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List of contents
1. Introduction
2. From Principles to Practicalities: Repatriation versus Resettlement
3. A Beautiful Dream: the Rise and Fall of Project Alpha
4. The United States and the Palestinian refugee issue
5. The Johnson Mission: A Real college try?
6. Kennedy and the Arab-Israeli conflict
7. The end of the road for the Johnson Mission
8. The 1967 War: Changed Parameters of the Arab-Israeli Conflict
9. Conclusion
About the author
Marte Heian-Engdal is Senior Adviser at NOREF Norwegian Centre for Conflict Resolution, an independent foundation working for the peaceful resolution of armed conflicts. She has worked as Associate Professor in History at the University of Oslo and as Senior Researcher at the Peace Research Institute in Oslo (PRIO).
Summary
After more than seventy years, the Palestinian refugee problem remains unsolved. But if a deal could have been reached involving the repatriation of Palestinian refugees, it was in the early years of the Arab-Israeli conflict. So why didn’t this happen?
This book is the first comprehensive study of the international community’s earliest efforts to solve the Palestinian refugee problem. Based on a wide range of international primary sources from Israeli, US, UK and UN archives, the book investigates the major proposals between 1948 and 1968 and explains why these failed. It shows that the main actors involved – the Arab states, Israel, the US and the UN – agreed on very little when it came to the Palestinian refugees and therefore never got seriously engaged in finding a solution. This new analysis highlights how the international community gradually moved from viewing the Palestinian refugee problem as a political issue to looking at it as a humanitarian one. It examines the impact of this development and the changes that took place in this formative period of the Arab-Israeli conflict, as well as the limited influence US policy makers had over Israel.
Foreword
Demonstrates how international diplomacy dealt with the Palestinian refugee problem in the first formative phase of the Arab-Israeli conflict
Additional text
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
