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Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

> How does one become a "former Palestinian"

I guess by obtaining a different citizenship and renouncing the original one, but tbh I expect parent poster meant folks who were born in another country from Palestinian parents.

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Hardly, a Palestinian has no governing authority allowing it to issue a passport or proof of citizenship. This again is controlled by Israel. So your argument does not hold water.

I found the use of the term "Former Palestinian" offensive. It implies that you are no longer such. Regardless of your citizenship, your ancestry defines your ethnic group. Palestinians are an ethnic group. Those born by parents of said ethnic group are de facto of that ethnic group.

You aren't always defined by your ancestry. My parents had to emigrate to more human respecting lands, and they still feel they're more part of that land than the one they were born in.

You cannot escape your DNA... Other than American Indians, everyone else in the USA emigrated there. So you can assimilate another culture, but ethnically (DNA-wise) you will always carry your ancestry around, and so will your descendants.

> a Palestinian has no governing authority allowing it to issue a passport

Statelessness is technically illegal according to international treaties, so the lack of specific documentation does not necessarily means lack of citizenship. Besides, acceptance for new citizenship is determined by the new country, not the old.

This is the kind of thing I was talking about, nobody can even decide if Palestine exists, so when you say "he used to be a Palestinian" some people think you're trying to verbally erase an entire ethnicity even if you just meant "he got out."

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