On 15 May 2011, hundreds of Palestinians gathered on the Syrian border with the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights to protest the sixty-third anniversary of the Nakba (Arabic, ‘catastrophe’), the mass expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from those parts of mandatory Palestine that became Israel. One man, whose parents were exiled from Jaffa back in 1948, managed to evade the Israeli army and hitchhike his way to his ancestral city, where he attempted to locate his family's house and reconnect with his lost homeland. He then voluntarily surrendered himself to the police, not before being interviewed by Israeli journalists. Israeli news outlets considered the affair an embarrassment for the state, as a mixture of shock, fear and disgust echoed through social media online and in conversations on the streets and on buses. Hijazi's daring return journey was widely and immediately dismissed as an attempt to ‘infiltrate’ the country by a Syrian, obscuring his Palestinianness and his profound affective connection to a homeland that he had only heard of from his exiled parents.

Denouncing Palestinian returnees as ‘infiltrators’ is not a new practice. In fact, Palestinians who attempted to return to their villages and towns after the formation of the Israeli state, even before the creation of the armistice lines in 1949, were called mistanenim (Hebrew, ‘infiltrators’), denoting their illegal status as non-citizens and as a security threat that must be removed. The fear of being engulfed by Palestinian returnees marching through Israel's borders is also not a novelty. In fact, in 1952, only four years after the Nakba, Israeli security apparatus was alarmed by reports of a potential ‘march of the refugees’, which was understood as an ‘insidious plot’ against the state of Israel by Arab governments. Internal correspondence stressed that