Settler-Humanitarianism: Dispossession, ‘Humanitarian Transfer’ and the 1948 Nakba

Abstract

This article revisits the history of the 1948 Nakba and suggests that hitherto literature has not explored in depth how the racialised liberal world order has come to bear on settler colonial strategies of dispossession. It was the international relations practice of ‘population exchanges’ that afforded a humanitarian operational logic to structure the mass expulsion of Palestinians in the name of creating a racially homogenous nation-state. The article shows how the idea of humanitarian population transfers was debated in the 1930s – particularly after the proposals of the 1937 British Peel Commission – and later a settler colonial form of humanitarianism was mobilised amid warfare in 1948, first to concentrate Palestinians internally inside enclaves, and then to entrench the expulsion of refugees. The conclusion reflects on the ways in which a similar notion of ‘humanitarian transfer’ has re-emerged during the contemporary Israeli genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.