Abstract
In his report published posthumously in September 1948, Count Folke Bernadotte, the assassinated United Nations Mediator in Palestine, wrote the following:
A new and difficult element has entered into the Palestine problem as a result of the exodus of more than 300,000 Arabs from their former homes in Palestine … The right of innocent people, uprooted from their homes by the present terror and ravages of war, to return to their homes, should be affirmed and made effective, with assurance of adequate compensation for the property of those who may choose not to return.1
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Notes
M. Shertok to A. Eban, 15 July 1948, Tel.MH710, Yehoshua Freundlich (ed), Documents on the Foreign Policy of Israel (hereafter DFPI), Vol. 1, 14 May– 30 September 1948 (Jerusalem: Israel State Archives, 1982), p. 334.
Ahmed Shukairy, ‘The Palestinian Refugees’, Excerpts from a Speech at the United Nations, 1958, in Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin (eds), The Arab– Israeli Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict (New York: Penguin, 1995), pp. 119–21.
Abba Eban, ‘The Refugee Problem’, Excerpts from a Speech, 17 November 1958, in Laqueur and Rubin (eds), The Arab-Israeli Reader (New York: Penguin, 1995), p. 138.
Article V: Transitional Period and Permanent Status Negotiations, Israel-PLO Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements, 13 September 1993, in Laqueur and Rubin (eds), The Arab-Israeli Reader, pp. 599–601.
The proceedings and offers made at the Camp David Summit of 2000 have been much disputed by participants and scholars alike, especially over the question of Israel’s offer to the Palestinian Authority. For firsthand accounts see, for example, Dennis Ross, The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace (New York: Farrer, 2005);
Bill Clinton, My Life: The Presidential Years (New York: Doubleday, 2004);
Madeleine Albright, Madame Secretary (New York: Hyperion, 2003);
Mahmoud Abbas, ‘Reports of the Camp David Summit, 9 September 2000’, Excerpts Published in The Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. XXX, No. 2 (Winter 2001), pp. 168–70;
Gilead Sher, The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Negotiations, 1999–2001 (London: Routledge, 2006); For the academic debate on the subject see,
Jeremy Pressman, ‘Visions in Collision — What Happened at Camp David and Taba’, International Security, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Fall 2003), pp. 5–43;
Shimon Shamir and Bruce Maddy-Weitzman (eds), The Camp David Summit-What Went Wrong? Americans, Israelis, and Palestinians Analyze the Failure of the Boldest Attempt Ever to Resolve the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2005); Robert Malley and Hussein Agha, ‘Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors’, New York Review of Books, Vol. 48, No. 13, 9 August 2001; Benny Morris, ‘Camp David and After: An Exchange 1. An Interview with Ehud Barak’, New York Review of Books, Vol. 49, No. 11, 13 June 2002;
Ahron Bregman, Elusive Peace: How the Holy Land Defeated America (New York: Penguin, 2005);
Aaron David Miller, Much Too Promised Land: America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace (New York: Random House, 2005);
Itamar Rabinovich, Waging Peace: Israel and the Arabs, 1948–2003 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
Legal Unit, Negotiations Support Unit to Dr Mahmoud Abbas, 2 January 2001, Al Jazeera Transparency Unit, The Palestine Papers, http://www.ajtransparency.com/en/projects/thepalestinepapers/20121821232131550.html (Last visited 08 July 2012).
Ruth Lapidoth, ‘Israel and the Palestinians: Some Legal Issues’, The Jerusalem Institute of Israel Studies, The JUS Studies Series No. 94 (2003), pp. 48–9.
Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of ‘Transfer’ in Zionist Political Thought, 1882–1948 (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992);
David Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch (London: Faber and Faber, 2003);
Walid Khalidi, From Haven to Conquest: Zionism and the Palestinian Problem Until 1948 (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1971);
Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (London: Oneworld Publications, 2007).
Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 165.
Morris, The Birth Revisited, pp. 164–5; This is slightly in contrast to Morris’ earlier study in which he called Plan D ‘a strategic-ideological anchor’, Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) p. 63.
Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (London: Penguin, 2001), p. 31.
Yoav Gelber, Palestine 1948: War, Escape and the Emergence of the Palestine Refugee Problem (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2001), p. 98.
Nadav Safran, From War to War: The Arab-Israeli Confrontation, 1948–1967 (New York: Pegasus, 1969), pp. 34–5.
Joseph B. Schechtman, The Arab Refugee Problem (New York: Philosophical Library, 1952), p. 3.
Jon and David Kimche, Both Sides of the Hill (London: Secker & Warburg, 1960), p. 124.
Erskine Childers, ‘The Other Exodus’, The Spectator, 12 May 1961, pp. 8–11.
Walid Khalidi, ‘Why Did the Palestinians Leave Revisited’, Journal of Palestine Studies Vol. XXXIV, No. 2 (Winter 2005), pp. 43–8.
Deir Yassin was a village that was attacked by Zionist underground forces on 9 April 1948 in which over 100 residents were killed (the original figure quoted and taken up by the Arab media was 254 dead) including women and children with incidents of reported rape and looting. For scholarly accounts see, Gelber, Palestine 1948, pp. 307–18; Uri Milstein, History of the War of Independence Vol. 4: Out of Crisis Came Decision (New York: University Press of America, 1996);
Walid Khalidi, All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992); Khalidi, From Haven to Conquest;
Benny Morris, ‘The Historiography of Deir Yassin’, Journal of Israeli History, Vol. 24, No. 1, 2005, pp. 79–107.
Dan Kurzman, Genesis 1948: The First Arab-Israeli War (New York: Signet, 1972), p. 183.
Arthur Koestler, Promise and Fulfilment: Palestine 1917–1949 (London: Macmillan, 1949), p. 160.
Aharon Cohen, Israel and the Arab World (London: W.H. Allen, 1970), pp. 458–60.
William R. Polk, David M. Stamler, and Edmund Asfour, Backdrop to Tragedy: The Struggle for Palestine (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), p. 290.
Nafez Nazzal, The Palestinian Exodus from Galilee 1948 (Beirut: The Institute for Palestine Studies, 1978), pp. 102–9.
Rony E. Gabbay, A Political Study of the Arab-Jewish Conflict (Geneve: Libraire E. Droz, 1959), pp. 83–4.
Shabtai Teveth, ‘The Palestine Arab Refugee Problem and Its Origins: Review Article’, Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 26, No. 2, (April 1990), p. 214–9.
Teveth, ‘The Palestine Arab Refugee Problem and Its Origins’, pp. 219–20; Also see Shabtai Teveth, ‘Charging Israel with Original Sin’, Commentary, Vol. 88, No. 3, (September 1989), pp. 28–30.
Avi Shlaim, ‘The Debate About 1948’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 27, No. 3, (1995), p. 288.
Avi Shlaim, Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).
Ilan Pappe, Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948–51 (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1988).
Efraim Karsh, ‘Rewriting Israel’s History’, Middle East Quarterly, Vol. 3, No. 2, (June 1996), pp. 23–6; ‘Falsifying the Record: Benny Morris, David Ben-Gurion, and the “transfer” idea’, Israel Affairs, Vol. 4, No. 2 (1997), pp. 47–71;
Efraim Karsh, Fabricating Israeli History: The ‘New Historians’ (London: Frank Cass, 2000), pp. 37–68.
Anita Shapira, Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881–1948 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 285–6;
Shabtai Teveth, ‘The Evolution of “Transfer”’ in Zionist Thinking, Occasional Papers, Vol. 107. Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, Shiloah Institute, Tel Aviv University, 1989.
Issa Khalaf, Politics in Palestine (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), p. 202.
S.G. Thicknesse, Arab Refugees: A Survey of Resettlement Possibilities (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1949), p. 6.
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© 2015 Simon A. Waldman
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Waldman, S.A. (2015). Introduction: The Palestinian Refugee Problem as an Impediment to Peace. In: Anglo-American Diplomacy and the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1948–51. Security, Conflict and Cooperation in the Contemporary World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137431523_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137431523_1
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