On December 9, 1948, the United Nations General Assembly convened in Paris at the Palais des Nations to adopt the text of the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The next day, December 10, the same body approved the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Then, the following day, December 11, the General Assembly passed GA Resolution 194 (III) to end the year-long war between Jews and Arabs in Palestine. What do these three events have to do with one another? December 9 and 10 commonly anchor our narrative of the emergence of international human rights and atrocity law after the Second World War. Together the Genocide Convention and the UDHR symbolize the birth of a global humanitarian legal order out of the ashes of war-torn Europe. By contrast, December 11 rarely figures in this history, except as a conspicuous instance of international law’s early failure in the postwar Middle East.Footnote 1 If December 9 and 10 represent hard-won legal cosmopolitanism, December 11 suggests law’s enduring weakness in the face of violent nationalism. The result is a jarring, bifurcated picture of a key moment in global history. International justice and injustice appear side by side in December 1948. High-minded diplomats stroll the halls of Paris and New York while soldiers and refugees flood the roads of Tel Aviv and Ramallah. The Holocaust brushes uneasily past the Nakba.
How do we explain the link between those two different frames? In and of itself, this is not a new question. Hannah Arendt was the first in a long line of scholars to note the significance of the temporal proximity of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to the 1948 war. In her estimation, both the Second World War and the war in the Middle East demonstrated the inseparable ties between human rights and national citizenship. Far from parochializing the nation state, she observed, the new proclamation of universal rights merely confirmed its global enshrinement as the basic template of modern politics. Despite much talk of a new dawn for humanity, the world still required the nation state to concretize human rights in the form of legal entitlements to its national citizens.Footnote 2 Recent events served to confirm her thesis. European Jews had lost their rights as de-nationalized Germans, Poles, Romanians, and others and regained them as Jewish citizens of the new State of Israel. Yet the restoration of Jewish human rights in 1948 merely led to the catastrophic dispossession of another people, Arendt lamented, leaving as it did the Palestinian Arabs stateless and rightless in the process.Footnote 3
Contemporary scholars have extended Arendt’s analysis further by attempting to emplace the Holocaust and the Nakba squarely into a single conceptual frame in the global history of human rights and genocide.Footnote 4 Cognizant of the conceptual and moral risks involved in linking these vastly different events, they nevertheless reckon that the historical exercise can yield a unified picture of twentieth-century Europe and the Middle East as twin sites of mass violence that together form interlocking parts of a single modern history of rights and rightlessness. There is no doubt but that any account of the 1940s human rights moment must engage with this fraught conjunction. Yet such an approach also risks reinforcing a firm set of symbolic binaries – Jew and Arab, Zionist and Palestinian, Shoah and Nakba, Europe and Middle East, righted and rightless, stated and stateless – in guise of dismantling them. We end up sacrificing historicism on the altar of theory.Footnote 5 The historical narrative becomes one of the Western nation state’s dualistic capacities to inflict violence and render justice leaving us with little sense of how contemporary activists themselves understood the moral, legal, and political interconnections between distinct global conflicts.Footnote 6
One way forward is to broaden our view of the Jewish dimensions of human rights history in 1948. All too often, accounts of Jewish advocacy present truncated pictures of individual activists deeply haunted by their experiences in the European Holocaust yet utterly disconnected from the political violence in the Middle East.Footnote 7 In this article, I offer a corrective through a reexamination of the World Jewish Congress, an organization whose leaders’ biographies and activities stretched across both frames of 1948.Footnote 8 The WJC activists spent the year closely engaged with the UDHR and Genocide Convention drafting processes at the UN at the same time as they coordinated a global Jewish response to the war in the Middle East. Their record of activities therefore affords us a direct window into contemporaneous understanding of the ties between the Holocaust and the Nakba, human rights, genocide, and refugeedom. What emerges is a surprising picture that challenges present-day assumptions about how Jewish human rights activists must have understood the events of 1948 in real time. The largely European-born leadership viewed the unfolding events of the year neither as a triumph for post-Holocaust global justice nor as a tragedy of Palestinian displacement but as an ongoing crisis of Jewish endangerment across the Middle East. Early Holocaust memory served less as a generic lesson for humanity than as an immediate warning about what might yet happen again, right away, to Jews living elsewhere in the postwar world.Footnote 9
These early activists hoped to employ international law to insulate Middle Eastern Jews from a war that they themselves openly supported. Nor did that inconsistency trouble them. They believed that at the new United Nations, national self-determination and international legal supervision rose in tandem. A Jewish nation state was necessary but insufficient. In their eyes, the embryonic instruments of human rights and genocide prevention could provide a neutral means by which to protect diasporic Jewish communities as a matter of global law not state-based politics. A depoliticized human rights law would provide a space for minority rights protection beyond the bounds of the nation state and the tether of state-based nationalism. On both accounts, their reality proved otherwise. Already in 1948, the first generation of modern human rights activists confronted a UN legal system in which the state-based politics of recognition decisively constrained the possibilities for global justice.Footnote 10
At first glance, the Jewish experience in 1948 may appear anomalous in postwar global history. The idiosyncratic Jewish geopolitical position between the Global North and Global South powers, between the colonial and anticolonial worlds, and across the statist and stateless boundary frustrates familiar meta-narratives about the anti-nationalist sources of legal cosmopolitanism. The creation of the State of Israel placed Jews squarely in the column of early UN beneficiaries, in conspicuous contrast to the Palestinians. Yet that successful act of national self-determination also exposed Jews across Eastern Europe and the Middle East to new forms of profound vulnerability. Precisely because of this complex combination of geographical and political elements, the Jewish story of 1948 presents an illuminating case study with which to re-examine the larger history of global activism and claims-making at the early United Nations.
Revisiting 1948 through Jewish eyes reveals the intrinsic shortcomings of the UN legal system in the very moment of it its founding. The new legal architecture of human rights and anti-atrocity law created that year was supposed to remedy the defects of the pre-war League of Nations system by universalizing rights-protection and de-politicizing claims-making. Yet despite the lofty rhetoric that attended its launch, crucial procedural powers remained lodged exclusively in the hands of state members. Much recent scholarship has emphasized the ways in which, newly independent, postcolonial states from the Global South harnessed their numbers to force the world to reckon with the issues of self-determination, global racism, and economic inequality.Footnote 11 Parallel to those efforts, non-Communist Global North regimes responded with a countervailing focus on individual rights, atrocity crimes, and migration as global justice priorities, with the European Communist world poised in between the two camps.Footnote 12 What ultimately linked both North and South, however, was an acceptance of states as the exclusive legitimate actors in the new UN legal system. The structuring of the UN legal system around states led to a fundamental disempowerment of a range of non-state actors – transnational diasporas, sub-state minority communities, indigenous populations, and global advocacy organizations – in their pursuit of claims-making after World War II.Footnote 13 Eventually, new human rights organizations would develop innovative strategies for global information politics, transnational campaigns, and domestic lobbying to advance legal claims at and beyond the UN.Footnote 14 Yet these later approaches to human rights advocacy -- and the persistence of Israel/Palestine as a global flashpoint within them -- can only be fully understood once we recover the fateful Jewish human rights campaign of 1948.
Another Jewish Holocaust?
In late December 1947, a handwritten Hebrew letter from a Syrian Jew in Damascus arrived in New York City, bearing a dire warning: ‘The war against Zionism has turned into a war against the entire Jewish people, and, of course, against the Jewish citizens of Arabia… The Jews of Arabia are bound to be annihilated just like those of Central Europe and in Germany, and if you will not come to our help soon, you will suffer the pangs of remorse.’Footnote 15 One month earlier, the United Nations General Assembly had voted to partition British Mandatory Palestine into two new states, one Jewish and one Arab. Now, as civil war raged in Israel/Palestine, anti-Jewish violence flared across the broader region. From Iran, Pakistan, and Yemen came ghastly news of violent pogroms involving Jewish deaths.Footnote 16 The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported in November that Arab League states had formulated ‘a plan to intern as enemy aliens any leaders of Jewish communities in Arab states suspected of harbouring Zionist sympathizers.’Footnote 17 Lebanese press accounts described Syrian plans ‘either to expel the Jews from Syria or to confine them to special concentration camps.’Footnote 18
The Damascus letter-writer, who cloaked himself in male anonymity, expressed fear that his Arab neighbours, influenced by a political leadership increasingly ‘imbued with the theory of Hitler and Nazism,’ would destroy the ‘Arab [Jewish] diaspora’ just as the Nazis had done to the ‘German [Jewish] diaspora.’ His language was suffused with liturgical imagery that suggested a typological repetition of an eternal evil threatening the Jewish people. Yet he acknowledged a decidedly secular cause for hope: ‘Our position differs from that of the Jews during the war. The Arabian countries are members of the United Nations, and immediate and effective steps may save the remnants.’Footnote 19 The international order would not fail the Jews a second time.
The letter-writer knew his audience. The New York-based leaders of the World Jewish Congress shared his belief in the power of the United Nations to halt atrocity and secure justice. Formally launched as an international non-governmental organization in 1936, the group’s origins lay in the post-World War I joint efforts of various European and American Jewish delegations at the Paris Peace Conference to constitute an international organization for global Jewish legal self-defence. Its core leadership comprised a far-flung network of prominent Jewish political figures, most of whom had direct personal ties to Eastern Europe. They included its president, the Russian-born Zionist leader Nahum Goldmann; Lithuanian Jewish parliamentarian and lawyer Jacob Robinson; British rabbi and Zionist leader Maurice Perlzweig; and American rabbi and military chaplain Robert Marcus. With offices in New York, London, and Paris, and a federated structure premised on the voluntary affiliation of local Jewish communities and domestic organizations, the WJC championed a complex, transnational vision of global Jewish nationhood premised on ‘the fight for Jewish rights in the Diaspora and for the upbuilding of Palestine as a Jewish Commonwealth.’ In practice, the legal dimension of this activity centred on a double-barrelled model of Jewish collectivity: internationally guaranteed national minorityhood in the various nation states of Eastern Europe and territorial national majorityhood in British Mandatory Palestine.Footnote 20
During the Holocaust years, the WJC actively publicized Nazi atrocities and helped rescue and resettle European Jews. Under the auspices of the Institute for Jewish Affairs in New York, they pioneered the collection of documentary evidence about Nazi war crimes and sought a place in the planning discussions of international criminal prosecutions at Nuremberg. The group’s leaders also devoted considerable attention to the postwar reconstruction of international law. Even as the newer model of individual human rights circulated through wartime Anglo-American policy planning networks in the early 1940s, WJC leadership held fast to their belief in the need for international law to recognize sub-state and transnational minority identities as part of the new legal order. The group’s 1944 International Bill of Human Rights proposal, for instance, blended individual and group rights into a comprehensive legal framework.Footnote 21 Similarly, the WJC called in 1945 for the UN human rights treaty to include ‘full and complete protection of life and liberty for the inhabitants of all countries’ and ‘the inalienable right of all religious, ethnic and cultural groups to maintain and foster their respective group identities on the basis of equality’ (with no territorial designation), along with a demand for ‘the opening of the doors of Palestine for unrestricted Jewish immigration and its reconstruction as a free and democratic Jewish Commonwealth.’Footnote 22 To this, they added their early support for the UN Genocide Convention. While the word ‘genocide’ immediately harnessed several other concepts relating to war crimes, mass atrocity, and repressive attacks on religious, national, and racial minorities, at its core lay a notion of group rights consistent with the WJC’s collective rights template.Footnote 23
It was still not at all clear by the close of 1947 what the relationship would be between minority rights, human rights, and genocide in international law. The UN bureaucratic machinery itself existed in a state of flux, buffeted by diplomatic intrigues and shifting geopolitical realities. The so-called International Bill of Rights and the Genocide Convention both remained in the drafting stages. As a non-governmental organization, the WJC attained ‘consultative’ status, a position from which they submitted memoranda and lobbied diplomats and UN officials. Yet they lacked a voice in the actual drafting and voting on the laws. Nor could they formally introduce topics for UN deliberation or action without the consent of the nation state delegates who controlled the institutional apparatus. That issue would become paramount in their quest to respond to the events of 1948.
The opening days of January that year brought further ominous accounts of surging violence between Jews and Arabs in Palestine as well as gruesome anti-Jewish attacks throughout the Arab and Islamic world. Press reports described Syrian Jews accused of poisoning their Muslim neighbours with cholera germs. Word arrived of an Arab League draft law, supposedly already approved by Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq, that required Arab states to treat all Jews in their respective countries as enemy ‘citizens of the Jewish minority State of Palestine’ unless they formally pledged to fight as ‘anti-Zionists’ in one of the Arab armies.Footnote 24 A cable from Bombay relayed news of ‘the planned extermination of all Jews in Aden [Yemen].’Footnote 25
Behind these reports lay a deliberate Arab diplomatic strategy. Convinced that the UN plan was an unjust imposition of Jewish minority rule backed by foreign imperial interests on an Arab-majority country, Arab diplomats and Palestinian nationalist leaders opted to employ menacing propaganda. They generally aimed by these pronouncements to scuttle the partition plan and deter their Zionist opponents. Eventually, however, Arab spokesmen would soon become prisoners of their own bellicose rhetoric, drawing the Arab League states into a war that some privately acknowledged as far back as the spring of 1947 would not stop the rise of a Jewish state in Palestine.Footnote 26
Primed by the reports from their own sources, meanwhile, the WJC analysts in New York that January regarded these statements not as evidence of overheated propaganda but rather emerging state policy. Nazi ideology had reemerged in the Middle East. The ‘Jews of Arabia’ really did face threat of destruction. Demanding that Jews denounce Jewish nationhood and fight against their fellow Jewish brethen was tantamount to antisemitism. Yet the question that lay before them was how to respond.
The status of the Jewish communities and their self-appointed defenders presented a confusing political and legal scenario.Footnote 27 Middle Eastern, Arabic-speaking Jews self-identified in a variety of ways across the disparate contexts of the post-World War I world. Some did view Zionism as a natural extension of their Jewish identities as members of an ethnoreligious community with common national ties, while others saw themselves as a religious minority within a pan-Arabic national culture. Hybrid and fluid social identities reflected the complexity of the region shifting dramatically if uncertainly into modern religious, racial, and national categories.Footnote 28
In this context, the relationship between national identity and political nationality remained ill-defined, especially in the case of Jews. For their part, the WJC leadership viewed Jews as a separate nation in need of public international legal recognition and a legal right to immigration to Jewish Palestine based on implied Jewish nationality. While they did not formally define theirs as a Zionist organization, several members of the WJC’s executive also held senior roles, some formal, others informal, in the international Zionist movement. Goldmann himself served as a senior official in the Jewish Agency, the Zionist diplomatic apparatus, also responsible for controversial land purchases in Palestine, while Robinson alternated between work for the nascent Israeli UN Mission in New York and his role as head of the WJC’s Institute for Jewish Affairs. These men adhered to what by 1942 had emerged as the mainstream Zionist position on the question of Palestine. Territorial partition represented the best option for achieving the goal of a viable Jewish state with a corresponding Arab state to rise next door in former Mandatory Palestine.Footnote 29 Yet those overlapping commitments only further highlighted the challenge they faced. As the group’s London-based political director A. L. Easterman noted, ‘while obviously we are 100% with and behind the State of Israel and Zionist aims generally, it is not our business to be an adjunct and gramophone record of either the State or Zionism.’Footnote 30 That notion of independence would be put to the test in 1948, requiring an answer to the question: How might they, Jewish nationalists, intervene on behalf of fellow Jews without further politicizing their Jewish identities and hence imperiling these people’s lives?Footnote 31
Prevention, not punishment
It was in this fraught moment that the WJC leaders began to invoke the term ‘genocide’ in reference to the Jewish fate in the Middle East.Footnote 32 The move came amidst a series of manoeuvres to publicize the growing crisis: overtures to the British and American governments; plans for the appointment of their own emissary to Arab countries to investigate conditions on the ground; a New York press conference; and efforts to ‘induce the New York dailies to send a special correspondent, if possible, a non-Jew to the Arab countries.’Footnote 33 Then, on January 8, 1948, New York-based political director Rabbi Robert Marcus met with UN Assistant Secretary-General Byron Price to ask that the Secretariat initiate action on the basis of the draft Genocide Convention. Marcus had served as a U.S. military chaplain during World War II, during which time he helped liberate the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1945 and spent months working with child survivors.Footnote 34 He minced no words in describing the current situation as an equally severe crisis: ‘The contemplated measures and the perpetrated acts of violence,’ wrote Marcus in an accompanying memo, ‘are clearly aimed at the total destruction of a racial and religious group, namely, the Jews, and thus constitute genocide.’Footnote 35
The Secretariat expressed sympathy but demurred on grounds that they lacked legal authority to take up the matter. After all, the Genocide Convention did not even yet exist. Marcus and his New York colleagues considered a direct approach to the Security Council but concluded that since that body was already intensely focused on the Palestine conflict, raising the fate of Middle Eastern Jews there would be counterproductive. The next logical address to which they might turn, the General Assembly, was not scheduled to meet in session for several months. So, on January 19, the group submitted an official petition to the UN’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), the membership body charged with overseeing the nascent Commission on Human Rights and the Ad Hoc Committee on Genocide.Footnote 36 When two weeks passed without reply, Marcus’s colleague Oscar Karbach suggested they follow up with an appeal to the UN Security Council. We must demand that the UN outlaws ‘jihad’ or ‘holy war’ as a threat to international peace and a violation of sovereignty according to the terms of the UN Charter, he proposed.Footnote 37
Karbach’s colleagues rejected that option. Instead, on February 16, Marcus submitted a second memo, this one directed more specifically to the Non-Governmental Organizations Committee of the ECOSOC, requesting the creation of a special UN ‘Committee of Inquiry on Arab violence against Jewish communities in Moslem countries.’ In stylized prose, he emphasized the ongoing peril facing Jews across the broader region:
Genocide is by no means a matter of the past. The example of evil achieving its aim of annihilating a human group is a dangerous lure in these days of reckless nationalism. It would appear that in many Moslem countries outside of Palestine Genocide directed against the Jews is the order of the day. In Aden and Bahrein, dozens of Jews have perished in ghastly pogroms. The ancient Jewish community of Peshawar, Pakistan, is no longer: its members have fled in order to escape violent extirpation. In Syria, Jewish property was recently looted, prayer houses were desecrated …. In many countries of the Arab League, administrative practices and legislative measures evidence a planned and systematic anti-Jewish campaign. Will the civilized world once more wait for the culmination of the plan in atrocities and extermination?Footnote 38
However politicized this rhetoric may sound to contemporary ears, Marcus and his colleagues viewed the invocation of genocide in 1948 as a way to depoliticize the issue. Indeed, the context for this shift in rhetoric was a new approach to the intersecting questions of the Palestine conflict and the fate of Jewish minorities elsewhere in the Diaspora. At a secret meeting held in January 1948 in New York City, WJC leaders and Jewish Agency representatives agreed to bracket out the political questions of violence in Palestine from the status of Jews beyond its borders. A division of labour was proposed. The Zionist leadership of the Jewish state-in-formation would focus on the struggle for statehood and the ongoing fighting in Palestine. The WJC would handle all matters of Jewish legal protection outside of Palestine. This led to a decision, in the words of New York WJC staff lawyer Nehemiah Robinson, Jacob’s brother, ‘to treat anti-Jewish persecution and discrimination in the Arab countries as a matter not directly concerned with the struggle around the Palestine issue, but as one involving the safeguarding of human rights.’Footnote 39
This division of labour was not a simple one. Beyond confusing optics over the WJC leadership’s own Zionist roles, an internal philosophical divide separated the WJC leaders from the Israeli government. After the shocking revelations of the massive demographic losses incurred in the Holocaust, the emerging Israeli leadership envisioned mass Jewish immigration from the Arab Middle East to populate the new state with a Jewish majority. This demographic question remained salient as the UN partition plan itself provided for a ratio of 498,000 Jews to 407,000 Arabs in the proposed Jewish state.Footnote 40 The Arab state would contain 807,000 Arabs and 10,000 Jews, while the international trusteeship of Jerusalem would contain 100,000 Jews and 105,000 Arabs. Even as they subscribed to this Zionist calculus, however, the WJC leaders remained ideologically committed to defending Jewish life in the diaspora, which in turn led them to resist this drive to encourage mass Jewish immigration as the necessary and inevitable outcome of the partition plan.Footnote 41 Their goal, they stressed time and again, was to provide safety for those who wished to immigrate to the Jewish state and to secure legal safeguards for those who sought to remain in their present homelands. Neither Jewish collective identity nor Jewish physical security should depend on territory. Nor should the Jewish state serve ‘as the formal representative of Jewish communities in the Diaspora,’ Goldman declared in one speech in 1948.Footnote 42 Hence the need for the WJC to intervene on their behalf.
In this regard, the WJC leaders favoured the draft genocide law as a legal tool because of its expansive definition of the various kinds of threats to group identity. Following the lead of Polish Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, with whom they at times collaborated, they insisted that genocide was a crime that encompassed violence against Jewish material and spiritual culture and economic and physical property, not just Jewish bodies. ‘In most cases, Genocide [sic] grows out of modest beginnings such as administrative disfranchisement, economic discriminations, and desecration of religious monuments,’ read the February 6 memorandum. It must be stopped early before it could fester into physical endangerment, ‘Emphasis should be not on punishment but prevention.’Footnote 43
In late February, the WJC leaders circulated a third memo, followed a few weeks later with a petition requesting the appointment of a three-person UN investigatory committee to survey the entire situation of Jews in the Middle East.Footnote 44 As before they presented their overture as a crucial test of the larger UN’s legitimacy and efficacy. The whole raison d’être of the emerging global justice system was to shield innocent individuals and groups from state violence, argued Maurice Perlzweig, the group’s chief UN representative in New York. What better case on which to apply these legal instruments than the situation of Jews in the Middle East? Besides, he confided to Nehemiah Robinson at the time, ‘I think some Arabs are against massacre, even if on anti-Zionist grounds.’Footnote 45
The limits of diaspora diplomacy
Events over those first few months of 1948 revealed how difficult the WJC legal diplomacy would be at the UN. The Arab diplomats who held key positions on the ECOSOC and other related UN committees generally viewed the WJC as a hostile body inseparable from the Zionist movement. This was particularly the case for the most important Arab voice on human rights, Lebanese delegate Charles Malik. A Greek Orthodox Christian philosopher turned diplomat, Malik served on the four-person Commission on Human Rights ad hoc steering committee then at work drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He also presided over the Commission’s parent body as first President of the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). In public, Malik consistently voiced support for the Jews. He forcefully denounced antisemitism and even invoked the Holocaust to argue on behalf of the need for human rights. At the same time, Malik served as a key leader of the League of Arab States, charged with representing pan-Arab political interests at the UN and blocking the Zionist drive for statehood in Palestine.Footnote 46
In theory, these overlapping roles might have inclined Malik to favour the WJC position that the fate of Middle Eastern Jews should be bracketed out from the Palestine conflict. After all, he routinely insisted that it was not the religion of Judaism that posed a problem for the Arab world, but only Zionism by virtue of its European colonial character. Furthermore, his own position vis-à-vis Arab politics was decidedly ambivalent. A passionate defender of Lebanese and Christian minority interests, he found himself cast as an official spokesman for a pan-Arab nationalism heavily infused with Muslim-majoritarian politics at odd with his own personal views. In practice, though, Malik’s principled anti-Zionism frequently collapsed into political and theological antisemitism. In his writings from 1947 and 1948, he slipped back and forth between clear-eyed critiques of Zionist power as compared to Palestinian weakness and dark, essentialist warnings about Jewish behaviours and beliefs that collapsed any distinction between Zionists and Jews. His private letters and memos are peppered with passages that erase any difference between ‘the Jews,’ ‘Jewish pressure,’ and ‘Zionist pressure.’Footnote 47 In his 1947 confidential reports to his colleagues in the Lebanese Foreign Ministry, for instance, he explained that the ‘rampant anti-Semitism’ in American society was naturally ‘the reaction of the non-Jewish sections of the population against the financial and business domination of the Jews.’ American media, business, and political leaders appease the Jews in foreign policy, because they are all ‘inwardly afraid of the Jews.’ ‘The Jews,’ he added, currently exert ‘tremendous international influence’ and ‘Zionism and the Zionists are an immense international power’ in world affairs, particularly through their control of ‘Jewish banks.’Footnote 48
Malik’s political convictions and his anti-Jewish beliefs drove his public position that the fate of Jewish refugees, whether European or Middle Eastern, could not possibly be considered as a human rights issue separate from the Palestine war. ‘The problem of [Jewish] refugees is not a humanitarian problem,’ he insisted, but stemmed from Jewish intransigence rooted in spiritual chauvinism and theological error.Footnote 49 In a public speech at Mount Holyoke college in May 1948, he called on Christians to tell ‘the Jews’ to stop their ‘exaggerated manipulation of international machinery.’ It was Jewish ‘Messianism,’ coupled with the Jewish ‘sense of superiority’ and ‘persecution-complex,’ that explained their arrogant conduct vis-à-vis Palestine.Footnote 50 Given this view, he had little qualms about informing the UN Security Council that it was only natural that the more the Jews enraged the Arabs, ‘the more precarious the very existence of the Jews in the Middle East was bound to be.’Footnote 51
Each time the WJC tried to introduce questions of violence and persecution of Jews in the Middle East onto the ECOSOC agenda that spring, Malik responded with procedural manoeuvres to block them.Footnote 52 Attempts to appeal to UN Secretariat official Henri Laugier only backfired, as they confirmed for Malik his suspicions that the Zionist conspiracy extended into diplomatic power offensives throughout the UN bureaucracy.Footnote 53 A similar dynamic surfaced in the WJC’s dealings with Charles Azkoul, another Lebanese diplomat who assisted Malik in the Commission on Human Rights sessions and served on the Ad Hoc Committee on Genocide. In March 1948, Azkoul objected to one WJC proposal on grounds that it was intrinsically ‘prejudiced’ against Arab countries.Footnote 54 After the Deir Yassin massacre of Palestinian villagers by far right Zionist paramilitary forces in early April, Azkoul openly charged the Zionists as a whole with perpetrating genocide. In various speeches, he suggested that Arab military intervention against dangerous political or minority groups could be justified to prevent genocide. The WJC took this to be a call for pre-emptive genocide against Jews and hastily protested.Footnote 55
Despite these early challenges, the WJC’s New York leadership continued to press their efforts at the UN. On April 6, Marcus addressed the UN Ad Hoc Committee on Genocide with a message that the spectre of ‘endangered’ Jewish communities in the Middle East and vulnerable Muslims and Hindus in India/Pakistan both cried out for a new approach ‘to the security of endangered groups everywhere.’ A successful genocide law would need to be accompanied by something akin to the prewar minority rights system. Beyond protesting the organization’s collective inaction while Jewish lives hung in the balance, he insisted that the Genocide Convention, then still in the drafting process, should formulate the nature of the threats to minorities in capacious terms:
[We require] the creation of machinery which would effectively preserve the lives and secure the existence of human groups against possible attacks by stronger groups. This aim could be achieved by establishing an international criminal law which would make it an offense against humanity to destroy or weaken any racial, religious or other group by unilateral action of their fellow citizens, the authorities of their home country or by an aggressor.Footnote 56
Doing so would require moving beyond the realm of ‘criminal law… to create effective machinery by the UN to prevent in all corners of the world the destruction of human groups.’Footnote 57 In effect, the danger of a genocide perpetrated against the Jews in the postwar Middle East presented the best case for continuing the minority rights regime originally developed for the Jews of prewar Eastern Europe.Footnote 58
Again, the April effort went nowhere, largely due to Malik’s stonewalling. Increasingly alarmed by the prospect of what he called a ‘mass pogrom’ of 800,000 Jews, in mid-May Marcus attempted to shame Malik into action by sending him a public telegram pointing out the renewed violence in the region.Footnote 59 Malik remained unmoved. Jewish nationalism was responsible for the violence, he insisted. It was not the Jews but rather the Palestinian refugees and the larger Arab world that ‘completely despair[ed] of international justice.’ No ‘political legalistic’ solution could solve the conflict until the world accepted the wrong inflicted on Arabs in the form of Zionist misdeeds and the unjust UN partition plan. The Jewish strategy of seeking support from the larger world while ignoring Arab concerns in the Middle East constituted the root of the problem.Footnote 60 Having by that time grown convinced that the Jews around the globe should experience the vulnerability caused by the war in Palestine so as to retreat from their demands for a sovereign state, Malik openly said as much in one speech to the Security Council, ‘The real task of those who would establish real peace in Palestine and the Near East is to refrain from giving the Jews a false sense of international security, and therefore from encouraging them to defy and flout the Arab world.’Footnote 61
On May 14, with the British Mandate in Palestine set to expire at midnight, the Zionist leadership meeting in Tel Aviv formally announced the new State of Israel. Hours later, surrounding Arab states began their coordinated military incursion into Palestine, turning a civil war within Palestine into a regional state-on-state war. The New York Times reported on Sunday May 16 that 900,000 people, the ‘Jewish populations in Arab and Moslem countries stretching from Morocco to India,’ now faced ‘grave danger.’Footnote 62 The formal involvement of multiple Arab state armies raised the geopolitical stakes for other countries vis-à-vis all diplomatic claims at the UN. Stymied by Malik’s procedural manoeuvres, the WJC leaders sought out individual state delegations to present their case. Yet the Great Powers proved reluctant to accept the premise that the laws-in-formation, both human rights and genocide, should be applied to the Jewish case in the Middle East. The Soviets briefly entertained one proposal, but in the end decided against any further commitment or public display of support. American, French, and British diplomats all insisted that the situation of Jews in the Middle East was not a legal problem of ‘human rights,’ but rather one of politics. The British Foreign Office dismissed the WJC entreaties as ‘misleading’ in terms of their facts and strategically counter-productive: ‘If accusations are made against them in this public way, the Arab Governments are likely to suppose that they have been instigated by their own Jewish populations, and reports in the local press of the Economic and Social Council proceedings will increase resentment against the Jews.’Footnote 63
Seeking other allies, WJC activists tried to rally several small states ranging from the Netherlands to Peru to take up their cause. Many accepted the claim that the status of these Jews was ‘a problem of human rights’ separate from the Palestine conflict. Yet all feared crossing one or more of the Great Powers or inserting themselves in between them.Footnote 64 The Chinese, the Dutch, and the New Zealanders were among those states that fell into this category.Footnote 65 ‘The lines are drawn very clearly between east and west on all matters, even the most unimportant,’ wrote Marcus wrote after one such failed entreaty, as the smaller powers feared any action might trigger Cold War repercussions.Footnote 66
A month later in mid-June came a four-week truce in the war. On June 21 and 22, the WJC finally secured a chance to present their case at a special ECOSOC NGO Committee hearing in Geneva, which included delegates from Egypt, Pakistan, Syria, and Turkey, on the topic of the ‘security of the Jewish population’ in their respective countries. This time Franz Bienenfeld, a legal expert based in the WJC London office, spoke on the group’s behalf. The Viennese-born Bienenfeld had been prominent in interwar Austrian legal circles and Zionist affairs before fleeing to England in 1939, where he took up the cause of expanding international law so as to prosecute Nazi war crimes and institutionalize human rights. He now insisted that policies of the Egyptian government and other similar developments in the Middle East ‘may easily lead to what is called “Genocide.”’ But in his next breath Bienenfeld tried to convince his audience that his organization had no interest in the politics of Israel/Palestine. The World Jewish Congress is ‘neither a Zionist nor an anti-Zionist organization,’ he declared, but rather an international group committed solely to ‘defend[ing] human rights and fundamental freedoms and equality before the law for Jews, wheresoever those rights and freedoms have been threatened or infringed.’Footnote 67
A debate ensued as to how to assess the problem, whether as a separate ‘humanitarian appeal’ or a ‘political’ question inseparable from ‘the very complex situation in Palestine.’Footnote 68 This time, the Soviet delegate openly supported the Jewish case, leading to a resolution which acknowledged that the ‘unsettled conditions in Palestine may affect the observance of fundamental human rights in Palestine and some other areas,’ and hence ‘governments and authorities concerned’ should ‘exert whatever efforts are necessary to safeguard the fundamental human rights of individuals and groups of different faiths.’Footnote 69 Yet the resolution meant little. In the end the ECOSOC NGO Committee ruled that it simply lacked the legal authority to launch a formal investigation of the allegations.Footnote 70 A subsequent attempt in August also failed. By that point, the context for all Jewish diplomatic overtures had shifted dramatically as a result of another mushrooming crisis directly related to the war: the plight of Palestinian refugees.Footnote 71
Dual displacement: The linkage begins
For the first seven months of 1948, the WJC leaders passed over the Palestinian refugee question in striking silence. During this period a massive number of Palestinian Arabs were forcibly displaced from their homes through a combination of panicked flight in response to violence, Arab evacuation orders, and deliberate Israeli military expulsions. British governmental estimates in June put the number of ‘displaced Arabs’ at roughly 550,000 people, split between 250,000 in the ‘Arab area of Palestine’ and 300,000 in bordering countries.Footnote 72 American Jewish press sources, matching Israeli government estimates, offered a figure of 400,000.Footnote 73 The Arab world was convulsed by the news of Zionist violence against Palestinian civilians, especially the Deir Yassin massacre. Yet the thousands of pages of WJC memoranda and correspondence generated within the organization during that period contain nary a mention of these issues. In part, this striking omission can be attributed to genuine uncertainty about the origins and scale of the refugee crisis. Hard numbers were difficult to fix amidst conflicting reports and wartime propaganda about organized flight and atrocities committed on both sides. Naturally inclined to the emerging Zionist narrative of the conflict, the WJC leaders accepted at face value the Israeli government’s public assertions that both the scale and the circumstances of the Arab exodus were grossly exaggerated. An additional factor in the inattention to the war’s impact on Palestinians was a persistent Zionist view of the conflict as one fought between Arab states and Israel. With many Palestinian spokesmen identified as part of a broader Arab nationalist movement, WJC leaders tended to treat Palestinian national identity interchangeably with Arab national identity. Consequently, Palestinian rights-claims were frequently submerged into general discussions of Arab ‘peasant’ society.Footnote 74
This sceptical posture was exacerbated by the presence at the UN of the Palestinian leader Jamal Husseini, of the Arab Higher Committee, who repeatedly accused ‘the Jews of Palestine’ of applying ‘barbaric and inhuman methods of extermination’ learned directly from their own Nazi persecutors to the Arab civilian population, including ‘bacteriological warfare,’ and genocidal murder rooted in the biblical-era Israelite conquest of Jericho.Footnote 75 Husseini’s UN petitions freely mixed genuine pleas for justice and verifiable facts with crude fictions and nakedly antisemitic stereotypes, effectively undermining his credibility in the eyes of the WJC activists.
Yet the most powerful driver of attitudes toward Palestinian refugees among the Jewish activists was a fierce ideological resolve to keep the Middle Eastern Jewish issue separate from Israel/Palestine. The ‘Arab refugee problem’ is best left ‘to the Israeli government or the representative of the Jewish Agency’ to sort out, argued Gerhard Riegner to colleagues, lest we jeopardize our humanitarian posture. In fact, the entire rationale for treating the Middle Eastern Jewish question as a matter of law and not politics rested on this distinction. Any overt acknowledgement of the geopolitics of the moment risked undermining the case for apolitical legal protection. The avoidance of Palestinian suffering was not born out of apathy but anxiety over its potential relevance to their own cause. Any day the two issues might easily become one.Footnote 76
By August 1948, the linkage had begun. The first change arose because of a shifting Israeli diplomatic posture. While internally the government continued to regard the fate of Jews in Arab countries as ‘a matter in which the WJC only acts,’ with the commencement of the Second Truce on July 18, the Israeli Foreign Ministry publicly began to link the status of Palestinian refugees to ‘the position and treatment of Jewish minorities in the Arab countries.’Footnote 77 Having already announced in June a policy of barring displaced Palestinians from legally reentering Israel, an increasingly assertive Israeli government now looked outwards to the larger post-conflict scenario. The Middle Eastern Jews beckoned as a demographic boon to state-building, and a possible token to be used as political counter-weight to Palestinians permanently resettled in Arab countries.Footnote 78 Israeli state interest in migration and population exchange soon led to the creation of a Department for Jews in the Arab Countries at the Jewish Agency.Footnote 79 It also spawned rumours that the World Zionist Organization, an organization chaired by Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and tightly aligned with the government, might take over the ‘diaspora’ work of the WJC.Footnote 80
A second factor driving the linkage was the UN’s own peace-making diplomacy. In mid-September, UN Mediator Count Folke Bernadotte issued his Second Interim report. Based on months of investigations and negotiations with Arab League and Israeli officials, Bernadotte’s comprehensive study outlined ‘seven basic premises’ for dispute resolution, which included the ‘right of repatriation’ for ‘innocent people, uprooted from their homes by the present terror and ravages of war’ and ‘international guarantees… with regard to boundaries and human rights.’ Bernadotte rejected the Arab proposals to scuttle Israel and replace it with a ‘unitary State in the whole of Palestine’ as unreasonable, unfair to Jewish claims, and past the point of practicality. He also acknowledged that ‘the exodus of Palestinian Arabs’ was a grave injustice that should be rectified by ‘the right to return to their homes in Jewish-controlled Palestine’ (as opposed to ‘Arab-controlled Palestine’). He recognized that these displaced Palestinians were now de facto stateless with no citizenship either in Israel or in the Arab countries in which they now sought refuge. This fact would be the basis for the eventual GA Resolution 194 (iii). At present, however, given the ongoing hostilities, Bernadotte concluded that the UN could therefore do no more than task itself with providing ‘disaster relief.’Footnote 81
Bernadotte’s assassination by right-wing Zionist terrorists on September 17, 1948, temporarily threw the entire UN diplomatic process into a state of chaos and doubt. But it did not alter the basic calculus of any of the parties – Arab states, Palestinian leaders, Jewish activists, or the Israeli government – regarding the interlinked issues of Palestinian refugees and Middle Eastern Jews. Throughout that fall Arab and Palestinian spokesmen opposed letting the UN address the Middle Eastern Jewish issue, yet consistently invoked the perilous fate of these communities to pressure Israel diplomatically. Israeli authorities insisted that any resolution of the Palestinian question could not be separated from the fate of the Jews of surrounding lands yet cried foul at any suggestion that their state bore responsibility for exacerbating a Jewish humanitarian crisis. Meanwhile, the WJC leaders struggled to pursue their mission from the sidelines of the UN debates. During the final drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Genocide Convention in the UN’s Third and Sixth Committees, respectively, in October and November, the WJC UN team continued to suggest amendments. The best evidence of the need for international human rights and genocide laws, they argued repeatedly, was the ‘Hitlerian Fascist’ ‘treatment accorded the Jewish populations in Arab countries,’ where mob attacks, arbitrary arrests, mass arsons, property seizures amounted to ‘precisely the same sort of crimes which the international tribunal at Nuremberg condemned as crimes against humanity.’Footnote 82
Egyptian and Syrian diplomats readily discounted these charges as overblown Zionist propaganda. Still, they warned, in the words of Lebanese delegate Michel Amoun, that Israel’s admission to the UN would only further imperil those Jews of ‘all States in which there was a Jewish minority, for the latter would thus come under a double allegiance which would strain their loyalty to the nations of which they were citizens.’ The Arab military incursion was not an act of war, these official reiterated, but a lawful humanitarian intervention to restore ‘law and order’ since the ‘Jews had committed atrocities against the Arabs.’Footnote 83 Few UN diplomats found these claims convincing, but they did recognize the legitimate problem of the Palestinian refugees. Israeli diplomats were dismayed to learn that the Palestinian issue now constituted a stumbling block to Israel’s UN membership. Well beyond the Arab world, key countries such as China and India hesitated to commit their support for Israeli admission absent some pledge to resolve the Palestinian refugee issue.Footnote 84
As a result of these factors, the refugee question featured as a constant in human rights drafting debates that fall. In late October, the UDHR drafting committee discussed at great length whether it could take up the immediate question of the Palestinian status, before declining to do so. From late October to mid-November, the Ad Hoc Political Committee of the General Assembly debated the question of Palestinian relief, culminating in the creation of the UN Relief for Palestine Refugees program (UNRPR), to be replaced a year later by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). These debates continued into the opening days of December in Paris, when the Palestine Mediation Commission met to discuss Israel’s application for admission, while the Third and Sixth Committees made final edits to the UDHR and Genocide Convention. At that time, Easterman, the WJC representative in Paris, tried without success for the final time to place ‘the question of Jews in Arab countries’ on the agenda of the General Assembly and the subsidiary committees.Footnote 85
On the evening of December 9, came the approval of the Genocide Convention, followed on the 10th by the UDHR. Finally, on December 11 the General Assembly approved GA Resolution 194 (iii) to end the war via a number of practical policies, including: (a) the internationalization of Jerusalem, with ‘maximum local autonomy for distinctive groups’; and (b) a policy of return for displaced war victims: ‘the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and … compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property.’Footnote 86 Contrary to popular opinion, GA Resolution 194 did not contain the earlier language of Bernadotte’s report involving a legal ‘right of return.’Footnote 87 In the interim between September and December, Israeli diplomacy had succeeded in whittling down the language to minimize the potential legal obligation involved. The measure passed easily even though the Arab states – Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen – all voted against the resolution, for fear of implicitly recognizing Israel. They would only begin to embrace GA Resolution 194 later in the spring of 1949 in the context of the armistice process.Footnote 88 Palestinian national leaders adopted the same position, rejecting the edict as inadequate and disempowering since it lacked a recognition of their basic claim to national self-determination. They maintained that stance for several decades, even as the ‘right of return’ grew into a central trope of Palestinian political culture.Footnote 89 The Israeli government, meanwhile, treated the resolution as non-binding and irrelevant, stipulating that refugee issues were a political question to be resolved in broader peace negotiations.Footnote 90
The immediate reaction of the WJC leadership to the events of December 9, 10, and 11 was to ratchet up their rhetoric about Jews in the Middle East. On December 17, they released a White Paper, The Treatment of the Jews in Egypt and Iraq, immediately invoking the new UDHR and Genocide Convention to highlight the Jewish fate in the Middle East: ‘What is going on in Iraq and Egypt is a deliberate and calculated program to exterminate a defenceless minority group.’Footnote 91 That same day, Nahum Goldmann accused Egypt of gross hypocrisy by ‘deliberately breaking the pact it signed to outlaw genocide by its pogroms against the Jews.’Footnote 92 In Washington, the WJC unsuccessfully floated a draft US Senate resolution, declaring the ‘severe acts of persecution and discrimination’ against Egyptian and Iraqi Jews to be both ‘a flagrant violation of the basic human rights of the Jewish population’ and evidence of ‘the crime of Genocide.’Footnote 93 In Tel Aviv, Arieh Kubowitzski predicted that Egypt and other Arab states might be brought to justice at the international court via the genocide law.Footnote 94 He also briefly entertained the thought of invoking GA Resolution 194 on behalf of the Jews of Arab lands, since it failed to specify the national identity of the refugees. Yet he quickly dismissed his own idea as impractical. In doing so, Kubowitzski posed a question that would prove prescient: ‘The Jewish position in the defence of the oppressed Jewish minorities has been greatly weakened, to my mind, by our failure to make any contribution to the solution of the problem of the Arab refugees. Does the position of the World Jewish Congress differ in this matter from the official Israeli position?’Footnote 95 His question revealed a new reality at hand. 1948 had ensnared Jewish human rights activism in the foreign policy of the Israeli government and created a lasting linkage between the Jewish and Palestinian fates in the Middle East.Footnote 96 ‘[I]t would be idle to deny that,’ Perlzweig commented, ‘whether we like it or not, the Jews of the Diaspora will feel the effects of Israeli policy.’Footnote 97
Over the first few months of 1949, Israel and its Arab neighbours concluded armistice agreements through the Rhodes negotiations, but no peace settlement emerged. Meanwhile, in Lausanne, the Palestine Conciliation Commission set up after Bernadotte’s murder tried but failed to reach an agreement on the refugee issue.Footnote 98 Palestinian nationalist efforts to establish a state in the Jordanian-controlled West Bank of Palestine foundered on the opposition of King Abdullah, who formally annexed the territory in 1950. That left the Palestinian refugees in a state of legal limbo. It also compounded the legal and political jeopardy for the Jews of the neighbouring Middle Eastern countries, whose fate now became a central preoccupation of Israeli foreign policy. Israel, for its part, began to assume an ever more assertive role in ‘acting for Jews in the Diaspora,’ which at times led to clashes with the WJC leadership.Footnote 99
In the face of these changes, the WJC did not abandon its advocacy Middle Eastern Jewry.Footnote 100 Yet already in January 1949, they changed tack, ceasing a large-scale publicity campaign accompanying the December White Paper.Footnote 101 Then, after March 1949, they abruptly dropped the attempts to invoke the Genocide Convention as a legal tool to protect Jews.Footnote 102 In April 1949, Perlzweig wrote candidly to his London colleague about the inextricable linkage that now existed. He had recently conferred with Israeli diplomat Abba Eban on the sidelines of UN meetings in New York and found a common agreement about the new reality:
He [Eban] shares the view that we must proceed on the basis of … Human Rights and not allow ourselves to be deflected by the argument that this problem is part of the Palestine problem…But he fully agrees that our approach from the human rights angle is in practice a reinforcement of their attempts to solve the problem on the basis of exchange of population. Our pressure will strengthen and not weaken their efforts.Footnote 103
The very scenario that Perlzweig and his colleagues had long feared had come to pass. Worse still, their own advocacy now facilitated informal population exchange. Already by 1949, then, the once expansive vision of robust transnational rights-protection had shrunk to a modest effort to facilitate orderly emigration and coax the Arab regimes into better treatment of their Jewish populations. Over the next few decades, the WJC leaders continued to turn to the UN on behalf of Middle Eastern Jews. They joined in NGO coalitions and pressed for more human rights treaties. Yet the terms of their engagement and possibilities for global Jewish activism had become circumscribed by the realities born of 1948.
An untenable diaspora
Scrawled across the comment sheet of a British Foreign Office confidential memorandum on the WJC’s advocacy efforts is a note from one diplomat to his colleagues dated September 30, 1948: ‘Incidentally, if and when the Jewish state is generally recognized and gets into the UN, we shall have to watch the position of these world Jewish bodies. There will be a tendency for the Jews to have two votes, one as a state and one as the diaspora, and I am not at all sure that this would be right.’ Directly below there is a puzzled reply: ‘I do not quite understand this point at X in the foregoing minute. The Jews have no vote anywhere in the UN at present, except, of course, in so far as they may succeed in indirectly influencing the vote of one or more delegates.’Footnote 104 That brief exchange sums up both the strangeness and the pathos of international Jewish human rights activism in 1948. To the first writer, the enterprise of Jewish rights advocacy amounted to a demand for equal political membership in the United Nations. How could it have been otherwise, his note suggested, since the WJC aspired to act as a like a state in shaping the UN agenda and acting transnationally on behalf of Jews? Yet that was not the way the system worked, reminded his respondent. The UN was an organization of sovereign states, not peoples or even state-like bodies. Jews stood on the outside, seeking to exercise influence through the sovereign states who ran the show. There could only ever be one Jewish vote at the UN in the form of the the sole Jewish nation state.
In a way, both men were right. The first author’s confusion about the system’s rules exposed the awkward fit between Jewish internationalism and a post-imperial world order structured exclusively around nation states. The second author’s correction similarly pointed to the marginalization of non-state actors in the very forum that claimed to empower them. Taken together, the two men’s comments implied the same question that might have been asked of the WJC: If Jews wanted to act like a state in the international sphere, why not just become one? In other words, what need was there for this transnational organization after the creation of Israel?Footnote 105
The sequence of three days in December revealed the deeper logic and political structure of international law in the postwar moment. Transnational activism could not exist outside the state system. The tightening nexus between nationhood, territory, and sovereignty in international law left no space for non-territorial collectives to stand apart and claim the mantle of collectivist rights-protection, especially not when the collective in question defined itself as part of a nation then engaged in nation state building. For Jewish human rights activists, the territorialization of Jewish group identity in Israeli statehood compromised their efforts to define a separate Jewish rights advocacy on behalf of a global Jewish people.
Palestinians, it should be noted, faced the opposite problem in 1948. The territorialization of Palestinian national identity applied rights-claims to a physical space that no longer existed on the map of the world after May that year. Consigned to the status of displaced war refugees, they found themselves invisible inside a state-based system premised on territory. Even their own anticolonial invocation of human rights remained challenged on two fronts, each of which revealed the tyranny of territory. Israel and its advocates insisted on viewing Palestinians as part of a larger Arab nation that did not require specific self-determination in historical Palestine. Meanwhile, Arab diplomacy loudly amplified Palestinian rights-claims in law-inflected language while quietly disempowering the legal category of Palestinian peoplehood.Footnote 106 Palestinian transnationalism, in other words, also failed to launch in 1948. That in turn would spark other forms of Palestinian diasporic memory culture and transnational political violence in quest for visibility and legitimacy.Footnote 107
In between Israelis and Palestinians, Arabs and Jews, there remained the Jews of the Middle East. Zionists would claim them after 1948 as parts of a Jewish nation in need of repatriation. Arab nationalists would alternately allegorize them as living proof of pre-Zionist Arab-Jewish coexistence and demonize them as an alien national minority compromised by their virtual ties to Israel. Far from the war’s greatest victims, they were forever transformed by its impact. Over the next few decades, a slow-motion exodus of some 800,000 Jews from the Arab and Islamic Middle East took place. The causes of that migration remain a subject of considerable debate down to the present owing to the enduring global conflict over Israel/Palestine. What is much less remembered, however, is that 1948 also launched an international legal system in which the pursuit of justice perpetually contended with the primacy of the state.
