Consolidating the Rule of Experts: A Model Village for Refugees in the Jordan Valley, 1945–55

Abstract

This article examines the history of the establishment and work of the Arab Development Society (ADS) in Palestine from 1945–55. While this study contextualizes the project within the broader history of global rural development projects in the post-Second-World-War era, it mainly frames the ADS’s activities within the regional context of Palestine, Jordan, and Israel and the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. The discussion traces the alteration of the ADS’s mission after 1948 from a rural development project into a project that utilized its village modernization ethos to deal with the pressing problem of Palestinian refugee housing in the Jordan Valley. Drawing on archival research, the article scrutinizes ADS’s encounters with states, international bodies, and the refugee population. It shows that though the ADS was able to challenge the rule of experts on the specific case of the possibility of resettlement in the Jordan Valley, it generally consolidated the patronizing logic of expertise and failed to engage with the political visions of the refugee population. In shedding light on the widely-forgotten ADS experimental scheme, the article contributes to enriching the understanding of the overlapping nature of rural development and to the questions of resettlement and repatriation in Palestine in the aftermath of 1948.