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Religion, Politics, and the Originsof Palestine Refugee ReliefBy Asaf Romirowsky and Alexander H. JoffePalgrave Macmillan268 pages; $105
With the recent breakdown of another iteration of attempts to "make forward progress" in Palestinian-Israeli negotiations, many have remarked on the basic intractability of the issues that divide the two. Among these, the disposition of the Palestinian refugees remains a focal point as a "redline" concern for both sides. The long-politicized historical narrative of the Palestinian refugees has taken center stage, sidelining attempts to inject objectivity or practicality into the negotiations.
But the ingrained blame-game pattern that interminably seeks to tease out who bears the "original sin" of culpability for the crisis misses a crucial piece of the puzzle. The Palestinian refugee population is the single recipient of its own United Nations agency, a designation that defies historical logic given the massive number of worldwide refugee dislocations around the globe in the 20th and 21st centuries. It is this conundrum that Asaf Romirowsky and Alexander Joffe explore in their new volume, Religion, Politics, and the Origins of Palestine Refugee Relief.
The authors, noted Middle East experts, deconstruct the involvement of NGOs with the Palestinian refugees over the 20th century and examine the relationships among early independent (religious) NGO the American Friends Service Committee (Quaker) and the UN agencies created to address the refugee crisis that Israel's creation in 1948 engendered.
Thoroughly researched and documented, this scholarly volume is readable and engaging. The authors outline the ambivalence of the AFSC toward Israel and the Palestine issue: a fundamental commitment to humanitarian relief of disadvantaged and uprooted people across the globe, at odds with an equally foundational belief in a supersessionist Christianity that could not reconcile the possibility of a rebirth of Jewish nationhood in the Land of Israel. A symbiosis between the Quaker...