As violence escalates in the Middle East, a peace agreement between Israel and Palestine seems more elusive than ever. Yet one thing remains clear: without constructive dialogue such an agreement cannot occur. This timely volume presents just such a dialogue. It brings together opinions, perspectives, and research focused on one of the region’s most complex and volatile problems: the Palestinian refugee situation. Based on a 1999 conference at the University of Oklahoma International Program Center, Palestinian Refugees combines contributions from Israelis, Palestinians, Jordanians, Egyptians, Americans, and Europeans. In addition to focusing on the Palestinian refugees, the essays present various proposals for solving the Palestinian problem. Organized in two parts, the volume presents both scholarly essays and position papers. The scholarly essays place current issues in historical context and explore the Palestinian belief in the "right of return" and questions of appropriate compensation. The position papers focus on policy and offer a variety of perspectives. Concluding the volume is a special essay on public polls that gauge how Palestinians and Israelis view the circumstances of Palestinian refugees and what they feel about possible solutions.

The main goal of this book is to record as much of the Palestinian refugees' political history as possible. The author is becoming increasingly aware of the ebb and flow of general interest in the refugee issue and the strong possibility of subsuming that chapter in the larger Palestinian story. As the PLO itself moved further and further away from the refugee constituency, it became necessary to examine and define the impact of the refugee issue on the larger Palestinian political picture, for indeed, as it turned out, they were always a tremendous influence on the course of Palestinian and Arab history. Although they lost their leadership positions within the PLO, as the latter became increasingly elitist and bureaucratic, the powerless refugees apparently never lost the means to influence the course of Palestinian history. This book relies heavily on early State Department dispatches, Israeli Foreign Office correspondence, early accounts of the stirrings of a refugee movement in Jordan and declarations, statements and studies of the Badil Research Centre and some right of return groups. Also investigated is much of the known literature to emerge from the secretive Oslo negotiations and the reverberations produced by their deliberations throughout the Palestinian diaspora. The resilience of the refugee question should never be questioned or declared until one of two things happened: either the obliteration or dispersal of concentrated refugee communities became a reality or the Palestinian refugees accepted a resolution of some kind or another.

This book offers diverse perspectives on the Palestinian refugee problem and the possible ways to facilitate its resolution. It contains contributions of Israeli, Palestinian and other scholars, and its main goal is to initiate an informed dialogue that will bridge the "knowledge gap" between the different camps. The book provides a comprehensive picture of the various aspects of the problem and of the possible means of its resolution.

Encompassing history, politics, and political culture, Bowker grapples with fundamental issues of Palestinian identity in the context of the peace process.

There is perhaps no aspect of the Arab-Israeli conflict that is more complex and more emotionally charged than the problem of the Palestinian refugees. The atmosphere surrounding the discussion has led to confusion, so that the facts have become unclear and the problems more difficult to treat. This book, first published in 1981, examines the complex interlocking issues that surround the topic of the Palestinian refugees in the country that adopted most of them – Jordan.

This book explores the realities behind the Palestinian exodus of 1948 during the Arab-Israeli war.

This book provides a comparative examination of a number of different refugee return situations in order to identify pre-requisites for an effective and durable Palestinian repatriation programme. It contains contributions from members of the UN and other NGOs as well as academics.

7. Scope of the study

More than four million Palestinian refugees live in protracted exile across the Middle East. Taking a regional approach to Palestinian refugee exile and alienation across the Levant, this book proposes a new understanding of the spatial and political dimensions of refugee camps across the Middle East. Combining critical scholarship with ethnographic insight, the essays uncover host states’ marginalisation of stateless refugees and shed light on new terminology on refugees, migration and diaspora studies. The impact on the refugee community is detailed in novel studies of refugee identity, memory and practice and new legal approaches to compensation and "right of return". The book opens a critical debate on key concepts and proposes a new understanding of the spatial and political dimensions of refugee camps, better understood as laboratories of Palestinian society and "state-in-making". This strong collection of original essays is an essential resource for scholars and students in refugee studies, forced migration, disaster studies, legal anthropology, urban studies, international law and Middle East history.

After more than seventy years, the Palestinian refugee problem remains unsolved. But if a deal could have been reached involving the repatriation of Palestinian refugees, it was in the early years of the Arab-Israeli conflict. So why didn't this happen? This book is the first comprehensive study of the international community's earliest efforts to solve the Palestinian refugee problem. Based on a wide range of international primary sources from Israeli, US, UK and UN archives, the book investigates the major proposals between 1948 and 1968 and explains why these failed. It shows that the main actors involved – the Arab states, Israel, the US and the UN – agreed on very little when it came to the Palestinian refugees and therefore never got seriously engaged in finding a solution. This new analysis highlights how the international community gradually moved from viewing the Palestinian refugee problem as a political issue to looking at it as a humanitarian one. It examines the impact of this development and the changes that took place in this formative period of the Arab-Israeli conflict, as well as the limited influence US policy makers had over Israel.