Humanitarianism Was Never Enough: Dorothy Thompson, Sands of Sorrow, and the Arabs of Palestine

The ambivalent legacies of postwar humanitarianism have been the subject of much historical critique over the past twenty years. This article discusses the politics of humanitarian compassion through the writing and advocacy of the campaigning journalist and broadcaster, Dorothy Thompson. One of the first to advocate for the rights of Jewish refugees in the late 1930s, Thompson scandalized U.S. opinion when she campaigned for Palestinian refugees in the late 1940s and 1950s. The refugees, she argued, were not simply one humanitarian crisis among many, but the consequence of the failure of the postwar human rights regime to deal either with the violence of state formation or the persistence of nationalism.