Palestinian refugees and the current Syrian conflict: from settled refugees to stateless asylum seekers?

Résumé En

The Syrian conflict has profound consequences for the Palestinian population in Syria. Palestinians in Syria were enjoying access to education and the labor market without particular discrimination in Syria before 2011. The conflict began in 2011 rejected the Palestinians in Syria to their stateless status and forced more than 70,000 of them to seek asylum in neighboring countries, like the Palestinians from Iraq following the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. The aim of this presentation is to analyze the specific treatment of Palestinians from Syria in a context of a broader discussion on the selectivity of migration policies of Middel Eastern states vis-à-vis the Palestinians. The current forced migration of Palestinian refugees, largely overshadowed by the magnitude of the Syrian refugee crisis, raises many questions regarding the status of refugees forced to leave their countries of first asylum to seek refuge in a third country out of any framework for international protection. This chapter is based on a research on the movement of Palestinians refugees since the mid-1990s as well as an exploratory field study carried out in December 2013 in South Lebanon which show strong relationships between secondary migration and other forms of international migration of Palestinians, as their local effects in Lebanon.