RECORDS OF DISPOSSESSION: Palestinian Refugee Property and the Arab-Israeli Conflict

The United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine was established in 1948 "to provide protection and facilitate durable solutions for Palestinian refugees displaced in 1948." While now largely dormant, in the 1960s, the commission compiled a property database that contains some 453,000 records documenting around 1.5 million individual property holdings. A professor of history at Virginia's Randolph-Macon College, Fischbach, who worked on digitizing the archive, here presents a closely argued summation of what he found there. The book will undoubtedly figure in discussions of the Palestinians' "right of return." 3-city author tour. (Dec.)