Every society has subterranean fractures—ethnic, regional, racial, tribal, or sectarian. Given the right confluence of events, these can erupt and take on new life. When imperial and colonial powers produce a body of knowledge about those they rule, they often construct sociodemographic categories along these very fault lines. In the Middle East, this process has coincided with an attempted regional remapping using imagined and yet real (although newly configured) social categories. With the democracy project fading, the mosaic—in which the region is conceptualized as a multitude of discrete sociocultural units based on sect, ethnicity, and tribe—has appeared. Complex social categories are distilled into bounded categories whose correspondence to reality is problematic.

This paper critically examines the term “diaspora” to describe contemporary Palestinian society. Exploring academic scholarship on diaspora more generally, and theway Palestinians can or cannot be subsumed by this conceptualization, opens the way for a critique of the concept itself. The goal is to complicate the notion of a Palestinian diaspora rather than to accept it as an unquestioned categorization. Focusing on demographic, spatial, and legal phenomena, in particular refugees' legal identity, provides a broad lens through which to probe the term's appropriateness in the Palestinian context. What are the political ramifications of assuming a Palestinian diaspora? Does an insistence on the right of return represent a refusal of diaspora?

The year 1948 marks the beginning of al-ghurba (exile or diaspora) and al-nakba (disaster or calamity), words intensely resonant in the Palestinian lexicon. After this decisive date, one can affix “pre-” or “post-” as markers of an apocalyptic moment. In this cultural and political orbit, a new spatial world took shape. Violently crafted and maintained borders that locked Palestinians in and kept them out became features of quotidian life. In 1948, through a combination of expulsion and flight, around 750,000 Palestinians became refugees in neighboring Arab countries. About 100,000 Palestinians remained in their homeland. The core issue, however, is not conditions of departure but denial of an internationally recognized right of return, as elaborated in United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194.

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