Sands of Sorrow

In 1950, the American Council for the Relief of Palestinians produced the first international documentary on the Palestinian refugee camps, Sands of Sorrow. Directed primarily at Christian churches and charities, the film’s tone was lightly didactic, its images striking and ethnographically attentive. An early example of the then relatively new genre of humanitarian advocacy, Sands of Sorrow invited its audience to focus on the human consequences of the mass displacement of the Palestinian Arabs, caused by the war and the creation of the State of Israel. That moral injunction came with some authority. The film was introduced by the American journalist, Dorothy Thompson, famous in the war years for her internationalism, anti-Nazi campaigns, and tireless support of Jewish refugees. This chapter discusses the politics of humanitarian compassion through Thompson’s writing and advocacy. One of the first to advocate for the rights of Jewish refugees in the late 1930s, Thompson scandalized U.S. opinion when she campaigned for Palestinian refugees. Refugees, she argued, were not simply one more humanitarian crisis, but the consequence of the failure of the post-war human rights regime to deal with the violence of state formation and the persistence of nationalism.