Learn about our project and our objectives.
The project Voices from Palestinian Exiles (VOPE) brings together universities, students, graduates, young academics, and researchers from seven Arab countries and Germany in an intensive academic and personal exchange and a confrontation with themselves, with the group, with academia and practice, and with their own and foreign perspectives and values.
The situation of Palestinian refugees is considered the most protracted, most complex, and most sensitive in the world. Obtaining reliable figures is a challenge. Estimates for 2018 put the total number of Palestinians worldwide at 14 million with 5.3 million living in the occupied Palestinian territories, namely 3.2 million in the West Bank and 2.1 million in the Gaza Strip (Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics: 2021).
At the heart of VOPE is the right of return or compensation of displaced persons. It is owed under the fundamental duty of international law to provide reparation in its basic forms of restitution and compensation.
Selected individual stories of Palestinian refugees as well as of protagonists of institutions and social work working with Palestinian refugees will be filmed and presented here.
As a boy in Gaza, I thought the world was big and full of people who would care if they saw what happened to us. My father told me stories about olive trees, stubborn roots that held onto the earth through centuries of storms and soldiers. He said we were like that — unshaken, patient, grounded in truth. I believed him. I believed we were protected by that truth. That if we told our stories loud enough, someone would come.
Then came the war. Not the first, and probably not the last. But this one—this one peeled something from me.
I was a shopkeeper once. My store was nothing fancy — a corner spot in Khan Younis that smelled of cardamom, diesel, and dust. I sold batteries, cigarettes, phone credit, sweets. On good days, I brewed coffee for the neighbors. On bad days, I locked the shutters and waited for the sky to stop falling.
When the war came this time, it came like a thief in daylight — loud, unapologetic, with nowhere left to hide. The warnings came on the radio, on leaflets dropped from drones, in text messages that made my wife's hands tremble. Evacuate south. It's for your safety. But the south kept shrinking, the line of safety crawling backward like a lie that forgot where it started.
A Summary of the pojects findings willl be published here
The conference “Voices from Palestinian Refugees” at Yarmouk University in early May 2026 will summarize the project’s initial findings and contrast them with perspectives from additional experts.
An online module will be developed providing the historical, sociological, political and legal background for VOPE. It will introduce the participants of the project to its context, bringing everyone to the same page. After having been further developed and evaluated during the entire project period, it will be made accessible to the public as open educational resource.
Get a comprehensive snapshot of each participating country including key demographic data, political background, development programs, migration trends, and refugee contexts. These fact sheets offer valuable insights for researchers, policymakers, and anyone seeking a deeper understanding of national and regional dynamics.
Project findings, country reports, perspectives from external experts and contributions to the workshops and conference are supposed to be published open-access in the „Quarterly on Refugee Problems – AWR Bulletin“. Summaries will be available through the project’s website and utilized for the online module “Palestine & Palestinian Refugees”.