Dr Victoria Mason

“If only there was a Palestinian Gandhi.” In recent years this has been a common sentiment expressed by leading international figures such as United States President Barak Obama.¹ This is part of a wider liberal argument that failures to establish a sustainable peace between Israel and the Palestinians are primarily a consequence of Palestinian terrorism, and that if the Palestinians would embrace nonviolence, they would gain the support of the international community—including the USA—as well as find a resonant response within Israel itself. In reality, however, Palestinians have a long history of relying on nonviolence to resist oppression...

Australia’s approach to asylum seekers is a contested area of public policy and has been subjected to ongoing critique by human rights bodies, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and refugee advocates both at home and abroad. In 2012, after two decades of mandatory immigration detention, Australia remained far from addressing criticism and presenting alternative policy formulations that adhere to its obligations as a signatory to the Refugee Convention of 1951 and other international instruments. Developing a regional approach is a concept that is gaining traction among academics, NGOs and other actors. Despite some incremental advancement, the Regional Cooperation Framework (RCF) is currently...

Whether precipitated by political or environmental factors, human displacement can be more fully understood by attending to the ways in which a set of bodily, material, imagined and virtual mobilities and immobilities interact to produce population movement. Very little work, however, has addressed the fertile middle ground between mobilities and forced migration. This article introduces the special issue by setting out the ways in which theories of mobilities can enrich forced migration studies as well as some of the insights into mobilities that forced migration research offers.

Introduction The 1990-91 Gulf conflict claimed a victim largely forgotten by the world: the community of approximately 400,000 Palestinians who lived in the emirate of Kuwait. The vast majority of Palestinians within Kuwait opposed the Iraqi occupation; however, their image was badly damaged by the perceived support of the invasion by the Palestinians outside of Kuwait. Consequently, Palestinians in general were tarred as Iraqi ‘collaborators’. As a result, frenzied revenge attacks took place after the liberation of Kuwait, with Palestinians in the emirate being beaten, tortured and in some instances, brutally killed. While these attacks were initially carried out by Kuwaiti vigilantes, once sovereign rule returned to Kuwait, they became part of a more systematic state campaign of terror aimed at ‘cleansing’ the emirate of Palestinians. As a result, the Palestinian community in Kuwait was reduced from 400,000 to around 30,000 people. While this campaign was driven to a certain extent by scapegoating and revenge, it was also part of a more systematic process of state terrorism. Due to the size and influence of the Palestinian community in Kuwait, by the 1980s, they were increasingly seen as a potential demographic threat. Thus, the actions taken against Palestinians following liberation also had more sinister motives – to terrorize the entire Palestinian civilian population to force them to leave the emirate. Although Kuwaiti actions received harsh criticism from human rights groups and NGOs, the plight of Palestinians from Kuwait was soon forgotten by the international community. This chapter explores this largely untold story: the acts of state terror perpetrated by the Kuwaiti government against its Palestinian population following the 1990-91 Gulf conflict.

Since 1 September 2001, Muslim minorro.es have experienced intensive 'othering' in 'Western' countries, above all in those US-led anglophone nations which invaded Afghanistan and Iraq to prosecute their 'war on terror'. This chapter examines the cases of Britain and Australia, where whole communities of Muslims have been criminalised as 'evil' and a 'fifth column' enemy within by media, politicians, the security services and the criminal justice system. Although. constituted by disparate ethnic groups, the targeted communities in each of these nations have experienced similar treatment in the state's anti-terrorist measures, as well as ideological responses and everyday racism, making comparable the two cases.

Following the Gulf conflict of 1990-91, approximately 650 Palestinians from Kuwait found themselves refugees and migrants in Australia. For a number of these people, it was their third exodus since the establishment of the State of Israel, and the move to Australia meant once again trying to rebuild their dislocated community and sense of home. This chapter explores the experiences of settlement in Australia for these exiles and the resulting structure and character of the community that evolved. It demonstrates that the home-building processes of this community have been aimed at engendering both the recreation of the Palestinian exile community, and the feeling of being at home in Australia. It also demonstrates that as a result of the nature of their multiple exiles, notions of identity, belonging, home and loyalty for this group are necessarily hybrid, and to use Edward Said's term, contrapuntal. This chapter then examines the impact of wider paradigms of acceptance and belonging in Australia for this community, arguing that discourses questioning the very compatibility of Arab ethnicity and Muslim faith within the wider Australian context undermine many of the home-building efforts of such communities, and mean that their lives are underlined by that which is known in Arabic as ghurbah, a notion encompassing homesickness, estrangement, isolation and lack of belonging.