Palestine should confer citizenship on its stateless refugees and enter into bilateral agreements with other states to improve their situation – as citizens - wherever they reside. Al-Shabaka Policy Advisor Fateh Azzam knows this proposal has pitfalls but argues it is a powerful way to create facts on the road to freedom and rights. Read the policy brief or the executive summary.

Palestinian leaders have not activated Palestine’s UNESCO membership despite the costly battle to join and even though it could help rebalance the skewed Israeli-Palestinian power dynamic. Al-Shabaka Guest Author Valentina Azarov and Policy Member Nidal Sliman review the assaults on Palestinian cultural heritage and set out the significant practical advantages of UNESCO membership, including reasserting sovereignty over Palestinian land and sea and obliging third states to hold Israel accountable.

Will re-launched Israeli-Palestinian negotiations lead to a sovereign Palestinian state? In this brief, Al-Shabaka Policy Advisor Camille Mansour analyzes Israeli and Palestinian positions relating to key issues of sovereignty (i.e. armaments, alliances, crossings, borders, Israeli military posts). His conclusions – and warnings – are essential reading.

As Mahmoud Abbas heads to the United Nations to secure non-member state status for Palestine, he faces a strong and growing movement among Palestinian civil society activists within and outside the occupied Palestinian territory to reframe the Palestinian struggle as fighting against an apartheid Israeli regime and for inalienable Palestinian rights – and not for a state per se. Al-Shabaka Policy Advisor Leila Farsakh discusses Abbas’ attempts to placate this movement while retaining control of his political program.

In this policy brief, Al-Shabaka Policy Advisor Salim Tamari examines the different proposals for the future of Jerusalem. Rooted in the sacrilization of the city, Tamari argues that the proposals ignore the colonial subjugation of Jerusalem. He contends that this fact must be addressed in order to achieve an equitable resolution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.