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

• Author: Stanton, Andrea L.
• Position: Book Review

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...