My Palestine afar -

Abstract

At a distance of more than 13000 km from Jerusalem, Chile is host to the largest Palestinian community outside the Arab world. After placing the genesis of this community within the framework of the global history of migration from the Arab Eastern Mediterrean in the late Ottoman times, this thesis aims to investigate the growth of the Chilean Palestinians’ sense of Palestinian nationalism during the pre-Nakba period of 1920s -1930s. This will be achieved by exploring this time-period through the lens of the diasporic Palestinian community settled in Chile, relying on an analysis of the most popular journals published in Santiago de Chile during the 1920s and 1930s. The thesis argues that a reading of these journals allows us to interpret the growing collective trend of Palestinian wataniyya (local nationalism) from the perspective of the diasporic community in Chile, as well as providing a lens for reflection on how the “British-Zionist” alliance generated policies on migration and citizenship that in practice consolidated a diasporic identification with this identity in Chile. By pursuing these lines of inquiry, it is hoped that this work helps set the history of the Palestinians before their Nakba in a transnational context, while also elucidating how the notion of a Palestinian wataniyya crossed physical borders to create an imagined national community that survives intact to the present day.