Abstract
If one were to summarize the major obstacles to solving the Palestinian refugee problem between 1948 and 1951, they would come under the following headings: relief, resettlement, rehabilitation and repatriation. As 1949 came to a close, the contours, although not an agreed solution, of how best to solve these four problems became clear. Take, for example, the problem of relief. As Chapter 2 demonstrated, by the end of 1948, a multi-million dollar mechanism for immediate refugee relief had been established through UN General Assembly Resolution 212. By the end of 1949, this emergency relief programme had been extended for the following year, as recommended under General Assembly Resolution 302 (IV).1
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Notes
Miles Copeland, The Game of Nations: The Amorality of Power Politics (Birkenhead: Wilmer Brothers, 1969), pp. 41–3.
Avi Shlaim, ‘Husni Za’im and the Plan to Resettle Palestinian Refugees in Syria’, Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 15, No. 4 (Summer 1986), p. 75.
Gabriel Sheffer, Moshe Sharett: Biography of a Political Moderate (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 473.
Damascus (Keeley) to Secretary of State, 19 May 1949, USNA, 501.BB Palestine/5–1949; the similarities between Zaim’s reign and Kemal Ataturk’s Westernization programme in Turkey were indeed striking. During his four and a half months in power, Zaim let it be known of his disapproval of traditional Arab dress and headgear. Literate women were given the right to vote, the use of traditional titles such as ‘bey’ or ‘pasha’ were banned and the process of breaking up religious endowments began while Sharia was being replaced with modern civil, criminal and commercial codes, see Patrick Seale, The Struggle for Syria: A Study of Post War Arab Politics, 1948–58 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 58. The allusion refers to the Greek and Turkish statesmen who signed the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne following the war between the two nations which was effectively Turkey’s war of independence. What followed was a population exchange in which 500,000 Muslim Greeks were transferred to Turkey while some 2 million Greek Orthodox Turks were evacuated to Greece.
Rabinovich, The Road Not Taken, p. 119; Shlaim, Iron Wall, pp. 62–8; Mordechai Gazit, ‘The Israel-Jordan Peace Negotiations (1949–51): King Abdullah’s Lonely Efforts’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 23, No. 3 (July 1988), p. 415.
Caplan, Futile Diplomacy, Vol. 3, pp. 131–2; Shlaim, Collusion across the Jordan, pp. 550–60; Rabinovich, The Road Not Taken, p. 140; Bruce Maddy-Weitzmann, The Crystallization of the Arab State System (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1993), pp. 133–5.
David Ben-Gurion recalled that during the summer of 1950, Israel proposed to the Soviet Union that representatives of Israel and Egypt should be invited to peace talks, but there was no reply. Ben-Gurion offered to talk about Arab refugees, limitations on arms, a non-aggression pact, border rectifications and widening armistice demarcation lines, see David BenGurion, My Talks with Arab Leaders (New York: The Third Press, 1973), p. 269.
New York Times, 16 May 1948, cited in Martin Gilbert, In Ishmael’s House: A History of Jews in Muslim Lands (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), p. 217.
Gilbert, In Ishmael’s House, pp. 218–33, 211–4; see also Rubin, The Arab States and the Palestine Conflict, pp. 201–2; Hayyim Cohen, The Jews of the Middle East, 1860–1972 (New York: Wiley and Kerter, 1973), pp. 33–4;
Maurice Roumani, The Jews of Libya: Coexistence, Persecution and Rehabilitation (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2007), p. 58;
Tudor Parfitt, The Road to Redemption: The Jews of Yemen, 1900–1950 (Leiden: EJ Brill, 1996), pp. 188–90;
Norman Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2003), p. 147.
Shlomo Hillel, Operation Babylon: Jewish Clandestine Activity in the Middle East 1946–51 (London: Collins, 1988), p. 226.
Elizabeth Monroe, Philby of Arabia (London: Pitman Publishing, 1973), p. 223.
The Pittsburgh Press, 19 November 1945; Ya’akov Meron, ‘The Expulsion of Jews from the Arab Countries: The Palestinians Attitude towards it and Their Claims’, Malka Hillel Schulewitz, The Forgotten Millions: The Modern Jewish Exodus from Arab Lands (London: Continuum, 2000), p. 113;
Rafael Medoff, Zionism and the Arabs: An American Jewish Dilemma, 1898–1948 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997), pp. 139–61.
See Peter Grose, Israel in the Mind of America (New York: Alfred a Knopf, 1983);
Zaha B. Bustami, American Foreign Policy and Question of Palestine 1856–1939 (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1989);
Leo V. Kanawada, Jr, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Diplomacy and American Catholics, Italians, and Jews (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1982).
Yehouda Shenhav, The Arab Jews: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, Religion, and Ethnicity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), p. 117.
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© 2015 Simon A. Waldman
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Waldman, S.A. (2015). Compensation: The Key to Break the Logjam?. 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_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137431523_6
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