Palestinian Refugees after 1948

Marte Heian-Engdal's book on the multiple failures to address seriously the issue of Palestinian refugees following the tumultuous events of 1947-49 fills an important gap in the literature. The initial reaction of the United Nations was to call for repatriation of refugees or compensation for lost properties of those who chose not to return. A Palestine Conciliation Commission was established to start the diplomatic effort to find an acceptable solution to the refugee problem. But all of this came to naught. Heian-Engdal has thoroughly researched the sources to explain why. Her primary explanation is that the United States, the dominant power concerning this issue in the post World War II period, was never able or willing to devote the energy or resources to forging an agreement between Israel and the various Arab actors, including the Palestinians. A major reason, well before the existence of an organized pro-Israel lobby in the United States, was the presence of important friends of Israel around U.S. presidents who were able to exert influence at crucial moments. With the outbreak of the 1967 war, the refugee issue became less important than the state-to-state relations of Israel and its Arab neighbors. This is a sobering and thought-provoking account of an issue that still affects millions of people in the Middle East and has immeasurably complicated the search for a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace. -- William B. Quandt, Professor Emeritus, University of Virginia, U.S This is an impressive study - well-researched, well-organized, and well-written - that surely will make a real contribution to our understanding of the politics of the Palestinian refugee problem. Marte Heian-Engdal has plumbed many archival materials and other hitherto-unused primary sources to focus on a largely under-studied dimension of the problem: the international relations questions surrounding the crucial 'repatriation vs. resettlement' debates that were so important in the twenty years after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. With discussion of how to resolve the Palestinian refugee plight still relevant today, this book is quite timely, and helps answer why the refugees have continued to languish in exile all these decades -- Michael R. Fischbach is professor of history at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia, U.S.A. and author of Records of Dispossession: Palestinian Refugee Property and the Arab-Israeli Conflict