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This article reflects on the ways in which children of Palestinian exiles born in Poland and the UK relate to their ancestral homeland and how they make sense of their Palestinian inheritance in the present. It argues that while the second generation of Palestinian diasporic subjects maintain links with their parents' homeland these connections are not limited to the intergenerational transmission of cultural identity. The article explores how Palestine 'becomes' important for secondgeneration Palestinians.It argues that it is the re-occurring waves of violence inflicted on Palestinians that activate and shape their engagement with Palestine. Rather than a sense of attachment based exclusively on a personal connection with ancestral 'roots', the article argues that the second-generation also develop a sense of long distance post-nationalism that transforms their connection with Palestine into a more universal endeavour for justice and against the dispossession. These arguments are based on the findings of a two-year multi-sited ethnography which involved oral history interviews with 35 Palestinians of different generations, carried out in Poland and in the UK, including 15 interviews with second-generation Palestinians, as well as site-specific field visits in Israel and Palestine and follow-up 'return' interviews.

The notion of belonging, prominent in social sciences, has been recently used extensively in relation to Central Eastern European migrants in the UK. Whereas the Brexit debates on migration have spotlighted the macro-politics of belonging and the judgments on who deserves to stay and under which conditions, the question of how these discourses of 'deservingness' surrounding Brexit may influence the everyday and intimate aspects of belonging among migrants warrants further exploration. Drawing on the interviews with 77 young Polish and Lithuanian migrants in the UK conducted from 2019 to 2020, this article examines how migrants position themselves in relation to the discourses of deservingness and hierarchies of desirability. The focus is also placed on how they negotiate their strategies of (un)belonging to the British society. We argue that the prominence of the deservingness discoursewhich has gained momentum in Brexit Britain -entraps migrants in the constant process of boundary making and may prevent them from ever feeling part of the 'community of value'.

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