Records of Dispossession: Palestinian Refugee Property and the Arab-Israeli Conflict

Records of Dispossession: Palestinian Refugee Property and the Arab-Israeli Conflict

By Michael Fischbach

(Columbia University Press, 2003)

By 1950, frustrated by its inability to achieve a resolution of the Palestinian refugee property issue, the United Nations Conciliation Commission

for Palestine (UNCCP) began focusing on "technical" efforts-studies of the extent and value of land lost-for use whenever negotiations did prove successful. Drawing extensively from these efforts, Michael Fischbach, a professor of history at Randolph-Macon College, traces the evolution of the issue of Palestinian refugee property in Records of Dispossession: Palestinian Refugee Property & the Arab-Israeli Conflict. Fischbach's book traces the ebb and flow of the property issue as a touchstone of international humanitarian concern, United States foreign policy strategic objectives, and Arab-Israeli political activit;, and recounts both the conceptual and logistical difficulties faced by the UNCCP. The result is a well-researched and extensively documented work that details UN committee reports as well as Arab, Israeli, and U.S. State Department memoranda to provide an exhaustive account of the various actors' positions on the issue over the years.

Records of Dispossession is organized chronologically in seven sections. Section One outlines early Israeli responses to the problem of refugee property, including the creation of a legal definition of "absentee" and establishment of a Custodian of Absentee Property in 1948, and the sale of refugee land in 1949 to the Jewish National Fund for development and settlement purposes. These early responses-most notably the decision to insist on collective compensation rather than individual restitution-established the parameters for all subsequent discussion. The Israeli government's focus on collective payment reflected its belief that the money should be used for permanent Palestinian resettlement in other Arab countries while underscoring its insistence that, as absentees, the refugees forfeited their holdings. Consequently, the issue was from the outset shifted from the legal realm: Palestinians were to be paid as a class-refugees-rather than as individual title holders, with the right to either sell or reclaim their land. Thus refugee property compensation was unlinked from what appeared to be the most dangerous threat to the existence of a Jewish state: the right of return.

Section Two charts the formation in December 1948, and initial endeavors of the UNCCP, while sections Three and Four address Israeli, Arab, and international policies and proposals as they developed during the same period. The urgency with which the UNCCP was formed and the relatively broad mandate it received reflected the prominence of the refugee issue on the world stage at the time. Subsequently, however, the Commission's effectiveness was curtailed by the most powerful of its three members, the United States. Fischbach's research indicates the degree to which United States foreign policy objectives determined the terms under which the UNCCP examined the refugee property issue, as well as limiting the types of compensatory solutions it could propose. The State Department, echoing Israel's position, envisioned collective compensation payments intended to facilitate Palestinian resettlement into neighboring Arab states. Estimating that compensation payments would cover only a minimal percentage of total resettlement costs, the State Department assumed that the United States, with help from other states and international banking organizations, would cover the majority. At the same time, its predominant position assured that U.S. "red lines" regarding the issue were always respected. The net effect was a further politicization of resolution efforts already hindered by Arab and Israeli political maneuvering.

In May 1951, frustrated UNCCP personnel launched the first of the organization's "technical efforts," commissioning a survey to identify and provide a concrete estimate of the extent and value of Palestinian refugee property. It is in recounting the conceptual and logistical difficulties that this and all subsequent studies faced that Fischbach provides his most valuable contribution by highlighting the degree to which the very definition of "property" was contested. Should it refer to land alone or include related property? With each, the critical issues of what land "counted" as owned (for example individual titled ownership versus collectively held land or cultivated versus pasture lands), whether to count orange tree groves and olive bushes as value-adding contributions, and to what extent to include buildings and movable property; erupted anew. Were the owners entitled to draw rent from their lands or had their legal relationship been severed?

Once the definition of "property" had been established, however, two equally fundamental problems arose: how to determine the extent of such property, and how to value it. Property identification was a laborious and uncertain process, since neither the British nor the Ottoman tax registries provided comprehensive listings. Consequently, extent and valuation estimates were equally politicized. The Israeli government, for example, considered only titled land actually under cultivation during 1947 and 1948 at issue. In this way it both limited the amount of land requiring compensation and gained legal access to great swaths of pasture lands for settlement and development. The UN commissions, however, included uncultivated and commonly held lands-angering the Israelis, but also angering Arab state representatives who felt that Technical Program procedures were too conservative in their valuation structure. Determining the rate at which land and property should be valued was equally fraught: had land sale rates in the late 1930s and early 1940s been artificially inflated by the eagerness of Jewish buyers? Complicating the entire process were political imperatives pushing for either collective or individual valuation. The argument for collective payment as a means of facilitating resettlement was strengthened from the early 1950s by the concern that individual restitution would disproportionately benefit a small number of major landowners, thus providing no impetus for Arab countries to participate in the resettlement process. Yet those same landowners proved to be influential lobbyists, as did Arab state representatives who recognized the link between collective payment and the refugees' permanent alienation from their lands. In short, the Technical Program's first study, like those that followed, displeased all major state players involved, hardening the stalemate.

Sections Five and Six follow the UNCCP's Technical Program activity from 1952 to 1964, which consisted primarily of additional studies as well as its sole success: the unfreezing of some refugee bank accounts. Even this proved a vexed process, though, involving extensive diplomatic negotiations between the UNCCP, Israel, the Arab states, the United States, Britain, and assorted banks. Later activity included the solicitation of letters of inquiry from refugees in 1964-more as a public relations move to demonstrate the UNCCP's continued relevance than a true vehicle for action. By 1966, Fischbach argues, the UNCCP was largely a dead-letter organization. Although never officially disbanded, it has produced no major studies and played no significant role in more recent attempts to address the property issue. The UNCCP's effective disappearance was matched by the waning currency of the issue, particularly following the dramatic shift in Arab-Israeli and Palestinian-Israeli relations after the 1967 war.

Section Seven addresses developments in the refugee property issue from 1967 to the present. The 1967 war shifted the focus of political discussion on Palestinian land, perhaps irrevocably, from property lost in 1948 to that being settled by Israelis on land occupied in 1967. Nineteen forty-eight property was now enveloped within the broader category of "refugee problem." (The 1956 war had similarly reduced the visibility of the refugee property issue, but the effects of the 1967 war were more dramatic and longer lasting.) At the same time, a politicized, organized Palestinian voice was becoming increasingly audible, contesting the structure of Arab-Israeli negotiations that had prevailed until then. However, neither the PLO nor any other organization put great stress on the refugee property issue, since these groups promoted armed struggle to regain Palestine rather than negotiated compensation for lost lands. Arab states, too, seemed disinclined to emphasize the issue, except as part of a longer list of grievances against the Israeli state. Nor did the international community, for whom the passage of time had faded the issue, press for resolution. Recent efforts of the PLO and others to conduct new surveys have met with little more success.

Fischbach concludes by reasserting the centrality of the property issue-chronologically, practically, and ideologically-to the conflict as a whole. Tracing its evolution and the numerous stalled resolution efforts is useful in the degree to which it illuminates the larger history of Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Arab relations. This seems a valid and critical point; it is neither the research nor the overall argument but his characterization of the issue that is troubling. Fischbach describes the refugee property issue as first and foremost a humanitarian concern, over which political issues have been laid. Focusing on the humanitarian aspect provides the issue with an urgency designed to help hasten its resolution. However, to characterize the issue as primarily humanitarian obscures the political and legal battles equally fundamental to it. The "plight" of refugees differs from that of earthquake victims in that the causal event is neither politically inert nor irreversible. As with other Red Cross crises, this characterization puts the focus on dealing with effects rather than causes, shifting the field of activity from determining culpability and obligation to pay towards voluntary, meritorious contribution. More dangerously, it offers de facto acceptance of the refugees' permanent alienation from their property-a proposition fundamental to the logic of compensation programs.

This may be merely a semantic quibble. Otherwise, there is very little to criticize and much to commend in this book, not least its great contribution as a resource for scholars and officials.

AUTHOR_AFFILIATION

Andrea L. Stanton is a doctoral student in Middle Eastern history at Columbia University.