In the years following World War I, the newly formed League of Nations saw refugees scattered in camps across Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq as potential venues for articulating and institutionalizing new forms of international authority in the Middle East. Three decades later, the freshly minted United Nations (UN) took on the project of assisting Palestinian refugees with much the same approach. This article places the two refugee regimes in comparative relief, suggesting some fundamental similarities (while also acknowledging some important differences) between the League's and the UN's use of Middle Eastern refugees both to construct discursive cases for their own institutional value and to establish practical modes of internationalist authority in the Arab Eastern Mediterranean.
Refugees were a priority of the League from its earlier years. Declaring assistance to the tens of thousands of mainly Armenian (and some Assyrian) refugees a “moral and political obligation of the strongest kind,”Footnote 1 League officials began to construct a series of long-term, highly interventionist plans for large-scale refugee relocation and resettlement almost immediately after World War I. In the 1920s and 1930s they collaborated with French authorities in Syria and Lebanon to establish Armenian and Assyrian refugees as discrete ethnic blocs, creating permanent enclaves for them on the outskirts of cities and in certain rural regions. Such a refugee policy drew superficially on earlier Ottoman models of semiautonomy for non-Muslim communities (millets), but it was now envisioned as having new purposes: solidifying French Mandatory rule, countering Syrian Arab nationalist feeling, and helping to establish secure control over difficult border areas while publicly highlighting a humanitarian case for an ongoing and perhaps permanent international presence in the Mashriq.
The League's slow collapse in the late 1930s did not signal the end of the idea that refugee issues provided a uniquely convincing rationale for new forms of international authority. In 1948, following the British abandonment of the Palestine Mandate and the subsequent Zionist expulsion of three-quarters of a million Palestinian Arabs, the new UN revived this concept of a refugee crisis requiring internationalist intervention. The UN's early attempt to find a solution, the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine, failed in its efforts to press for refugee return and/or compensation; its successor would have rather different goals, both more and less ambitious. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), formed in December of 1949, developed programs of refugee encampment and relief intended not only to assist refugees but also to engage in land development, agricultural and industrial modernization, and political stabilization in ways that would protect the interests of its most important stakeholders (particularly the United States) while advancing a humanitarian argument for an essentially permanent UN presence in all the Arab states hosting refugees.
The actual practices of international authority that emerged around each of these refugee regimes were inevitably fragmentary and ad hoc, as disagreements emerged within both the League and the UN and as refugees and host states shaped, restricted, and sometimes quashed their activities. Internal conversations about the League's refugee regime in Syria and Lebanon reflected divergent political and philosophical commitments among its various bodies and its French mandatory interlocutors; local resistance also diluted refugee policy, as Armenian and Assyrian refugees fought resettlement and local Arab communities vehemently protested refugee policies in the press and refused to sell land for purposes of refugee establishment.Footnote 2 Similarly, the early UN served as a site for major internal disagreements about the Palestinian refugee issue that the founding of UNRWA highlighted rather than resolved, while at the regional level many of UNRWA's early schemes for resettlement and development collapsed following opposition from Palestinian refugees themselves and from the Arab states hosting them. The resulting camp regime partially (and usually inadvertently) came to reflect at least some refugee interests in nationalization, memorialization, and the preservation of their political claims to Palestine.
Similarly, the public relations machinery at both the League and the UN long continued to find Middle Eastern refugees useful for advocacy purposes despite the many outright failures and the ongoing practical limits of the actual refugee regimes that had emerged. As late as 1935 League officials were still contending that the ongoing refugee issues in Iraq and Syria demonstrated the necessity and value of an international presence, showing “how well an international organisation can handle a problem akin to the refugee problem when all national efforts have failed.”Footnote 3 The UN echoed such arguments nearly thirty years later, crediting UNRWA's refugee program with “maintaining the precarious stability of the area, and . . . [enabling] the Middle East to work in a more orderly, evolutionary manner.”Footnote 4
There are many reasons that these parallels have been overlooked: the long-standing tendency to treat Palestine-Israel as a sui generis case with few regional or global points of comparison, the relative paucity of historical (as opposed to anthropological) work on UNRWA and on Palestinian refugees generally,Footnote 5 and the scholarly portrayal of the UN as departing in fundamentally important ways from the political philosophies and operational models of its predecessor.Footnote 6 But recognizing these historical resemblances is central to understanding how refugees operated at the intersection of local, national, colonial, and international authority throughout this crucial period of nation-state formation and ethnonational definition. This article, then, seeks to identify the many resonances between the League's post–World War I refugee policies for Armenians and Assyrians and the UN's Palestinian refugee programs after 1948. It argues that in both instances, refugees became a central site for articulating arguments about the validity and necessity of new and rather vaguely defined forms of internationalism, even as the policies themselves often mainly sought (and just as often failed) to advance the interests of the League's and the UN's primary stakeholders.Footnote 7 Such a comparative examination not only illuminates the continuities of concepts of refugeedom, statehood, and citizenship, but also suggests the ways in which 20th-century internationalism depended in fundamental ways on statelessness and stateless individuals for its own philosophical legitimacy and practical modes of operation.
THE LEAGUE'S EARLY REFUGEE REGIME
The idea that refugees constituted a problem uniquely suited to the capacities of international authority underpinned the League's refugee project from the beginning.Footnote 8 Its first refugee offices were formed at the behest of the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Gustave Ador, who wrote to the League Council in 1921 to request that attention be paid to the 800,000 Russian refugees in Europe. He declared the League to be “the only supernational political authority capable of solving a problem which is beyond the power of exclusively humanitarian organisations”Footnote 9 —and, he implied, individual national governments. The British Secretariat member Philip Noel-Baker further emphasized this message in his own support for League action on refugees. “The problems connected with the refugees,” he declared, “are insoluble except by international action.”Footnote 10 In a period when the newly constituted League was looking for a role in the postwar world, refugees offered a valuable opening as a site of intervention that seemed tailored for the new internationalism.
This seemed especially true in the Middle East, where the League held a degree of political authority not only over massive refugee populations but also over the emerging states of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Palestine, and (briefly) Transjordan via the Mandate system. The postwar treaties divided the former Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire into newly constituted nation-states and assigned them to British and French “Mandate” governments operating under the aegis of the League, on the grounds that they were “not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world.”Footnote 11 The League had faced serious challenges to its plans to resettle the war's refugees in Western Europe and North America, where postwar governments were now enacting new and highly restrictive immigration policies as public expressions of national sovereignty.Footnote 12 In these spaces the League's primary tool for refugee settlement, the Nansen Passport, had to rely on voluntary acceptance by individual states for its implementation.Footnote 13 But in Middle Eastern Mandate states where national sovereignty was essentially nonexistent and the League claimed the right to oversee British and French colonial administrations, refugee resettlement policies could be enacted without permission from local populations and designed specifically to support a new form of European political authority. Refugee policy thus served both as a tool of colonial administrations and as a mode of differentiating sovereign from less sovereign political spaces.Footnote 14
From the early 1920s, League officials began to collaborate with British and French Mandate authorities to consider how the resettlement of the Armenians and Assyrians who made up the bulk of refugees there could be deployed to shape political boundaries and demographics in ways that buttressed European Mandatory rule and made a case for the League's particular brand of internationalism.Footnote 15 They had already come up against questions of refugee policy in a different context, dealing with the hundreds of thousands of “White Russian” refugees streaming out of Bolshevik-controlled areas in Russia and Eastern Europe.Footnote 16 In 1921 the Norwegian diplomat and former Arctic explorer Fridtjof Nansen was appointed “General Commission for the Russian Refugees” at the behest of, among others, the International Red Cross. His initial charge—either to repatriate refugees to Russia or to find employment for them where they were—was rendered moot when the Soviet government stripped them of their citizenship the following year. Nansen, under the new and broader title of High Commissioner for Refugees, faced the question of how to achieve some permanent settlement for huge numbers of stateless, displaced people. These now included Armenians for whom the always problematic possibility of imminent “repatriation” had likewise vanished following the collapse of the short-lived Armenian republic.Footnote 17
By this time most of the survivors of the Armenian genocide—which had also encompassed exterminatory deportations of the Assyrian populations of eastern AnatoliaFootnote 18 —were encamped in refugee shelters run by the American missionary organization Near East Relief and other smaller Christian missions in Syria and Lebanon, with some further refugee gatherings in Iraq and Palestine.Footnote 19 By 1921 Syria and Lebanon were already hosting upwards of sixty thousand refugees in Aleppo, Beirut, Alexandretta, and elsewhere. Tens of thousands more Armenians and Assyrians were in camps in Iraq following the British evacuation of anti-Ottoman forces from the Iranian–Turkish borderlands in the final stages of the war; smaller numbers found themselves in Palestine, where local Armenian communities organized church relief efforts that brought some survivors to Jerusalem.Footnote 20 In the aftermath of the French withdrawal from Cilicia and its handover to the emerging Turkish republic, the numbers expanded further. In December of 1921, 16,500 more refugees were moved from Mersin to Syria by sea and 12,000 entered Aleppo and Alexandretta overland; the next summer an additional 27,000 Anatolian Christian refugees (of who two-thirds were Armenian, one-third Greek, and about 1,000 Assyrian) fled to Aleppo to escape Turkish–Greek violence.Footnote 21 By 1924, one source estimated, nearly one-third of the 205,000 Armenian refugees across the region had landed in Syria and Lebanon.Footnote 22
Fridtjof Nansen now began to consider a permanent “solution” for these Armenian refugees that would resettle some in Soviet Armenia (a substitute for the still-extant, though at this point highly implausible, commitment to the concept of Armenian nationhood encompassed in the now-defunct Treaty of Sèvres) and integrate most of the rest into their Middle Eastern host countries as permanent but discrete ethnonational communities. By this point much of the League's refugee settlement work had been turned over to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), run by the French socialist Albert Thomas, a former minister of munitions with a long-standing interest in international labor law. His relative silence about labor issues in colonial contexts—and, perhaps, his consistent and well-documented commitment to Zionism—indicated his broad amenability to working with the Mandate governments in the Middle East. Under his tenure, the ILO was broadly supportive of the project of the Mandate and the desires of the French Mandatory authorities.Footnote 23 Nevertheless, tensions arose in the triangular relationship between Nansen, the ILO, and the French High Commission, with Nansen remaining committed to the idea of mass Armenian resettlement in Soviet Yerevan (despite the logistical barriers to entry that the Soviet state was busy erecting by the mid-1920s, not to mention its political distance from the Armenian sovereignty for which nationalists had originally hoped)Footnote 24 and increasingly embittered by the lack of interest in this project from other quarters within the League.Footnote 25
From Nansen's perspective, resettlement in Soviet Armenia and in the Syrian and Lebanese Mandate states could coexist as complementary parts of a broad League refugee resettlement project. As Nansen advocated for mass “repatriation” of refugees to Yerevan, his reporting committee was simultaneously proposing that refugees in Syria could be permanently resettled locally: “the establishment of a maximum of 10,000 [out of a total of about 100,000] on the land would liquidate substantially the acute portion of the Armenian refugee problem in Syria . . . a revolving fund of 1,000,000 French francs would constitute an important step toward the realisation of this proposal.”Footnote 26 To this end, the League began to plan for the permanent settlement of Armenians in Syria and Lebanon in collaboration with the French High Commission—a partnership that also drew in philo-Armenian groups in Europe viewed as vital sources of funding for the underfunded High Commission.Footnote 27 In 1926 money from these Armenian organizations, the Lebanese government, the High Commission for Refugees, and the Nansen Stamp Fund went to building houses on the outskirts of Beirut and acquiring rural land for settling 3,500 “agricultural refugees.” This agenda was partly determined by these contributing private organizations that sought to maintain a degree of Armenian cultural and social distinctiveness within Syria and Lebanon and required that their funds be used only to resettle refugees in coastal areas “near existing Armenian settlements.”Footnote 28
Their goals coincided with those of French Mandatory authorities, who wanted to maintain or even create Armenian enclaves in Syria and Lebanon rather than encourage emigration or assimilation. The ILO maintained the fiction that such settlements were temporary until such time as Armenia could be reconstituted as a sovereign nation. As a report put it in 1925, “until an Armenian National Home can be established, every possible facility should be given to the refugees to establish themselves in productive employment in other countries so as to maintain and safeguard their national existence.”Footnote 29 In practice, though, Thomas and his staff largely supported the resettlement efforts of the French High Commission, whose commitment to maintaining Armenian refugees as distinct ethnic enclaves aimed primarily at further fragmenting the ethnoreligious landscape in postwar Syria, preventing the emergence of Communist sympathies among refugees, and providing a facade of intercommunal political participation.Footnote 30
Some officials tried rather weakly to make the case that such schemes reflected the desires and interests of the refugees themselves. One 1925 report responding to British and American criticism of the conditions of these settlements argued that it was neither possible nor desirable to break up the refugee community and settle Armenians on an individual basis: “All Armenians who have not yet attained a certain degree of economic independence wish to be members of groups consisting of their own countrymen, as they derive a sense of security from the existence of groups of this kind.”Footnote 31 Such claims were belied by internal conversations that articulated the French commitment to maintaining refugee communities in Syria specifically to serve Mandate interests, actively opposing both assimilation into Arab Syria and emigration out of the Middle East for Armenian refugees. In 1936, High Commissioner for Syria Henri Ponsot precisely articulated the French approach: “It is necessary to help the refugees primarily to establish them permanently. This is what the goal is. With the Armenians, what one fears is that as soon as they have a little savings, they will wish to go elsewhere. This must be avoided . . . [and] this task is underway: what has been done in the Levant toward this goal does honor to the League of Nations.”Footnote 32 The French High Commission—and, by extension, the ILO—unsurprisingly viewed refugees primarily as tools for the maintenance of the Mandate system, not as sites of humanitarian refugee empowerment. This development represented an enormous disappointment to Nansen himself, who decried European approaches to Armenian nationhood as little more than self-interested window-dressing: “Pity the Armenian people! It would have been better if its name had never been uttered by a European diplomat.”Footnote 33
EXPANDING RESETTLEMENT: ARMENIANS AND ASSYRIANS IN BORDER AREAS
The idea of collective “resettlement” for the Armenians had a further incarnation with even more direct benefits for the French Mandate: the transfer of some urban refugees to rural, agricultural sites in the Jazira, the Ghab valley, and the contested territory around Alexandretta, as a central part of what one French official called a “final and permanent solution of the Armenian problem.”Footnote 34 This “solution” sought to create Armenian buffer zones in various areas where French control remained tenuous—particularly, but not exclusively, in the border areas between the new Syrian Mandate state and the Turkish republic.Footnote 35 Such agricultural resettlement of refugees also served as a way of directing development money away from potentially nationalist Arab Syrians and toward Armenians whose privileges within the Mandate state depended on their cooperation with the French authorities.Footnote 36
By this point the ILO had relinquished its refugee responsibilities to the newly established Nansen International Office for Refugees, which supported not only these plans but also their extension, a proposal in the early 1930s to resettle Assyrian refugees from Iraq in these same Syrian borderlands.Footnote 37 Tens of thousands of Assyrians originally from the Hakkari region (now in southeast Turkey) had entered Iraq under British military authority during the last stages of World War I and were subsequently established in scattered settlements in the area around Mosul.Footnote 38 Their decade-long relationship with the British authorities—particularly their eventual drafting into the colonial “Levies” protecting British interests against local Kurdish and Arab insurgencies—led to a rising sense of panic within the community as the Mandate was dissolved in favor of a truncated form of Iraqi independence in 1932.Footnote 39 In July 1933 a group of Assyrian tribal leaders wrote to the Minister of the Interior in Baghdad to announce their intention to cross the border into Syria: “the Iraq Govt Policy was explained to us. . . . Mutasarrif openly said ‘those unsatisfied with this policy are free to emigrate from Iraq,’ accordingly we have come to the frontier and we request the Iraq Govt not to block the road to those who want to join us.”Footnote 40 One month later Assyrians in the village of Simele and its surrounds became victims of a brutal massacre at the hands of the Iraqi army.Footnote 41
At this juncture the French High Commission, fearing disruption in the event of Assyrian expulsions from Iraq and hoping to use Assyrian settlers for the benefit of the colonial state, agreed to permit a limited number of Assyrian refugees to settle in Syria. The League of Nations was so enthusiastic about this plan that two officials proposed making a commercial film about it, to promote the League's unique capabilities and the value of international authority.
All the main elements of the League are involved, for the subject is at once political, economic and humanitarian. Political, in that the film would show the settlement by the League of a thorny local problem which has been disturbing the Near East for a considerable time; economic, in that the film would show what the League can do to help the development of uninhabited land; and humanitarian, in that the film would show how well an international organisation can handle a problem akin to the refugee problem when all national efforts have failed.
This particular refugee community, they argued, could serve as an example of the value, efficacy, and legitimacy of internationalist action while also offering practical support to the French High Commission—with the additional virtue that “a film on the Assyrians is highly unlikely to arouse any strong political feeling.”Footnote 42
The first of these settlement proposals focused on territory in the Ghab, a flat plain west of Hama targeted by French and League officials as a possible site of agricultural improvement via large-scale irrigation and drainage projects. The Assyrian refugees were to serve as an entry point for broader schemes of land reclamation; as a French member of the League subcommittee put it, such “essential works (the construction of the Acharna barrage, the dredging of the Orontes, the tunnel of Karkor etc.) [would be] necessary not only for the reclamation of the land allocated to the Assyrians but also for the reclamation of the remainder of the Ghab Plain in due course.”Footnote 43 (This exact space would later be the site of a very similar US-led development scheme.) Local pressures soon put paid to this plan, as Syrian Arab nationalists and pan-Arabists spearheaded protests against the use of state funds to accommodate non-Syrian, non-Arab refugees and local landowners raised land prices to prohibitive levels.Footnote 44 Eventual estimates of the projected outlay for the proposed irrigation project, including compensation for landholders whose land would be flooded, came to about 86 million francs in League estimates (of which the financial subcommittee admitted they could not find 13.5 million) and more than 122 million francs in some of the French figures.Footnote 45 Further, the original French plan to clear land for Assyrians by forcing foreclosures on indebted properties in the Ghab became less and less tenable as nationalist feeling rose. By 1936 French ambassador Alexis Leger was backing away from the idea, telling the League, “The increasingly uncompromising attitude of the majority elements in the Levant is a fact. . . . Already landowners are showing little disposition to offer the Trustee Board acceptable terms and this at a time when the current political evolution deprives the mandatory authority of part of the means previously at its disposal to create a conciliatory state of mind.”Footnote 46
The next, more modest scheme involved limited Assyrian settlement in a remote and sparsely populated area in the Khabur valley, in the northeastern reaches of Syria. It was already home to about 500 Assyrians who had crossed the border in 1933 following the massacre and subsequently negotiated an agreement with the French High Commission and the Iraqi government to allow their families to join them. In 1935, 340 more settlers from a Mosul refugee camp set up just after the massacre were transferred to the site, along with another 1,000 refugees “taken from among the poorest members of the Mosul community.”Footnote 47 The French administration had less of a presence and met with less resistance in this region, where it acquired some land for the scheme by appropriating territory from local Bedouin communities and managed to build and settle a few small Assyrian villages with French and Iraqi money.
This collaboration between the French High Commission, the Iraqi government, the British, and the League aroused suspicion and unease among Syrian nationalists, some of whom feared the long-term consequences of land allocation to non-Syrians and saw parallels between Armenian and Assyrian refugee settlement in Syria and Lebanon and European Jewish colonization in Palestine. As early as 1925 Lebanese Arab leaders were already accusing the Armenian refugee community of trying to establish a “national home,” reminiscent of Zionism in Palestine, within Lebanese borders.Footnote 48 By the 1930s press coverage in Syria had begun targeting Armenians as a non-native element representing colonial intervention and reactionary antinationalism. A 1931 headline in al-Yawm (Today), a newspaper based in Damascus, made this comparison clear, asking: “The Armenian national home: is it a fantasy or a reality?” The article named specific pockets of Armenian settlement in the Jazira, suggesting that they jeopardized the territory's inclusion in a future independent state.Footnote 49 The Iraqi government had grudgingly contributed funds to the Assyrian resettlement scheme, but now began to declare that it would oppose “any further transfer of Assyrians from Iraq to the Khabur unless as part of new scheme to remove the Assyrians permanently far away from Iraq.”Footnote 50 And to add to the opposition, many among the transferred Assyrian refugees had themselves begun to demand loudly that they be repatriated to Mosul.Footnote 51
By the end of the Mandate, then, the League's grandly conceived refugee policy of settling Armenians and Assyrians in the outskirts of cities and in rural border regions to support French Mandatory authority over Syria had devolved into a patchwork of underfunded and haphazard settlement schemes, often derailed or at least limited by both internal discord and local and refugee opposition. Nevertheless, officials continued to make use of the refugee question as a rationale for a continued League presence even after the institution had essentially been dissolved in Europe—to the extent that as late as 1946 longstanding League representative Georges Burnier was still presenting his office in Beirut as a branch of the Nansen Office “under the authority of the League of Nations.”Footnote 52
REFUGEES AND INTERNATIONAL GOVERNANCE REDUX: THE UN AND THE PALESTINIANS
In the aftermath of World War II and the 1948 conflict in Palestine, the international organizations charged with the welfare of three-quarters of a million Palestinian Arab refugees began to construct relief and resettlement schemes that reflected many of the assumptions, ideologies, and political goals of the refugee regime for displaced Armenians and Assyrians thirty years earlier. Like the League's refugee schemes, the UN's plans were significantly circumscribed by internal disagreements as well as by refugee resistance, local activism, and host country demands. And as in the League, elements within the UN nevertheless pressed the case that its emerging refugee regime constituted a convincing argument for the necessity of an internationalist presence in the Arab states of the Middle East.
Just as the League had inherited an informal but substantial refugee regime for Armenians and Assyrians run by private missionary organizations like Near East Relief, the newly minted UN found itself assuming responsibility for a Palestinian refugee effort in concert with already extant Christian missions and other humanitarian institutions (though, of course, these had not acted as refugee relief organizations prior to 1948). The Quakers took charge of relief efforts in Gaza, while the International Committee of the Red Cross operated among refugees in Israel and Jordan and the League of Red Cross Societies ran relief efforts in Lebanon, Syria, and other parts of Jordan—all arrangements concluded in formal agreements with the UN in December 1948.Footnote 53 Like the earlier cooperation between the League and mission relief groups, these agreements were made partly to mobilize services and institutional support already in place but also to fill gaps in funding. American and British Protestant missions in Palestine immediately interpreted mass Palestinian Arab expulsion as parallel to the earlier Armenian refugee crisis and responded along similar organizational lines, urging donations from American and British congregations to support the relief efforts of organizations such as the Church Missionary Society in the Middle East, the World Council of Churches, and the long-established American Near East Relief.Footnote 54 These links were material as well as institutional: some of the seventeen Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, for instance, had originally been built as shelters for Armenian refugees after World War I.Footnote 55
The United Nations Conciliation Commission on Palestine (UNCCP), founded in December 1948, had a mandate of “refugee protection, particularly to achieve a specific durable solution for the entire population of displaced Palestinians [emphasis in the original]”Footnote 56 —including potential mass return as well as “the repatriation, resettlement and economic and social rehabilitation of the refugees and the payment of compensation.”Footnote 57 But Israel's refusal to consider full Palestinian return, and varying degrees of resistance to permanent incorporation from both the refugees themselves and the Arab states now hosting them, presented insuperable obstacles to both repatriation and resettlement.Footnote 58 With the exception of Jordan, which had long hoped for an absorption of some Palestinian territory and population and offered its refugees citizenship almost immediately, the Arab countries now hosting most of the refugees did not want to absorb hundreds of thousands of destitute people and reify and legitimize the State of Israel in the process. Israel, in turn, dug in on its position that Palestinian Arabs would not be allowed to return to their homes and property and rapidly began to ensure the impossibility of mass return by constructing a legal regime around “absentee” property and reallocating Palestinian land, houses, and possessions to incoming Jewish immigrants, whose numbers reached nearly 700,000 by 1951.Footnote 59 So in 1949, having failed to resolve the question of return for the 750,000 Palestinian refugees scattered across the Arab Middle East and privately acknowledging the unlikelihood of mass Palestinian return, the UN established the United Nations Relief and Works Agency to provide services in the new refugee camps that were already becoming an established aspect of the political landscape of the Middle East.
UNRWA AND THE PROMOTION OF INTERNATIONAL GOVERNANCE
The gradual attenuation of the UNCCP—which was never formally dissolved but had been essentially abandoned as early as 1951Footnote 60 —left UNRWA as the only UN institution charged with oversight of displaced Palestinians, who were treated separately from the postwar European refugee regime represented by the International Refugee Organization and then the UN High Commission on Refugees and quickly became a separate and unique category of refugee.Footnote 61 UNRWA was established as a temporary agency and was explicitly not responsible for—indeed, was forbidden from—engaging with questions of a permanent settlement of the refugee question. Rather, it was charged with the task of registering Palestinian refugees, a highly contentious task in itself, and providing them with basic services and opportunities for social and economic development—the “works” part of the agency's name. As such, in its early years the organization proposed and partially carried out several highly contradictory efforts aimed not only—perhaps not even primarily—at improving the lot of Palestinian refugees themselves but also at institutionalizing relationships among the newly formed UN, the Arab host countries where the refugees found themselves, and the superpowers who constituted the UN's most powerful members. Just as the League had maintained a public commitment to the idea of Armenian and Assyrian nationhood while gradually allowing the question of Armenian and Assyrian national “homelands” to lapse in favor of other schemes of refugee encampment and resettlement, in the early 1950s the UN began to construct a regime for Palestinian refugees that publicly advocated return while practically establishing refugee institutions intended both to offer immediate practical succor and to bolster its own presence in the Middle East—a contradiction that reflected its officials’ complicated and ambiguous approaches to their institution and the populations they found themselves serving.
From the beginning of the expulsions, advocates for the UN had suggested that Palestinian refugees might constitute a useful site for international intervention in Arab states just emerging from decades of colonial rule. The Swedish diplomat Folke Bernadotte—the UN's appointed Security Council mediator, murdered in Jerusalem by Zionist terrorists in September 1948—reported just before his death that he thought UN aid to refugees “might indirectly be of permanent value in establishing social services in the countries concerned, or greatly improving existing services . . . [especially] general social administrative organizations, maternal and child care services, the training of social workers, and the improvement of food economics.”Footnote 62 In 1949, the UNCCP established an “Economic Survey Mission,” headed by the former US Tennessee Valley Authority director Gordon Clapp, that underlined the UN's idea that refugees could serve as an entry point for international authority across the region, helping to define and promote the role of the UN in the postwar world. This document proposed that the UN engage in large-scale public works not only to assist the refugees themselves but also to change the political and economic landscape of the Middle East as a whole. “A higher standard of living must grow out of the application of human skill and ingenuity . . . The highly developed nations of the world did not make their way by wishing,” the report declared, “[and] the administration of the relief and public works programme for refugees . . . can, in the considered judgment of the Economic Survey Mission, become a contributing factor for peace and economic stability in the Near East.”Footnote 63
In part, of course, such plans derived from the prevailing development theory of the time, which advocated massive investment in public works as a path to rapid industrialization and modernization—and, for the Eisenhower administration, to a new US-dominated regional and global order.Footnote 64 But the Clapp mission and UNRWA's initial proposals, in their commitment to the idea that refugees could serve as a site for “development” via international economic and political intervention, also built on the League's premises for refugee policy in the Middle East three decades earlier. Their development schemes clearly paralleled the attempts in the 1920s and 1930s to settle Armenian and Assyrian refugees in rural Syrian border zones, and reflected earlier modes of thinking about refugees as potential tools for claiming and developing unproductive land and controlling difficult territory.Footnote 65 The Clapp report recommended four “pilot demonstration” projects as initial forays into such works planning, one of which—a “reclamation” project in the Ghab consisting of “a complete engineering-agricultural and economic plan for the development of the valley”—closely recalled the irrigation and land development project the French Mandate government and the League had proposed in the 1930s in the context of Assyrian and Armenian settlement in precisely the same area. It also suggested the revival of the other schemes of land development discussed in the context of refugee settlement in the 1930s, noting that “the much planned and discussed development of the more remote areas of the Khabur River and the savannahs of the Jezira would appear more feasible than at present, if experience could be gained first in the development of the Ghab.”Footnote 66
By this point Israel was explicitly exempted from this Mandate of internationalist development, despite its status as host to hundreds of thousands of refugees from Europe and the Arab world, on the grounds that it “already has available technical mean of all kinds . . . [and has already begun] with the relatively large funds placed at its disposal from abroad, to develop irrigation and to employ modern agricultural methods.” Israel, the report declared, possessed “means of enquiry, education and progress . . . superior to anything available in the neighbouring Arab States.”Footnote 67 Such distinctions between recently decolonized Arab countries, where refugees represented a site of internationalist intervention in the form of large-scale development schemes, and Israel, where a European settler project had already taken hold institutionally, paralleled earlier League modes of using refugee resettlement policies as a mode of distinguishing between more and less sovereign spaces. The UN would find, though, that even in their postcolonial uncertainty the newly sovereign Arab host states wielded a greater capacity to resist such international intervention than had their Mandatory or neocolonial predecessors.
In its first years, UNRWA engaged in large-scale efforts to “reclaim” large swathes of territory for Palestinian refugees in Egypt, Jordan, and Gaza through massive irrigation and water development schemes. In 1953 it came to an agreement with the Jordanian government to earmark $40 million of its $200 million “rehabilitation fund” to finance a major water and power development project in the Yarmouk and Jordan Valleys. With additional money from the US Operations Mission in Jordan, UNRWA hired a private engineering firm to complete a survey and estimate the costs of irrigating more than 500,000 dunums of land in the Jordan Valley and provide 167 kilowatt hours of power to the region.Footnote 68 Its officials also proposed plans for further water development, buildings, and highways, as well as creating a Jordan Development Bank to offer loans to refugees starting small-scale businesses.Footnote 69 Other schemes mooted the same year included a massive proposal to irrigate part of the Sinai with water from the Nile, on which the newly established ʿAbd al-Nasir government and UNRWA agreed to collaborate; and in Gaza, UNRWA undertook to “reclaim certain sandy areas by afforestation,” planting 4.5 million seedlings before abandoning the idea in 1959.Footnote 70 Such campaigns suggested an UNRWA regime whose goals went well beyond providing immediate succor to the refugees themselves to creating a strong and highly visible international presence engaged in land and population management.
As had also been true of earlier settlement and development schemes surrounding Armenian and Assyrian refugees in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, this approach reflected the perceived material interests of the international agencies’ key stakeholders. Howard Wilson, a representative of the American Friends Service Committee in Geneva, noted the particularly American orientation of such development schemes: “It has been my impression that this type of solution to the problem is very appealing to Americans especially . . . There is obviously a great appeal in the idea of a new TVA [Tennessee Valley Authority] in the Tigris-Euphratis [sic] valley, reorganization thereby of ‘backward’ Arab agriculture, reclaiming of land, the establishing of photogenic subsistence homelands.”Footnote 71 The United States, which represented UNRWA's single most important financial backer and in some years provided as much as 70 percent of its funding, viewed these schemes of refugee relief as a mode of preventing Communist feeling among the Palestinian dispossessed (recalling earlier French worries about Communist feeling in Armenian refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria) as well as a form of economic and political leverage with their Arab host states.Footnote 72 Assistant Secretary of State George McGhee put the matter clearly in a statement to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs in 1950:
The political loss of this area to the Soviet Union would be a major disaster comparable to its loss during war. Certainly the political strategic position of the Soviet Union would be immeasurably strengthened by the attainment of its objectives in the Near East . . . [The Palestinian refugees] will continue to serve as a natural focal point for exploitation by Communist and disruptive elements which neither we nor the Near Eastern governments can afford to ignore . . . . The presence of three-quarters of a million idle, destitute people—a number greater than the combined strength of all the standing armies of the Near East—whose discontent increases with the passage of time, is the greatest threat to the security of the area which now exists.Footnote 73
By 1961, the State Department was defending its policy of supporting UNRWA by pointing out that at a cost of nine cents a day it had been “remarkably successful in keeping the potentially explosive refugee problem under control.”Footnote 74 Though the United States arguably had less at stake (and considerably less political authority) in the Levant than France had thirty years before, its use of refugee populations reflected similar interests, goals, and strategies.
But like the earlier refugee plans coming from the League, UNRWA's schemes faced resistance from different quarters that often limited and sometimes actually dismantled its most grandiose plans. First, of course, its own Mandate conflicted with its parent body's approach to the Palestine/Israel question. Locally and regionally, competing Israeli water development schemes, demands from the Arab countries over water access, and rising Cold War tensions meant that most of these ideas were never realized. By 1955, out of a projected budget of 200 million dollars the agency had spent only about 5.6 million on preliminary work, with no prospects of being able to move forward on any of their main development proposals.Footnote 75 Two years later, UNRWA was reporting that no progress had been made on either of the major irrigation projects proposed for Jordan and Egypt, “in the absence of acceptance by the governments involved.”Footnote 76 In the second half of the 1950s, facing resistance to its “works” program from the host states targeted for development, UNRWA gradually turned its attention away from these projects to focus on food, shelter, and education within the camps themselves—an approach made possible by tacit support from Egyptian and Jordanian officials who broadly tended to view the refugees as charges of an international system that had approved and supported the creation of Israel and was therefore responsible for those the new state had dispossessed.Footnote 77
But here UNRWA often ran into difficulties with the Palestinian peasantry who made up most of the refugee population and who were determined to regard the camps and their exile as temporary phenomena. This problem was reflected in one of UNRWA's most fundamental limitations, its theoretically temporary mandate and the necessity of re-upping its very existence every three years. Local populations, too, resented both the presence of the refugees and the agency supporting them.Footnote 78 In Gaza, where tensions between the 80,000 previously established residents and the approximately 250,000 refugees who arrived in 1948 were already high, UNRWA's commitment to help only the displaced (despite the poverty of the longer-established inhabitants and the disastrous impact of the war) caused anger and dismay.Footnote 79 Refugees themselves sometimes refused to register their families, engaged in subterfuge to access ration cards and provisions, destroyed camp property, and defied UNRWA and host country restrictions on building onto camp structures.Footnote 80 By 1961, UNRWA had begun focusing on efforts that aroused less opposition; it replaced all the tents in the camps across the region with shelters, established more enduring medical services, and set up school facilities and curricula.Footnote 81 In practice, the camps that had emerged by the 1960s often inadvertently served refugee interests in preserving memory, establishing spaces for Palestinian nationalization and memorialization, and creating opportunities for political activism—including, sometimes, informal military training and the amassing of weaponry.Footnote 82
Despite its many failures and its eventual emergence as an institution severely restricted by the demands and pressures of refugees, local communities, and host governments, UNRWA's services to Palestinian refugees emerged as an early and public raison d’être of the UN. Already by the mid-1950s the agency was producing public relations brochures and pamphlets intended “to supply visiting journalists and tourists with an idea of the nature and scale of the operation” and to present it as a site “of considerable achievement . . . which the Agency staff in Jordan views with pride but without complacency.”Footnote 83 While acknowledging the collapse of many of its original development plans, one report claimed that UNRWA's
current programmes of education and vocational training benefit not only those who receive the training (without in any way prejudicing the question of where they may ultimately live) but also advance the technical and economic development of the Middle East . . . There would appear to be little doubt that the services which UNRWA has rendered, with the co-operation and assistance of the host Governments, have contributed to maintaining the precarious stability of the area, and perhaps to the creation of a climate which may enable the forces which are shaping the future of the Middle East to work in a more orderly, evolutionary manner.Footnote 84
Just as had happened with Armenian and Assyrian refugees thirty years earlier, Palestinian refugees had become a venue for articulating the argument for international authority as a positive influence—perhaps even an urgent necessity—across the Middle East.Footnote 85
CONCLUSIONS
The parallels between the League's use of Armenian and Assyrian refugees after World War I and the UN's deployment of Palestinian refugees after 1948 are remarkable. In both cases, these new agencies created plans for refugee encampment and resettlement designed not only as schemes of immediate humanitarian relief but also as ways of establishing new forms of international authority in the Mashriq. The various refugee commissions of the League and the ILO collaborated with the British and French Mandatory governments in Iraq and Syria to resettle refugees as discrete ethnic blocs along the borders of the Syrian Mandate state, with the goals of developing agricultural land and solidifying Mandatory authority. They also sought to remake Armenian and Assyrian refugees as discernably separate subject communities with strong ties to the French colonial government, as a counterbalance to increasingly vocal Syrian Arab nationalist interests. After 1948 the UN deployed Palestinian refugees in very similar ways, using them as sites for land development, ambitious schemes of agricultural modernization, and venues for anti-Communist activities within newly independent Arab states of particular interest to the United States.
Some scholars have argued that refugee agencies and institutions had the (mostly inadvertent) effect of empowering refugee communities by providing a venue for their self-definition;Footnote 86 but they also sidelined refugees in an institutional sense, relegating their concerns to the sphere of internationalist humanitarianism rather than global politics. As such, refugees often perceived their best opportunities for activism and protest to lie in disrupting internationalist and state-level refugee policies, thereby foregrounding refugees’ political demands rather than their aid needs. It is telling that in both instances discussed here, League and UN attempts to use refugees to establish and buttress an internationalist presence in the Middle East foundered not only in the face of internal disagreements but also as a consequence of active resistance from refugees and host states, who forced accommodations to refugee interests, limits on the programs’ regional political goals, and in some cases the abandonment of particular schemes for land development or permanent resettlement. Unlike many observers of humanitarianism past and present, refugees themselves were often quite cognizant that they were being treated not as a temporary humanitarian problem but as a useful and long-term venue for establishing new forms of political authority across the Middle East and beyond.
