Palestinians in Egypt Since 1948

Vol. XVI THE PALESTINE YEARBOOK OF INTERNATIONAL LAW (2010) 3. UNPROTECTED: PALESTINIANS IN EGYPT SINCE 1948 Oroub El-Abed Washington: Institute of Palestine Studies, 2009, xxiii and p. 253 Reviewed by Lena El-Malak* On January 25, 2011, thousands of demonstrators in Egypt took to the streets to demand the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak’s autocratic regime, as well as legislative and constitutional reforms guaranteeing rule of law and a transition to a plural and representative democracy. Over the course of the next 18 days, the crowds of pro- democracy protesters, as they became known, swelled into the millions. Breaking barriers of age, religion and social status, they spread across the nation a thirst for freedom and justice, and a strong will to end decades of oppression, corruption and subservience to foreign powers. On February 11, 2011, under the unrelenting pres- sure of millions of peaceful demonstrators, President Hosni Mubarak stepped down and handed over the helms of power to Egypt’s military. News of Mubarak’s ousting was met with euphoric cheers that spread from Cairo to Gaza, and from Tunis to Amman. Despite the overwhelming sense of joy at Mubarak’s removal from power, there is great cause for concern over the future of Egypt. The next few months will determine whether the Egyptian revolution was successful in bringing about regime change and democratic reforms, or whether the will of the people will be smothered with time. While the future of Egypt is being determined in the transitional period, the fate of its small minority of Palestinian refugees remains uncertain. Published in 2009 and based on research undertaken between 2001 and 2003, Oroub El-Abed’s book Unprotected: Palestinians in Egypt since 1948, sheds light on the status of the country’s Palestinian minority. Drawing on primary and secondary sources in English and Arabic, the book fills an important gap in research on the status of Palestinians in Egypt. Indeed, few scholars have investigated this issue, and most of the studies that had hitherto been undertaken were outdated or incomplete. Despite being prevented by Egyptian security from completing fieldwork research, El-Abed’s book provides the most comprehensive and detailed account of the status of this largely marginalized and forgotten group of diaspora Palestinians. Oroub El-Abed was no stranger to the struggles of exile, or ghurba, as she calls it in her book. Born to Palestinian parents and brought up in Amman, she defines * Lena El-Malak is a freelance researcher in public international law. She has worked for UNRWA and the UNHCR on cases involving Palestinian refugees. She also completed a doctoral thesis on ‘The Right to Reparation of Palestinian Refugees under International Law’ at the School of Oriental and African Studies. 755 BOOK REVIEWS herself as a “Palestinian-Jordanian researcher” (p. 195) and has spent several years of her life working and researching the Palestinian refugee issue. In the first chapter of her book, she outlines the different migration flows of Palestinians into and out of Egypt from the years preceding the 1948 Arab-Israeli War (also known as the Nakba, or Catastrophe, to Palestinians), to recent years. El-Abed reveals the Egyptian government’s dual policy of limiting the number of Palestinians entering and remaining in Egypt on one hand and, on the other hand, of maintaining a strict separation between Egypt proper and the Gaza Strip, which was placed under Egypt’s administration from 1948 until 1967. It is therefore no surprise that the number of Palestinians in Egypt is minimal, compared to other countries in the Middle East hosting Palestinians – estimated to be between 41,000 and 89,000, although no offi- cial statistics are available. The second chapter of the book discusses the policies and attitudes of Egypt toward its Palestinian refugees, which continued to evolve according to the political situation and the developments in the Arab-Israeli conflict. According to the author, Palestinian refugees were also vulnerable to swings in public opinion, which were most often entirely beyond their control. The fact that Palestinians in Egypt were subject to changing policies is not peculiar to Egypt. Over the past decades, Palestinian refugees throughout the Arab world were deprived of their most basic rights, and were even expelled at times, based on strictly political considerations. In Lebanon, for instance, Palestinian refugees, long accused of instigating the country’s civil war, continue to be deprived of their fundamental rights to freedom of move- ment or property ownership, and their right to work is subject to strict limitations. Reacting to the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s (PLO) statements in support of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, Kuwait also expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees in the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion of the country in 1990. As noted by El-Abed, the backlash against Palestinians in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War also had repercussions on Palestinians in Egypt. Indeed, the state-controlled Egyptian media seized the opportunity to launch a propaganda campaign targeting them. Furthermore, thousands of Palestinians expelled from Kuwait had Egyptian travel documents and many of them were prevented from entering Egypt. Chapter Three of the book explores the settlement patterns and coping mecha- nisms of Palestinians in Egypt throughout the decades. In the aftermath of theNakba , Egypt refused to allow the leading UN agency mandated to provide assistance to Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) from setting up camps in the country, unlike some of the other host countries in the region, namely Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. According to El-Abed, “the absence of refugee camps profoundly shaped the Palestinian com- munity in Egypt” (p. 59). In other host countries, Palestinian refugees used the camps to reconstruct the settlement patterns of their home village and clan. By contrast, Palestinians in Egypt were scattered across the country and typically lived in mixed communities or neighbourhoods, instead of being concentrated in one area. In the absence of UNRWA, which is the main provider of basic services (education, health, relief and social services) to the millions of Palestinian refugees registered with it and residing in one of its areas of operation, Palestinian refugees in Egypt have had 756.

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