Lost Lands

How different are Palestinian refugees?

LOST LANDS

What are the different ways a people can lose their lands?  What do and should they do about it?  What does this mean for the Palestinians?

Until the Christian era, conquerors saw little need to justify or explain their possession of land – they had won it through strength.  That itself perhaps demonstrated their good standing in the eyes of the gods. 

The voyages of discovery  in the Early Modern era threw open wholly new challenges.

Europeans entering newly discovered lands often sought a Christian justification for conquest - the need to spread the faith.   Others argued the discovered lands were effectively vacant because they were not being used.  The New World was described as

‘fruitful and fit for habitation being devoid of all civil inhabitants, where there are only savage and brutish men, which range up and down, little otherwise than the wild beasts of the same[1]’. 

Early settlers in North America often felt a need in addition to come to some kind of agreement with the native inhabitants.  For all the bad faith and progressive deterioration of terms, the various later treaties with Native American tribes in the USA and the Treaty of Waitangi with the Māori demonstrate this hankering after a title based on a greater legitimacy than simple force. 

In practice the collision of a more technologically advanced civilisation with a more backward one usually has disastrous consequences, and not only with Europeans.  When the Maori first heard of the existence of the Chatham Islands from European sailors, their immediate response was to sail there, massacre a fifth of the inhabitants and enslave the rest. 

It is not surprising that nations based on a Christian tradition have a guilty conscience about the original inhabitants, when they exist and even (for example Tasmania) where the contact was so devastating as to wipe them out completely.  The debate between the case for integration or revised, fairer treaties continues.

The situation is a bit different in Europe.  Here, a complex patchwork of communities, self-governing or owing allegiance to various lords, was transformed in the nineteenth century.  Industrialisation, centralisation and democratisation cast into increasingly stark relief who controlled the state, its language and customs, leading to competing and overlapping claims on territories.

The twentieth century has seen the vast majority of those conflicts resolved, usually brutally. 

None of the outstanding issues of the twentieth century resonates as much as the foundation of the State of Israel.  Benjamin Netanyahu interestingly echoes some of the language of the first American settlers, arguing the areas that are now Israel were almost uninhabited before Jewish settlement, with Arab immigrants arriving in numbers as Jewish settlement began to improve the local economy.  But this isn’t a theory widely taken seriously.

Sanctioned by a vote of the UN, the small boundaries originally envisaged were expanded after the war of 1948 during which Arab states, who rejected the UN resolution, sought to crush the new state.  Perhaps 700,000 Arabs left the area that became Israel, driven out by the Israeli army, fleeing the fighting or advised to leave pending an Arab victory, depending on whose story you follow, (but probably mainly the former).  Perhaps 1000 died in the process.    

Unlike displaced persons elsewhere, whom UNHCR sought to resettle, UNRWA was set up with the assumption that Palestinian refugees would return to their homes.  While Arab states took in large numbers, they were frequently not granted citizenship or permanent status, meaning that Palestinians even now amount to a stateless people with approaching 6 million claiming refugee status all over the Middle East. 

Most people can sympathise with the feelings of those pushed out of lands their families had occupied for many generations.  But how does this differ from the other often even more brutal displacements of the twentieth century?   Perhaps 13 million Germans were expelled from ancestral homelands after WWII, with a conservative estimate of half a million dying.    When I was born, German school pupils were still being taught geography with maps showing these areas as German but ‘temporarily under Polish/Russian administration’.       

So is it a matter of guilt?  Does the fact that the Germans were citizens of the aggressor power or, in the case of the Sudeten Germans, a fifth column of supporters within Czechoslovakia, make the difference? 

But in that case, what about the forced transfer of Greeks and Turks after the Greco-Turkish war?  Between 1920-21 around 1.5m Greeks were forced to leave areas along the Ionian and the Black Sea that they had inhabited for 3000 years, not before perhaps 300,000 Pontic Greeks had been massacred.  Around 400,000 Turks moved in the other direction.    

Or what about the 1.1m Poles expelled from what is now Belarus, Ukraine and Lithuania after WWII, and  the 400,000 Finns forced to leave Karelia after the Soviet invasion and annexation after the Winter War?

Or is that Palestinians uniquely lack a home at all?  Germans could flee to West Germany; Finns to Finland, Greeks to Greece, Poles to Poland – where were Palestinians supposed to go?   But the Pontic Greeks spoke a Greek dialect incomprehensible in the ‘homeland’ to which they were expelled and where their ancestors hadn’t lived for 3000 years.   And this take assumes a distinct Palestinian national identity.  This may have emerged over the last 80 years, but it’s worth noting the progressive line for much of the period after 1947 was that Pan Arabism was the future; rejecting states that had been artificially created by European colonists. An observer in the 40s or 50s would have struggled to define a difference between Jordanians and Palestinians.

Is it time?  The Good Friday Agreement saw  the acceptance that, whatever the facts of the seventeenth century plantations and immigration, the Protestant population of Northern Ireland had the same rights to identity as the Nationalist one.  My mother, a Welsh speaker, always claimed to have been taught in history at school that King Arthur would return and reclaim the whole of Britain for the Welsh, but these sentiments aren’t likely to trouble the UK any time soon.   

But the Palestinian expulsions were no more recent than many of the others discussed above.  And indeed the world has in the last few months watched with indifference the complete extinction of the Armenian settlement in Nagorno Karabakh, Armenian since perhaps the second century AD and from which all 100,000 inhabitants have now fled. 

For all the sympathy anyone should have for those expelled from their homes in 1947, the creation of the fourth generation of stateless refugees looks like a cynical but effective move by Arab states.  In the mid to late twentieth century, many of these states were wary of the political radicalism that Palestinians might inject into their societies.  Jordan dealt brutally with the PLO threat in the 1970s, while Lebanon was riven already by sectarian conflicts.  Better to keep refugees in the camps to be returned once the inevitable military victory was secured

Over time, perhaps, the Arab nations saw the power of such a large number of the dispossessed appealing to the Western sympathy for the underdog.  The Arab states have proved ineffective militarily and economically and politically dysfunctional, growing ever weaker relative to Israel.  This means, however, that the younger generation in the West have grown up seeing the conflict through this lens of victimhood. 

It is hard to imagine how scathing the criticisms of ‘revanchism’ would have been had any of the other states describe above – Greeks, Germans, Finns or Poles, kept their refugees in a similar state of limbo over multiple generations as a symbol of their determination to recover lost land.  Rightly or wrongly, those states had to accept the border changes, and the German school maps I described were quietly put away once the 1970 Treaty of Warsaw was signed.    Are we holding the Israeli state to higher standards because it looks Western?  Does that mean the Jewish state is being asked to atone for the misdeeds of earlier Christian kingdoms and empires? 

The return of Palestinian refugees is not going to happen; and Western states are doing no one any favours pretending it could.  Indeed the original UN resolution only referred to return for those ‘wishing to live at peace with their neighbours’ which even a neutral observer might think is questionable here, let alone the average Israeli.   A 50/50 state is likely to descend into immediate civil war, with the Israeli Jewish population all too aware there is now no precedent of an Arab state tolerating a substantial Jewish population.   Sometimes every outcome involves doing an injustice – but the current UNRWA set up arguably just keeps the conflict boiling, and the West would do better to direct our support to countries prepared to absorb Palestinian refugees while compensating them for the historical injustice they have suffered.

---

[1] William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation: 1620-1647