| Palestinian Arabs. However, he returned to the Middle East, not on a British plane, to be sure, but on a US plane. According to his admirer, the Arab historian Majid Khadduri, this was a US Army aircraft.
Another peculiar feature of British policy during the mandate --that Kimmerling and Migdal should explain-- was to keep Jews and Arabs from reaching agreements among themselves. One Arab leader, Ragheb Bey al-Nashashibi, suggested in 1923 that it was British policy to keep Jews and Arabs at odds. He complained, "the High Commissioner is guided by the advice of [Ernest] Richmond, who makes all cooperation with the Jews impossible." The European Union states seem to follow a similar policy in the practice of their Jerusalem consulates to hold separate celebrations for Jews and Arabs on the national holidays of the various EU states. In the case of this book, not only factual omissions are significant. It is also the questions that are not asked. After all, in the same period of time when 600,000 to 800,000 Palestinian Arabs became refugees --the immediate post-war period-- twenty to thirty million refugees were created in Europe and India. Shortly after the fighting of WW2 stopped, more than three million Germans were expelled from the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia where they had lived for hundreds of years. Another nine to twelve million Germans were expelled from Silesia, Pomerania, and East Prussia, which were transferred to Poland and the USSR. Millions of Poles were transferred from western Ukraine and Belarus to Poland's new western territories taken from Germany. Finns were transferred from the 10% of Finland that was transferred to the USSR. This adds up to a conservative estimate of about 15 million. In India, between eight and 15 million persons fled from the newly invented Pakistan state to the new Indian Republic, and vice versa, Hindus and Sikhs going to India and Muslims to Pakistan (a million or more are estimated killed). These many millions of refugees were soon resettled in both Europe and India (including Pakistan). Today little is heard of these refugees. Many otherwise well informed people are not aware of these events. To be sure, groups of expellees in Germany still nurture demands for return. But even in Germany they are not much heard, and they are labelled "right wing." In contrast, a great international apparatus, supported over the years mainly by US funds funneled through the UN's UNRWA subsidiary, and including other bodies such as the American Friends Service Committee (Quakers), the International Committee of the Red Cross, and various church groups, has been functioning for more than fifty years not only to provide help to the 1948 refugees but to perpetuate their refugee status. To some extent, Kimmerling and Migdal realize that UNRWA and the refugee camp system have served to perpetuate the refugee situation and to create, to some extent, a sense of identity among the camp population somewhat distinct from that of other Arabs. Yet they attribute perpetuation of the camps and the refugee status to the camp residents themselves who, they write, rejected resettlement out of the camps. However, if we assume that the camp residents always rejected resettlement (and we know that the UN, the Arab states, and Western powers objected to Israel's project to build housing for them in Gaza outside the camps, when some were willing to move to new homes), then we still need to ask if the popular will has often been the determining factor in the countries where the camps were located. In any case, the camps could not have continued without international funding and international political support. Did not the Sudeten Germans want to go back? But they were not maintained as a separate group in West Germany. Another is issue is what the international agencies have been telling and teaching the Arabs over the years. The authors do not ask this relevant question. In short, Kimmerling and Migdal do not ask why the Arab refugee situation has persisted as it has whereas other refugee situations from the same period were solved long ago, by resettlement. This is the main question that they do not ask. Why are these Arabs an exception? Nor do the authors ask why the Western press and academic world and Western governments and church establishments seem so eager to promote the notion of a "Palestinian people" and to anguish along with these Arabs, while the other post-war refugees are forgotten. One may ask, Who needs this book? Yehoshu`a Porat's book (on Palestinian Arab nationalism) covers much the same ground up to 1939. It is far superior as a historical work and not burdened with Kimmerling and Migdal's conceptual confusion. If a book is needed to cover the history of the Eretz-Israel Arabs and the refugees since 1939, this is not the book. It has some plausibly accurate and helpful sociological information that Porat may lack and it is not a work of pure Arab propaganda. Yet it is striking that, although Porat is a major source for them, they leave out much of his information that does not fit their thesis, such as that British officials worked to organize the Muslim-Christian Associations after their occupation. Hence, the book has too many mistakes and omissions, distortions, evasions, and lies, plus too much conceptual confusion and tendentiousness to be of much use, although people who are themselves ill informed may not realize that. Moreover, the Hebrew edition lacks the documented footnotes that the English edition has. What is most striking about the book, all considered, is that much of the information that they do present actually contradicts their claim of a "Palestinian people" (much less a "Palestinian nation") ever existing, or even that the Palestinian Arabs had any traditional, historical sense of being different from the Arab Muslims in neighboring countries, and contradicts the authors' effort to depict the 1934 revolt against Muhammad Ali as the onset of a separate identity. Nor do they satisfactorily prove that there is a "Palestinian people" even now, since they disregard contrary evidence. Even the Arab historian Majid Khadduri questioned the "Palestinian people" notion. NOTES |
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