statelessness Syria UNHCR UNRWA vulnerability

Introduction

Man, it turns out, can lose all so-called Rights of Man without losing his essential quality as man, his human dignity. Only the loss of a polity itself expels him from humanity. (Arendt, 1951: 297)

Palestinian statelessness is one of the world’s most persistent refugee crises; it goes back to 1948 when more than 750,000 Palestinians were displaced from Palestine as a result of the establishment of the state of Israel. According to the United Nations Relief and Working Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), ‘Palestine refugees are people whose normal place of residence, between June 1946 and May 1948, was Palestine, and who lost both their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict’ (UNRWA, 2009: 3). Today more than half a million Palestinian refugees, who have resided in Syria since 1948, are reliving the trauma of their statelessness through the current Syrian conflict. The social marginalization and legal preciousness of Palestinian stateless refugees during the Syrian conflict are, in fact, examples of the limitations of the international refugee protection system which allow the exclusion of millions of refugees as they do not fit within its legal frameworks. Palestinians were never protected by the international protection regime as they have been subject to a set of legal structures that prevent them from officially accessing international refugee protection. Yet, during the current Syrian conflict, this group of refugees has experienced multiple layers of discrimination and rejections that push them to seek refuge in other destinations through life-threatening journeys.

This article examines the particular predicament of Palestinian refugees from Syria, a predicament that powerfully reveals the political nature of the legal framework that governs stateless Palestinians. The article argues that the international refugee protection regime, which was established in the aftermath of the Second World War to mainly address the issue of European refugees, has failed in solving the statelessness of Palestinians when it excluded them from the 1951 Convention of the Status of Refugees and from the mandate of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). This failure reflects a structural disconnect between the UN’s normative solution, expressed by the ‘right of return’ in the UN Resolution 194 (III), and the institutional structure of the system presented by the separate assistance regime that does not facilitate the implementation of the UN Resolution 194 (III) as the solution for Palestinian statelessness. As explained by Akram (2011), the particular exclusion of Palestinian refugees from the UNHCR mandate has, in fact, complicated their international legal status as refugees and undermined the efforts of implementing durable solutions for their statelessness. The exclusion meant that the UNHCR could not intervene to pressure Israel, the state responsible for the statelessness of Palestinians, in order to implement the recommendations of repatriation according to Resolution 194 (III) (Akram, 2011). As a result, Palestinian refugees were left with no international protection structures to maintain their access to social rights and to assist with ending their statelessness. They became subject to precarious legal frameworks that do not recognize them as refugees and resulted in various forms of social marginalization that govern their unsolved statelessness through a politically unstable region.

The article examines how this exclusion was institutionally designed and how a separate UN regime of assistance and relief was established for the Palestinian refugees with no mandate of protection and no means to facilitate the only just solution for their statelessness, as expressed in the UN Resolution 194 (III). The article then shows how this unresolved crisis of statelessness is revealing acute protection gaps for Palestinian refugees through the current Syrian conflict.

The Historical Development of the International Refugee Protection Structures

The international refugee protection regime, which was established after the Second World War, currently appears inactive. By the end of 2015, the world witnessed an unprecedented total of 65.3 million displaced individuals, out of which 21.3 million were refugees; the highest number that the UNHCR has recorded since its establishment in 1950 (UNHCR, 2016). During that same year, only 107,100 refugees were admitted for resettlement through official resettlement programs, while 3.2 million people applied for asylum globally (UNHCR, 2016), a situation that was described by former UN Secretary General Mr. Ban Ki Moon as ‘a crisis of solidarity’ (UN, 2016c). Out of those numbers, around half a million Palestinian refugees from Syria, who were never protected by the UNHCR, are currently subject to extreme legal restrictions and vulnerabilities through their new displacements. Those who manage to escape the war in Syria and cross the borders to other neighbouring countries, illegally in most cases, find themselves trapped between domestic legal restrictions imposed against them due to their stateless identity, and inaccessible international protection structures, represented by the UNHCR, which exclude them from its services upon their establishment. To understand the links between the current protection gaps for Palestinian refugees from Syria and the governing structures of their statelessness, the next section explores the structural limitations of the international refugee protection regime which allows the exclusion of millions of refugees, including Palestinians.

The international refugee system, which is expressed in the UN Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, Geneva, 28 July 1951, and its institutional element represented by the UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, is subject to many limitations that affect the ability of the system to protect refugees and to provide them with humanitarian assistance. The system was initially designed to assist European states to manage massive groups of refugees in Europe after the Second World War (Barnett, 2002). The solutions sought by the regime were Eurocentric in nature, tailored in a way that aligned with the political and economic interests of European states at the time (Mazower, 2009). The limitations and Eurocentric nature of the protection regime can be traced through the drafting of the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees. Marrus (1985) explains how the narrow definition of ‘refugee’ that was adopted in the Convention reflects the European influence in the articulation of the concept of protection. The definition was individual-oriented, with a particular focus on the cause of flight (Kushner and Knox, 1999). The definition was also limited to those who were from Europe and who became refugees as a result of the Second World War (Johnson, 2011). As a result, the Convention defined refugees as persons who:

as a result of events occurring before 1 January 1951 and owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted on account of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion, is outside the country of their nationality, and is unable to or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail him/herself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it. (UN, 1951: 152)

This definition resulted in the exclusion of millions of refugees who did not fit within its framework (Macklin, 1996). The UNHCR, the main international agency responsible for refugee protection, is also affected by the Eurocentric nature of the international refugee system. Upon its establishment, the UNHCR was given a temporary mandate for 3 years. This short mandate reflected the intentions of UNHCR founders, who were mainly interested in finding solutions for the European refugee crisis at the time. The mandate was renewed every 3 years until 2003 when it was recognized that the UNHCR no longer needed this periodic renewal (UNHCR, 2014). This temporary nature of the UNHCR mandate reflected the intentions of its establishment, which was to solve the post-war refugee crisis in Europe. Some of the other factors that have limited its effectiveness include its lack of financial autonomy and lack of political impartiality. The UNHCR is dependent upon donor states, and financial contributions are often unpredictable. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that the top 10 donors to the UNHCR, including the United States and the European Union, contribute up to 75% of its budget (Milner, 2008). Consequently, the durable solutions that are implemented by the UNHCR to assist refugees are always subject to economic, political and cultural factors and are informed by the need to accommodate the interests of Western states (Betts, 2013).

The enduring Palestinian refugee crisis presents a compelling example of the limitations of the international refugee protection regime and its failure to address their statelessness. This crisis, which goes back to the period around 1948, illustrates how legal restrictions were officially imposed on a certain group of refugees as they were outside Europe, and their refuge crisis was, in fact, a direct consequence of a refugee resettlement program that partially contributed in solving the question of refugees in Europe. The next section examines the development of the Palestinian statelessness crisis and the governing structures of this crisis that resulted in the exclusion of Palestinian refugees from the international refugee protection regime.

A Crisis of Statelessness Outside Europe

Zionist leaders realized the Eurocentric origins of refugee resettlement in Europe and used those ideas to support their plans of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine (Mazower, 2009). The establishment of the Jewish state was particularly presented by Zionist leaders as an expansion of European civilization into the Middle East (Mazower, 2009). In this context, the immigration of Jewish refugees to Palestine was articulated as an element of the international refugee resettlement plans. In the process, a new crisis of statelessness was created and more than 750,000 Palestinians were forced into displacement as a result of the establishment of Israel. At the time, this issue was peripheral to the larger concern of addressing the European refugee resettlement problem in a manner that did not affect the European stability. Arendt (1951: 290) addresses the link between resettling Jewish refugees in Palestine and the creation of a new crisis of statelessness as follows:

After the Second World War, it turned out that the Jewish question, which was considered the only insoluble one, was indeed solved – namely, by means of a colonized and then conquered territory – but this solved neither the problem of minorities nor the stateless. On the contrary, like virtually all other events of our century, the solution of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of the stateless by another 700,000 to 800,000 people.

Yet, the statelessness of Palestinian refugees was not an accidental consequence to this project. Forcing Arab Palestinians out of Palestine was planned by the Zionist leaders earlier in the 19th century (Said, 1992). Through their plans of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine, the idea of transferring Arab Palestinians to areas, such as Syria, Iraq and to what is now known as Jordan, was suggested and intensively discussed by many Zionist leaders at that time (Mazower, 2009). The idea of ‘population transfer’, was suggested to resettle Arabs from what would become the ‘Jewish State’ and the idea was then adopted and implemented as an official policy by the Israeli government in December 1948, preventing the return of Arab refugees who had fled their homes earlier that year as a result of the conflict in Palestine (Mazower, 2009). The Zionist plans of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine were particularly aided by the unique nature of the British mandate in Palestine, which did not lead to its full independence as was the case for other similar territories, but rather officially included a commitment to implement the ‘Balfour Declaration’, which was issued by the British government in 1917, supporting ‘the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’ (UN, 2016a).

During the period from 1922 to 1947, large-scale Jewish immigration, mainly from Eastern Europe, took place, increasing the Jewish population in Palestine from less than 10% in 1917 to over 30% in 1947 (Farah, 2003). In December 1947, the UN General Assembly issued Resolution 181 (II), proposing the partition of Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state (UN, 2016a). The resolution was rejected by the Palestinians who demanded their full independence. When Israel declared its independence on 14 May 1948 and the British mandate in Palestine officially ended the day after, a Jewish territorial expansion plan was put in action, where cities and areas designated as parts of the Arab state came under the occupation of Jewish forces. Organized terror and massive hostilities forced thousands of Palestinians out of their towns and villages, followed by Israel expanding its occupation throughout 77% of Palestinian territories. By the end of 1948, more than 726,000 Palestinians were displaced, which amounted to around 70% of the total Palestinian population at the time (UN, 2016a). After its official establishment, Israel was determined to prevent Palestinian refugees from returning to their homes and towns. To this end, a set of policies and recommendations entitled Retroactive Transfer: A Scheme for the Solution of the Arab Question in the State of Israel were implemented. These policies provided the basis for Israel’s systematic prevention practices. Akram (2011: 3) explains some of the policies that were included in the plan:

Among the measures recommended and implemented were destruction of Palestinian Arab population centers, settlement of Jews in Arab towns and villages, and the passage of legislation to prevent refugee return. Israel also passed a series of laws defining Palestinians who had been forcibly removed from their lands or had fled as ‘absentees’, and their land as ‘absentee properties’ which were then confiscated. Subsequent Israeli legislation converted vast amounts of confiscated Palestinian properties for the exclusive benefit of Jews, and prohibited restitution of such land to Palestinian Arabs in perpetuity.

Consequently, Palestinians became subject to systematic and institutional policies that were implemented by Israel after its establishment to erase the Palestinian existence as a nation (Piterberg, 2001). Israel issued laws that secured the dispossession of Palestinians and then institutionalized and normalized this dispossession through an ideological and political foundation of a radical denial (Habib, 2011). By losing their lands, Palestinians lost the constitution of their collective autonomy as a community or as a nation. The Palestinians’ narratives of loss and statelessness have been chronically rejected and denied, and through their different experiences of displacement and exile, after 1948, Palestinians became landless and stateless and above all prohibited from telling their narrative of dispossession. The Israeli institutional denial of the rights of Palestinians as a nation involved a systematic denial of Israel responsibility towards the Palestinian statelessness (Pappé, 1998) and a rejection of any international durable solutions that recognize Palestinians as refugees who deserve protection. The next section examines how the involvement of the UN in the crisis of Palestinians statelessness has contributed in prolonging this crisis as they were made subject to a special relief regime that has no protection mandate and has no power to implement their repatriation, which many would consider as the just solution for their statelessness.

The Response of UN to the Palestinian Refugee Crisis

The first practical UN intervention in the Palestinian refugee crisis was through the appointment of Count Folke Bernadotte as the UN mediator at the end of May 1948. This was followed by the creation of the United Nations Relief for Palestine Refugees (UNRPR) as the agency responsible for providing relief and assistance for Palestinian refugees in November 1948 (Custer, 2011). By late December 1948, the UN issued Resolution 194 (III), in which it recognized some of Bernadotte’s recommendations and called for a peaceful return of Palestinian refugees to their homes and compensation for those who did not want to return (UN, 2016a). The Resolution also led to forming the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine (UNCCP) as the first part of a UN separate regime of assistance designed for Palestinian refugees. Yet, the UNCCP was not successful in its peacemaking mission, and the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 512 (VI) in January 1952, allocating the responsibility of reaching an agreement on the conflict to the involved governments (UN, 2016b). It was significant that the resolution did not refer to the question of refugees as they had no voice within this crisis. They were displaced from a mandated territory and had no recognized state to represent them. This was the first block in the legal limitations governing the Palestinian statelessness crisis, which mainly initiated the legal framework that made Palestinian refugees subject to the legislation of their hosting states in addition to a special regime of humanitarian relief and assistance in designated territories. The United Nations Economic Survey Mission (ESM) in the Middle East was then established in 1949, reflecting a shift in the mindset of the UN towards the Palestinian refugees from repatriation to resettlement within their new host communities. The main aim of this body was to study the economic conditions in neighbouring countries where Palestinian refugees settled after the events of 1948, in order to facilitate their social and economic rehabilitation and integration (Rosenfeld, 2009).

Through its recommendations, the ESM report contributed to the establishment of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) (Rosenfeld, 2009). The UNRWA was established in December 1949 by UN Resolution 302 (IV), replacing the UNRPR, ‘to prevent conditions of starvation and distress…and to further conditions of peace and stability’ (UNRWA, 2016a). It was responsible for carrying out direct relief and work programs for ‘Palestine refugees’, including education, healthcare, relief and social services, camp infrastructure and improvement, microfinance and emergency assistance in the areas of Gaza, West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria (UNRWA, 2016b). The agency was created under a temporary mandate subject to subsequent renewals. Based on the recommendations of the ESM, UNRWA was also mandated to undertake the development projects that could lead to refugee integration. This particular mission was supported by a separate UN Resolution, 393 (V), issued in December 1950, which states that UNRWA could work with regional governments in the Near East for permanent re-establishment of refugees (Rosenfeld, 2009). Despite the failure of this project due to a number of financial and political reasons, it reflected a tendency towards the resettlement of refugees in contradiction to Resolution 194 (III), which recommended the repatriation of Palestinian refugees. Furthermore, UNRWA used the term ‘Palestine refugees’ instead of ‘Palestinian refugees’ and limited this term to those ‘persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948, who lost both their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 Arab–Israeli conflict’ (UNRWA, 2009: 3). This restricted definition was mainly constructed to serve the operational nature of UNRWA rather than providing a legal status of Palestinian refugees that could entitle them to international protection (Khalil, 2009).

The UNRWA definition helped in identifying those who were entitled to humanitarian assistance but not legal protection. Instead, the mandate was mainly concerned with the agency’s operational work of providing relief and working closely with host governments. UNRWA’s mandate was mainly designed to protect the social and economic rights of Palestinian refugees, whereas the protection of physical security, human dignity and human rights of Palestinian refugees was left to the discretion of their host governments (Khalil, 2009). As a result, Palestinian refugees were left with the UNRWA as the sole international agency that was responsible for their assistance with no reference to the protection of Palestinians as refugees and no authority to facilitate their ‘right of return’ as stated in the UN Resolution 194 (III).

In addition to this lack of protection within the UNRWA mandate, Palestinians were excluded from the 1951 Convention for the Status of Refugees, drafted as the core part of the international refugee protection regime. Their exclusion was based on the Article 1D, which states:

This Convention shall not apply to persons who are at present receiving from organs or agencies of the United Nations other than the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees protection or assistance. When such protection or assistance has ceased for any reason, without the position of such persons being definitively settled in accordance with the relevant resolutions adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations, these persons shall ipso facto be entitled to the benefits of this Convention. (UNHCR, 2015: 5)

Thus, Palestinian refugees were excluded from the Convention with the assumption they were subject to the UNRWA and were excluded from the mandate of the UNHCR when it was established as the main international agency responsible for coordinating the international protection for refugees and the main UN agency that can facilitate the solution for their statelessness through the implementation of Resolution 194 (III). As a result, Palestinian refugees, who were not represented during the drafting of the Convention, were left with the UNRWA as the only relief agency, with no protection mandate, that operates in only certain areas of the region. And despite of the fact that paragraph 2 of the Article 1D includes those Palestinian refugees that have ceased to receive protection or assistance from UNRWA for any reason, the legal status of Palestinian refugees has been subject to the discretions of their hosting states. Most of these hosting states are not signatories of the 1951 Convention and its 1967 Protocol and thus do not adhere to the international regulations of refugee protection, which resulted in various forms of politicization, discrimination and social marginalization for Palestinian refugees.

The current Syrian conflict has revealed the tragic legacy of these legal limitations on the lives of Palestinian refugees and the protection gaps they experience due to their stateless identity and to the absence of any effective protection structures. The next section examines the current protection gaps of Palestinians through the Syrian conflict and illustrates the impact of their precarious legal status and unresolved statelessness on their lives and trajectories.

Current Protection Gaps

Compared with other countries in the region, Syria was considered home for many Palestinian refugees. They enjoyed relatively good living conditions before the start of the conflict in 2011 as they were fully integrated within the legal, social and economic life, and unrestricted in their work or internal mobility (Brand, 1988). In addition to the services of UNRWA, Palestinian refugees had full access to Syrian public services, including education and healthcare (Brand, 1988). Since the beginning of the Syrian conflict in March 2011, however, the vast majority of Palestinian refugees in Syria, as with Syrian citizens, have been suffering from deteriorating security conditions and acute poverty. All Palestinian refugee camps in Syria were affected by the intense fighting, which forced the majority of Palestinian refugees in Syria into displacement and new forms of vulnerability (UNRWA, 2014a). Of the 480,000 Palestinian refugees who remained in Syria, 95% are in need of humanitarian assistance, whereas more than 50% of registered Palestinian refugees have been displaced (BADIL, 2015). Through their new displacements, they are left without any international protection, suffering from extreme mobility restrictions and social marginalization (Human Rights Watch, 2014a, 2014b, 2014c). The states of Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt have been involved in structural practices of criminalization, detention and discrimination against Palestinians refugees from Syria (Human Rights Watch, 2014a, 2014b, 2014c). Hundreds of those refugees were detained and on some occasions forcibly deported to Syrian war zones, in a clear breach of the international principles of refugee protection (Amnesty International, 2014a; Human Rights Watch, 2014a, 2014b, 2014c).

Lebanon, for example, has hosted around 450,000 Palestinian refugees since 1948 (UNRWA, 2014b). More than half of them live in refugee camps that suffer from serious problems, including poverty, overcrowding, unemployment, poor housing conditions and lack of infrastructure. Unlike the conditions in Syria before the war, Palestinian refugees in Lebanon have always been subject to legal restrictions and structural discrimination (Amnesty International, 2014b). The deeply rooted political tensions between the Lebanese people and Palestinian political factions, which materialized during the Lebanese Civil War in the mid-1970s, are reflected in the extreme discriminations and legal restrictions that govern the lives of Palestinians in Lebanon. Lebanese officials, in general, treat Palestinian refugees as a security burden and a political threat (Nayel, 2013). The xenophobic rhetoric against the Palestinians in Lebanon can be traced in public statements of Lebanese politicians (Nayel, 2013).

Due to their stateless identity, Palestinians are prohibited from the right of property ownership (Knudesn, 2009) and are banned from participating in a number of professions, including medicine and law, while they have no access to any social security plans (ILO, 2012). As a consequence, Palestinians in Lebanon are economically and socially marginalized and crowded in slum-type camps which lack basic infrastructure (Amnesty International, 2014b). This politicized attitude against the Palestinians in Lebanon expanded to include Palestinian refugees from Syria (IRIN Humanitarian News and Analysis, 2012) and was reflected in the Lebanese government’s reluctance to receive Palestinian refugees from Syria (IRIN Humanitarian News and Analysis, 2012). In fact, Palestinian refugees from Syria have always been forced to obtain special visas and pay expensive fees before they are allowed to enter Lebanon (UNRWA, 2014b). Those who managed to escape the war in Syria and crossed the borders into Lebanon have been living in devastating conditions. They have been struggling through their displacement with no access to official aid or protection. While the Lebanese authorities do not recognize them as refugees, they are not allowed to seek protection through the UNHCR, because they are subject to the mandate of UNRWA. Thus, Palestinian refugees from Syria have no legal status and no protection in Lebanon (Human Right Watch, 2014a). They lack the basic needs of life, including proper housing and daily food supplies. Additionally, they have no access to healthcare or education services, except for the limited assistance provided by UNRWA in Lebanon, which is already struggling to meet the basic needs of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon (BADIL, 2015; IRIN Humanitarian News and Analysis, 2012). Their acute poverty, combined with expensive housing, has forced many families to share overcrowded shelters in a full absence of basic living necessities, including furniture, clean water and sewage utilities (ANERA, 2013).

In August 2013, new mobility restrictions were implemented by the Lebanese authorities against Palestinians from Syria – they were totally denied entry into Lebanon (Human Rights Watch, 2014a). Furthermore, the authorities in Lebanon have been involved in detaining numbers of Palestinian refugees who attempted to depart from the Beirut Airport to other destinations using forged documents. Those Palestinians were deported to Syria and became subject to potential detention, torture and possible killing (Human Rights Watch, 2014a).

Similar restrictions and discriminations are implemented against the Palestinians from Syria in Jordan. Since the beginning of the Syrian conflict, the Jordanian authorities increased the already established mobility restrictions against Palestinian refugees from Syria, thus limiting the number of those who managed to cross the Jordanian border to around 14,000 refugees (UNRWA, 2014c). In January 2013, Jordanian authorities officially announced a nonadmittance policy, denying the access of any Palestinian refugee from Syria into Jordan (Al Monitor, 2014). The Jordanian Prime Minister referred to this step as a ‘sovereign decision’, when he publically announced that ‘Jordan has made a clear and explicit sovereign decision to not allow the crossing to Jordan by our Palestinian brothers who hold Syrian documents…They should stay in Syria until the end of the crisis’ (Al Monitor, 2014: n.p.). Those who attempted to enter illegally were detained and deported back to Syria (Human Rights Watch, 2014b). Refugees who managed to cross the borders before 2012 and have no valid documents are forced to keep a low profile, as they are threatened with detention and deportation to Syria if caught by Jordanian security forces (Al Monitor, 2014). This status of fear prevents Palestinian refugees from integrating within their host communities and turns them into subjects of exploitation and acute discrimination. The vulnerability of Palestinian refugees from Syria in Jordan is exacerbated by the fact that they are left without any official legal status. Like in Lebanon, Jordanian authorities do not recognize Palestinians from Syria as refugees, while at the same time, they are not allowed to seek protection from the UNHCR due to their exclusion from its mandate. Thus, they cannot be accepted in refugee camps that are managed by the UNHCR and cannot be included within the humanitarian relief programs for those who live outside the camps. Furthermore, with no legal status in the country and no recognition by the UNHCR, those refugees have no permission to work or to receive any social services from the Jordanian government (Al Monitor, 2014) which makes their displacement in Jordan unbearable.

The 10,000 Palestinian refugees from Syria who crossed the borders into Turkey since 2011 have crossed illegally, since Turkish authorities do not recognize their travel documents that were issued by the Syrian government (BADIL, 2015). Thus, those Palestinians are not recognized as refugees in Turkey and have limited access to healthcare and education facilities and cannot obtain work permits or clear legal status (Baban et al. 2016). In spite of the absence of UNRWA services in Turkey, Palestinian refugees cannot access the services of the UNHCR there (BADIL, 2015).

Similar protection gaps are experienced by Palestinian refugees from Syria who moved to Egypt after 2011. In fact, Palestinians in Egypt were dramatically affected by the political tensions in the country, given the close links between some Palestinian political factions, including Hamas, and the currently banned Muslim Brotherhood group. The politicization of Palestinian refugees in Egypt has affected their living conditions and limited their access to the basic services of education and healthcare (Relief Web, 2014).

The unbearable displacement conditions and the extreme vulnerabilities of Palestinian refugees from Syria in the surrounding regions were not recognized by the UNHCR when it estimated that out of the 3.2 million refugees in Syria’s neighbouring countries, 10% were recognized as ‘acutely vulnerable individuals and need resettlement elsewhere’ (UNHCR, 2014). Palestinian refugees from Syria were excluded from any resettlement projects while lacking all means to facilitate their ‘right of return’ which is rejected by Israel.

For all those reasons, thousands of Palestinians were pushed to join other desperate refugees from the region to strive for protection and acceptance in other destinations. In such circumstances, Northern European countries were perceived as preferred destinations as they offer better rates of success in terms of protection and social acceptance. Yet, European states have implemented a ‘nonentrée’ regime (Hathaway and Gammeltoft-Hansen, 2015) that consists of securitization strategies of borders combined with restrictive visa policies against those who attempt reaching European territories from Syria. Therefore, mobility restrictions affected the trajectories of refugees and shaped the routes of their journey. Nevertheless, for Palestinians from Syria, the restrictions were harsher due to their stateless identities and the lack of recognized travel documents. Thus, they were pushed into multiple forms of irregularity that started at the regional borders of the neighbouring countries of Syria and expanded to include the borders with Europe. They had to ‘experience mobility in ways that are outside the strict policies and procedures of management and control governing border regimes’ (Johnson, 2014: 3). During this process, they become trapped in a border control system that is mainly based on prevention and deterrence (Johnson, 2014; Mountz, 2010; Squire, 2011). For example, Egyptian authorities criminalize those refugees who have attempted to depart illegally from Egypt towards Europe (Amnesty International, 2014c) and while Syrians used to be released after a short period of detention, Palestinian refugees who attempt to depart illegally were detained and then forcibly deported back to Syria due to their stateless identity and lack of legal status in Egypt (Human Rights Watch, 2013).

On the route to Europe, Palestinians from Syria join other refugees with their encounters with the European ‘nonentrée’ regime. During the journeys, like other desperate refugees, they conduct precarious manoeuvres to avoid control. Thus, they are forced to use the services of smuggling networks to depart the region, which make them subject to other forms of victimization and exploitation by smugglers who usually force refugees to board old fishing boats that are unworthy for such journeys with insufficient supply of water, food or medicine. A catastrophic example took place in October 2013, which ended with the death of the majority of those who were on board of the ship, estimated to be around 450 people, mainly Syrian and Palestinian refugees (Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, 2013). The ship departed Libya and headed towards Italy, but sank close to the Italian coast. The tragic events continued for the survivors who were prevented by Italian authorities from attending the burial procedures of the bodies of their beloved ones (Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, 2013).

Refugees who survive the journey by sea still have to cross through several countries in Southern and Central Europe before reaching their desired destinations in the North. The images of thousands of refugees, who crossed from Turkey to Greece in rubber boats, and then were stranded at razor wire fences along the borders between Greece and Macedonia, or walked through the fields of Serbia, dragging their families and young children for days and nights, demonstrated their victimhood and vulnerabilities and illustrated their plight for protection and safety which they did not find in their home region.

Conclusion

This article examined the protection gaps for Palestinian refugees through the Syrian conflict as a particular case of the flaws of the international refugee protection regime, where stateless Palestinians who have never been protected by this regime are reliving the trauma of their statelessness through the current Syrian conflict. Thus, the article establishes a link between these protection gaps and the limitations of the international refugee protection regime which allowed the exclusion of a particular group of refugees – Palestinians – from the structures of international protection as they were a peripheral concern for Europe and a consequence of a refugee resettlement project that assisted in solving the question of European refugees in the period of after the Second World War. The impact of this exclusion can be tragically traced through the revictimization of Palestinian refugees during the Syrian war. Stateless Palestinians were made subject to a special assistance regime with no protection mandate that left them with no access to the legal frameworks of international protection. They consequently experienced discriminations and legal precariousness through their new displacements. Thus, thousands of desperate Palestinians were pushed to consider resettlement in other destinations, mostly in Northern Europe. Yet, and in the absence of any safe and legal route to Europe, Palestinian refugees from Syria have to join other refugees in making precarious journeys across the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas that, in many cases, end by their death before reaching their intended destinations. Those who survive the journey have to encounter restrictive border control regimes that are designed to prevent them from reaching European territories and to push them into severe forms of illegality (Macklin, 2005; Schuster, 2011; Squire, 2011). They are transformed from refugees who deserve protection, to ‘unwanted’ illegal migrants who are subject to deterrence and criminalization.

Thus, the exclusion of Palestinian refugees from the 1951 Convention and from the UNHCR mandate prevented them from accessing the international regime of refugee protection, without providing them with an alternative protection structure. The drafters of the Convention did not distinguish between the relief mandate of UNRWA, which is mainly concerned with providing material assistance, and the mandate of the UNHCR as the main international agency that is responsible for the protection, safety, security and human rights protection for refugees. Furthermore, this exclusion resulted in the absence of any systematic strategies to implement the recommendation of Resolution 194 (III) on the repatriation of Palestinian refugees. This absence is combined with the persistent Israeli rejection of Palestinians’ ‘right of return’, a combination that maintains the status quo for Palestinians and prevents any genuine attempt to end their statelessness and multiple displacements since 1948.

The limitations of the international refugee regime stimulate the urgent need for a more universal system that offers sufficient protection to millions of refugees from the Global South, including the Palestinians. Yet, the particular crisis of Palestinian statelessness necessitates offering this group of refugees with sufficient protection to guarantee their access to legal and social rights during their displacement, while facilitating a final solution for their statelessness presented by the implementation of UN Resolution 194 (III) on the ‘right of return’. Repatriation of Palestinian refugees presents a breakthrough towards justice in this persistence crisis of statelessness. It is the solution that preserves the Palestinian’s collective identity, memory and national narrative (Said, 1986) after decades of rejection and denial. Or else, the unresolved crisis of statelessness will continue to generate new cycles of social marginalization and legal preciousness whenever a new conflict emerges in the region.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflict of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

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