Migration in its various forms is a fact of the life of many people in our time. The last fifty years have seen particularly significant changes in numbers of migrants and patterns of migration. An integral part of the modern and postmodern migration debate concerns the relevance of national and local identities vis-à-vis powerful global forces and interests. Dowe all live in a “world of movement”? What effect do migratory moves have on the formation and re-formation of groups and people and on their respective identities? Migration studies have analyzed different forms of voluntary and forced migration; economic, political, and...

National identity in different forms is something young Palestinians bring back from their diaspora locations to Palestine when they return. They do not have their own traumatic memories of 1948, but they know about the Nakba as a part of the collective memory of their people. Their national identity is framed and defined by how they were raised, by historiography, by political discourse, and by their experiences in various Palestinian communities.

The emergence of a Palestinian national identity as a collective phenomenon has been a subject of debate on both the political and the scholarly levels. Denying Palestinians a national...

Exile and diaspora are the antithesis of home and homeland. The traumatic loss of the homeland strengthens the connection of refugees and exiles to the homeland, and it continues to play an important role in their individual and collective imagination, constituting a central aspect of their self-definition.

Where do the notions of being refugees, exiles, and members of a diaspora intersect? Can Palestinians be described as a diaspora, based on the larger theoretical application of the term to different types of modern migration? And if, as modern diaspora studies claim, the “myth of the homeland” plays such an important role...

Return,al-ʿawda, is one of the central concepts of Palestinian ideology and life. It includes the dream of return, in political expression and literature, and the right of return. The right to return is a subject of international law, Palestinian demands, and Israeli rejections. There is the dream of return, never abandoned but incorporated into daily life in diverse ways. And there are the realities of those who have been able to return since the signing of the Oslo agreements. The conditions and circumstances for their return as well as the reflections of those who wrote about their experiences are...

Many factors need to be considered for the description and understanding of the experience of returnees to Palestine, which is shaped by a combination of ideology, memories of previous generations, notions of exile, experience of diaspora, and yearning for homeland. The experiences of the two groups of young returnees in this study are part of this larger framework of return. How then did their return come about? What were the distinguishable steps of this process? The returnees in the two groups and four subgroups have a number of features in common. Their experiences of the five-stage process of return will...

Return as a process involves different stages and confronts the young returnees with a challenge to their previous identity as members of Palestinian diaspora communities. In order to substantiate the thesis of a rewriting of identity during and as a result of the return process, this chapter describes different aspects of identity as they developed in the diaspora situation and how they changed upon return to Palestine. Thus, what is of concern here is not the return process itself but the status of identities before and after return.

If identities are defined as multiple and fluid, dividing them into subcategories...

Has being without a home and homeland become the home of the Palestinian diaspora? This chapter is “returning” to the question of home and homeland touched upon throughout this study. Have the young Palestinians interviewed for this study really returned? Do they feel at home now? How can these feelings be translated into a future of Palestinian identities? Is feeling at home equivalent to integration in Palestine? And, finally, what options do the young Palestinians have if the return process does not result in integration?

Rayda was twenty-four and had been in Palestine for eight months when I interviewed her....

Since I left Palestine in the summer of 1999, much has happened to Palestine, the Palestinians in general, and the respondents of this study in particular. I pointed to the events and developments of the Second Intifada and its impact on Palestinian society in the preface.

I have been back only once: In the summer of 2001 I went on a brief trip to Jerusalem to lecture to Palestinian and Israeli students. I had been planning on going to Ramallah to meet and speak with some of the many young Palestinians I had met through my fieldwork, but it turned...