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Palestinian DiasporaPlace Description
“Palestinian diaspora” refers to the many territories, countries, camps, and localities to which Palestinians were displaced following the Zionist settler-colonial violence initiated in 1947 and continuing to the present. The Museum of the Palestinian People in Washington, DC, affirms Palestinian identity through its mission while resisting and challenging the false geographic precision imposed by colonial frameworks that require the identification of a single place of making as the object's origin. The term encompasses Palestinians displaced internally within historic Palestine, as well as those living in refugee camps and communities throughout the region and around the world. The Palestinian diaspora refers to any Palestinian who is not on their ancestral land, including the farmlands that they cultivated in 1947.
While “Palestinian diaspora” may reflect an imprecise term on the coordinates of a map, it reflects the ways in which Palestinian communities have fragmented across the world and developed their own communities, regardless of country, camp, or experience of displacement. Many Palestinians in the diaspora are unable to return to their homeland and believe that, even when they have never visited, lived in, or been born in Palestine, Palestine lives within them. Palestinians in the diaspora often say, “We may not live in Palestine, but Palestine lives in us.”
Still, Palestinian geographies continue to be violently restructured under Israeli settler colonialism. Within museum contexts, the attribution “Palestinian diaspora” demands both Palestinian authorship, cultural ownership, and a unity within the geographic fragmentation produced through displacement and exile, in circumstances where conditions have been imposed for an indeterminate amount of time.Place Type
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BWB_ID:9Updated By
Wafa Ghnaim