Records of Dispossession: Palestinian Refugee Property and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (review)

Records of Dispossession is the fifth publication of the Institute for Palestine Studies series on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Although sponsored by an institute committed to the Palestinian cause, Fischbach's work is a thorough academic research based on ample Israeli, Arab, U.N., and other primary and secondary sources. It deals with a key issue regarding the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and its resolution, the evaluation of the property left behind by the Palestinians in 1948. The importance of this issue derives from the key role the question of the compensation of refugees and their decedents played in the efforts to bring a stable and just peace solution to this conflict.

Fischbach presents detailed, although conflicting, estimates of Palestinian property lost in 1948, made by Israelis and Arabs and by the experts of the UNCCP. However, his work lacks a professional economic evaluation of contrasting and conflicting data included in different reports on this matter. His detailed research of the work of the UNCCP in the 1950s and 1960s provides a most authoritative narrative of the effort made by the U.N. to promote Arab-Israeli reconciliation through the channel of Palestinian refugees' compensation. His overview of the fall and rise of the question of the refugee property issue since 1967 and until recent exposes its prevailing importance for the achieving a peace solution to the conflict.

Like any student of the history of different aspects of the Middle East conflict, Fischbach was obliged to deal not with conflicting and contradicting data, but with conflicting historical narratives, Arab and Israeli- (post- and anti-) Zionist, while locating his subject in context. The short introduction chapter seems the only place he attempted to do so, and not very successfully. Fischbach also avoids dealing with another context crucial for his work, the rather similar cases of population exchange, deportation, and resettlement in Europe and South Asia that took place during and following both world wars, consequent to the disassembling of European and colonial empires.

Missing a discussion of both contexts, the book is essentially a narration of the history of the refugee property question. The first chapter of this narration is the most problematic one. Fischbach seems to avoid existing research done on refugee flight and Israeli policy toward Palestinian-Arab abandoned property in attempt to present original research on the matter. This might seem plausible, although not very realistic, regarding the ample of archival and other material relevant to such a research, which was not used by Fischbach.

Narrowing his scope to the work of the UNCCP in the second chapter, Fischbach reveals fascinating and mostly unknown historical material. Nevertheless, the chapter is too long and too detailed. A more concise and critical text, not of Israeli views and policies alone, followed by short and clear conclusions, would have made it more comprehensible for the reader. Returning to the Israeli policy in the third chapter, Fischbach concentrates on the demand to relate the Palestinian-Arab property to that of the Jews who were forced to leave Arab countries following the 1948 and 1956 wars. No doubt it is important deal with this issue; nevertheless, the author could have shortened it by using data and findings of previous research.¹

This reluctance to deal with the property issue in a wider context characterizes further chapters of Records of Dispossession. Subsequently, from the first chapter the author consolidates a narrative portraying the gaining side—the victorious Jewish Zionists—as the guilty one and its actions as the sole cause for the strife of the Palestinian Arabs. His interpretation of the U.S.A. as Israel's key supporter and patron since the early 1950s is mistaken and anachronistic. Placing the Palestinian Arabs in the role of the victims and avoiding the role of Arab states in the formation of the tragedy and loss experienced by the Palestinian Arabs is typical of Western orientalism, which regards non-Europeans as passive and inferior...