One quarter of all global refugees are Palestinian.

Evidence

Dispossession of homes and groves, territory and terraces, through outright demolition, confiscation, or expropriation manifests homelessness in both the immediate and more nationalist senses of the term, and ultimately a virtually perpetual and perhaps permanent exilic refugeedom. (Fully one quarter of the world’s refugees are Palestinian, according to the United Nations.) Traces of lives once lived, of the fabric of lives lost, are etched into the landscape, faint lines seeped into the foundations of the victor’s architecture overlaid, phantoms haunting the ecology of the possessor. This population expulsion and transfer, while in some ways not unlike “forced removals” under apartheid, distinguishes racial palestinianization from that modality also. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 655

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to apartheid forced removals literature and the racial-state framework from chapter 1 of this same book.