Palestinian Refugee Resettlement: Lessons from the East Ghor Canal Project

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1. Purpose and method The problem of the Palestinian refugees is a major obstacle to peace in the Middle East. Israel argues that the refugees should be resettled somewhere in the Arab world, since it took in equivalent numbers of Jews from Iraq, Morocco, Yemen, and the other Arab countries.' But the Arabs insist that the refugees should be repatriated rather than resettled, since they have a historic right to the land and left it only because of Zionist terrorism in 1948.2 Although they stress the refugees' attachment to Palestine, the Arabs seem to fear what the Israelis assume: that refugee resettlement will reduce the refugees' desire to return to their homes. The purpose of this study is to test this assumption, i.e. to determine whether or not refugee resettlement does in fact reduce the refgees' attachment to Palestine, through an analysis of the East Ghor Canal project. This project was, prior to its abandonment soon after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the largest refugee resettlement project in the Arab world. The question is whether or not it was successful. Did it raise the refugees' levels of productivity and income? If so, did ft reduce their desire to return to their homes? If not, why not? What lessons can be learned about refugee resettlement from an analysis of the East Ghor Canal project? Data to answer these questions will be drawn primarily from a survey research project which I directed in 1966, five years after the opening of the Canal.3 Of the total sample of 278 respondents drawn from the first section of the project at least 216 were Palestinian refugees.4 Of these, 71 were project farmers and 145 were nonproject farmers. All interviewing was done in Arabic, by two trained and experienced Palestinian interviewers, under my direct supervision. These survey data were supplemented with information from a variety of sources: interviews with Jordanian administrators and their American advisors, research in the UNRWA archives in Jerusalem and the files of both the USAID mission and the East Ghor Canal Authority in Amman, and six months of anthropological field work in the project area.