Religion, Politics, and the Origins of Palestine Refugee Relief

A. Romirowsky, A. Joffe

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349478200, 9781137378163
• eBook ISBN: 9781137378170
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This bookexamines the leading role of the Quaker American Friends Service Committee in the United Nations relief program for Palestine Arab refugees in 1948-1950 in the Gaza Strip. Using archival data, oral histories, and biographical accounts, it provides a detailed look at internal decision-making in an early non-governmental organization.

1. Studying the Palestine Arab Refugee Problem

The scholarly literature on the Palestine Arab refugee problem and UNRWA is vast but deeply uneven and highly politicized. Despite many thousands of published items, only it may be argued that only a handful are truly scholarly works or display penetrating insights. Moreover, despite countless diplomatic and political histories of the period, refugee relief—as opposed to the real or putative origins of the refugee crisis—plays only a small role in the narrative.¹ And yet refugee relief, in the form of UNRWA, has become one of the primary engines of both continued international involvement and modern Palestinian identity.

Another difficulty in writing about Palestine Arab refugee relief is the unevenness of the documentation. Surprisingly, publicly available United Nations materials are not extensive. Available records include, for example the General Assembly and its various debates, and public discussions regarding the many United Nations organizations and commissions, including the UNPRP, the Economic Survey Mission, Conciliation Commission for Palestine, and the early years of UNRWA. These provide superficial descriptions of the politics surrounding the refugee issue. But internal UN documents such as field reports, memoranda, planning, budgeting, and personnel files remain difficult to access. The UN’s internal decision-making processes thus remain obscure.

There is, however, no lack of such primary documentation for the UN’s Palestine Arab refugee programs. The Ford Foundation funded an inventory of UNRWA documents in 1985 by the Refugee Documentation Project at York University that located hundreds of meters of UNRWA documents. These included various refugee registration files, photographic documentation, and administrative documentation.² But unlike archives maintained at the United Nations in New York, access to UNRWA archives remains carefully controlled by the organization itself. These archives have been primarily used by a small number of sympathetic scholars and by UN personnel writing in advocacy or academic capacities, such as those documenting Palestinian property claims in anticipation of eventual repatriation or compensation schemes,³ or allegedly restoring the “lost visibility” of pre-1967 refugee society.⁴ Research on Palestinian society, UNRWA itself, and the evolution of relief organizations have not been priorities for those accessing UNRWA documents, to the detriment of historical understanding.

But any look at the modern debate over Palestine Arab refugees—both the origins of the problems and international responses—must take into account two facts that are not often recognized. First is that the debate was originally shaped by scholars with direct experience with refugee relief, including with the AFSC. Second, and more significantly is that in recent decades two entirely parallel, competing narratives have developed that are drawn from many of the same materials but shape them to reach utterly different conclusions. The competing narratives over the Palestine Arab refugee problem are a microcosm of those that describe and shape the Arab-Israeli conflict as a whole.

EARLY SCHOLARSHIP ON THE REFUGEE CRISIS

In-depth studies of the Palestine Arab refugees emerged in the early 1950s, some of which still have unique value, since they do not suffer as greatly from the overburden of later polemical scholarship. One early work was a doctoral dissertation by Channing B. Richardson,⁵ written at Columbia University under the supervision of the important Middle East historian J. C. Hurewitz. Richardson had been a conscientious objector during World War II, serving in the Civilian Public Service program, and later joined the Quakers. In 1945 he joined the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and worked in displaced persons camps in Germany.⁶ After returning to the United States, to begin his doctoral work, he accepted an assignment with the AFSC to administer a refugee camp in Gaza under the auspices of UNRPR.

While in Gaza, Richardson published a piece that described the origins of the UNPRP.⁷ He stressed the inadequacy of the United Nations Disaster Relief Organization and the originality of the UNRPR approach, with respect to the public-private partnership, the speed of implementation, and both the autonomy and political independence of the organizations providing aid on the ground. But most significantly, already in 1950 Richardson clearly stated about one of the most vexing problems facing the relief organizations:

“What is a ‘refugee’?” Since no official definition has ever been given, the agencies interpret the word as best they can in the field. Thus arises a series of problems which few, if any, international organizations might answer satisfactorily. Are Bedouins entitled to United Nations relief if they are cut off from some of the lands in which they used to roam? Are fellahins refugees if they used to be migrant workers deriving 40 per cent of their livelihood from lands now in Israel? What about villagers living in their own homes but separated from their lands by mines and barbed wire? Or settled residents of an area who are now destitute and hungry because the presence of hordes of refugees has cut off their labor?⁸

Richardson articulated problems that were well known to AFSC, United Nations and governments, but that were not understood by either scholars or the public. Had they been, it is possible that other policy choices would have been made. These problems, however, would confront UNRWA and other relief organizations for decades to come. UNRWA would also continue to construct its own definitions of “refugee.”

In 1952, Richardson summarized UNRPR’s operations.⁹ His view of the origins of the refugee problem shows the Quaker mindset of even-handedness at work; “Over 1,000,000 Arabs and about 625,000 Jews were apparently determined to use violence to enforce their claims.”¹⁰ This mentality, where cause and effect were of less significance than the results, has helped subtly shape the history of the refugee question ever since.

Another early work on the refugees was a doctoral dissertation by Don Peretz,¹¹ also written under the supervision of J. C. Hurewitz at Columbia University. Peretz had worked in 1949 for the AFSC in Israel, and later traveled through the Middle East on behalf of the Ford Foundation that was then in an early stage of adopting an international focus.¹² As will be shown below, his Jewish background and “un-Quakerly” sympathy for Israel was to be a source of controversy with the AFSC leadership. Peretz remained involved with the Palestine Arab refugee issue, authoring several studies during the 1970s through the 1990s.¹³

Peretz’s dissertation was published in 1958 and remains significant today, especially for his succinct presentations of the numerous international negotiations and plans to address the refugee problem, including repatriation, the shift to ever-larger economic development solutions, and internal Israeli political debates.¹⁴ One of the most controversial aspects of his book, however, was his relatively brief analysis of the origins of the refugee problem. He contrasted, for example, the Jewish community’s “quasi-government” with the Arab community’s near complete lack of autonomous institutions. With the British withdrawal there was a breakdown of all services to the Arab sector, a collapse of morale, and “the community became easy prey to rumor and exaggerated atrocity stories. The psychological preparation for mass flight was complete.”¹⁵ Such explanations have been strenuously downplayed by many recent historians.

Another contribution to early scholarship is Rony Gabby’s 1959 hugely detailed book A Political Study of the Arab-Jewish Conflict. The Arab Refugee Problem, based on his doctoral thesis for the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva.¹⁶ Although largely descriptive, it remains one of the most useful and comprehensive studies of the problem. Born in Baghdad, Gabbay was a Jewish refugee in Israel from 1950 to 1955. Although written long before the declassification of official Israeli, British, and other documents, Gabbay’s discussion of the social structure of Mandate era Palestine, as well as the circumstances of the flight of the refugees, remains unmatched as a model of scholarship and even-handedness.

Gabbay’s treatment of Palestine’s pre-1948 politics and demography is concise and direct, and his use of the voluminous United Nations documentation is especially helpful. Like Peretz’s book, however, his discussion of the origins of the refugee crisis emphasized Palestine’s abandonment by the wealthy Arab class, chaotic wartime conditions, and the disorganized flight of lower classes.¹⁷ The title of his book also speaks to an understanding of a basic religious dimension to the conflict that was lost in the rising nationalist polemics of the later 1950s and 1960s. For these reasons, the book has been rarely cited in recent years. For his part, Gabbay himself never wrote about the Arab-Israeli conflict again.

1970s AND 1980s

The Palestine Arab refugee issue, and a general consciousness of the Palestinians as a separate group, entered the academic and popular consciousnesses during the 1960s. But the critical literature on UNRWA and international organizations dealing with the Palestine refugee problem remained surprisingly small through the 1980s. The few perceptive analyses that were produced are important in their own right and also help show the way in which subsequent scholarship has been dramatically polarized.

One such contribution was an article by political scientist and former United Nations official David Forsythe in 1971.¹⁸ Forsythe argued that UNRWA had come to be viewed as a de facto “peacemaking” organization when in fact it had “been limited to peaceservicing roles of an administrative nature which have indirectly facilitated the success of movements that seek to use coercion not authorized by the UN.”¹⁹ He pointed to the manipulation of the language that created UNRWA, where Western states initially sought to emphasize “practical” and “realistic” solutions and Arab states read this as code for refugee resettlement. In response, they insisted that “repatriation” be included in the founding resolution, as well as the term “Palestine.”²⁰ In Forsythe’s view the organization was constrained from the moment of its creation and thus gravitated toward direct relief and other forms of assistance and maintenance. In doing so, the organization “is having a political impact on the Middle East not expressly intended by the General Assembly and directly contrary to Security Council efforts to facilitate peacemaking.”²¹

Political scientist Amos Perlmutter responded to Forsythe in a piquantly titled paper, “Patrons in the Babylonian Captivity of Clients: UNRWA and World Politics.”²² He lamented Forsythe’s uncritical assessment of UNRWA’s political involvement, saying, “the agency’s existence formed a structural addition to the international institutionalization of the Arab-Israeli conflict. At the mercy of the refugees, while at the convenience of Arab states and their anti-Israeli machinations, the agency’s “bypassing” of the conflict became a structured aspect of this conflict.”²³ Perlmutter argued that this “turned UNRWA into a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: The Palestine Arab Problem and the International Community
• 1. Studying the Palestine Arab Refugee Problem
• 2. The Quakers and the American Friends Service Committee: Origins of the Quakers and Quaker Ideology
• 3. The AFSC in the Middle East: The Official Origins of AFSC Involvement in the Middle East
• 4. AFSC in the Field: December 1948–December 1949
• 5. AFSC and the Politics of Regional Development
• 6. AFSC, the Economic Survey Mission, and Regional Development
• 7. The AFSC and UNRWA: The End of UNRPR
• 8. International Security and the Question of Reintegration
• 9. Assessing the AFSC as an Early NGO
• 10. Conclusions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index