TRANSCRIPT
The Middle East has been making headlines for more than a year.
From attacks in Israel and Gaza, to the death and mass displacement of many.
Gaza is Hadil Al Barqi's home city, and she reflects on when she used to be able to go to the beach.
"Because you can't travel, you can't really go anywhere else. So it's always, yeah, the beach. Yeah, all these breaks that we had at uni during the day, because the uni was like 15 minutes walk from the beach. So you go to the beach just, I don't know, have nice time. Enjoy the weather when it's sunny and warm. It's like nice memories that I miss a lot and I know that I won't have again."
In this episode of Belonging Nowhere, we're looking at stateless people in the Middle East.
Ms Al-Barqi is a Palestinian woman who was born and raised in the Territory, where all movement in and out of the Gaza Strip is controlled by Israeli authorities.
The exception was the pedestrian-only crossing between Gaza and Egypt, but that has been closed since May 2024.
"You've got like, you know, the army all around, like, all around, like, everywhere, impacting, like, disrupting every single aspect of our life, you know, with invasions, home invasions, at night, with like bombings, like any time. So it was like, like losing people, people being killed or injured, or homes destroy. Destroyed was like all of this was kind of like normal for us. It's like part of our life."
The State of Israel was established after World War Two in 1948, intended to be a homeland for Jewish people in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
The year is also referred as the Nakba, which means 'catastrophe' in Arabic, as it led to the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
Dr Jordana Silverstein is a senior research fellow at University of Melbourne's Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness.
She is also the grand-daughter of stateless refugees; her grandparents were Jewish Holocaust survivors.
"In my research as a historian, I've also written about statelessness more expansively, around people who consider themselves to be stateless, and that might be because their national self-determination has never come to fruition. So Palestinians, obviously, sort of meet all of those criteria for different people."
Palestinians are an Arab group comprising mainly Muslims and Christians living in Israeli territories occupied after the Six Day War of 1967 including the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.
The Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion says the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory denies Palestinians their collective national rights and the right to self-determination - and has left millions of Palestinians stateless for more than 70 years.
"Israel controlling everything, controlling borders, controlling what comes in and goes out, like, including people, trade goods, like everything. So yeah, we - like this impacted, like everything with, lack of access to, like, high quality education, health services, you know, like all these basics in our life."
Ms al-Barqi's journey to gain permission to leave Gaza in 2020 as an international student to Australia was a tough one.
"I was informed of it like the night before, so it's like, you're leaving tomorrow, so you have to be like standby, and no guarantee that I get the approval on time. And they had - they needed to see a convincing reason why you want to leave. So in my case, I needed to go to do my masters, and I had, you know, I got acceptance from the uni. So it's not like whenever you want to leave, you just go. And on the day, there was like so many restrictions, so many in terms of - like the things that was I allowed to carry with me. So it was only handbag with clothes and one pair of shoes. Not allowed to take any, no electronics, it was only my phone no charger."
She began to understand more about her rights and privileges as she started to settle into Australia.
"When you move to a normal country, normal life, you start realising the difference and how your life was so so abnormal. And you start reflecting on, I would say, like, how resilient we are, like how much we how much pain and suffering we endured, and we're still sane and normal, and some of us are really gorgeous despite everything they went through."
"Rockets hurtling through the skies over Gaza, and across the border into Israel. The sound of sirens woke several cities around the country. Israel's Iron Dome defence system is said to have a 97 per cent success rate. some 3,000 Israelis were at this desert rave near the border when the militants crossed over. Partygoers seen running for their lives.They were going three by three and shooting - pow pow pow pow - everywhere from two sides, and I saw many people, like people were dying all around."
Palestinian health authorities say Israel's fighting in Gaza has killed more than 50,000 people including thousands of women and children.
Hadil Al Barqi is the only person from her family currently in Australia.
"It's beyond, beyond horrible to have family there at the moment. Everything is documented live, like you can see. It's not like you're not able to see what's happening. Everything, everything happening is being documented. So it's like the evidence is everywhere, but it's not strong enough to make people change their policies and stand up for humanity."
Thousands from the occupied territory have also been trying to find safety in Australia, and political discourse has run hot.
Opposition leader Peter Dutton has maintained people leaving Gaza should not be allowed into Australia.
"I don't think people should be coming in from that war zone at all at the moment. It's not prudent to do so and I think it puts our national security at risk."
But Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says nothing has changed in terms of vetting people for security risks.
"If the Leader of the Opposition doesn't have confidence in that system, he should say so. It's exactly the same system that was in place when the Leader of the Opposition was the Minister for Immigration, who presided over these issues."
Since December 2024, more than 800 Palestinians who came to Australia on tourist visas have been granted work, Medicare and study rights.
Dr Silverstein's research includes Jewish history, and she focuses on questions like belonging, nationalism and identity.
She has also studied the histories of statelessness, making a podcast on the oral history of stateless people.
She says due to a general lack of understanding of statelessness, most people don't know that Palestinians are stateless.
"A lot of them don't have citizenship anywhere. So if you don't have citizenship somewhere, then you are legally stateless, yeah. And so this is an intergenerational problem, of course. And so this is, yeah, really important to understanding what Palestinians face. Palestinians, certainly most Palestinians in Gaza and in the West Bank also might not have citizenship anywhere. Palestinians within Israel, or what's called the 1948 territories by Palestinians, might have Israeli citizenship. But of course, that's for many Palestinians that's not the most comfortable relationship."
She says with the mass displacement of Palestinians dispersing all around the world, it makes it difficult for them to properly settle.
"So many Palestinians find that they are because they there is no Palestine to give them citizenship, they then become, they have to deal with the discriminatory citizenship systems of other countries around the world and of where they're able to travel to. I think that people need to understand how statelessness becomes entrenched across generations."
Hadil al-Barqi is still not sure what her future looks like.
"You feel like your, your situation is uncertain. Um, it's like you because you have no idea what's going to happen next. Now it's like two years since I've launched my visa application. I'm still waiting with no communication from the department, even though it's like, because the situation back home is very, very bad, still this didn't like, encourage the like, the government or the department to speed up the process, or, you know, like make any decision that might make things easier for me."
The next episode looks into when and how statelessness can end, what role Australia can play in a global setting to reduce statelessness and how does Australia make people stateless within its own borders.
And while those in power make decisions on stateless people, how many stateless people are there?
