I

Our first ‘R’ is ‘refugee’. Historians have written with some justification that the twentieth century was the century of the refugee – a designation that it now seems the twenty-first century might well come to share.Footnote ⁶ During the First World War, the cataclysmic event that opened the ‘age of extremes’, physical displacement was an experience shared by Belgians fleeing German troops; Jews who hastily left their residences in Galicia and Bukovina; Italians forced out of Austria; ex-Ottoman Armenians seeking refuge in Russian-administered Erevan; a tsunami of Russian émigrés who fled the Bolshevik revolution; and many more – amounting to well over a million refugees by the time the war finally drew to a close. The mid-century years saw any number of further mass displacements, including the internationally sponsored ‘population exchange’ between Greece and Turkey in 1923, the epic dislocations across Nazi- and Soviet-occupied territory during the Second World War, and the mass expulsions of ethnic Germans from eastern Europe after 1945. Fast forwarding to 2006, there were about 10 million officially recognized refugees worldwide, not including some 26 million internally displaced persons.Footnote ⁷ Today, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that there are some 35 million refugees and 62.5 million internally displaced people across the globe.Footnote ⁸

Emphasizing the scale and scope of these forced displacements does not deny earlier experiences of exile, nor the fact that the term ‘refugee’ has been used in a variety of ways for several centuries. Etymologically, the Oxford English dictionary dates the first appearance of the word ‘refugee’ in English to 1628, primarily to designate Huguenots fleeing France due to religious persecution. The word seemed to have gained increasing popularity after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685.Footnote ⁹ Going beyond a Christian-centric history of the term, there are arguably other, even earlier, cases of refugeedom, including Jews and Muslims (‘Moors’) expelled from the Iberian peninsula after the 1492 ‘Reconquista’.Footnote ¹⁰ The experience of dislocation would become a key thread in early modern global politics: in addition to Mayflower pilgrims – religious dissenters fleeing to America – several key figures in the history of the Reformation, among them John Calvin and John Knox, had been expelled from their communities and developed their religious doctrines to appeal to other exilic churches.Footnote ¹¹

There is clearly nothing quintessentially modern about the experience of forced dislocation and exile. Indeed, it is perhaps worth noting that palit, the word used in contemporary Hebrew for refugee, originates in biblical Hebrew and refers to individuals who escaped from a battlefield or fugitives from a besieged city (see, for example, Jeremiah 51:50; 2 Kings 9:15). Nevertheless, the remaking of the descriptive of ‘refugee’ into a specific political and legal concept was indeed something particular to the modern era. We should not dehistoricize the ‘refugee’ by regarding it as an ever-present figure in world history but identify specific incarnations. As Peter Gatrell has put it, what made twentieth-century displacement ‘unprecedented’ was its link ‘to the collapse of multi-national empires, the emergence of the modern state with a bounded citizenship, the spread of totalizing ideologies that hounded internal enemies, and the internationalization of responses to refugee crises’.Footnote ¹² The concept was already clearly emerging in both a legal and a political sense by the time of the Balkan wars of the mid- to late nineteenth century and continued to accumulate specific legal and political meanings through the first half of the twentieth century, when the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees instantiated the term into international law.Footnote ¹³

At the state level, the Ottoman Empire was the first regime to establish a national office for co-ordinating refugees, in 1859, when a wartime influx of Caucasian and Balkan Muslims into Anatolia led the Ottoman state to create the General Administrative Commission for Refugees. As a matter of both theory and practice, this new body treated displaced people as a distinct subcategory of migrants subject to a specialist legal regime – one that included refugee-specific provisions for state-sponsored resettlement and certain carefully delineated paths to Ottoman citizenship.Footnote ¹⁴ The Habsburg empire, too, began in the mid-1870s to construct a formal state-level refugee management system to control the large numbers of refugees fleeing a major uprising in Bosnia and Herzegovina into coastal Dalmatia, in modern-day Croatia. Its approach included the mooting of a formal category of refugee eligible for state-dispersed cash payments from a refugee commission, but also sometimes subject to internment, forcible relocation, or repatriation.Footnote ¹⁵

The years 1914 to 1923 marked the beginning of a cross-border approach to refugees in the context of an emerging modern global order of nation-states.Footnote ¹⁶ If the Ottoman experience had represented the first nationalizing approach to a coalescing political understanding of refugees, it was the League of Nations that emerged as the main venue for its internationalist conceptualization. The League’s vision of refugeedom was less about displacement or persecution than about internationalist ordering; its refugees were not merely displaced or stateless people but those whom, for specific circumstantial reasons, the League was interested in claiming as wards. As the League Council declared in no uncertain terms, ‘The mere fact that certain classes of persons are without the protection of any national Government Council is not sufficient to make them refugees.’ In this first incarnation, then, the legal moniker of refugee, with its attendant promises of protection and assistance, was limited to a few particular nationalities: Russians and Armenians in the first instance, and small numbers of ‘Assyrians, Assyro-Chaldeans, Montenegrins and Turks’ who were ‘in a condition analogous to that of Russian and Armenian refugees as a consequence of the war’.Footnote ¹⁷ In the event, rather like the term ‘minorities’ being deployed in the ex-Ottoman territories in the same moment, refugeedom appeared to refer in the main to Christians displaced by Muslims.Footnote ¹⁸

The first intergovernmental effort to offer documentation to refugees, the so-called Nansen passport, was similarly limited in scope and reach. The passport was named after the first High Commissioner for Refugees, the famous Norwegian polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen. Nansen was a strong advocate for the idea of a compulsory ‘exchange of populations’ between Greece and Turkey; but such a model of forcible expulsion and renationalization could not be made to apply to the stateless Russians and Armenians for whom the League had assumed responsibility. The papers bearing Nansen’s name therefore offered refugees the possibility – not the right – of crossing international borders in search of work, and allowed them to take up temporary residence in signatory countries.Footnote ¹⁹ In 1933, another League convention laid out further specifics of the Nansen passport and established the principle of non-refoulement (the right not to be returned to a persecuting country) but again emphasized that it applied solely to ‘Russian, Armenian and assimilated refugees’ – not, in other words, to just anyone who happened to be displaced across an international border.Footnote ²⁰ Even these protections were temporary, offered on sufferance, and not infrequently honoured more in the breach than the observance; host states remained legally unbound by the agreements.Footnote ²¹ The émigré Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov, one of the most famous recipients of the special passport, mockingly called the document a ‘Nonsense Passport’ in Lolita and returned to the subject in his melancholic memoir:

The League of Nations and its constituent members, then, had gone a long way to define the term ‘refugee’ as a legal, political, and bureaucratic concept – albeit a very limited one – long before the Second World War. But by the early 1930s it was becoming clear that this clear but restrictive construction of who qualified as a refugee had little to offer in the face of a more general phenomenon of mass displacement, particularly as it applied to emerging Nazi depredations unfolding in central Europe. When President Franklin Roosevelt called his famous meeting of states at Évian in 1938, it was fundamentally to address not so much the displacements themselves as the problem that these new expellees stood outside the terms and protections, such as they were, of the extant conventions and agencies. Consequently, as the next decade witnessed European dislocation on an unprecedented scale, the League’s already-delineated formal definition of ‘refugee’ was increasingly abandoned in favour of essentially ad hoc schemes of aid-cum-control.

One of the first of these emerged in 1943, when the United States, desperate both to keep refugees from American shores and to ensure that Europe’s mass population upheavals did not threaten the Allies’ military progress, pressed for the founding of a new refugee agency called the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). Founded on Rooseveltian conceptions about the economic benefits of the provision of relief to populations in liberated zones, UNRRA was charged with careful ‘management’ of refugees (as a much later language of relief would euphemistically put it) as crucial to rebuilding the shattered post-war European economy. This task necessitated forsaking the earlier limited definition of the refugee as a matter of sheer practicality, and indicated a future in which humanitarian intervention of this kind would serve as a tool for Cold War-era American hegemony.Footnote ²³

Departing from the League’s approach, UNRRA concerned itself not solely with legally defined ‘refugees’ but with anyone whose dislocation represented a threat to the war effort or continental post-war stability. Though the terms ‘refugee’, ‘evacuee’, and ‘expellee’ were commonly and casually used to describe UNRRA’s wards, particularly the interned inhabitants of its hundreds of camps across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, the formal language at the agency revolved around what it called its ‘Displaced Persons Operations’. The old definitions and practices surrounding refugeedom had virtually no bearing on UNRRA’s disposition of the displaced persons (DPs, as they now came to be colloquially known) in its care.Footnote ²⁴ As we shall see in our subsequent discussion of repatriation, the agency returned the bulk of its wards to their home countries – sometimes forcibly, and by and large without reference to the carefully limited interwar definition of the refugee or commitment to the principle of non-refoulement.Footnote ²⁵

It was not until the agency was facing down the question of what to do with its remaining ‘hard core’ of DPs – people who, for one reason or another, could be neither repatriated nor placed as workers in a new country – that the word ‘refugee’ re-entered the conversation for formal legal redefinition. The first iteration of this came as UNRRA began to hand over its work first to a preparatory commission and then to the new International Refugee Organization (IRO), founded in 1946. This new agency sought to find resettlement opportunities (a fourth R!) for those DPs who refused to be repatriated. It continued to use the term ‘displaced persons’, but also began to feature a novel concept of the ‘genuine refugee’ in its discussions, highlighting histories of ‘duress, threat or violence … either for forced labour or for reasons of race, religion or politics’ but also now a ‘fear of persecution’.Footnote ²⁶

This new emphasis on the legitimacy of refugee claims formed the backdrop to the rounds of talks that followed the Second World War and the founding of the United Nations, which now included explicit discussion of the need to revisit the legal concept. In the event, the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees constructed a new definition specifically in terms of the war: those who had had to leave their places of residence as a result of ‘events occurring in Europe before 1 January 1951’ or (an alternative option for signatory states) ‘events occurring in Europe or elsewhere before 1 January 1951’, and who now could not return ‘owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted’ – a definition that applied in the main to either survivors of Nazi terror or Soviet dissidents.Footnote ²⁷ It was this reformulated legal designation, hemmed about with the particularities of the Holocaust and the anxieties of these early Cold War years, that would serve as the permanent basis for internationalist policy and legal frameworks vis-à-vis displacement.

One more specificity of the post-war legal apparatus around the term ‘refugee’ deserves mention here: the mooting of a separate and distinct category of ‘Palestine refugee’ for those expelled from their homelands in the 1948 war that created the new state of Israel. The 1951 Convention explicitly excluded ‘persons who are at present receiving from organs or agencies of the United Nations other than the United Nations High Commission for Refugees protection or assistance’. This stricture applied almost exclusively to Palestinians displaced in the Nakba, who had become wards not of the new UNHCR but of the Palestine-specific United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), now busy setting up camps from Lebanon to Egypt for this new population of displaced people. Though a formal legal framework was never forthcoming, UNWRA’s operations eventually defined a ‘Palestine refugee’ as a person ‘whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict’ – a definition, and a category, that offered substantially fewer protections than the one being promulgated at the same moment for displaced Europeans.Footnote ²⁸

The distinctiveness of the ‘Palestine refugee’ derived in part from the particular demands of the refugees themselves, who feared that their political and material claims on Palestine might be suspended should they accept a more general refugee status under the umbrella of the new UNHCR.Footnote ²⁹ In addition, much of the Arab world beyond Palestine understood the United Nations itself, as the institutional successor to the League of Nations that had created the pro-settler conditions of the British mandate for Palestine, to be uniquely responsible for the 1948 war and its consequences, and they viewed any Palestinian absorption into a more general refugee definition as an abrogation of the institution’s political responsibilities. As a Lebanese representative put it to the UN in 1950, ‘The Palestine refugees were therefore a direct responsibility on the part of the United Nations and could not be placed in the general category of refugees without betrayal of that responsibility.’Footnote ³⁰ Such concerns dovetailed with an evident determination on the part of western European and North American governments to permit a limited refugee status to white Europeans without opening the doors to what was already a pattern of decolonial forced migration in Asia and Africa, as well as with decolonizing countries’ own sets of concerns about internationalist interventions vis-à-vis displaced people. (For instance, victims of Partition-related dislocations in India did not qualify as refugees under the terms of the 1951 Convention.Footnote ³¹)

The term ‘refugee’, then, had been carefully defined in limited and exclusionary ways since its entrance into the sphere of internationalism during the First World War. Now, even at the apex of its international acknowledgement, recognition, and definition, the legal definition of the refugee was very far from carrying universalist meaning and included some profoundly notable exceptions. It was in this context of post-war jockeying that such concepts as return and repatriation could take on new articulations, derived less from the collective memories of a pre-exilic past than from newly energized imperial and superpower attempts to deal both rhetorically and practically with the displaced.

II

Unlike ‘refugee’ – a term whose national and international legal history began only in the late nineteenth century – the idea of ‘return’ had an extended pedigree carrying heavy theological baggage. ‘Return to Zion’ makes an appearance in the book of Psalms (for example, ‘When the Lord brought back the captives to Zion, we were like men who dreamed’, Psalms 126:1), as well as in those of Ezra and Nehemiah (for example, ‘And the children of Israel, who had come again out of captivity, and all such as had separated themselves unto them from the filthiness of the heathen of the land to seek the Lord God of Israel’, Ezra 6:21). The Amidah prayer, too, recited by observant Jews three times a day, includes the enunciation ‘and may our eyes see Your return to Zion, with mercy’ (Ve’techezinah eineinu b’shuv’cha l’Tzion b’rachamim). It was unsurprising that, with the advent of Zionism, such linguistic formulas would be appropriated by the modern national movement and repurposed, generating a new kind of theopolitics.Footnote ³²

The appeal of Jewish ‘return’ was not limited to Jews. The ‘Holy Land’ had long represented a singular space within the Christian–European imagination, and ideas of return were rooted in Christian eschatological belief that Jews must be ‘restored’ to the promised land in fulfilment of biblical prophecy before the second coming of Christ. By the nineteenth century, this British ‘restorative theology’ was infusing Protestant missionary zeal into any number of imperial projects in the Ottoman realms. Anglican theologians such as George Stanley Faber, who addressed Jewish ‘return’ in the framework of his dispensationalist theories, and Edward Bickersteth, an Anglican missionary who served as the bishop of Exeter, offered political-cum-eschatological visions for a British-sponsored return of the Jews to Palestine.Footnote ³³ The most famous and eccentric of these authors was the utopian mystic Laurence Oliphant, who attempted in vain to obtain permission from the Ottoman government for Jewish settlement in northern Palestine. The fact that Oliphant settled in Haifa with his wife, Alice, and had close ties with the Jewish poet Naftali Herz Imber (author of ‘Hatikvah’, later Israel’s national anthem) made him almost a household name for Zionists.Footnote ³⁴

Once a Jewish national movement calling for establishing colonies in Palestine was formally created, the optimism of restorative theologians swelled. In 1897, the year of the first Zionist congress, the Anglican bishop of Jerusalem, George Francis Popham Blyth, issued a circular letter declaring ‘the return of the Jews to the Land that is theirs (and which the Turks have owned, is God’s Land in their trust)’ was a matter of immediate concern. He urged the church not to leave this crucial project only to ‘the Jewish race’, who, he stated ‘have their hand upon the finance of Empires, and they have a very defined intention before them with reference to Palestine’.Footnote ³⁵

Jewish nationalists, especially the more secular variety, tended to be suspicious of political programmes relying on divine assistance, particularly those that cast them as necessary but disposable pieces in some Christian dispensationalist game. As demonstrated by Aviezer Ravitzky and others, until the rise of religious Zionism, most rabbinical authorities refrained from promoting discussions about the rebuilding of the Temple or immediate resettlement of the land, in favour of strict adherence to Jewish law. They were concerned that advocating for tangible steps towards these goals amounted to a hastening of the end times – a dangerous human interference with divine plans, characteristic of false messiahs.Footnote ³⁶ Nonetheless, Zionists found it hard to turn away potential political allies among those who quickly came to be known as ‘Christian Zionists’. The category initially emerged to describe Henry Dunant, a Swiss Calvinist banker (awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1901 for founding the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)) who lent a sympathetic ear to Theodor Herzl, the charismatic founder of the Zionist movement.Footnote ³⁷ Shortly thereafter, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Hakohen Kook (later the Ashkenazi chief rabbi of mandatory Palestine) delivered his famous eulogy for Herzl, which linked the political leader to the figure Messiah ben Joseph, proposing that Herzl’s worldly actions to lay the material groundwork of the Zionist movement were analogous to paving the way for spiritual redemption. The notion of theological redemption was thus intertwined with the secular political project.Footnote ³⁸

Terms such as ‘return’, ‘reconstruction’, and ‘restoration’ gradually percolated into Zionist discourse, becoming more prominent after Jerusalem’s capture by the British and the creation of a robust Zionist–British bond via the Balfour Declaration in 1917. Attempts to manufacture historical narratives that would speak to some coherent, long-standing tradition of Christian endorsement of Jewish ‘return’ also mushroomed after the British conquest, providing a conceptual axis for the first official history of the Zionist movement, authored by the Polish-born Zionist leader and writer Nahum Sokolow in 1918, and further evident in the writings of the British-Jewish journalist Albert M. Hyamson, appointed commissioner for migration of the mandatory government in Palestine.Footnote ³⁹

The emerging dominance of Hebrew as the language of Jewish nationalism charged the term with additional theological meanings. Shiva, the word used in Hebrew for ‘return’, carried a double meaning: it could refer either to an act of return to a physical space or a place of origin, or to acts of repentance (teshuva) – that is, to a ‘return’ to righteous life, a deepening of one’s faith, and moving back closer to God, so to speak, especially after a period of estrangement. This dual meaning, rooted in biblical Hebrew (Deuteronomy 30:6–8), loaded Zionism with explosive theological-political elements. Famously, such developments infuriated anti-Zionist Jewish rabbinical authorities, who insisted that messianism was a transcendent ideal that could not be transformed into a worldly political programme; they accused Zionists of ‘forcing the end’ and considered them a modern incarnation of Sabbateanism and other earlier disastrous episodes of widespread Jewish enthusiasm for ‘false Messiahs’.Footnote ⁴⁰ They also alarmed more dovish Zionist intellectuals like Gershom Scholem, the renowned scholar of Jewish mysticism, who warned against ‘utopian’ and ‘catastrophic’ messianism culminating in an apocalypse to occur outside ‘human’ historical time.Footnote ⁴¹

Return, in other words, began in this period to transcend its former meanings, taking a central role in creating the impression of an uninterrupted continuity between historical ‘Judaism’ and the modern settler project. In the words of the historian Yair Wallach, ‘the Jews of Palestine were called upon to think of themselves as participants in the “project of the yishuv” – a project that was defined through two competing, yet overlapping, frameworks: the revived religious obligation for Jews to reside in Eretz Israel (mitzvat yishuv Eretz Israel), and Jewish colonization’.Footnote ⁴² Whether the English and Hebrew translators were correct in choosing this word when translating nineteenth-century secular nationalists like the German-Jewish socialist Moses Hess falls outside the boundaries of our present discussion.Footnote ⁴³ What is evident, however, is that, during the first half of the twentieth century, most Zionist ideologues, including those self-defined as atheists, had fewer qualms than Scholem when using terminology that injected religious meanings and subtexts into their writings and speeches. The polysemous idea of ‘return’ joined the list of religious terms endorsed and mobilized by Zionism, which had an equivocal relationship with the notion of redemption but found in such theological ideas an exhilarating stimulant that might energize the political project of colonizing Palestine.

These long-standing intra-Jewish discussions notwithstanding, what pushed the concept of return into the centre stage of international politics were the catastrophic conditions of the 1940s. In January 1942, while the war was still raging in Europe and the first reliable bits of information about the scale and system of the Nazi murder of Jews had reached the US, the prominent liberal Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr declared that Jewish sovereignty in Palestine must be part of the post-war settlement and the remedy for age-long Jewish suffering.Footnote ⁴⁴ In parallel, liberal Jewish jurists and activists who had formerly invested their energies in defining and promoting ‘minority’ and Jewish rights in the diaspora switched gears and began advocating for a Zionist vision.Footnote ⁴⁵ In September 1945, the number of ‘displaced persons’ placed under the guardianship of Allied armies and relief agencies (including UNRRA) amounted to 1.5 million people, including more than a quarter of a million Jews who had fled from eastern European countries and the Balkans to central and western Europe. Given their experiences of persecution and violence endured under Nazi occupation (not infrequently at the hands of local collaborators) and the evident unattractiveness of living under communist regimes, the question of ‘return’ was becoming more pressing: many Jewish DPs did not wish to return to their previous homes but wanted to be allowed to immigrate and resettle elsewhere.

The dire DP camps became a site for reintroducing ‘return’ to the international discussion. A damming report produced in August 1945 by Earl G. Harrison, the US commissioner for immigration and integration, who visited the DP camps in the American and British occupation zones, concluded by stating:

It was at this tense moment that the British, trying desperately to exit from Palestine without further complications, called upon UN member states to open their gates to immigration rather than rely on Palestine as a repository for DPs and survivors. But President Harry Truman, reluctant to amend the immigration restrictions established in the 1924 Johnson–Reed Act, instead used the Harrison Report to pressure the Atlee–Bevin government to lift its 1939 white paper restrictions and admit 100,000 Jewish refugees to Palestine.

This development did nothing to calm the situation. Anti-British resentment among Zionists in Palestine turned from October 1945 onwards into violent militancy. Palestinian Arabs, too, were anxious and infuriated. It was under these circumstances that Khalil al-Sakakini, the famous Palestinian educator and scholar, noted in his diary:

These developments, coupled with Anglo-American disagreement around the question of DP migration to Palestine, incentivized the formation in 1945 of a joint Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Jewish Problems in Palestine and Europe (AAC). Headed by two judges and composed of a dozen members – six American representatives and six English – one is tempted to compare the AAC to the twelve apostles. Most of the members of this odd tribunal were academics, along with economists, legal experts, and diplomats.Footnote ⁴⁸ The British co-chairs, Sir John Singleton and Major Reginald Manningham-Buller, were primarily interested in protecting British troops in Palestine and favoured restricting the powers of the Jewish Agency and disarming the Haganah. They were utterly different in taste and inclination from the American chairman, Justice Joseph Hutcheson, a federal appeal judge for the Fifth US Circuit Court of Appeals and a self-described Old Testament Christian and Jeffersonian Democrat.Footnote ⁴⁹ William Phillips and James McDonald were the only veteran diplomats on the American team. McDonald served as the League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees for two years, being the single member experienced in refugee politics. Together with the San Francisco attorney Bartley Crum and the British Labour MP Richard H. Crossman, McDonald’s sympathies lay with the Zionists.

Their itinerary was packed. The committee held its first hearings in Washington, DC, in January 1946 and sailed from there to London. They left for Europe in February and, working in subcommittees, investigated the Jewish DP crisis in Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Italy, and Greece. On 28 February, they flew to Cairo and then to Jerusalem. After a week of plenary sessions there, the AAC members dispersed and went to visit neighbouring Arab countries (Syria and Lebanon were visited by Lord Morrison, Hutcheson, and McDonald, while Singleton, Buxton, and Major Manningham-Buller went to Iraq and Saudi Arabia; most members also made a stop in Transjordan). They reassembled in Jerusalem on 21 March for a final week of public hearings, from where they continued to Lausanne, Switzerland, for their deliberations. They submitted their formal report a month later, on 20 April 1946, unanimously calling for the admission of 100,000 Jewish refugees to Palestine – presenting their recommendation as a new and different understanding of what might constitute ‘return’ in this post-war moment.Footnote ⁵⁰

The public hearings and the invitation extended to world-renowned intellectuals, including Albert Einstein and Philip K. Hitti, the Lebanese-born Princeton professor of ‘Oriental’ languages, to testify before the committee made the AAC into an international forum for deliberation on the nexus of repatriation, return, and resettlement on the one hand and great-power politics in the Middle East on the other. Scarred by the many earlier instances of British ‘commissions of inquiry’ sent to determine their future, Palestinian and Arab intellectuals regarded the AAC with suspicion and hotly debated whether to co-operate with it.Footnote ⁵¹ Representing the Arab Office, the academic and future renowned historian Albert Hourani protested ‘the injustice of forcing a long-settled population to accept immigrants without its consent’ and warned that the implementation of the forced resettlement would necessitate violence and would result in partition.Footnote ⁵²

Nor did all Jews toe the official line of the Jewish Agency. Albert Einstein succeeded in alienating both Zionists and the British by restating his opposition to a Jewish state and accusing Britain of stirring up conflict in Palestine, arguing that ‘Palestine is a kind of small model of India.’Footnote ⁵³ The orthodox rabbi Yitzhak (Isaac) Breuer, president of the orthodox party Agudath Israel, alluded to the notion of return when stating that he favoured ‘free immigration for the development of the country’ but not national independence: ‘according to our tradition, sovereignty is a root of harm in the world’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Martin Buber and Judah Leon Magnes, the leaders of the association Ihud, spoke explicitly about Jewish messianic yearnings, recommending the immediate admission of 100,000 Jewish DPs and the lifting of restrictions on Jewish land acquisitions – but not with a view to a Jewish demographic majority, proposing instead movement towards a joint Jewish–Palestinian federalist state. (Perhaps proving the difficulty of such an endeavour, Buber could not resist repeating the old Zionist trope that Jewish settlers could protect Palestine from ‘the dangers of stagnancy, isolation and the forms of social degeneration particularly threatening colonization in the Levant’.)Footnote ⁵⁵

Both the Americans and the British accepted that east European Jewish refugees would refuse to rehabilitate their lives in their home countries and that Jewish DPs should be regarded as ‘non-repatriable refugees’; but neither side was willing to alter its domestic or colonial immigration policies. Given the intractability of their disagreement, the two great powers would have preferred to delegate the solution to a third international party, but UNRRA – which was in any case wrapping up its work – was clearly unable to imagine a solution for the remaining Jewish DPs. Moreover, the Zionist movement, whose manifest ideology was anchored in the idea of ‘return’, had now to recalibrate its demand as it became clear that what actually stood at the centre of the discussions was not the demand of the homeless survivors to return in a literal sense but quite the opposite: their demand to be resettled in other countries, and not necessarily Palestine.

The cracks in the wartime Anglo-American alliance invited the active involvement of the newly founded United Nations. Tasked both with ending the DP crisis in Europe (without opening the doors of Western countries to survivors) and with finding some way to bring British rule in Palestine to a close, it now decided to kill two birds with one stone. The IRO’s monumental decision in 1948, immediately after the war, to support sending Jewish DPs to Israel as the primary political ‘solution’ to their displacement marked a new phase in internationalist reconfiguration of both Jewish and Palestinian nationhood. Jewish refugee resettlement in Palestine had long-standing ties with British and American colonial developmentalism, dating back to the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁵⁶ Now, the IRO’s approach appeared comprehensible not only in terms of European reluctance to incorporate displaced Jews into its own body politic but also in the context of a long history of Jewish settlers serving as a venue for a Western-driven economic development of Palestine. Particularly as American interest in the Zionist project was growing in this post-war moment, the mass resettlement of Jewish DPs in Israel appeared to present a valuable opportunity for continued postcolonial British and American influence after formal empire had ended. To solidify the case, this decision could now be officially recast as a form of return, with all its appealing ties to Protestant romanticism and Zionist theological-political thought. It was a decision that emerged alongside an attenuated but clear internationalist refusal of Palestinian Arab claims and a low-profile acceptance of their dispossession. In fact, the UN’s 1949 ‘Economic survey of the Middle East’ (headed by an American, the former Tennessee Valley Authority director Gordon Clapp) viewed Palestinian displacement as another valuable point of entry for American investment and development across the region.Footnote ⁵⁷

Dissenting voices were silenced or rendered impotent. A day after submitting his recommendations for a ceasefire, insisting that all the Palestinians who fled territories under Israeli control should be able to return to their homes, the UN mediator Folke Bernadotte was assassinated by Zionist paramilitaries. His successor, Ralph Bunche, equally failed to press the point home. On 11 December 1948, the UN General Assembly’s Third Committee adopted Resolution 194 (III), which stated that ‘refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date’, adding that compensation for the property of those choosing not to return ‘should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Unsurprisingly, such statements yielded no tangible results as the UN quietly took on the task of settling the refugees in settlements that were clearly less and less temporary, and abandoned any idea of bringing Palestinians back to their homeland.Footnote ⁵⁹

Return, as a concept, was now essentially turned over to the new state of Israel. The ‘Law of Return’ (hok hashvut), passed by the Israeli government in 1950, granted the right of immigration and automatic citizenship to every person defined as a Jew under this rubric. Closing the circle, the same Zorach Warhaftig who had urged the international community to intervene in solving the DP crisis five years earlier was one of the key framers of the law, acknowledging and highlighting its theological dimensions. As he explained in his address to the Knesset during the deliberations leading to the passing of the bill,

Jewish return, then, was being redefined at the international level: not as a relocation to a pre-war home but as a kind of existential/theological return that would also serve as a convenient solution for the emerging international community and especially for Allied powers unwilling to open their doors to the refugees.

But Palestinian Arabs, expelled en masse from their homelands to make possible this new iteration of internationally sanctioned Jewish ‘return’, now also laid claim to the concept. Over the subsequent decades, the idea of a ‘right of return’ would develop yet another incarnation: a Palestinian nationalist one that understood it less in theological terms than as an aspect of internationally guaranteed human rights. As Palestinians developed the idea of return, it took on still other valences, encompassing a permanent and unalterable claim to a nationality and a territory that rested above all in international conceptions of human rights and justice, and that could co-exist with any number of other manifestations of citizenship, subjecthood, and residency.

For all the importance of the question of return in the political literature surrounding Israel/Palestine, there has been remarkably little written on the specific genesis, dissemination, and discursive development of the concept of the right of return (haqq al-ʿawda) in Palestinian political discourse and imagination. It is clear, though, that the term was already being used in the immediate aftermath of the Nakba and has been a consistently prominent aspect of Palestinian nationalist writings and speech since 1948. In 1951, the Palestinian poet Abd al-Karim al-Karmi, better known as Abu Salma, wrote in an iconic poem:

making the concept of return a kind of battle cry and a vision of liberation.Footnote ⁶¹

Initially, among Palestinians working in exile immediately after the Nakba, the concept of ‘return’ was most often framed as a kind of natural right, supported by the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights – which did guarantee everyone’s right ‘to return to his country’ – as well as by a more general and indisputable moral frame. ‘No person or group can bestow on Arab refugees the right to return or not return’, wrote the Palestinian activist Rafiq Farah in 1949. ‘This right … is one of their innate human rights.’Footnote ⁶² (The article in which Farah made this claim, published in the communist journal Al-Ittihad, called for the formation of a ‘League for the Defense of Human Rights’ open to all Arabs and Jews, an idea that attracted the attention of a number of both Arab and Jewish activists, including Martin Buber, who wrote a letter to Farah offering support.Footnote ⁶³) In the decade following the Nakba, the broad Palestinian commitment to the right of return and the belief that return was imminent went some way to explain the deep-seated suspicion and, often, rejection of schemes of settlement, employment, and (in Jordan) citizenship for Palestinian refugees, all of which many feared might dilute claims for return and weaken the Palestinian national case.

The subsequent decades saw the gradual further articulation of the right of return, allowing it to co-exist with other forms of settlement and diaspora, and even sometimes with other citizenships. By the early 1970s, Palestinian thinkers had constructed a thoroughly documented case for the right of return grounded mainly in prior international law. ‘The right of a person to return to his home in his native country traditionally has been included among an individual’s fundamental rights’, ran one study presented to the UN in 1978. ‘In the case of the Palestinian people, the individual or personal right of return assumes a special significance for without its restoration, the exercise of the collective or national right of self-determination, itself guaranteed by a variety of international instruments, becomes impossible.’Footnote ⁶⁴ There were, however, specificities to this vision of Palestinian right of return: eventually, Palestinians began routinely to make the case that the right of return, independent and free-standing as it was, had no bearing on any other legal status an individual refugee might have acquired. ‘This right is a legal inheritable right, and there is no one that one [sic] can relinquish it’, one refugee with Jordanian citizenship told a researcher in 2013. ‘This is an absolute right for all the people. And me [sic], with full conviction, believe that especially the Palestinian with all of his suffering, his obtaining of a different nationality … is to facilitate his life.’Footnote ⁶⁵

Particularly after Oslo, when many Palestinians both in the territories and elsewhere understood the Palestinian Liberation Organization to have signed away the right of return, the idea that the right of return had to be continually elucidated and taught became paramount across many different Palestinian refugee spaces. As one activist in Bethlehem put it, ‘Creating a [political] culture on the right of return (thaqafa-t-haqq al-ʿawda) means educating the children about their villages of origin, about their rights – to keep something concrete/tangible (malmus) for them.’Footnote ⁶⁶ In other words, the Palestinian right of return eventually emerged as its own discourse, drawing on but at the same time independent both of the negotiations over the political possibilities for physical return and of the legal histories of Palestinian (and other) forms of refugeedom. It continues to develop and accrue specific meaning as both a legal concept and a locus of political action for Palestinians – most recently in the Great March of Return demonstrations of 2018, which connected the right of return to the end of the Israeli blockade of Gaza and Palestinian claims over Jerusalem.Footnote ⁶⁷

III

The third ‘R’ of the era – repatriation – was, unlike the older concept of return, entangled from its inception with ideas about internationalist authority and its power to move people around at will. Originally associated with prisoners of war, it was through Fridtjof Nansen that the term came into the internationalist playbook as a possible tactic for dealing with refugees and displaced people – one that would eventually serve as a central practice for institutions like the UNHCR.Footnote ⁶⁸

Nansen’s first appointment with the League of Nations was as High Commissioner for the Repatriation of Prisoners of War. In 1920, he organized a prisoner swap that returned nearly half a million prisoners from central Europe and Russia to their homelands.Footnote ⁶⁹ His apparent success in this enterprise attracted notice in international humanitarian circles, particularly the ICRC, which was struggling to assist the thousands of ‘White Russian’ and Armenian refugees stranded in Constantinople. The ICRC appointed a commissioner, one C. B. Thomson, to investigate the situation of the refugees in Belgrade, Sofia, and Constantinople, and to make recommendations. Thomson, declaring that such displaced communities would represent a more or less permanent threat to peace and stability if they were allowed to remain in place, proposed ‘repatriating’ large numbers to Russia under ongoing supervision.Footnote ⁷⁰ When the League Council subsequently appointed Nansen as High Commissioner for Russian Refugees in 1921, partly in response to Thomson’s report, Nansen, too, tried to sell the League on the strategy of refugee repatriation. ‘In the long run’, ran his testimony, ‘there can be no final satisfactory solution of the problem created by the presences of such a large number of one and a half million refugees in Europe except by repatriation of, at any rate, the greater part of them.’Footnote ⁷¹

But even with a high degree of Soviet control over the entrance, the process of returning refugees to Russia through Bulgaria proved exceptionally difficult. By late 1923, one of Nansen’s envoys estimated that the League had repatriated no more than about 5,700 people.Footnote ⁷² As the League’s refugee office under Nansen turned its attention to other populations with no chance of going home – first Armenians and Russians, and then Anatolian Christians removed to Greece under the terms of the treaty of Lausanne – repatriation seemed increasingly irrelevant as a tool of refugee policy, particularly after thousands of Armenians who had been ‘repatriated’ to Cilicia in 1921 had to be re-evacuated with the French withdrawal.Footnote ⁷³ Further, as an alternative idea took hold – making use of refugees to bolster the European colonial and settlement projects of the mandate era – repatriation fell into disuse as a concept as well as a practice. As the interwar chronicler of displacement Sir John Hope Simpson put it gloomily, ‘The possibility of ultimate repatriation belongs to the realm of political prophecy and aspiration … It can be ignored as an important element in any future programme of international action aiming at practical liquidation of the existing refugee problems.’Footnote ⁷⁴

The possibility of repatriation would be revived in the context of the Second World War. Particularly given the high degree of American resistance to providing humanitarian aid, however evidently necessary, to Soviet citizens, UNRRA from its early days viewed repatriation as the quickest, most straightforward, and least expensive method of dispersing the inhabitants of its nearly eight hundred camps. Between the spring and autumn of 1945, the agency sent between six and seven million people, mainly from German territory, back to their pre-war homes. As we have already seen, this left about one and a half million still in DP camps: regarded for one reason or another as un-repatriable, and in the main demanding resettlement somewhere other than their countries of origin. UNRRA officials were generally unsympathetic to such resistance. ‘There is no such thing as an unrepatriable Pole’, one British UNRRA report declared in 1947, echoing the Allies’ determination to be rid of UNRRA’s refugee charges at any cost, so that the liberating troops could deal effectively with the pressing issue of the Germans.Footnote ⁷⁵

In the immediate aftermath of the war, UNRRA and its institutional successors – first the IRO and then the UNHCR – took on other approaches to the remaining European DPs, placing them in third-country employment where that was possible and arranging for some form of local integration where it was not – and eventually, of course, shipping them en masse to Israel.Footnote ⁷⁶ But by the late 1950s, the employment-focused IRO had shuttered its doors and the UNHCR became involved in a new kind of refugee crisis: a decolonial one, outside Europe. Its involvement with refugees fleeing French depredations in the Algerian war of independence (1954–62) led it back towards UNRRA’s strategies: some 200,000 Algerian refugees now encamped in Tunisia and Morocco would, it decided, have to be restored to their country of origin. Repatriation had returned with a vengeance: just as in its earlier incarnations, it was not as a humanitarian effort responding to refugee desires but as an internationalist (and neo-imperialist) answer for what was increasingly understood as a pressing postcolonial problem of regional and global security.

The UNHCR mobilized all its partners and worked with the Front de libération nationale and its military wing on the logistics of repatriation, which included planning refugee transport across demilitarized zones strewn with unexploded mines.Footnote ⁷⁷ Their schemes involved the mass transportation of anyone in the refugee zones, among whom were any number of nomadic communities and migrant labourers whose pre-war national affiliation was unclear. The repatriation was quick, thorough, and mandatory, aiming to secure the border areas and render the new postcolonial states’ borders clear. Once they had delivered their charges, UNHCR workers left tents and rations for the refugees and quickly withdrew, with predictable results. ‘It rapidly became apparent’, one Red Cross official noted in the aftermath of the operation, ‘that [the refugees’] fate could not be separated from that of the two million displaced and regrouped people who likewise converged on their douars [villages] of origin, nor from the mass of the needy population whose standard of living had dropped considerably following this prolonged conflict.’Footnote ⁷⁸ Nevertheless, the UNHCR declared the campaign a resounding success and made plans for its expansion. ‘If the planned rate of repatriation is maintained, a permanent solution of the most satisfactory kind will have been found for a problem which, for a number of years, has been a source of serious concern’, its representative told the General Assembly.Footnote ⁷⁹

As repatriation emerged as a tactic of internationalist refugee policy across the first half of the twentieth century, then, it developed a new and specific meaning: the return of displaced persons to a pre-conflict homeland, undertaken not by the refugees themselves but by an international body claiming a kind of guardianship over them. It came, in other words, to be understood, experienced, and practised as something quite distinct from ‘return’: not an act of voluntary renationalization undertaken as a demonstration of political and emotional commitment, and certainly not an expression of theological or eschatological world-building, but a technical tool of restoring order after wartime chaos, requiring ‘experts’ and an institutional infrastructure for its accomplishment – and, perhaps, the willingness to make use of coercion or force or both. By the early 1960s, repatriation had become an established aspect of an internationalist refugee regime: one driven by the interests of donor states and the institutional imperatives of humanitarian agencies, rather than the desires and imaginaries of refugees themselves. As one official put it bluntly decades later, ‘We were always interested in repatriation, but geopolitical factors prohibited it. So when the opportunity emerged to move towards repatriation, UNHCR jumped.’Footnote ⁸⁰

IV

In May 1962, the revisionist poet and essayist Uri Zvi Greenberg penned a furious article opposing the pressure on Israel to take action vis-à-vis the return of the Palestinian refugees, which he dismissed as emblematic of the international community’s profound hypocrisy. ‘It’s inconceivable that Soviet Russia, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, all UN members (who also vote against us there!), would be subject to the same UN demand as Israel: to repatriate millions of German refugees to lands that were once part of “their Germany”’, he wrote. ‘This is despite the fact that, unlike the venomous declarations of the Arabs, these German refugees harbour no desire to annihilate the inhabitants of the occupied territories. Finding a home for displaced populations doesn’t keep Russia, Poland, and Czechoslovakia up at night. The same should hold true for Israel.’Footnote ⁸¹ This vitriolic reading accurately registered the trajectory of both of these variously defined terms through the turbulent era of the post-war period towards a kind of uneasy agreement on their differentiated and oppositional meanings.

From 1948 onwards, the UN’s Allied power brokers – coming off several years of promoting repatriation as the main response to the Second World War’s mass dislocations – came to view Palestine/Israel as a valuable site for the elaboration of a particular conception of Jewish ‘return’, located in the entanglement between imperial theology and imperial politics. Such a reorientation could serve, among other things, as a solution to Europe’s long-standing ‘Jewish problem’, as well as a way to shut down the threat of refugee migration to western Europe or North America. Once the utility of ‘return’ had served its purpose for the construction of the state of Israel, it could be actively rejected as a political principle for Palestinians, whose post-1948 commitment to the right of return served not as a support but as a challenge to internationalist conceptions of the post-war geopolitical order. Within the now well-established institutions of the international refugee regime, then, commitment to the emotionally laden concept of return shifted back to a revived interest in ‘repatriation’, which assigned internationalism and its agencies the power forcibly to move and resettle displaced populations, with or without their consent. Over the subsequent decades, this concept of repatriation repeatedly proved its worth as a mode of internationalist migration management and was increasingly represented as the most viable, as well as the most humane, of what the UNHCR called ‘durable solutions’ – now sometimes re-infused with references to return, this time explicitly including the non-voluntary variety.

By the end of this international experiment in Palestine/Israel, the idea of return, with its accumulation of emotive and even theological meaning, had solidified primarily as a national concept; repatriation, with its implications of outside authority, had become mainly an international one. The emergent political contours of ‘return’ and ‘repatriation’ in Palestine/Israel were by no means borne solely of the lived experiences, collective memory, or political imaginations of Jewish or Palestinian refugees themselves; they acquired their increasingly oppositional meanings in the course of the creation of an international system of refugee management, built to privilege the security of its great-power architects over the well-being of its wards. The long, resonant, and romanticized histories of both terms came eventually to mean that the ‘international’ community, such as it was, could deploy them at will to bolster and legitimize refugee control efforts that might, on their face, have seemed distinctly antithetical to refugee interests and refugee claims. It is a historical legacy still very much evident in this same system’s contemporary treatment of displaced people, inside and outside Palestine/Israel, whose actual relationships to both return and repatriation continue to be marked primarily by coercion and force. As the UNHCR itself admitted in 1997, ‘it is quite clear that a large proportion of the world’s recent returnees have repatriated under some form of duress’.Footnote ⁸²