The One Human Right That No One Demands For Palestinians

On Thursday, President Trump signed two more executive orders narrowing birthright citizenship, and the human rights world erupted. Amnesty International USA said in February that ending birthright citizenship was “rooted in racism and white supremacy.” Human Rights Watch has a number of press releases critical of Trump’s attempts to end birthright citizenship for children of illegal immigrants. The ACLU sued within hours of the first executive order in January 2025 and won at the Supreme Court in June, a 6-3 ruling in Trump v. Barbara that reaffirmed the Fourteenth Amendment. Democratic senators and much of the immigration bar treated the attempt to deny citizenship to American-born children as an assault on a foundational right, and the human rights establishment agreed.

They are correct that birthright citizenship is considered a foundational right. It is enshrined not only in the Fourteenth Amendment but in the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, which obligates states to grant nationality to a child born on their territory who would otherwise be stateless, and in the Convention on the Rights of the Child, ratified by every Arab state, the State of Palestine, and every other country on Earth except the United States.

This is very interesting. Because when it comes to Palestinians, no Arab state allows the children born on their territory to become citizens unless one or both of their parents are already citizens. And human rights groups are very, very silent.

The Convention on the Rights of the Child does not require every state to hand out citizenship to everyone born within its borders. If they have a path to citizenship, usually via their parents, there is no obligation for the state to give its own citizenship to the child. But Article 7 adds a specific duty “in particular where the child would otherwise be stateless,” which means that if being a citizen of a state is not possible for a child otherwise, then they should be come citizens of the nation they are born in.

That is exactly the Palestinian case: no Arab state allows a child born on its territory to become a citizen unless a parent already is one, and a Palestinian parent has no nationality to pass down, because no state — including the one that claims to represent Palestinians — has ever created one. Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, so quick to protect children’s rights to citizenship against Trump, have never once demanded that Arab nations honor it for Palestinian children.

Millions of Palestinians have been born in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq across four generations without their host countries ever offering them citizenship. Amnesty and HRW, who certainly support that Convention, have never demanded that Arab countries follow the very Convention that they signed and give Palestinian children citizenship.

Is this a human right, or not?

I’ve been asking about this since at least 2019, when I put the question directly to B’Tselem’s Sarit Michaeli on Twitter: did she agree that Palestinians should be allowed full citizenship in their Arab host countries if they wanted it? She never answered, because the honest answer would have exposed the position that B’Tselem, HRW, and Amnesty all share — that the fictional “right to return” for the great-grandchildren of 1948 refugees matters more than the actual statelessness of the people alive today. (And they base their legal reasoning for the “right to return” on what must be an intentional misrepresentation of a real ICJ case.)

What about the “State of Palestine” itself?

That’s where it gets even more interesting.