In 1927, the British Legation at La Paz, Bolivia rejected the cases of Palestinian Arab Sari Ismael and others who applied for recognition of their Palestinian citizenship under Article 2 of the 1925 Citizenship Order-in-Council. The rejection was based on the legation's assessment that they did not intend to return to Palestine because their lengthy absence (seven years in Ismael's case) supposedly indicated that connections with their native homeland were severed. In an attempt to prove his case, Ismael even produced a laissez-passer from the Military Governor of Jerusalem that proved he was in Palestine as recently as 1920. The legation assumed that the applicants were former Ottoman citizens and held Turkish nationality by default given that they were not resident in Palestine. Without a Turkish representative to confirm or deny this, the British authorities in Bolivia could not grant visas to these Arabs to return to Palestine. As a result of the provisions of the citizenship legislation in Mandate Palestine, they remained in Bolivia as stateless individuals. Without any identity documentation they could not (and many emigrants did not wish to) naturalise as citizens of their host country.

In the first half of the 1920s, Great Britain's administration of Palestine combined precedents of colonial citizenship with British legislation and international regulations to produce a set of provisions that effectively created an entirely new Palestinian citizenship. As a response to legal realities on the ground, Palestinian Arabs articulated different ideas of what it meant to be a citizen in a local context. Only after the enforcement of the 1925 Palestine Citizenship Order-in-Council did clearer notions of citizenship emerge out of the discursive field of ‘the nation’. The primary factor that helped local Arabs to clarify the meaning of nationality, citizenship and rights for the wider public was the situation of Palestinian Arab emigrants. The purpose of this chapter is to show how the question of the status of the emigrants (al-muhajarīn) actively created a space for the discussion of citizenship. It argues that emigrants acted out civic and political behaviours that linked citizenship with the concept of nationality as the Arabs of the former Ottoman provinces understood it.