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The Palestine mandate was built around the assumption that the League of Nations and the British mandatory government would preside over a gradual demographic and political transformation there, creating a European Jewish settler majority to replace the Palestinian Arab one and allowing for the eventual emergence of a Jewish nation-state. This process required a corresponding de-nationalisation of the incumbent Arab population – a project that formally began with the language of the mandate and continued through the mechanisms of governance set by the British mandate state and the League of Nations throughout the mandate period. Through new legal, economic and political mechanisms, the mandate system coalesced around a project of producing Palestinian Arab statelessness that made notable use of a simultaneously emerging language of refugeedom elsewhere in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. This paper explores the use of refugee-related discourse and institutions to produce this deliberate de-nationalisation of Palestinian Arabs during the mandate period, arguing that the League of Nations put into place conditions and categories of statelessness for Palestinians that set them up as 'proto-refugees' long before the physical expulsions of 1948 and set the stage for an international acceptance of their refugee status as a long-established and essentially permanent condition.

"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."--

"The repatriation of Palestinians is a highly topical issue, and a critical component of any future peace process for Israel / Palestine. Until now, the mechanics of repatriation has not been dealt with before in this detail. This book explores the notion that the Palestinian refugee case is exceptional. It does this through the comparative study of refugee repatriation, and by asking the following questions: to what extent can the Palestinian case said to be unique?; Where are the divergences, the overlaps and points of similarity with other refugee situations?; What lessons can be drawn from these comparisons?; How can these lessons inform refugee organizations, the donor community and policy makers? In attempting to answer these questions, the expert contributors cover three main fields. Firstly: the contextual and methodological field, reviewing on one hand the main trends in forced migration and refugee studies and issues concerning policy transfer and comparative research; and on the other hand, the historical and political background of UNHCR and the negotiations around the Palestinian refugee issue. Secondly: the book offers a truly comparative approach with other case studies from around the world. It covers in-depth case studies of specific refugee situations - covering Cambodia, Guatemala, the Horn of Africa, Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia and Herzegovina - to reveal the key issues in the formulation of repatriation programs. Finally, the book draws together the lessons learnt, and considers to what extent these lessons are relevant to the Palestinian-Israeli situation"--Provided by publisher.

The resettlement question and the Israeli-Arab conflict. Policies of Israel, the Arab states, the PLO, and the UN Relief and Works Agency.