Throughout almost seven decades of Arab-Israeli conflict, ever since the UN first supported a partition of Palestine by which Jordan annexed the West Bank and Egypt occupied Gaza, the Palestinians have repeatedly found themselves at the margins of the political process. For the Palestinians it is a history og being handled, rather than engaged with as an autonomous political actor. . The Palestinians have first and foremost been treated as either a humanitarian issue (as refugees) or as a security issue (as terrorists). Even after the PLO was accepted as legitimate political representative, the problem of representation remains, as illustrated by the international treatment of Hamas after their electoral victory in 2006 and the irrelevance of the Palestinian National Council after the introduction of the Palestinian National Authority.
This panel engages historical and current cases where external parties (UN, US, Israel) have handled the Palestinian issue whilst excluding the Palestinians from the decision-making process. The four papers furthermore investigates the different dilemmas this has entailed for the Palestinian national movement Historically, neitherIsraeli, Arab nor international actors have been willing to seriously entertain ideas about Palestinian statehood.Instead, only partial autonomy, whereby a Palestinian leaderships is given the role of handling the Palestinian population on behalf of others, has been offered For many years, various international actors sought to dissolve – rather than solve – the Palestinian predicament. Furthermore, in an effort to avoid the politically sensitive issue of the Palestinian refugees’ right of return, the international community has instead focused on humanitarian assistance . This management of the Palestinians was meant to be temporary, but observing the current situation, the opposite seems to be true. What is more, the logic of the unending temporary seems to have also been extended to the management of the situation in the occupied territories; where massive amounts of external financial aid compensate for a deadlocked political process. The continued occupation and long-time displacement has also resulted in a fragmentationof Palestinian politics , leading to political paralysis and a deficiency in Palestinian political representation. Nowhere is this ore evident than in East Jerusalem, where PalestinianEast Jerusalemites find themselves isolated from the rest of the Palestinian environment and, increasingly so, also from each other.
Since Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem the state has sought to Judaize the city. This paper outlines the consequences of the Judaification for ordinary East Jerusalemites. Based on interviews with grassroots activists as well as field reports and news source in Arabic and English, it argues that East Jerusalemites have been caught in a political and social limbo. Nobody represents their interests, and they are cut off from both the West Bank and Israeli society. Alienation, insecurity and rampant crime are the results. As an occupied population, East Jerusalemites are supposed to be managed by the Israeli state, but this state has left the community to fend for itself without providing it with the means to do so. Local organizations and activists seek to fill the void, but without local leadership or strong support from external actors the effect of their efforts remains limited. The situation is East Jerusalem today is characterized by a large degree of social breakdown, a condition I connect to the concept of political anomie. I argue that the current wave of knife attacks in the occupied territories and Israel is properly interpreted only against this backdrop.
While the PLO gradually moved towards accepting a two-state solution in the mid-1970s, particularly at the Palestinian National Council meetings in 1974 and 1977, and the Arab states had formally declared the PLO as the “sole representative of the Palestinian people”, the US continued to refuse to speak with the PLO. This refusal was rooted in a pledge made by Kissinger as part of the Sinai II negotiations. When Jimmy Carter became president, he aimed to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict in its entirety, including the Palestinian aspects of the conflict. Paradoxically, his decision to include the Palestinian question as a key issue in the negotiations did not alter the premise that the US would not speak with the PLO. While there were several attempts to create a situation in which the Palestinians could participate, all of these failed, and the PLO was excluded from negotiations between Egypt, Israel and the USA. This exclusion persisted despite the fact that a central element of those negotiations was to allow the Palestinians to decide their own future. Instead of negotiating with the Palestinians they negotiated about the Palestinians, conceptualizing a form of autonomy whereby a local Palestinian administration would rule the Palestinians inhabiting the West Bank and Gaza. This would not lead to a Palestinian state and the land would remain Israeli. Neither the PLO nor the local Palestinians accepted this premise, but Sadat and Carter insisted that this was the best the Palestinians could get. The autonomy negotiations never came to fruition, but it is important to understand how the autonomy concept was developed, because fifteen years later the idea resurfaced, forming the basis for the Oslo structure and the Palestinian Authority. This paper is based on recently declassified material from the Carter Library archive, shedding new light on an important period in US mediation in the Arab-Israeli conflict.
From the origin of the Palestinian exodus in 1947-1949, the dominating tension in finding a solution to the Palestinian refugee problem was between repatriation, on the one hand, and resettlement with some financial compensation on the other. While the Arab regimes maintained that full repatriation was a pre-condition to any further talks of a settlement with Israel, Israel insisted that a solution to the refugee problem could only be found via resettlement in the Arab host-nations, or in third destination countries. In the first few years after the establishment of Israel, the Arab position found resonance among key actors in the international community, where repatriation was viewed as an important political principle. The pinnacle of this view is found in UNSC Resolution 194, which stated that the Palestinian refugees who wanted to return had the right to do so. Gradually, though, the international actors’ focus on repatriation also faded. Thus a reframing of the issue took place, and the focus of the international actors (both in the US and the UN system) shifted onto practicalities of managing the Palestinian refugees. This shift represented a de-politicization of the refugee issue, transforming it from a political into a humanitarian question. During this process the Palestinians were not asked what they wanted, nor included in any negotiations. Managing the Palestinians developed into a process where the core of the matter – the Palestinians – mainly found themselves pushed to the margins. The basic assumption of the international actors was that the Palestinian cry for repatriation was largely symbolic, and thus, if just their lives could be improved, this cry would still.
In this paper I discuss Israel’s shifting position on its willingness to consider compensation for the Palestinian refugees, which came to be seen as the “antithesis” to repatriation, as well as various international efforts to address the refugee problem with practice-oriented solutions throughout the 1950s. Although these processes had different motivations, they had in common that they all, in essence, sought to dissolve – rather than solve – the Palestinian refugee problem.
A catch 22. Palestinian refugees and the politics of humanitarianism
Refugee camps are normally intended to provide a temporary shelter for refugees. In the Palestinian case, after more than 60 years, 58 official refugee camps still exist. The longevity of encampment – and the refugee question – is related to the absence of a solution to the refugee problem created during the war over Palestine in 1948, and the establishment of the state of Israel. In this context the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in the Near East (UNRWA) was established in 1949 with a temporary humanitarian mandate to assist and rehabilitate the refugees. This paper is based on my PhD dissertation, and unique access to UNRWA’s own archives in Amman, Jordan.
The establishment of UNRWA shifted the Palestinian refugee issue from the political issue of return to the humanitarian issue of poverty. This was a highly political turn, as UNRWA’s mandate would be limited to humanitarian assistance, and there was no one organization with a active mandate to search for political solutions. Over the years, this setup has led to a status quo of humanitarian assistance, that all, except the refugees, have been living rather well with. Donors work under the assumption that improved living conditions will help the efforts for a political outcome. Simultaneously, Palestinian refugees have been presented as an obstacle to peace, and refugees’ genuine participation in negotiations has been denied.
UNWRA is in a catch 22 of long-term humanitarian assistance. While its assistance is needed, and has made important improvements, it will not lead to a just solution to the refugee situation. One paradox of refugee relief is that the urgent needs of survival may over time help accommodate a status quo. In this paper I discuss consequences of long-term humanitarian assistance through UNRWA with a view to its practices and relations to Palestinian refugees and refugee camps. I discuss consequences of long-term humanitarian assistance through UNRWA. What are the political implications of such humanitarian aid? Has it lessened the needs for political solutions or affected future solutions?
