The Arabic word tanaaqush (تَناقش, discussion) stems from naqasha, which refers to chiselling a stone. I was pondering these meanings as a tombstone was placed on my mother’s grave in the Aida refugee camp in Palestine, with a chiselled inscription identifying her nationality and place of birth and death. Three days later, and thousands of kilometres away, in the Netherlands, the Dutch government changed the information on my residence permit identification card. My nationality now reads ‘unknown’, and my place of birth the code ‘XXX’. This brief anecdote places these two versions of language (one for the dead, the other for the living) into a discussion (tanaaqush) to demonstrate how language can mask the complexity of our knowledge system. It intends to challenge the Western intellectual law that renders the ‘unknown’ – stateless and refugees – out of place, out of time, and thus incapable of political agency. Finally, the stateless are not citizens of the nation state model; can their social and political experiences open up a space to imagine – and perhaps realise – forms that might exist outside of what is possible or even conceivable today?
Like most Palestinian refugees, my mother and I were born in a refugee camp and inherited our refugee status. The legacy of such status embodies an enduring inheritance of violence. Initially, humanitarian institutions established Palestinian refugee camps (59 of them) in response to the Western-backed genocide committed by Jewish Zionist paramilitary groups, such as the Irgun, Lehi, Haganah, and Balach. With their destruction of Palestinian society – the displacement of 750.000-900.000 Palestinians and the occupation of 78% of the land in 1948 – the Zionist dream culminated in establishing Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people in historic Palestine. Two decades after the new settler colonial state was legalised under international law, Israel invaded and occupied the remaining Palestinian territories, creating more refugees and camps. More than seven decades have passed, and the occupation of the land, forced displacement and ethnic cleansing against the indigenous people of Palestine have not stopped.
Today, Palestinians (among others) scattered across the world are registered either under other nationalities, or as ‘unknown’ or ‘stateless’. These registrations confirm the status quo of a political impasse. International law defines a stateless person as ‘a person who is not considered a citizen by any state under its law.’[1] However, the Dutch authority assigns an ‘unknown’ classification to people who ‘lack’ the documents necessary to prove their nationality.[2] The legal difference between the two classifications is that an individual registered as stateless in the Dutch Personal Records Database (Basisregistratie Personen, BRP) can eventually apply for a Dutch travel document and citizenship. Meanwhile, ‘unknown nationality’ is not eligible for these rights, therefore, is prohibited from international protection. According to the Dutch Central Bureau of Statistics, 13.169 children under ten years of age are registered with ‘unknown nationality’, many of whom have been born in the Netherlands.[3] Most recently, the Public Interest Litigation Project (PILP) stated that ‘80.000 people are registered as “nationality unknown”, in the Netherlands.’[4] Meanwhile, the Dutch Immigration and Naturalisation office (IND) ‘estimates’ that 40.000 individuals with ‘unknown’ designations and 12.000 ‘stateless’ are registered in the BRP.[5] In all cases, only a few of them are Palestinians.
The Dutch government presents identity documents as impartial statements attesting to objective facts about people. So, an ID card is merely a bureaucratic record of objective facts about a person. However, ID cards consist of multiple layers. Manufacturers use heat, pressure, and cooling to bind various layers of polycarbonate – a type of thermoplastic material – and create an ID document. The fusing of different layers means that the structure of the finished data-page card is very robust, and the individual layers cannot be separated or split after lamination. Ultimately, the formed surface composed of photos, discourse, fingerprints, biographical data, laser ink colours, and resources, renders histories and the politics behind them invisible. Therefore, emphasizing the disembodied layers of the material document subverts such violence and opens the possibility of liberating the material images from such dominant readings. It enables us to look at the ethical, theoretical, and practical challenges of capturing emotions, silence, subjectivity, experiences, and politics beyond the material image of the identity document itself.
In 2019, the Dutch House of Representatives held a hearing about incorrect registration in the Personal Records Database with the then State Secretary, Raymond Knops. Questions 2 and 3 were:
‘Is it true that the person concerned, born in occupied Palestinian territory, is registered in the BRP as being born in Israel, and this can only be changed to «unknown», and in that case, it is not correctly displayed where he was born? If so, why is this the case?’
‘Is it true that in 2012 it was announced by the Ministry of the Interior that the registration «(occupied) Palestinian territory» would be added to the system of the Key Register of Persons, but that the ministry later changed its mind about this? If so, why did it come back to this?’
The State Secretary answered:
The Country Table must be used to register the country of birth in the Personal Records Database (BRP). The policy of the State Secretary for the Interior and Kingdom Relations and the Minister of Foreign Affairs is based on the principle that only states and territories recognized by the Kingdom of the Netherlands that are politically part of a state recognized by the Kingdom can be included in the Country Table. Under Article 23 of the BRP Decree, the State Secretary for the Interior and Kingdom Relations may exceptionally decide to include other areas in the Country Table. The listing of areas must fit within the system of the Country Table as an administrative/political list. It must also be in accordance with the foreign policy of the Dutch government. The designation «(occupied) Palestinian territory» does not fit within the system of the Country Table and is therefore not included in the Country Table.
The person registered in the BRP as being born in Israel was born in East Jerusalem. With the “Guideline for inclusion of country of birth of persons in East Jerusalem”, issued on 17 April 2014, it was decided at the time to offer persons born in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, the option upon request to use their country of birth as a code 0000 with the description “unknown”.’[6]
The hearing in the Dutch House of Representatives occurred six years after the Dutch citizen born in East Jerusalem had finally reached the legal age and requested recognition of his Palestinian identity. He was born to a Palestinian mother, but his country of birth was registered as Israel. The Dutch authorities refused and instead offered him to be ‘unknown’. The person entered administrative and legal proceedings and invoked his ‘right to identity’ under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which ‘provides’ the right to ‘respect for your private and family life, home and correspondence.’[7] On 11 April 2018, the Utrecht District Court and the Administrative Law Division of the State Council decided that they had not found a violation of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights; however, it supported that the entries ‘Israel’ and ‘unknown’ are incorrect.
The case, perhaps, shows how the Dutch authority’s bureaucratic theory that identity documents describe objective facts about people negates the performative nature of such documents. Documentation not only describes facts about people and their relationship to the nation state but also ‘creates’ these facts.
I got a visa stamp on my travel document to enter the Netherlands through the Dutch representative office in the West Bank, Palestine. Upon arriving in Utrecht, I registered myself with the city council. I soon received my first Dutch residency card, which stated Palestine as my place of birth. Less than a year later, I renewed my residency, but this time the Dutch authorities replaced Palestine with the codes ‘XXX’ and ‘unknown’. The former inclusion of Palestine on the ID card was not a methodological or technical error but an act of human solidarity.
When the Dutch authorities decided to intervene in both cases, they did so in a way that they considered ‘objective’ and maintained a reputation of impartiality. The solution was to group human judgments into quantifiable variables. This is because the decision-making process would be better if the decision could be aggregated and converted into a mathematical function. Nevertheless, how does mathematics suppose for itself to deal with perfect knowledge? How can the process of coming into being and passing away, of growth and decay, be captured with the beauties of mathematics?
Walter Benjamin warned us against turning violence into law: when violence becomes law, we all obey that law and forget the violence. The embodiment of the aesthetic symbol ‘XXX’ into a legal form points to the classificatory practices of Western modernity that serve to reinforce the nation state model of its own making. Likewise, the term ‘unknown’ suggests a language of the state which denies the very existence of Palestine and our struggle not merely out of place but out of time – out of sync with a (Western-modern) political time in which any political transformation would be possible. The Dutch authorities consider ‘space’ and ‘time’ two commodities that are embodied in the relationship between ownership and improvement. It is a policy that aims to create differences between people by forming Otherness, defining time and place for some as one of care, and for others as one of control. Neither suitable for nor relevant to modern times, Palestine and Palestinian exist neither in this place nor in this time.
Here lies one of the main entrances to this text. It remains the canon of modern Western thought that has the power to represent and construct discursiveness around the ‘Other’. But memories are the antithesis of the colonial power of the colonised subject. The Western desire to discover and control ‘unknown’ lands created a global consciousness, where the world’s dominant subjectivity (as an unimaginable place) ended up giving colonial subjectivity a place for global consciousness. This account encourages us not to understand the West as a geopolitical project but as a kind of entity with no fixed time.
‘X’ is the Latin symbol for the Arabic word, shay (شيء), which means ‘something’; something to learn, uncover or figure out. When he arrived in America, Christopher Columbus recorded in his diary on October 12, 1492, addressing the Spanish colonial monarchy, ‘these are people without religion.’ In the late fifteenth century, during the ideological rule of the European Catholic Church, the new concept of ‘people without religion’ meant that they had neither a God nor souls and therefore were non-human in nature. By applying this classification, the West carried out ‘encomienda’ – structural forced labour and forced conversions of conquered non-Christian peoples – enslaved native Americans and committed atrocities under the pretext of enlightenment while assuring themselves that they had not committed sins.
Less than a hundred and fifty years later, the father of modern Western philosophy, René Descartes, famously released his philosophical phrase, ‘I think therefore I exist’ – from the heart of Amsterdam, thirty years after the Dutch defeated the Spaniards – declaring that Western man is the basis of knowledge in the era of Modern European Societies. Descartes’ celebration of the Western man was conditional. It arose after the Western expulsion and genocide against Muslims and Jews from Spain, which included the theft and burning of libraries in Granada and Cordoba. Burning women accused of witchcraft in the West. The colonisation of America. The colonisation and enslavement of free African peoples. All are genocides that shaped the contemporary Cartesian assumptions of the intellectual definition of ‘humanness’ as entities and processes separate from emotion.
***
Today, while the settler-colonial state of Israel is ethnically cleansing the Indigenous Palestinian population, a computer chip is being reprogrammed in the Netherlands. In this obfuscated language, we can understand the Dutch government’s policy to erase structures of knowledge, memory, and the present history of the Palestinian struggle. In the end, a new device is produced with software that creates a contemporary colonial subject with a colonial narrative of history, identity, etc.
To end at the beginning. The title of this text is ‘XXX, the unknown’. Consider it a tautology – we don’t know what we don’t know. The central point here is the position of enunciation: the geopolitical and body-political location of the subject that speaks. The one who narrates is the one that finds themselves in the middle of their narration. While I am the story’s narrator, I suddenly find myself also being a character inside my own story, where the text swallows up my subjectivity. However, subjectivity is not a deterministic assumption but has its roots in experience. The experience does not define it; instead, we use the experience to serve our political selves.
For decades, scholars, theories, and policies have focused on citizenship and the nation state with less regard for all other forms of social formation and the fabric of relations outside of these models. I am not interested in an immaterial view of language or the exacerbation of feelings as a desperate and historical reaction to an overwhelming reality. On the contrary, I am interested in talking about the aesthetic orientation of stateless autonomy, which is the preferential choice of Palestinian refugees. As nation states deteriorate across the Arab world (and beyond), shaping a future of necropolitics for its citizens, Palestinian refugees remain caught in a nostalgia for the future lost, a constant state of anticipation for a more just future. This is why we ask; if we, the unknown, have nothing, what does the known have? And how does this ‘having’ affect deprivation? What I mean here is the deprivation of ‘stateful’ – basically, those who have nothing; have everything and nothing to lose.
The Palestinian state-building project, which emerged from the Oslo Accords and was framed by neoliberal institution-building, came to challenge the camp and deviate from the Palestinian liberation struggle and the refugee prospect. This nation state structure came from the social formation of capitalist slavery – racial capitalism – and the relations of production of colonialism. However, the camp is an extraterritorial space; no state has direct authority over it. And the way refugees understand and inhabit camps goes beyond the delimited conception of the camp by institutionalized international humanitarian providers as a space exclusively dedicated to providing humanitarian aid.
Indeed, we must remember that refugee camps were meant to be as envisioned by humanitarian aid providers. They were meant to be limited and temporary places; no one would have imagined that it would be a place where people would make a life out of their limitations. Eventually, tents were modified first with vertical walls, later replaced by shelters, and then new houses made of concrete were built, making the camp dense and durable urban spaces. Such a radical shift did not normalize our political struggle. On the contrary, the prolonged exceptional temporality of the camp has opened a new horizon for political and social formations, a counter-site for emerging political practices and a new form of urbanism. Seventy-four years after its founding, its current spatial manifestations bear witness to the genocide perpetrated against Palestinians in 1948. The camp’s history is replete with international crimes and political failures.
Nonetheless, over the years, camps have become fully fledged realms of political life. They become spaces where people organize political movements and take political action. But also spaces of political theories – thinking about the political future in a new way and not just organizing people into a classic movement. It is our secret weapon of political prospect heritage, the unnatural habitat and habitus of analytic engines with innovative abilities – the embodiment of the Palestinian struggles.
The political theorizing of the camp is not only a possibility for refugees but for citizens too because it is not a utopian project that imagines that everything will become new as if the future lies in an entirely positive sense. On the contrary, its presence is part of its history of disposition. Its continuation, in some ways, is a symbol and a sign of a lack of a resolution of this politics that the future has not arrived. It is a space where many people are disadvantaged and vulnerable. So, all these things are facts and can’t be ignored. However, it is within this that possibilities emerge. That makes it even more potent because it must start with the full complexity of life. Not from a fantasy of perfect politics or a perfect future. Or a fantasy of being together as only good. Being together involves politics, hierarchy, and differences of opinions that are always resolved in the complexity of those matters – but starting from a place freed from some of the structural thoughts and constraints of nation state modality.
We have come from the unknown, which the known misunderstood. The unknown is not the property of the state but an open set of social lives whose materialized exhaustion remains an irreducible chance. The unknown – the anti-colonial and decolonial struggle – is, after all, an active effort of a possibility in the present that is not readable to the global hyper-connected mind. It is, however, an aching archive – the known unknown that contains our constant grief, the dispossessed longing for the bodies that were once among us and have gone over the known side that we will go to, too. The unknown is not to doubt our very own subjectivity. After all, we might be as artificial or as real as you are. The unknown is not to look for an origin or an essence in a lost past but a creative act. The real challenge is building empathy between cultures and challenging the dominant power structure that is racist, sexist, and epistemicidal.
[1] UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), The 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons: Implementation within the European Union Member States and Recommendations for Harmonisation, October 2003 <https://www.refworld.org/docid/415c3cfb4.html>.
[2] ‘Statelessness’ Government of the Netherlands <https://www.government.nl/topics/dutch-citizenship/statelessness>.
[3] ‘The Netherlands violated child’s right to acquire a nationality, UN Committee finds’ United Nations. 29 December 2020 <https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2020/12/netherlands-violated-childs-right-acquire-nationality-un-committee-finds>.
[4] ‘Statelessness’ The Public Interest Litigation Project. 11 August 2015 <https://pilpnjcm.nl/en/dossiers/statelessness/>.
[5] (See note 2).
[6] ‘Antwoord op vragen van de leden Karabulut en Sjoerdsma over foutieve registratie in de Basisregistratie Personen’ Tweede Kamer der Staten Generaal. 11 Februari 2019 <https://www.tweedekamer.nl/kamerstukken/kamervragen/detail?id=2018Z23337&did=2019D05518>.
[7] European Court of Human Rights. ‘Guide on Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights’ 31 August 2022 <https://echr.coe.int/Documents/Guide_Art_8_ENG.pdf>.