The formation of the Israeli state produced a new category of stateless people: Palestinian refugees. Today, the total number of Palestinian refugees and IDPs combined constitute one of the largest and longest-standing displaced communities world-wide. The unresolved question of Palestine raises important considerations in an era of reparations. Thinking about the politics of redress in Israel/Palestine introduces a question central to this lecture: how did an Indigenous Palestinian population with historical ties to land come to be governed as humanitarian wards of a settler-state?

Tracing a paper trail of UN archival material, this lecture discusses how a land-based reparative justice imperative came to be managed through protracted humanitarian governance. Empirically, I turn to a collection of progress reports written by Count Folke Bernadotte – the first UN appointed mediator, alongside telegraphs and correspondence letters between Arab and Israeli leaders in the aftermath of Israel’s state declaration. Examining how the Palestinian right of return was internationally recognized and debated prior to the creation of UN General Assembly Resolution 194, this lecture discusses how the political project of return came to be suspended within a racialized economy of humanitarian discourse.