The Limits of Humanitarian Aid: Refugees in the 20th-Century Middle East

The long-lasting political conflicts and wars in the Middle East have generated a great number of refugees on borders, who were suffering from starvation, disease, and poverty. The problem of refugees has been long considered a humanitarian crisis that could only be resolved by humanitarian aid. However, their effectiveness was very limited due to the lack of policies on settlements and peacemaking efforts in global politics. Moreover, their tendency of describing refugees merely as “people in need” and their depoliticized narratives of refugee experiences have led to greater prejudices towards refugees, which is still an understated problem today. 

At first glance, humanitarian organizations have been saviors to Middle Eastern refugees, which was not completely false. Humanitarian assistance has been generously given to refugees with no expectations of economic returns. The Nansen Office had been able to distribute 400,000 Norwegian kroner a year to refugees, either as loans or as direct grants, which had enabled people to start a small business or save their livelihood at critical moments (Hansson). Trucks of supplies, such as food, clothes, and medicine, have been transported from Britain, the United States, and other developed countries to Arab refugees lingered around ]borders in the desert, saving 750,000 lives, with the participation of the humanitarian organizations like the International Red Cross, UNICEF, and UNESCO, etc. Milk powder was donated by UNICEF, making a “difference between life and death to the refugees”, preventing many children from severe malnutrition. The establishment of orphanages and sanctuaries further provided shelters, protection, and some education to children who lost their parents in wars (Sands of Sorrow). This humanitarian assistance partially resolved the most urgent needs of refugees, saving hundreds of thousands of lives from starvation and disease, which was an indelible achievement of humanitarian organizations in the midcentury Middle East. 

Nevertheless, the achievement of humanitarian organizations in the Middle East was far from being called “successful”. Though humanitarian organizations have provided great amounts of supplies and resources, their powers have been inadequate to resolve the root problems that caused the difficulties of refugee groups. That is their poverty and nationlessness due to the failures of political settlements and peacemaking. As the ongoing wars continued to generate new refugees, the supplies from humanitarian organizations were never enough to assist all displaced people. Although the United Nations has sent truckloads of flour and basic food essentials, it was not adequate compared to the greater amount of demands. Even though children were provided with some education, there were only very few blackboards and teachers. Furthermore, this effort to educate seemed to be especially meaningless as these children were still dealing with starvation and had no proper shelter (Sands of Sorrow). It was straightforwardly stated in the Nobel address that the demand for aid was so great that “the resources of the Nansen Office dwindled rapidly,” revealing that humanitarian aid may seem to be useful for saving refugees at the surface level, while there was no established way to end this condition of poverty and displacement (Hansson). This situation was because they lacked legal status to either return home or to work in foreign lands, and there were no jobs offered in the desert refugee camps. As laws and policies of their own home countries and surrounding countries regarded them as vagrants and sought to drive them out “like infested animals”, refugees were given no opportunity to develop ways for self-support or to break the cycle of poverty. This means that even though humanitarian organizations offered financial aid to refugees, they were still unable to sustain and rehabilitate to become self-sufficient and repay their loans (Hansson). Without the evolution of the legal system that allowed refugees to acquire lawful status to return home or to work, the effectiveness of humanitarian assistance was very limited in improving their living conditions. To push through political and legal changes, not only aid but also political settlements were required, but this effort was outside of humanitarian organizations’ sphere of responsibility. It evinces that although humanitarian organizations were able to rescue hundreds of thousands of refugees’ lives in the short term, they were incapable of resolving the political predicament that brought about the difficult situation in the long term.

Beyond the limitations of humanitarian organizations in resolving the poverty problem of refugees, their humanitarian narrative of the refugees exploited their existence and caused more problems, too. First, there is a tendency of describing refugees merely as homeless people in hardship while neglecting their actual purposes, actions, needs, and attitudes. In their stories, the achievements of humanitarian organizations were measured in numbers, while no individuals’ views were presented. Refugees were commonly regarded as mere victims, living in camps and waiting for westerners to feed them, instead of people with agencies and with different backgrounds who would make choices on their own. In this overgeneralization of refugee experiences, these displaced people were depicted solely as people with hardship and people in need, which satisfied the white savior complex, whereas their actual wants and voices were ignored. Even the positive narratives about refugees were constructed with the interest of bringing out empathy and raising more money (Gratien et al.), which not only compromised the diversity of refugee stories in reality but also reinforced the biases, fears, even hate against refugees, preventing refugees from obtaining legal status to work in other countries. As the primary knowledge producers, humanitarian organizations were also troublemakers who created obstacles for refugees to be properly settled and rehabilitated because they created this victim narrative for the purpose of gaining empathy, which made them partially responsible for the negative reputations of refugees.

Also, the narrative of refugee experiences have been largely depoliticized. As described above, refugees are not simply one humanitarian crisis but the symptom of the failure of the postwar human rights regime to deal either with the violence of state formation or the persistence of nationalism (Stonebridge). Nonetheless, the enthusiasm for worldly compassion in the narratives masked a deeper political problem, leading to the omission of historical and political accounts in refugee narratives. For example, in Sands of Sorrow, all sufferings were presented as context-free, failing to call attention to the political implications that have caused the difficult conditions that refugees were facing (Sands in Sorrow). And in the Nobel address, Hansson mentioned that the Nansen Office spent most of the funds in the form of loans to encourage self-help, highlighting that refugees were “naturally not always able to repay the loans”, which, because of the omission of the political implications behind the situation, conveys a negative connotation that refugees were ungrateful poor people who take from the ethical rich westerners (Hansson). In humanitarian organizations, there has been an attempt to depoliticize refugee experiences in order to suit the objectives of those who are maintaining the global distribution of refugees (Gratien et al.). Especially as non-political organizations, humanitarian agencies were required to perform “objective” views on refugee issues, deliberately erasing political factors from the stories, which prevented people from knowing their responsibility to support refugees and obstructed the process of amendment of laws and refugee policies. As a result of this depoliticized narrative by humanitarian organizations, refugees are “routinely turned loose on the capricious kindness of the world” due to the manipulated global ignorance of the responsibility to move the legal, strategic, and diplomatic situations for refugees (Stonebridge). The depoliticized narrative, therefore, created barriers for refugees to rehabilitate and become self-supporting.

In conclusion, humanitarian organizations helped save Middle Eastern refugees’ lives in the short term, while they were unable to provide a long-term solution to refugees’ poverty for their lack of influence to push through evolutions in political and legal spheres. Furthermore, the depoliticized victim narratives of Middle Eastern refugees created a collective hallucination in developed countries, which actively maintained the discrimination against refugees and held them back from being rehabilitated and supported by other countries. To improve this situation, we should stop pinning all hopes of saving refugees on humanitarian organizations. Instead, we should actively drive the development of policies and laws that offer refugees legal status to work and become self-sufficient. It is also significant to focus on the agency and diversity of refugees, as well as to re-politicize the refugee stories by including the historical and political context. By rebuilding a more specific and vivid account of migration with full context, Middle Eastern refugees may receive more global support and may restore their normal ways of living sooner.

This piece was written by our Managing Editor (2024-2025) Felicia Jiang, and edited by Tooba Abid

Expand for Citations and Further Reading

Gratien, Chris, et al. “Narrating Migration: A Cross-Disciplinary Roundtable.” Ottoman History Podcast, 2019, https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2019/11/narrating-migration-mesa-2019.html.

Hansson, Michael. Nansen International Office for Refugees Nobel Address. 1938.

Sands of Sorrow. 1950.

Stonebridge, Lyndsey. “Humanitarianism Was Never Enough: Dorothy Thompson, Sands of Sorrow, and the Arabs of Palestine.” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, vol. 8, no. 3, 2017, pp. 441-465.