‘A Better Remedy’
Chapter 7 traces the sensibilities that brought Jacob Robinson and Shabtai Rosenne to clash over the Refugee Convention’s ratification. Here they diverged in how they read the Convention’s Jewish aspect and the Diaspora’s place in Jewish life at the age of Jewish sovereignty. The Refugee Convention confirmed and challenged cardinal Zionist principles. On the one hand, it affirmed Israel’s character as the Jewish people’s state of asylum and validated the Zionist principle of ‘Return’ and Israel’s ‘in-gathering of exiles’ policy. On the other hand, the Convention was rendered superfluous by Zionism’s ‘radical solution’ and ‘better remedy’ of ‘Return’ to the Jewish state. Moreover, the Convention subverted the Jewish state’s very raison d’être: a permanent political remedy to Jewish statelessness itself. Robinson’s reading of the Convention as according Israel ‘legal title’ to intervene on behalf of Jewish refugees, therefore, marked an ideological deviation accentuated by Rosenne’s reticence to see it ratified.