Quakers in the Israeli Palestinian Conflict: The Dilemmas of NGO Humanitarian Activism

Copyright © 2007 by

The American University in Cairo Press

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Dar el Kutub No. 3294/07

eISBN: 978 977 416 105 6

Dar el Kutub Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gallagher, Nancy

Quakers in the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict:The Dilemmas of NGO Humanitarian Activism / Nancy Gallagher.—Cairo:The American

University in Cairo Press, 2007

p.       cm.

ISBN 977 416 105 X

1. Palestine—History—1948 I. Title

956.94

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8     12 11 10 09 08 07

Designed by Andrea El-Akshar/AUC Press Design Center

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Quaker Peacemaking in Theory and Practice

Early Quaker Peacemaking Efforts

Establishment of the American Friends Service Committee

The AFSC in the Second World War

Quakers and the United Nations

Quaker Missionaries in Palestine

The 1948 Palestine War

A Petition for Peace in Jerusalem

UN Mediation in the War for Palestine

A Quaker Municipal Commissioner for Jerusalem

Quakers and the Palestinian Refugees

A UN Invitation to the AFSC

Catastrophe in Gaza

The First Refugee Camps

The AFSC’s Early Days in Cairo and Gaza

Establishment of a Public Health Service

Establishment of a School System

Conflicts, Misunderstandings, and Adaptations

Relief versus Repatriation

Clarence Pickett’s Views on Repatriation

AFSC Opposition to Resettlement Plans

Transition from AFSC to UNRWA

Assessments of the Gaza Project

The AFSC in Israel

The Acre Relief Unit

Expulsion of Palestinians from Faluja and Iraq al-Manshiya

Relations between the AFSC and Israeli Officials

The Tur‘an Agricultural Center

Nasser, Ben Gurion, and the Quakers

Elmore Jackson’s Unofficial Diplomacy

The Suez War of 1956

Quaker Reassessments Post-Suez

Conclusion

Glossary

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Refugee women carry bedding, Gaza

Egyptian army flour being distributed to refugees, Gaza.

The first blanket distribution in Khan Yunis Camp. Gaza.

AFSC volunteer meeting with Palestinian refugees, Gaza.

Girl and her grandfather in former British army barracks, Gaza.

Distribution center in Gaza City.

Milk distribution at a feeding center in Gaza City.

Refugees lining up at the Bureij feeding center, Gaza.

AFSC camp leader at food distribution center, Gaza.

Refugees drawing water from tap at Bureij Camp near Gaza.

Digging a latrine, Bureij Camp, Gaza.

Refugee family waiting while a DDT sprayer does his work.

Quaker nurse in Khan Yunis treats a Palestinian boy, Gaza.

Inoculation clinic, Khan Yunis, Gaza.

Coptic nurse treats a Bedouin child, Khan Yunis, Gaza.

A carpentry shop begun by the AFSC in Ramal, Gaza City.

Students at the Khan Yunis boys’ school, Gaza.

Boys study at Maghazi Camp, Gaza.

Recess at AFSC tent school for girls in Nuseirat Camp, Gaza.

Between classes at the Deir al-Balah school, Gaza.

Refugee teacher instructing a class of girls, Gaza.

Refugee families in Quonset hut, Gaza.

A family of refugees in their tent, Gaza.

Volunteers enjoy an outing on the beach, near Rafah, Gaza.

AFSC and Palestinian volunteers unpack donated clothing, Acre.

Refugees looking at their former homes in Beit Hanoun, Gaza.

Sewing classes for girls in AFSC community center, Acre.

Expert explains machinery registration to landowner,Tur‘an.

Acknowledgments

Ibegan this study at the archives of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in Philadelphia where Jack Sutters, formerly director of the archives, and Joan Lowe, formerly assistant archivist, offered their friendly and competent assistance. By coincidence, the Corporation of the American Friends Service Committee, the legal entity under which the AFSC is incorporated, was holding its annual meeting in Philadelphia, and I was able to discuss the project with former volunteers in town to attend the meeting, including Kimi Nagatani, Toshi Umeki Salzberg, Richard Smith, and Channing and Comfort Richardson. Toshi Umeki had helped organize a reunion of Gaza volunteers in 1992 and made available to me her organizational materials. Joan Lowe had conducted a series of interviews at the 1992 reunion that proved to be invaluable primary sources. I later interviewed Jean Johnson, wife of the late Paul Johnson, director of the Gaza unit in its final months, and Lucy Keshishian, an Armenian-Palestinian whose family had entertained AFSC volunteers at their home in Gaza. Howard Wriggins, in 1949 the AFSC liaison to the United Nations Relief for Palestine Refugees at the United Nations Headquarters in Geneva and Bryce Professor of the History of International Relations, Columbia University, read the entire manuscript at an early stage and offered his encouragement and critical insight.

Sami Abu-Zuhry, coordinator of the Oral History Center, Islamic University, Gaza, arranged the interviews with Palestinian refugees who had been employed by the AFSC in 1948–49. Haidar Abdel Shafi, physician and leading Palestinian negotiator, who had worked with the volunteers in 1949, shared his memories with me when he was visiting the United States. Philip Sa‘ad, a pastor in Haifa, met me in Nazareth and took me to Tur‘an to visit his family, which had hosted the AFSC volunteers in the 1950s. In Tur‘an, we also discussed the project with Jamal ‘Adawi, who had recently completed his dissertation on the early years of the Quakers in Palestine.

Josef Keith, of the Library of the Society of Friends, London, kindly helped locate hard-to-find archival materials. Hagar Moshonov obtained materials from the Israel State Archives. Rema Hammami and Salim Tamari, both of Birzeit University, Garay Menicucci, University of California, Santa Barbara, and May Seikaly, Wayne State University, Michigan, read and commented on all or parts of the manuscript. David Hirsch, University of California, Los Angeles, helped with Hebrew and Mariam Humeid, Ventura College Community Education, with Arabic translations. David Deis, California State University, Northridge, drew the maps, and Nancy Humphreys, Wordmaps, drew up the index. Ralph Jaeckel, senior lecturer emeritus, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, University of California, Los Angeles, critiqued the manuscript from beginning to end, making it a far better study. Neil Hewison, associate director for editorial programs, Chip Rossetti, senior editor, and Nadia Naqib, managing editor, at the American University in Cairo Press, were a pleasure to work with. I greatly appreciated the comments of the anonymous reviewer. I am grateful to the Academic Senate of the University of California, Santa Barbara, for a series of research awards. Finally, my family, Tony, Lisa, and Karina, made every aspect of the project fun.

Introduction

The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) has played a prescient role in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict from its very first years—albeit behind the scenes. I first became aware of Quaker interest in the conflict when I came across a small book entitled Search for Peace in the Middle East.¹ Members of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a service organization founded by Quakers, had written it, and it had been translated into many languages and widely read.² The authors had spent the year after the 1967 June War interviewing, listening to, and assessing the needs of persons on all sides of the conflict, including Palestinian Arabs.³ At that time, Westerners had nearly forgotten about the Palestinians, who were usually called ‘Arab refugees’ if referred to at all. The book gave equal space to all parties: in the chapter entitled Viewpoints on the Conflict, readers found subsections on Palestinian Arab and Israeli positions.⁴

Why did the authors of Search for Peace begin with the Palestinian Arabs? The authors explained that Quakers had worked closely with Jewish organizations to aid the victims of Nazism, with Arab educators in Palestine, and with the United Nations in Palestine and Israel, and that these experiences had deepened Quaker concern for both Arabs and Jews.⁵ It turned out that several of the authors were among the fifty-one AFSC volunteers who had distributed humanitarian relief to Palestinian Arab refugees in the Gaza Strip and Israel during and after the 1948 Palestine War and had subsequently maintained their ties to the region. In 1982, the AFSC sponsored the publication of a second book, A Compassionate Peace: A Future for the Middle East, in which it again referred to its work with Jewish and Arab refugees, its projects in Israel and Gaza, and its concern for all peoples in the region.⁶ Neither book, however, explained what the AFSC had actually done in Israel and Gaza. A more recent AFSC article entitled Faces of Hope: Palestinian Nonviolent Resistance since 1967, traced the long history of Palestinian nonviolent resistance and while the article noted the importance of ties between international and local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), it, too, said little about the activities of the Quakers in Palestine/Israel.⁷

When I discovered that the AFSC archives in Philadelphia contained extensive written records and photographs from the projects in Palestine and Israel, and audiotapes of interviews with Gaza volunteers recorded at a 1992 reunion, it appeared to me that these unusually rich source materials, combined with additional interviews and secondary sources, would tell the story of how the Quakers became involved in missionary and educational activities, humanitarian relief, refugee repatriation, community development projects, and nonviolent reconciliation in Palestine and Israel, and that this story might be of use to contemporary peacemakers and humanitarian aid workers.

Many observers have hoped that NGOs such as the AFSC may offer new approaches to longstanding conflicts and that the high ideals and dedication of humanitarian and human rights activists, operating at grass-roots levels, may find a way around the inflexibility of entrenched elites and narrowly nationalistic leaders. The activists may gain insights into the dynamics of a conflict, enabling them to find new ways to work toward reconciliation, the repatriation of war refugees, and a more equitable future for all parties. On the other hand, humanitarian NGOs may find that their projects help those who drove out or are preventing the return of the refugees. Michael Wines, a journalist for the New York Times who has covered conflicts in Africa, writes that by providing assistance to victims of ethnic cleansing, relief organizations may aid the perpetrating government to consolidate its hold on the land while the refugees are being housed and fed far from their homes.⁸ Relief organizations that seek to be neutral may become part of the conflict. Fiona Terry, director of research for Doctors without Borders, asserts that in Rwanda, Afghanistan, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Cambodia, humanitarian aid has prolonged the suffering it sought to relieve.⁹ Deborah Scroggins, a former editor and correspondent for the Atlanta Journal and Constitution who covered the war in Sudan and later wrote about the brief but eventful life of a British aid worker in Sudan, similarly suggests that well intentioned Westerners, seeing themselves as saviors of the downtrodden but not understanding the local or international geopolitical cultures and contexts, may inadvertently do more harm than good.¹⁰

While not disagreeing with the usefulness of international aid, William Easterly, a professor at New York University, senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, and formerly an analyst for the World Bank, has found that international aid is hindered by the tendency to over-plan rather than to adjust methods incrementally according to local conditions.¹¹ Taking a different tack, Sari Hanafi, a sociologist and former director of the Palestinian Refugee and Diaspora Center (Shaml) and Linda Tabar, a Ph.D. candidate at the School of African and Oriental Studies, University of London, have criticized NGOs for undermining state authority and for enabling international donors to set the agendas of local activists.¹² David Rieff, a journalist who has covered wars, ethnic cleansing, and humanitarian emergencies in the former Yugoslavia and in Africa, suggests that humanitarian aid became the principal vehicle for the moral hopes of many in the West when it was in fact no more than a means of temporarily relieving suffering.¹³ For Rieff, humanitarianism, peacemaking, and human rights activism became the new ‘civilizing mission’ that enabled Western governments to avoid taking action to address the root causes of conflicts.

NGOs in Israel/Palestine have been criticized for serving the interests of one side over the other. In a panel entitled (De) Politicization of Humanitarianism, at a conference on The Politics of Humanitarianism in the Occupied Territories held in 2004 at Birzeit University in the West Bank, Meron Benvenisti, an Israeli former deputy mayor of Jerusalem and author of many books on the conflict, argued that all humanitarian aid in the occupied Palestinian territories should be stopped because it allows Israel to continue its occupation.¹⁴ In contrast to Benvenisti, Gerald Steinberg, professor of Political Studies at Bar Ilan University, Israel, runs NGO Monitor, a web site that purports to end the practice used by certain self-declared ‘humanitarian NGOs’ of exploiting the label ‘universal human rights values’ to promote politically and ideologically motivated anti-Israel agendas.¹⁵ The role of NGOs, even those claiming to be nonviolent and working for human rights and equality for all, is a political issue.

The nonviolent approach to peacemaking is also controversial. Quakers believe that violence almost never brings a permanent solution to a conflict. Military force, however, combined with skilled diplomacy has enabled the Zionists to prevail over the Palestinians, to force them out, and most importantly to prevent their return to their homes. On the one hand, victory in war also has enabled the Zionists to greatly expand their territory. On the other, many Palestinians and their international supporters have since the early days of the conflict advocated nonviolently for repatriation, coexistence, an independent state in part of the land, and what they consider to be a just peace, but have repeatedly failed.

Ironically, many Israelis, along with people around the world, admire and celebrate those European Jews who militantly resisted their fascist oppressors even against hopeless odds and tend to wonder why the majority passively submitted. Yet Israel and the United States along with nonviolent advocates call on and expect Palestinians to cease all militant activities, with no assurance that the refugees will be allowed to return or that the occupation will come to an end. Does nonviolence mean that Palestinians must passively accept their fate?

The AFSC confronted such dilemmas from the first days of the conflict. Chapter 1 of this book traces the history of Quaker peace-making and shows how Quaker experiences in the Levant and the Second World War prepared the AFSC for its involvement in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Chapter 2 explains Quaker peacemaking in the 1948 Palestine War, and how the AFSC came to be one of three NGOs to distribute emergency relief to the Palestinian Arab refugees. Chapter 3 illustrates how AFSC workers set up an emergency relief distribution project in Gaza, and describes the anatomy and dynamics of the process. Chapter 4 shows how the AFSC volunteers tried to work toward repatriation of the refugees and in so doing came to question the consequences of their efforts. Chapter 5 discusses the experiences of AFSC volunteers in Israel and explains how they managed to launch a community center and agricultural program despite frustration and disillusionment. Chapter 6 relates how acquaintances made during the AFSC relief projects led to a major peacemaking effort in which a Quaker mediator attempted to work out terms that Egyptian and Israeli leaders could accept and how, after the Suez War, the Quakers reoriented their humanitarian approach.¹⁶ Can humanitarian NGOs work effectively for the rights of all? This study shows how the AFSC volunteers faced this question and numerous expected and unexpected challenges in Palestine and Israel, and why they continue to advocate an idealistic and universalistic resolution to the conflict.

Early Quaker Peacemaking Efforts

Since the seventeenth century, Quakers have undertaken humanitarian relief not only to relieve suffering without distinction of race or creed, but to reinforce the dignity of recipients and to help alleviate hostility between enemies. The Quaker approach to conflict resolution has entailed listening to grievances and, to avoid unnecessary publicity, working behind the scenes to foster communication between the hostile parties.¹⁷ Quakers believe that there is something of God in everyone, that all people have the capacity for love and goodness, and that more can be accomplished by appealing to this capacity than by threatening punishment or retaliation. Accordingly, conflicts are aberrations and decision-makers can be helped to work through their frustrations to arrive at just solutions. Quakers do not deny the existence of evil, but believe that the most effective way of combating it is not with armed force. They strive to build relationships and political structures that can contain and resolve conflict and to abstain from relationships and political structures that are unjust and exploitative.They live in the real world and know that conflicts arise and that efforts to resolve them may fail, but argue that it is better to live as if it were always possible to defend what they value and to resolve conflict without deliberate harm—in such a way that if damage does occur, healing is possible. Many people, not all Quakers, have set examples of such attempts, and many are still working on that basis.¹⁸

Historically, most Quakers were committed pacifists who opposed both the chauvinism of nationalist movements and militant revolutionary movements that sought to destroy the old order in favor of the new. In confronting their inability to prevent the wars of the twentieth century and the new imperative posed by nuclear weapons, many Quakers modified their approaches to peacemaking and moved from a quietist or passive approach to a more active approach and began engaging directly in international affairs.

The Quaker approach as it developed during and after the Second World War differs from official approaches to conflict resolution in which mediators work within the Westphalian system of established states. The official state approach focuses on political, legal, military, and territorial issues rather than on cultural aspects of conflicts: if compromise is desirable and possible, mediators use their influence or resources to facilitate the communication process; if compromise is not possible, they try to manage deadly and intractable conflicts. Quakers have neither wealth nor power, but can work at a more personal and unofficial level. Through their humanitarian work, they can assess the basic needs of individuals at the grassroots level.As mediators, they assume that all parties in conflicts have basic human needs for representation, dignity, and status and consider themselves to be victims. Since all parties are members of collective or social groupings and, through language and culture, identify their interests with their groups, they all need to come to terms with their losses and reconcile with their opponents. Quakers try to understand the roots of the warring parties’ nationalist sentiments, group identities, and grievances in order to suggest solutions or courses of action that might satisfy the basic needs of each.

Quaker mediators ultimately hope to create the conditions for peace through education and community development. Building on the basic Quaker belief that all persons have intrinsic worth and that unofficial mediators have a role to play in a peacemaking process too vast and complex to be left to politicians