A Nation without a State: Palestinian Identity Formation and Structural Violence in Lebanon

Introduction

This essay presents a genealogy of Palestinian identity formation in Lebanon, tracing cultural, political, and historical dynamics from the pre-modern Levant through the Nakba and the so-called “Lebanese Civil War,” to the present day. Palestinian existence in Lebanon is not an anomaly within the nation-state system but a fundamental antagonism to it (Zebdawi 2021; 2024). Across these pivotal moments, Palestinians have been shaped by dual pressures: the external imposition of statelessness and the internal cultivation of a distinct national identity rooted in resistance, memory, and the right of return. Through this lens, we approach statelessness as a site of both constraint and insight (Zebdawi 2020), revealing how the nation-state framework is flawed at best, and structurally violent and “doomed to fail” at worst, while asserting the non-negotiable necessity of Palestinian statehood.

In the Levant, or Bilad al-Sham, uncritical mainstream discourse has long framed “national” identity and sectarian politics as the driving force behind most regional armed conflicts in contemporary history. The question of Palestinian “national” identity exposes the inadequacy of the modern neo-colonial nation-state framework: through their legally stateless yet highly politicised status, Palestinians residing across the Levant both emphasise the interrelatedness of the region and fundamentally destabilise the nation-state structures that seek to exclude them. Their presence is not incidental; it constitutes a living critique of the contradictions and systemic violences embedded in the neo-colonial order.

We situate this analysis within broader critiques of the nation-state itself, approaching its foundation, structure, and maintenance as a protracted form of neo-colonial violence designed to produce hierarchical identities of belonging and non-belonging. Inclusion and exclusion operate according to the same principle of domination, and the systematic negation of Palestinian statehood is not a failure, but a structural necessity of the colonial state matrix. To theorise this, we draw on Étienne Balibar’s concept of the “myth” of the nation: not a falsehood but a foundational narrative that presents the state’s history as continuous, inevitable, and natural, while masking its fractures, exclusions, and violences.

In the sectarian governance of the Lebanese context, and despite being violently excluded from state structures, Palestinians erode the myth of the nation and expose the artificiality of a demographically “rationed” Levant. Yet, the troubling demographic divisions in Jordan and Syria confirm that this is a regional condition under the postcolonial nation-state framework. Palestinians’ histories, narratives, and futures traverse borders, persist despite displacement, and actively challenge the structural exclusions imposed by states.

As Palestinian and Syrian authors and researchers, we have both witnessed and personally endured the far-reaching consequences of “Israeli” settler-colonial violence, including the martyrdom of loved ones to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, as well as loss instigated and sustained by the brutality in the West Bank. We find it both urgent and imperative to reclaim intellectual and historical agency. This work emerges not only as a scholarly intervention but as a refusal to accept the imposed narratives that justify dispossession, displacement, and erasure. In writing this, we seek to honour the memory of those who have been lost, and to challenge the ideological structures that sustain their continued suffering. By confronting the logic of occupation with our own, we aim to contribute to a counternarrative rooted in the everyday lives, shared histories, and political imaginations of the (dead and) dispossessed.

Bilad al-Sham

Following the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the division of the Levant region into imposed borders was largely orchestrated between the British and the French through the Sykes-Picot Agreement in 1916. Before this, Bilad al-Sham, or “Greater Syria,” was organised in somewhat flexible and “in-flux” partitions within the Ottoman Empire, encompassing parts of modern Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine. For example, the southern Lebanese city of Saida and the northern (occupied) Palestinian city of Akka were governed as the same sanjak (Dulkadir and Özüçetin 2022; Abu Manneh 2007). Today, Saida and Akka have aesthetic similarities. Several young Lebanese men and women have one parent from Akka and another from Saida, while others have extended family in both cities. The Ottoman method of “partition” was common; some overlapping Lebanese and Syrian locales were governed as one. Palestine too underwent different divisions: it was initially governed as part of the Damascus eyalet, and Jerusalem eventually became an independent mutasarrifate (Abu Manneh 2007). Contemporary Jordan was partitioned between the sanjak of Nablus, Jerusalem, and Egypt, as well as the Syrian Province (ibid.).

During the reign of the Ottoman Empire, internal governance by the occupying authorities was limited, and these designations were largely to organise tax collection (and military/strategic interests) rather than to demarcate where individuals were “from” or to represent borders/barriers to entry. That being said, Ottoman rule was far from innocent of ethno-motivated violence throughout the period of widespread occupation. At the end of the Ottoman Empire, the Sykes-Picot agreement drew definitive borders to divide the region’s resources between France and England. The mandate period changed the socio-political structure and effectively reshaped the entire region to suit an exploitative colonial enterprise. The agreement, excluding the Arabian Peninsula, stipulated that the UK would occupy Palestine, Jordan, and parts of Iraq, while France would control Syria, Lebanon, parts of Türkiye, and the Kurdistan region. These mandates persisted until the respective liberation movements of the midcentury. Since then, regional nation-states have pursued development while the declared Zionist entity fractured Palestine.

The contemporary structures of these states have retained much of their colonisers’ frameworks, whether through coercion or co-optation, particularly in government organisation and legislative design. In parts of Bilad al-Sham, state institutions continue to operate under neocolonial conditions, hosting foreign military bases and sustaining authoritarian regimes effectively propped up and underwritten by the US and the EU. Their political and economic compliance is secured through sanctions, conditional aid, and the implicit threat of military intervention. In Lebanon, the sectarian allocation of political representation, instituted under the French Mandate, remains a central organising principle of governance. Legislative systems also bear these colonial imprints: the kafala (sponsorship) system, introduced originally under British administration in the Gulf before being embraced by the Lebanese ruling class is still in force today, restricting foreign workers’ legal status to employer sponsorship, severely limiting their rights and mobility, and making the hiring of non-nationals contingent on onerous state controls (for example, AlShehabi 2019). Likewise, nationality laws derived from the Napoleonic Code (1804) prevent women from passing citizenship to their children (Sayegh 2025; Guerry 2020), and the Vichy government “family laws” effectively criminalised homosexuality. Official civil status documents, such as Lebanon’s and Syria’s daftar al-ʿīleh, mirror the French livret de famille (“family book”). Neocolonial restrictions on alliances, trade, and resistance to the Zionist state repeatedly curtail attempts to renegotiate governance structures within the imposed nation-state framework. Parallel to these structural legacies, the post–mid-century period witnessed waves of nationalist movements seeking to construct coherent “self-narratives” to assert sovereignty both regionally and internationally. Again, this construction took place alongside the concerted degeneration of a possible Palestinian nation-state, with resulting narratives attempting to make sense of these new borders and new identities.

In Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, Etienne Balibar (1991) explains that it serves the hegemonic power to convince the region’s population of the relevance of their borders, and one way in which they do so is through the construction of the “national myth.” He says: 

All these structures appear retrospectively to us as pre-national, because they made possible certain features of the nation-state, into which they were ultimately to be incorporated with varying degrees of modification. We can therefore acknowledge the fact that the national formation is the product of a long “pre-history.” This pre-history, however, differs in essential features from the nationalist myth of a linear destiny. First, it consists of a multiplicity of qualitatively distinct events spread out over time, none of which implies any subsequent event. Second, these events do not of their nature belong to the history of one determinate nation. They have occurred within the framework of political units other than those which seem to us today endowed with an original ethical personality. (1991:88)

Palestinians are the physical embodiment of the region’s shared pre-history. This pre-history defies the constructed colonial “nation-state history,” but, moreover, disturbs fundamentally the Zionist nationalist myth of a linear destiny necessary to eradicate Palestinian statehood and, by extension, Palestinian nationhood. Balibar (ibid.) critically concludes: “It is the characteristic feature of states of all types to represent the order they institute as eternal, though practice shows that more or less the opposite is the case.” Palestinians’ existence in and out of Palestine reinforces the purposefully arbitrary and elimination-geared nature of the Bilad al-Sham borders; it both exposes and dismantles (neo)colonial interests, myths, and apparatuses. It is vital to bear in mind that Lebanon only obtained independence in 1943, which means that the country only “legally” existed for five years before the Nakba. If a nation’s “history” is to begin with its independence, and if the myth of national identity is formed through a shared historical narrative and a secure future within the nation’s borders, how then are Palestinians systematically excluded from even partial participation in the Lebanese nation-state? How can a people, which form a large part of a nation-state’s demographic, be violently kept out of local affairs, professions, and residential areas (Eloubeidi and Reuter 2021; BADIL 2019; 2022)? To what extent is Lebanese national identity constructed in relation to Palestinian presence or nationhood? On what basis, through which ideological framework, are the current Lebanese policies towards Palestinian and Syrian refugees written? And which superstructure does it ultimately serve? 

A Nation across Nation-States 

As a result of both flagrant and protracted violence, forced expulsion, and the contemporary “Israeli” Holocaust in Gaza, Palestinian “national” identity is reconstituted within its fragmentation, “existing and resisting” in scattered places around the world, simultaneously bound and unbound by physical space, purpose, and shared history. This identity is also bound and unbound by the lack of a distinct Palestinian nation-state, with other countries of residence and entities such as UNWRA standing in place. 

The events of the Nakba and the Naksa saw the forced displacement of approximately 700,000 to one million Palestinians in 1948 (IMEU 2023; IPS 2020; Pappé 2007), and up to 325,000 Palestinians in 1967 (Nuseibah 2017; Pappé 2007; Bowker 2003), with millions more internally displaced. As of May 2025, conservative estimates count 3.2 million displacements in Gaza alone (IDMC 2025). In so-called “countries of refuge,” the degree to which Palestinians were legally integrated into new communities varied from state to state, as did the degree to which these states’ national identity was formed, or rather re-formed.

In Lebanon, Palestinians retain their national identity as Palestinians in both unifying and alienating dimensions, historically woven with and into the very same fabric of a “sovereign” nation. This phenomenon is more easily identifiable in Lebanon than in neighbouring Jordan and Syria due to its particularly discriminatory state policies. Despite their varying degrees of complicity in the ongoing genocide and their repression of Palestinian resistance, the governments of Jordan and Syria treated refugees slightly more favourably after the Nakba. In Jordan, many Palestinians found themselves legally naturalised (al-Husseini 2013). In Syria, “Law No. 260 (1957) stipulates that Palestinians living in Syria at the time of this law have the same duties and responsibilities as Syrian citizens in education, work, trade, work with public sector and military services, but keep their [non-Syrian] nationality” (UNHCR 2013; Brand 1988). Since the fall of the Assad regime, Palestinians are officially registered as “Palestinian residents” instead of “Palestinian Syrians,” as it used to be the case, which raises important questions about the long-term implications and intentions of such amendments. Though total inclusion is not present, these precedent policies remain in contrast to Lebanon’s, where, in 2025, Palestinians are still barred from working in 39 different “high-wage” professions such as medicine, law, and engineering among others, from entry into public schools, and from purchasing property outside the camps (De Schutter 2022; Mellies 2023). This “second class” status of existence renders them vulnerable to dangerous working and living conditions, with no access to health coverage or labour benefits, and cements them as a legal “other” within the nation-state (Eloubeidi and Reuter 2022). 

The question of “belonging” and the interrogation of our identity is not limited to the Lebanese context; it has also plagued many members of the Palestinian diaspora, who have raised this issue in their works in academia, the creative industries, and literature, among others (for example, Edward Said, Fadwa Touqan, Ghassan Kanafani, Mahmoud Darwish, Walid Khalidi, Hanan Ashrawi, amongst numerous others). Balibar argues that for the “illusion” of national identity to be formed, two core criteria must be met. First, a group of people residing in the same place must experience a series of events in unison to solidify a sense of “state” and “peoplehood,” thus building a historical narrative necessary in creating the modern nation-state. Second, the very same group of people must have the impression that they will remain in the same geographical space to fulfil their national “destiny” (1991:86-7). How does the diasporic existence of Palestinians strengthen, rather than weaken, the bond to a national struggle for liberation?

At this juncture in time, to be Palestinian most likely means to live outside of Palestine – to be connected to family dispersed all over the world or internally displaced within Occupied Palestine (Aouragh 2008; Gabiam 2018; Joudah 2012). And while this forced exodus, siege and belligerent occupation have created a divergence from a “national” identity, the notion of Palestine as a homeland remains deeply ingrained within the Palestinian diaspora, rarely with any exception. 

Signifiers of this “nationhood” are well documented. As noted by Bitar, “if diaspora serves to articulate a social ecology of cultural identity as part of the work of connecting to an original homeland, language is its primary vehicle” (2009:38). Palestinian commitment to their local dialects persists even when residing in Arabic-speaking countries that use different dialects, such as in the Gulf. In an interview with Salman Rushdie in 1986, Edward Said explains that even within refugee camps in Lebanon, with Lebanese-born refugees, you always hear inflections in language exclusive to Palestinian locales like Jaffa. Rosemary Sayigh notes this phenomenon as well:

Even in the event of a mini-state, a large number of Palestinians will remain outside it, either by choice or because of its restricted area; their situation and role will remain very different from that of other Arabs with space for internal migration. Even if they take other Arab citizenship, or emigrate, their affiliations and vocations are unlikely to lose their Palestinian colour. (1977:4)

In the face of a campaign of erasure of a Palestinian state, Palestinian narratives and forms of nationhood persist, particularly amongst refugees. This is characterised as both material and ideological struggles over geography, narrative, and identity (Khalili 2007; Said 1993:7).  The concept of the “nation” is also present institutionally, particularly to registered Palestinian refugees availing education services from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).

UNRWA’s educational activities unintentionally provided a structure crucial not only for the continuation and growth of Palestinian personal identity but also for the reconstruction of national identity among Palestinians in refugee camps and beyond through poetry, music, plays, paintings, short stories, traditional songs and dances, and workshops. In addition, UNRWA’s hiring of teachers and administrators almost exclusively from the refugee community helped foster a sense of “self” and “other” in schools and camps at large, especially in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. (Shabaneh 2012:2)

This unwavering commitment to Palestinian-ness takes a particular form of extra-territorial nationhood because it extends far beyond heritage. This “nationhood” binds us to our anti-colonial struggle to liberate Palestine and, for most of us, the right to return. As such, Palestinian national identity across and within states defies the norms of diaspora and nation-state formations established by the dominant scholarship. And while nationalism within the region isn’t without due critique, Palestinian “nationhood” hinges on the resistance to and dissolution of the Zionist settler-colony, a stop to the attempted eradication of Palestinian life, and the formation of a Palestinian state. Emergent militant and political movements from Palestinians geared towards a type of state-phobia are important, as they undermine the ethno-state expectations of neocolonial nation-state developments, in their “host” countries as well as in “Israel” (Abu-Assab and Nasser-Eddin 2018; Mignolo 2021). But the drive towards some semblance of Palestinian nationhood and statehood persists as a matter of survival.

A Palestinian nation without a nation-state challenges the very structure of the modern nation-state; it highlights the continuous purpose of the Bilad al-Sham nation-state framework to erase Palestinian statehood and Palestinians at large. The persistence of Palestinian identity, and their social/civic positioning within Lebanon, speak directly to the post-colonial nation-state as ultimately doomed to fail. In the short term, if we take extermination methods as inherent to nation-state building (Hage 1996), the nation-state framework is working as intended.

A Shared History and a Distinct Social Identity 

Following the October War of 1973, the primary propagator of the pan-Arab movement, Egypt, became the first Arab government to normalise relations with the occupation by formally recognising “Israel” as a state. This was a devastating blow to the “Arab” cause behind the liberation of Palestine, and it reinforced Palestinians’ sense that they were alone. It is through this historical lens, and the failure/impossibility of post-colonial “Arab” nation-states in dismantling the occupation of Palestine, that the events of the so-called “Lebanese Civil War” from 1975 until late 1990 can be understood. Palestine, and the inclusion and exclusion of Palestinians, provided the necessary “myths” for the Lebanese to create the illusion of a nation-state – and to shatter it. As much as Palestinians were woven into the pre-history and participated in Lebanese nation-building, the deepening fault lines further problematised the “sectarian” framework introduced by the French (Traboulsi 2012; Chamie 1976/77). 

Tensions in Lebanon escalated in early 1975 amid growing dissatisfaction with the government’s inaction in response to “Israeli” attacks on both the Palestinian refugee camp in Nabatiya and the southern Lebanese village of Kfar Shuba. Compounding these pressures was the February fishermen’s strike in Sidon against corporate elites that turned deadly when Ma’rouf Saad, a prominent Sidon-based political figure advocating for small-scale fishermen, was shot and later died from his wounds; several demonstrators and soldiers were also killed during the unrest (Chamie 1976/77:175).

Soon after, on April 13, a senior member of the Phalangist party, a Maronite Christian nationalists far-right group strongly opposed to the Palestinian guerrilla presence in Lebanon, was killed in a Christian neighbourhood under contested circumstances. Yet, the Phalangists attributed the shooting to Palestinian fighters. Later that day, armed Phalangist members attacked a passing bus carrying unarmed Palestinians and Lebanese, killing 27 people (Chamie 1976/77:175–6). While not the sole cause of the war, the April 13 bus massacre became a widely recognised flashpoint, retrospectively seen as the moment where latent tensions erupted into full-scale conflict. Its symbolic weight in public memory often overshadows the broader socio-political fractures that had long been festering within the Lebanese nation-state.

Sect was swiftly and successfully instrumentalised to the extent it widened into more or less well-demarcated regional and geographical divisions and a growing political conflict between reform and security. The demands of security grew increasingly centred on the Palestinian armed presence, both as a protective force against “Israeli” aggression and eventually a disruptive force within Lebanon (Traboulsi 2012:175). But resistance and guerrilla warfare were and remain central to the construction of Palestinian identity, as the fight for the liberation of our occupied homeland, a state, and a right to return is ongoing.

The idea of a common fate, camaraderie and rituals bring fighters closer, and in commemorations of battles, they are tropes which represent the battle as dangerous – thus worthy of men – but gratifying endeavours (Bourke 1999 cited in Khalili 2007:153).

Within this heroic framing, the Palestinian fighters at the time were viewed by their communities as formidable rivals in battle. They enjoyed the popular support of a large chunk of the local Lebanese population, many of whom were affiliated with communist and socialist parties. This collective myth-making began to show a more distinct separation from the identity of the Palestinians in Palestine, within the colonial borders of “Israel,” and elsewhere in the region, even manifesting as specific artworks (political posters and graffiti) relating only to matters within Lebanon. For instance, a 1982 poster encouraged solidarity between Palestinians and the people of southern Lebanon, visually distinguishing the two communities by their attire: the Palestinian depicted as a guerrilla wearing a kaffiyeh, and the Lebanese in a variation of traditional mountain dress (Tripp 2013:263). While containing distinctive features, the myth-making allowed and necessitated entanglement.

However, as the fighting began to escalate, it was marred with multifaceted violent massacres, continuous “Israeli” aggression, and the near impossible navigation between ethnic and national divides within an imposed (neo)colonial state regime. The escalation of violence included alliance formations between predominantly Christian Lebanese militias and “Israelis,” and the deterioration of sympathy for Palestinian political aspirations. Soon, Palestinians dispersed, resulting in the weakening of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). 

This reconfiguration of national identity and presence was virtually palpable as a result of a series of events that came to pass during and after 1982. The massacre of Sabra and Shatila took place following the gradual withdrawal of the international forces: first the US, then the Italians, and finally the French on the morning of September 12, 1982 (al-Shaikh 1984:59). With no locally stationed PLO fighters and the camp’s infrastructure already devastated by “Israel” and its allies, the residents had little defense. As a result, up to 3,500 Palestinians were massacred by the Phalangists, ushered inside the camps by “Israeli” forces occupying Beirut at the time.

The Palestinian national narrative in Lebanon “receded to the background of the national imaginary” following the camp massacres (Khalili 2007:151), Sabra and Shatila being only one example. International and regional pressure to expel the PLO from Lebanon, including air strikes from the Syrian regime, increased; with the fragmentation of the organization and the withdrawal of its fighters, Palestinians’ military power and autonomy was forcibly snatched by the Lebanese state. Massacres became the most salient rallying points of “nationalist commemorations” (ibid.), and the image of the Palestinian fighter shifted to that of the Palestinian refugee: 

It was the historic persistence of massacres that created an “us” against whom atrocities were committed. This “us” was the Palestinian refugee, whose political identity was so dangerous that even Lebanese citizens married to Palestinians were targets of violence. (2007:150)

This reconstruction of identity was not a deliberate choice nor one that was particularly desired. But with the “absence of alternative structural and institutional services,” adopting the category of “refugee” became a “strategic necessity” (Peteet 1996) in terms of day-to-day survival. 

The new bureaucratic battle that Palestinians in Lebanon had to fight was compounded by the expanding, violent, illegal, and abjectly amoral occupation of Palestine. We may return here to Balibar’s two criteria for the “illusion” of a national identity. Firstly, Palestinians in Lebanon had indeed experienced a series of events that solidified a sense of peoplehood and historical narrative. Secondly, Palestinians in Lebanon were politically neutralised and geographic options towards a nation-state became increasingly limited. This political stalemate ensured that Palestinians were to remain in Lebanon, and were to do so deprived of the (albeit limited) freedoms, and military and leftist organising they once exercised. Their “destiny” had been redirected and, in a sense, reduced to the form of a battle for civil rights set in their social foreground. This new historical narrative, again, hinged on their necessary exclusion within the region and within other nation-states. 

The historical reconfiguration of Palestinian identity in Lebanon cannot be separated from the broader colonial project that has fragmented Bilad al-Sham. The nation-state project at large and within the region is operating as planned, with certain peoples barred from statehood completely and others stratified within nation-states. The persistence of exclusionary Lebanese laws, alongside “Israel’s” systematic erasure of Palestinian national presence and state development in historic Palestine, reflects a continuum of spatial domination (Zebdawi 2025), from the ghettoisation of refugee camps in Beirut to the ongoing annexation of the West Bank under the long-standing “Greater Israel” expansionist project. This same “project” continues to annex the West Bank, claim kilometres of land from Syria, encroach on Lebanese territory, and hold Jordan hostage through (notably water) resource extraction and imposed “peace agreement,” positioning itself as a singular enemy.

Since October 7, 2023, “Israel” has escalated this settler-colonial project to a level that is genocidal in scope, killing nearly 100,000, or plausibly close to 200,000 (Khatib et al. 2024) Palestinians in Gaza, displacing more than 1 million (IDMC 2025), and systematically destroying universities, hospitals, archives, holy sites, and essential infrastructure. The sustained bombardment and flattening of refugee camps such as Jabalia and Rafah, like the massacres such as Sabra and Shatila, expose the lethal culmination of the colonial “destiny” imposed on Palestinians. These actions, coupled with intensified settler violence and military incursions in the West Bank, affirm that the “Greater Israel” project is regional in scope, designed to dismantle all forms of Palestinian political, cultural, and physical presence. This project also insists on the destruction of any type of Palestinian nation-state. 

Yet, this architecture of fragmentation is being directly challenged by an unprecedented cross-border armed resistance. In Gaza, the al-Qassam Brigades, al-Quds Brigades, and al-Nasser Salah al-Deen Brigades (amongst others) have coordinated across ideological lines – Islamist, communist/socialist, secular, nationalist – demonstrating a unity of purpose in defending Gaza and their people against one of the world’s most technologically equipped armies. In southern Lebanon, Hezbollah’s military engagements with “Israel” were explicitly framed by the group as part of the Palestinian struggle; in Iraq and Yemen, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq and Ansar Allah carried out strikes in declared solidarity. This multi-national, multi-religious mobilisation contests not only the occupation of Palestine but the entire “Greater Israel” project’s reliance on (and their incitement of) ethno-religious segregation. While it is only a handful of regional players, it symbolises that resistance to imperial and colonial power is still present despite the immense destruction and human cost it entails. 

The duality of annihilation vs. resistance breaks the colonial myths Balibar identified. “Destiny,” imposed through borders and massacres, is rejected in the act of cross-border struggle. “Nation,” conceived as a bounded, exclusionary territory, is defied by refugee resistance rooted in sumud (steadfastness) and the right of return. “Identity,” continuously reconstituted around events, highlights its fluidity and existence outside colonial definitions, remade through suffering and strategic success. Far from erasing Palestinian existence, the current genocide has compelled a collective reclamation of peoplehood, though at devastating cost, out of the very fragments that colonialism produced. The supposed permanence, unity, and inevitability of the colonial order are stripped bare, revealing instead that belonging emerges through the struggle against imposed borders, rather than their acceptance.

Conclusion

This essay has explored Palestinians’ and Lebanese’s shared “pre-history” as a fundamental resistance to neo-colonial state structures, the distinct nation-making history and culture of Palestinians within Lebanon, and attempts to navigate these complexities as members of the larger Palestinian body wishing for the right to return. Further, this essay situates this exclusive fragmentation as built-for-purpose, ensuring that the nation-state framework bars Palestinians from achieving statehood. Within this framework, Lebanese national identity has been constructed in contrast to Palestinians: to be “Lebanese” is to not be Palestinian. At the regional level, the existence of Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon as “nation-states” has unfolded precisely against the non-existence of Palestine as a state: you have nation-states because Palestine does not. The exclusions that Palestinians experience in Lebanon are not failures of the nation-state, but symptoms of a system built to deny them statehood altogether.

At the same time, Palestinians have retained and re-forged national identity across borders. Through dialects, memory, and cultural practices, Palestinians in Lebanon insist on the continuity of peoplehood even as they remain outside the legal definition of the nation. Institutions like UNRWA, though deeply limited, have been critical in sustaining social and civic infrastructures in place of a state, producing a kind of extra-territorial citizenship. The refugee camps themselves, and the political networks that sustain them, expose the paradox of a “nation within other nation-states:” Palestinians are excluded from sovereignty, yet exist as a polity that challenges the legitimacy of the exclusionary order.

What emerges is a fundamental contradiction. If the nation-state is the arbiter of belonging and rights, then Palestinians in Lebanon are denied both. By acknowledging their history, their embeddedness in Levantine society, and their capacity to sustain a national identity across multiple states and temporalities, the nation-state framework emerges as inadequate. Lebanese identity, and the identities of other states in the region, are possible only because Palestine is denied statehood. The nation-state, then, is not a neutral entity, but a system premised on exclusion, violence, and hierarchy. Today, Bilad al-Sham is being attacked by the same violence that put Palestinians in this position within the state borders of Lebanon. The colonial violence directed towards southern Lebanon re-emphasises the shared history, postcolonial traumas, and otherness necessitated by the state. For the Lebanese, Palestinians, and Palestinians in Lebanon, questions arise around what cracks are re-exposed, formed, and maybe even pulled closer.

The implications are twofold. First, unless the entire nation-state system is dismantled, the denial of Palestinian sovereignty cannot be sustained without perpetuating violence: nation-states for all, or for none. Second, in the immediate reality of ongoing genocide in Gaza and the re-eruption of “Israeli” aggression into Lebanon and Syria, the recognition of a Palestinian state is not an abstract question of political theory, but a material condition for survival.