Excerpt from The Refugee Question This intensification of nationalist feeling both in the racial and in the economic sphere has put a stop to those movements of population which were normal in pre-war days. For many years before the War there was an annual exodus of hundreds of thousands from Europe to lands across the oceans. These people, though not classed as refugees, were in fact spurred by adverse religious, political, or economic conditions in their countries of origin. It is probablethat facility for emigration at that time prevented movements definitely refugee in charac ter. The importance of the change is evident in the figures published in the annual i.l.o. Year Books. In 1933, for example, Europe actually showed an inward balance of migration, while in 1932 Poland, an area from which emigration before the War was enormous, had the small outward balance of and this was only due to emigration to Palestine, backed by Jewish funds for reasons not purely economic. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

This book is the first full-length study of the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem. Based on recently declassified Israeli, British and American state and party political papers and on hitherto untapped private papers, it traces the stages of the 1947-9 exodus against the backdrop of the first Arab-Israeli war and analyses the varied causes of the flight. The Jewish and Arab decision-making involved, on national and local levels, military and political, is described and explained, as is the crystallisation of Israel's decision to bar a refugee repatriation. The subsequent fate of the abandoned Arab villages, lands and urban neighbourhoods is examined. The study looks at the international context of the war and the exodus, and describes the political battle over the refugees' fate, which effectively ended with the deadlock at Lausanne in summer 1949. Throughout the book attempts to describe what happened rather than what successive generations of Israeli and Arab propagandists have said happened, and to explain the motives of the protagonists.

In the decades after World War II, the United Nations established a global refugee regime that became central to the lives of displaced people around the world. This regime has exerted particular authority over Palestinian refugees, who are served by a specialized UN body, the Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). Formed shortly after the 1948 war, UNRWA continues to provide quasi-state services such as education and health care to Palestinian refugee communities in the Middle East today. This book is a groundbreaking international history of Palestinian refugee politics. Anne Irfan traces the history and politics of UNRWA’s interactions with Palestinian communities, particularly in the refugee camps where it functioned as a surrogate state. She shows how Palestinian refugees invoked internationalist norms to demand their political rights while resisting the UN’s categorization of their plight as an apolitical humanitarian issue. Refuge and Resistance foregrounds how nonelite activism shaped the Palestinian campaign for international recognition, showing that engagement with world politics was driven as much by the refugee grass roots as by the upper echelons of the Palestine Liberation Organization. It demonstrates that refugee groups are important actors in global politics, not simply aid recipients. Recasting modern Palestinian history through the lens of refugee camps and communities, Refuge and Resistance offers vital new perspectives for understanding politics beyond the nation-state.

Encompassing history, politics, and political culture, Bowker grapples with fundamental issues of Palestinian identity in the context of the peace process.

As the Israel-Palestine conflict rages on, it is more important now than ever to understand the history of the Palestinian people. Rosemary Sayigh's The Palestinians is a classic of radical history. Through extensive interviews with Palestinians in refugee camps, she provides a deeply-moving, grassroots story of how the Palestinians came to be who they are today. In their own voices, Palestinians tell stories of the Nabka and their flight from their homeland. Sayigh's powerful account of Palestinians' economic marginalisation the social and psychological effects of being uprooted and the political oppression which they have faced continues to resonate today. Reissued with an extensive new foreword by Noam Chomsky, which brings the story that Sayigh tells up-to-date in the context of the Hamas victory and the war in Lebanon, this book is both a fascinating historical document and an essential insight into the situation in the contemporary Middle East.