Rather than within the UN system itself, the origins of Palestines international legal subalternity are located in British secret treaty-making and diplomacy between 1915 and 1947, particularly as institutionalized within the League of Nations system. Although the literature on the history of Palestine in this period tends to focus on political themes, this chapter examines this period through the cross-cutting theme of the Eurocentricity of international law and organization then prevailing. It is set against the backdrop of the global paradigm shift then occurring in the international system, from one based on the norms and values of the late-imperial age grounded in an international rule by law, to one based on those of an emerging liberal western rights-based discourse, ostensibly based on an international rule of law. The main systemic issue that emerges for Palestine at this time is its contingent and subaltern status in the international legal order, a status that was eventually placed before the UN in 1947.

The end of the British Mandate created a vacuum. The Zionist leadership was better prepared and Britain betrayed its obligations under the mandate and disregarded the Palestinian quest for independence. The result was a free hand to the Zionist movement to carry out the ethnic cleansing of Palestine that led to the expulsion of half of its population and the destruction of half of its villages and most of its towns.

The first chapter focuses on the experiences of Jewish refugees who came to Palestine before or during World War II but sought to return to their European countries of origin at war’s end through a repatriation program launched by the Middle East office of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). Since the repatriation program took place during the heightened period of the Zionist struggle for statehood in Palestine, it became a source of conflict between the Zionist leadership in Palestine and the UNRRA. The former accused the latter of encouraging Jewish return to Europe, whereas UNRRA officials accused Zionists in the Yishuv of trying to prevent repatriation and of ostracizing those opting to return. The chapter analyzes this conflict from the perspectives of UNRRA, the Jewish Agency, the Jewish press in Palestine, and the refugees themselves. It shows that the controversy derived from conflicting ideological and political considerations regarding the role of Jewish refugees in postwar reconstruction. But the positions of the quarreling parties were disconnected from those of repatriation applicants, who were determined to rebuild their lives outside Palestine, but conceived of postwar reconstruction mainly in material and personal rather than ideological and political terms.

The Introduction lays out the main purposes, themes, and arguments of the manuscript and places them in a historiographical and theoretical framework. It discusses the tension between exile and homeland, the significance of the Land of Israel, and the importance of the theme of return to the land in Zionist consciousness, and provides a historical overview of Jewish immigration to Palestine/Israel from the late nineteenth century to the early years of Israeli statehood.

This background helps to clarify the degree to which emigration was antithetical to the Zionist spirit, and was therefore seen as a threat to the national project and condemned as an act of treason. The Introduction demonstrates the various ideological, political, and logistical challenges that emigration posed to the Israeli state and society, to Jewish diaspora communities, and to relief agencies in countries of destination. It engages studies of migration and nationalism to clarify the problematic role of emigration as a phenomenon and emigrants as individuals in the Israeli nation-building process.

The Introduction also discusses the statistical and demographic aspect of the story, presenting information on yearly rates of emigration, destination countries of emigrants, and emigrants’ personal backgrounds.