The imperiled Red Cross and the Palestine-Eretz-Yisrael conflict, 1945-1952

the long version

This remarkable book reconstructs the strategy of an institution, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which was under attack at the end of World War II for having failed to help the victims of Nazi concentration camps. Threatened with dissolution by the International Red Cross movement, the ICRC developed its defense through the policies behind its activities during the Palestine-Eretz-Yisrael conflict between 1945 and 1952, in connection with the elaboration of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and new statutes of the International Red Cross. Far from being a pious chronicle of the good works of the ICRC, this uncommonly independent-minded book leads the reader to the very heart of the endangered institution, uncovering not only the political objectives of its members, as seen in the wording of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and in the statutes of the International Red Cross and of its financial decisions, but also the experience of its delegates, thrust into the daily violence of war and who, forged in its institutional culture, tried to apply its criteria to a context where the underlying values and interests were very different from their own.