November 29 is the United Nations' "International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People." It occurs on the anniversary of the 1947 date that the United Nations voted to partition the British Mandate of Palestine between Jews and Arabs. Many Palestinians and other Arabs rejected the UN partition, and started a war to exterminate the infant state of Israel a few months later. So by choosing November 29 as Palestinian day, the United Nations is in effect rewarding the aggressors who refused to comply with the UN plan. A much better date for the United Nations to acknowledge the suffering of the Palestinian people would be December 8, the anniversary of the 1949 creation of the organization that, for over half a century, has done more than anyone to immiserate the Palestinian people. That organization is UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.
That there is 21st-century refugee problem from a war that ended in 1949 is primarily because of UNRWA’s decision to maximize Palestinian suffering for political advantage.
Established in December 1949, UNRWA began operations the next May. The UN Agency's job was to help settle the Palestinians who had left Israel because of the 1948-49 war. According to General Assembly resolution 302(IV), UNRWA's mandate was that "constructive measures should be undertaken at an early date with a view to the termination of international assistance for relief."
Over half a century later, UNRWA's annual budget is nearly half a billion dollars, including nearly $150 million from US taxpayers. As UNRWA's website explains, "In the absence of a solution to the Palestine refugee problem, the General Assembly has repeatedly renewed UNRWA’s mandate." Stated another way, UNRWA's bureaucratic existence depends on making sure that the Palestinian refugee problem is not solved, and that "international assistance for relief" is not terminated at an "early date," or ever.
In 1950, the United Nations created the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which began work in 1951. UNHCR tries to help refugees all over the world. It has worked on behalf of refugees in more than a hundred nations. UNHCR, which whose work is governed by the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, has helped more than 25 million refugees begin new lives.
In terms of organizational behavior, UNHCR has no incentive to try to obstruct the solution of any particular refugee problem. To the contrary, UNHCR can work to solve one problem, secure (bureaucratically) in the knowledge that new problems with other refugees will occur soon enough.
But in 1949, there was no UNHCR, so UNRWA was created solely to deal with the Palestinians. UNRWA is the only UN entity dedicated solely to serving a single ethnic group.
The creation of UNRWA turned out to be a catastrophe, particularly for the Palestinians, and also for the Israelis. Because the suffering of Palestinians has been used so effectively by terrorists to build support for attacks on the United States, Americans are also victims of UNRWA. America's naive good intentions in providing billions for UNRWA, while Arab governments contribute only a pittance, has obviously not bought America good will in the Middle East.
In retrospect, it is clear that once the UNHCR was created, the UN should have merged UNRWA into UNHCR. Then UNHCR could have aided the Palestinian refugees the same way that it has aided refugees in so many other countries—by helping them find new, permanent homes, so they could begin building new lives.
The Origins of the Refugee Problem
Wars often produce refugees. People who choose to start a war must accept responsibility for the creation of refugees of a result of the war.
From the end of World War I until 1948, "Palestine" (a name invented by Roman imperialists) was governed by the United Kingdom, as the result of a mandate from the League of Nations. Formerly part of the Ottoman Empire, Palestine (consisting of the modern nations of Jordan and Israel) was acquired by the UK as part of the spoils of World War One.
The reason that the League of Nations awarded Palestine to the UK was the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which promised to create a Jewish homeland there. The Declaration was part of a British effort to win Jewish support during the war.
But the British government broke its promise and failed to carry out the League of Nations mandate. Even after World War II and the Holocaust, Britain refused to create a Jewish homeland. The exasperated Jewish population's war of national independence finally led to Britain announcing in 1947 that it would abandon its mandate in Palestine in 1948. In late 1947, the United Nations announced a partition of Palestine: over 80% would be given to the new nation of Jordan, whose population was (and still is) majority-Palestinian. The new Jewish state would be given only territory which was already owned by Jews, or which was Crown property (owned by Great Britain).
On the day in May 1948 that Israel declared its independence, the new state was granted diplomatic recognition by American President Harry Truman. The same day, five Arab states, joined by many Palestinians, launched a war of extermination.
The war lasted from 1948 to 1949, when the Arabs gave up trying to destroy the Jews immediately, and accepted an armistice, although they did not renounce their state of war.
During the Arab war of aggression, several hundred thousand Arabs left Israel. Some left because they listened to the Arab propaganda urging Palestinians to get out of the way of the Arab armies. Some left without prompting because they just wanted to get away from the fighting. Some were pushed out because they were part of Palestinian villages that were fighting to eliminate the Jews.
Many Arabs, however, chose to stay in Israel, and today they constitute one-sixth of the Israeli population. For over half a century they have enjoyed the rights denied almost everywhere in the Arab world: complete freedom of religion, freedom of speech, the right to vote, the right to be elected to government (as many Israeli Arabs have been), the right to due process of law under a fair judicial system, and many other fundamental human rights. The nation with by far the best record in the Middle East for protecting the right of its Arab citizens is Israel.
During war, Israel urged the Arabs to stay, and after the war Israel welcomed back a hundred thousand who did return.
At about the same time--from 1947 to 1950--over three-quarters of a million Jews were forced out of Islamic nations where they had lived for many centuries. Intensified persecution in Iraq, Yemen, Morocco, Syria, and other Islamic countries made life intolerable. The United Nations did nothing for the Jewish refugees.
Most of the Jewish refugees went to Israel, where they were welcomed, and the new government worked hard to integrate them into society. Israel has always accepted Jewish refugees from anywhere, and today Israel is one of the most successful multi-racial and multi-ethnic societies in the world.
The Palestinian Arab refugees did not receive similar treatment from their Arab brethren. Except for Jordan, none of the Arab countries would grant them citizenship. Instead, the Arab governments decided to make them permanent refugees. By preventing them from resettling, the Arab dictatorships could create a human rights problem which could be used to distract the subjects of the Arab dictatorships from the massive human rights abuses of those dictatorships.
As Ralph Galloway, a disillusioned former director of UNRWA observed in 1958: "The Arab states do not want to solve the refugee problem. They want to keep it as an open sore…and as a weapon against Israel. Arab leaders don’t give a damn whether the refugees live or die." (Terrence Prittie, "Middle East Refugees," in Michael Curtis et al., eds., The Palestinians: People, History, Politics (Piscataway, N.J.: Transaction Books: 1975), p.71.)
Today, many of the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of those Palestinians who left Israel in 1948 still live in refugee camps. They are the only refugee population in the world for whom the United Nations has actively prevented resettlement.
UNRWA's Refugee-Maximizing Rules
Because of pressure from Arab countries, UNRWA was, from its very inception, given almost unlimited autonomy. It sends one report per year to the General Assembly, and is subject to essentially no checks or balances on its operations. There are no outside audits; just an audit performed by the notoriously corrupt UN itself.
UNRWA has used its autonomy in the manner favored by its prime UN sponsors—the Arab bloc—to ensure that as many people as possible are classified as "Palestinian refugees."
For all refugees in the world--except the Palestinians whom UNRWA "serves"--the key international law is the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. The UN's High Commissioner for Refugees follows the standards of the Refugee Convention.
The UNCHR defines its objective as finding solutions, which often means working to ensure that "everyone can exercise the right to seek asylum and find safe refuge in another state." The goal of UNHCR, in accordance with the 1951 Convention, is to help people stop being refugees.
UNRWA does just the opposite. For example, the 1951 Refugee Convention defines a "refugee" as a person who "is outside his/her country of nationality or habitual residence; has well-founded fear of persecution because of his/her race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion; and is unable or unwilling to avail himself/herself of the protection of that country, or to return there, for fear of persecution."
The UNCHR definition means that, at the least, a refugee must be someone who has left his "country of nationality or habitual residence." If an American businessman lived in China for three years, and then the businessman tried to help some countries which were invading China, and then the American businessman fled China after China won the war, the American businessman would not be "refugee" according to UNCHR's common-sense definition.
Likewise, if a Jewish or Ukranian family fled from Communist persecution in the Soviet Union in 1948, and came to the United States, then the American children, grand-children, and great-grand-children of the Soviet refugees would, obviously, not be refugees according to UNCHR. The children, grand-children, and great-grand-children, having been born and spent all their lives in the United States, could hardly be "habitual" residents of Russia.
UNCHR’s common-sense definition of "refugee" is designed to identify true refugees, while preventing other people from making false claims about refugee status for political purposes.
UNRWA works in exactly the opposite way, awarding refugee status to people who are not real refugees.
Although Jews have lived in Israel continuously for over three thousand years, a surge of Jewish immigration to Israel began in the late 19th century, when the area was ruled by the Ottoman Empire. Immigration continued during the period of British rule, and the formerly torpid economy of the region began to blossom. The Zionist immigrants drained swamps, reclaimed wasteland, started small businesses, and made the desert bloom. The economic growth resulting from Jewish immigration attracted many Arabs, who sought to participate in the economic opportunities that had been created by Zionist initiative.
Many of the Arabs who left Israel because of the 1948-49 war had not been there very long. So UNRWA fabricated the definition that refugees were "persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948, who lost both their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict." By UNRWA's definition, the American businessman who left China after living there three years (or an illegal alien in the United States who got deported after living in the U.S. for more than two years) would be a refugee.
Similarly, UNRWA pretends that any descendant of a refugee is a refugee. By UNRWA’s theory, if your ancestors fled from someplace 150 years ago, then you are still a refugee. In fact, the descendants of many of the Arabs who chose to leave Israel after 1948 have permanently settled in other countries and become citizens. The largest number settled in Jordan, the only Arab country to grant them citizenship. Many others moved to Europe. Yet UNRWA still issues refugee cards to all of these people, and their children, and their children's children.
In contrast, 1951 Convention does not include any descendants of refugees—let along the third or fourth generation of descendants—as "refugees."
Similarly, the 1951 Convention specifies that if a refugee acquires a new nationality and the protection of a new government (e.g., a refugee from Russia becomes a U.S. citizen), she is no longer a refugee. In contrast, UNRWA claims that a "Palestinian refugee" who becomes a citizen of the United States, France, Jordan, or any other nation is still a "Palestinian refugee" forever--and so are his children, his grandchildren, and his great-grandchildren.
UNRWA has been so eager to increase the number of refugees that it can claim to serve that it has given out enormous numbers of refugee cards to people whom it knew were not refugees. (And then, of course, all the descendants of the person with the original refugee card are also counted as refugees.) UNRWA admits that it gave out at least a hundred thousand improper refugee cards (entitling card-holders to UN welfare) in its early days, although the actual number of improperly-issued cards may be much larger.
So today, you may hear that there are over four million "Palestinian refugees," a figure that has grown from the 914,000 refugees that UNRWA claimed in 1950. Most of them are not refugees, but are descendants of people whom UNRWA labeled as "refugee" many years ago.
UNRWA's Abuse of Palestinians
Of the "refugees," about two-thirds have found their own housing, while one-third live in one of the 59 housing facilities that UNRWA operates in five countries. Some of the housing is UNRWA-owned row houses in cities that have grown around or near the camps. Other housing is more primitive. Rarely are the housing facilities well-maintained. Their Palestinian residents do not own them; they belong to UNRWA, so no-one in a housing unit has a financial incentive to conduct preventive maintenance, let alone invest in improvements.
Moreover, UNRWA insists on the fiction that the housing units—which have been occupied from 1950 until the present—are merely "temporary" because the residents will be going "home" to Israel. So UNRWA too performs little upkeep or improvement, lest UNRWA be seen as deviating from its official pretense that the housing is temporary.
When Israeli troops entered Gaza in 1967, they were appalled at the squalid conditions in the UNRWA camps there. The Egyptians had forbidden residents to work outside the camps, and had not allowed electricity or running water inside the camps. Israel attempted to ameliorate conditions there, including medical care, and to replace shacks with small houses, but UNRWA blocked the improvements. UNRWA is often reluctant to allow conditions in the camps to improve, because such improvements might diminish the desire of "refugees" to "return."
In 1985, Israel offered to give 1,300 permanent homes near Nablus to refugees. Israel did not even ask the people who would receive the charity housing renounce their so-called "right of return." But the UN blocked the housing program, and claimed that "measures to resettle Palestine refugees in the West Bank away from the homes and property from which they were displaced constitute a violation of their inalienable right of return."
Similarly, after the Israelis withdrew from Gaza in 2005, the United Arab Emirates donated one hundred million dollars to the Palestinian Authority to build a new city in Gaza, for the benefit of people who have been harmed by the Arab-Israel conflict. Yet the PA refused to allow the refugees to live in this new city.
The Phony "Right of Return"
Under international law, there is no such thing as a right of return. If your ancestors left France, or Russia, or anywhere else (regardless of whether they were forced out, or they just wanted to live somewhere else), then you have no right of return to France or Russia. Nor do your grandchildren.
Nevertheless, UNRWA tells the "refugees" that they have a "right of return"” to Israel—that the grandchild of someone who moved to Tel Aviv to work as a janitor from 1946 to 1948 has a right to live in Israel, and to take back whatever real property their ancestor abandoned when he left Israel.
The pretext for the claim of an "inalienable right of return," is General Assembly Resolution 194, which says, "the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date..."
In fact, Israel did allow one hundred thousand Arabs who had fled the fighting to return to Israel.
The General Assembly Resolution itself indicates that the only refugees who should be allowed (not who have a "right") to return are those who wish to "live at peace with their neighbours." It is the Palestinians who have the obligation to prove—against a record of many decades of aggression—that they have changed, and are now willing to live in peace with their Jewish neighbors.
In 1974, at the height of the period when the UN was dominated by the Soviets and anti-Semites, General Assembly Resolution 3236 declared "the inalienable right of return" of the Palestinians, and formalized the UN's relationship with what was then the world's foremost terrorist organization, the PLO.
Yet in international law, General Assembly resolutions have no legal force. In contrast to Security Council resolutions, GA resolutions express nothing more than the sense of the General Assembly, and cannot, by themselves, create legal rights.
The notion of a right of return is preposterous not only as a matter of international law, but as a matter of common sense. Israel was established to be the Jewish homeland. To allow immigration by over four million people—the vast majority of whom have never lived in Israel, and whose ancestors rejected the opportunity for Israeli citizenship—would destroy Israel as a Jewish state. Even worse, more than half a century of anti-Israel propaganda education at UNRWA-run schools have turned many of the four million "refugees" into anti-Semites and supporters of terrorism.
UNRWA schools follow the curriculum in the host country, so UNRWA schools in Egypt and Syria are now, and always been, schools for indoctrination in extreme anti-semitism. In 1995, the Palestinian Authority was granted authority over UNRWA schools in the West Bank and Gaza, pursuant to the Oslo Accords. According to the Oslo treaty between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, both sides were required to carefully revise their educational curricula, so that schools did not foment hatred. Israel complied with the Oslo Accords, while Arafat and his PLO did not. So beginning in 1995, UNRWA schools in the West Bank and Gaza adopted the hate curriculum developed by the Palestinian Authority.
The Committee for Monitoring the Impact of Peace (CMIP) analyzed the UNRWA/PA curriculum, based on general guidelines from the United Nations Educational, Cultural, and Scientific Organization (UNESCO). The analysis revealed massive lies about Middle-East history and the present, all of them geared towards fomenting anti-Semitism and encouraging terrorism. The schools' maps do not even acknowledge the existence of Israel. Among the features of the PA hate education are: covering up the extensive historical and archeological record of Jewish habitation of Israel and nearby areas from ancient times until the present; using the Koran to incite hatred to Jews; refusing to acknowledge the existence of Israel; presenting Zionism as a western colonial movement (even though it was resisted by Western colonial powers); ignoring the existence of Jewish holy sites; depicting Jews as uniformly evil; propagandizing for the destruction of Israel; blaming the status of Palestinian refugees solely on Israel (with no hint of responsibility for the Palestinians and other Arabs who started the war against Israel); and extolling jihad and terrorism.
A study of fourth and ninth grade textbooks by the Israel/Palestine Centre for Research and Information (the only joint Palestinian-Israeli public policy think-tank) also found extensive historical misrepresentation, maps which refused to acknowledge Israel's existence, and the promotion of jihad. Although the textbooks did promote "tolerance" in the abstract, the concept was not directly pplied towards modern-day tolerance of non-Muslims.
As a practical matter, no-one but the deluded victims of UNRWA and terrorist propaganda actually expects that Israel would honor the fictive right of return. But by making sure that as many Palestinians as possible remain refugees incensed about the continuing denial of their "right of return," UNRWA fulfills the objective of Arab dictatorships in making sure that the Arab-Israeli conflict is never resolved.
As with so much that the UN does, the "Palestinian right of return" is presented to the world as a high moral principle—but it is a principle that applies only when it can be used against Israel. Consider the many Palestinian guest workers who lived in Kuwait before Saddam Hussein invaded in 1990. Many of these guest workers had lived in Kuwait for much longer than two years (the period that UNRWA claims entitles a Palestinian and every one of his descendants to the right to "return" to Israel).
When Saddam invaded, many of the Palestinians in Kuwait supported him, as did the Yassir Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization. After US-led forces drove Saddam out of Iraq, the Kuwaitis promptly expelled the entire Palestinian population.
If Kuwait were treated like Israel, the expelled Palestinians would be housed in special camps run by a UN agency created just for their benefit. The United Nations would incessantly denounce Kuwait for violating the "inalienable Palestinian right of return." And while insisting on the Palestinians’ right to return to Kuwait, the UN allow its schools to be used to teach children that Palestinians have a historical right to rule Kuwait, and to claim it by jihad if necessary.
In January 2000, Israel's government, under severe pressure from President Clinton, accepted his demands, and announced it would grant Yassir Arafat's Palestinian Authority a state of its own in the West Bank and Gaza. Faced with the granting of so many demands, Arafat was able to find a pretext for continued war only by insisting that neither he nor anyone else would ever make peace unless Israel also granted the "right to return"—thereby destroying any hope for peace. UNRWA's mission--as perverted by the Arab bloc--had succeeded.
The Annapolis Conference aims to bring peace to the Middle East in 2008. A helpful contribution by the United Nations would be to abolish UNRWA, which has long been an obstacle to a just resolution of the problems of the Palestinian people.
Just a heads up.
[DK: Thanks to you, and to rlb. Typos fixed. I appreciate your help.]
The world of the UN if full of such stupidities. That is because they are decided by the General Assembly, where countries from around the world can vote to "stick it to the man"(i.e. to the US) without any real consequence. The only time anyone cares what the General Assembly does, is when they decide on the new non-permanent members of the Security Council. That should not take away from the respect that the UN as an institution deserves, it just means that one should give such GA pronouncements exactly as much attention as they deserve: zero.
Shipping the Palestinians to other Arab countries is not a solution because those countries are more anti-Palestinian than Isreal. And that's to Israel's credit.
The only viable solution is two states (Israel and Palestine), but that can't happen until the Palestinians give up the armed struggle, and that could take decades.
I don't see a better short term solution than the status quo--Israel withdrawing to defensible lines and defending itself until the Palestinians decide that they are more pro-Palestinian than anti-Israeli. The refugees and their decendents will be stuck for a long time. Shame.
The Arabs created the refugee problem by their violence in 1948, and maintained it, both by rejecting any peace with Israel and by denying the refugees absorption. The expulsion of Jews from the Arab countries after 1948, and Israel's absorption of them, more than offsets any Israeli obligation to accomodate Arabs displaced in 1948. This is not perfect justice, but it is practical reality.
But he does his cause no favors when he repeats irrelevant ultra-Zionist canards. British mapmakers added a large area of totally barren north Arabian desert to Trans-Jordan in 1920; that does not make that area part of historic "Palestine", nor increase. The League of Nations mandate was issued to Britain at Britain's urging on Britain's terms; the only promise Britain made was to carry out a policy she had already decided on for her own reasons.
That policy was illegitimate: Britain had no right to repopulate Palestine without the consent of its existing people, nor could the League grant such a right. (Any more than the U.N. today has the right to award Israel's territory to the Armenians or the Roma or the Jehovah's Witnesses.)
It is embarrassing for Zionists to insist that Jews had an absolute right to live in Palestine because of supposed descent from ancient Israelites, but Arab refugees of unquestionable Palestinian origin have no right of return.
Israel is a fact on the ground, retroactively justified by the post-1948 refugees. That's all that needs to be said today. As for the Palestinians - facts on the ground again - their behavior and attitudes have forfeited their claims.
for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.
Note: "Refugees."
So I guess the Palestinians who remained in Israel have *not* been "suffering." Unlike, say, those who from 1949 to 1967 were under the TLC of the Jordanians and Egyptians.
Huh. That's odd. I wonder why . . .
--------------
But over the past four months the Interior Ministry has registered an unprecedented 3,000 applications, primarily residents of the Arab neighborhoods unlikely to remain under Israeli sovereignty according to the political initiative currently on the agenda.
The 240,000 non-naturalized Palestinians in the city currently hold the status of permanent residents. As Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem they were also eligible to participate in the elections held by the
Palestinian Authority.
As accepting Israeli citizenship was viewed by many within the community as tantamount to treason, most Palestinians opted to remain permanent residents and enjoy the benefits of living under Israeli sovereignty - full welfare rights, municipal voting rights and unrestricted movement - without putting their loyalty to the Palestinian Authority into question. The average Palestinian family in East Jerusalem currently receives a $770 monthly stipend from Israel.
"They've weighed the pros and cons of life under the Palestinian Authority and those under Israel and they've chosen," said residents in East Jerusalem of their naturalization-seeking neighbors.
[DK: Thanks for spotting the typo.]
"Among the features of the PA hate education [in UNRWA run schools] are: ... extolling jihad and terrorism."
Is there any way to have the UNRWA declared a terrorist supporting organization and thus deny it US funds?
Which is what, and why?
An Arab who remained in Israel has more civil and political rights than one who fled Israel to an Arab country.
Rostrom's view closely comports with the anti-Zionist claim that the Jewish state was from its very beginning illegitimate, unjust, or both. As he would have it, the "Palestinian" people, a grouping which for him takes in diverse ethnicities but not Jews (though it was the Jews living there who styled themselves "Palestinians," not the Arabs), were robbed by the British, who were granted license to do so by the League of Nations. He asserts, "Britain had no right to repopulate Palestine without the consent of its existing people..." (italics added) And to make unequivocally clear how utterly baseless he considers any Jewish claim to a state in those parts, he adds, "Any more than the U.N. today has the right to award Israel's territory to the Armenians or the Roma or the Jehovah's Witnesses."
Rostrom, in whose eyes Israel is only "retroactively justified by the post-1948 refugees," would ignore or deny the continuous Jewish presence there for thousands of years, the Jewish attachment to what was the only Holy Land for them before it had any religious significance to others and has always remained such, and the "repopulation" (if previously unpopulated or underpopulated, then even less of an injustice, if any, I would think) of the land by Jews which started at the end of the 18th century and continued into the 19th century while the Ottoman Turks, not the British, were the reigning power, as they had been for hundreds of years. Rostrom's ahistorical account would support the otherwise unsupportable claim that the Jews had no more right in 1948 to a state in what had been part of the Ottoman Empire, and for a relatively brief while part of the British Mandate territory, then those Armenians, Roma, and Jehovah's Witness he imagines as potential rival claimants to the state that is today Israel, rightfully so.
As for, "British map makers added a large area of totally barren north Arabian desert to Trans-Jordan in 1920; that does not make that area part of historic 'Palestine,'" I don't know what we are supposed to make of it. Wasn't it British map makers, along with French ones, who in the first place created the artificial construct of Trans-Jordan, which would have a dynastic ruler brought in by the British, and incorporated that "totally barren north Arabian desert" as part of the never meant to be permanent entity. (Where exactly did that piece of "totally barren north Arabian desert" begin and end? Does Rostrom have in mind the part of Trans-Jordan that the Jews got in 1948 to "repopulate," which they have done over time, and turn from "totally barren north Arabian desert" into a productive country, which they have done over time?)
Israel is far, far more than "a fact on the ground," and no less a legitimate state than all the Arab states created out of what was the non-Arab Ottoman Empire.
As I recall, the British government went to great pains to stop more Jews from entering Palestine.
As I recall, the British government went to great pains to stop more Jews from entering Palestine.
And the above discussion is irrelevant to the questions of whether UNRWA:
Unjustifiably counts migrant workers who happened to be in Palestine in 1948 as "refugees".
Is unique and unjustified in granting inheritable refugee status in perpetuity.
Discourages those under its care from attempting to find a new life either in their current country of residence or elsewhere.
Intentionally maintains substandard living conditions in the camps it runs and discourages residents of its substandard housing from moving out when better housing opportunities are made available.
Allows the miseducation of children under its "care" by political radicals.
As constituted has an institutional incentive to prevent mideast peace and to prevent any resolution of the situation of the Palestinians currently under its "care".
Should be disbanded by the UN.
Should be declared a "terror sponsoring organization" by the US State Department and deprived of all US funding, support and cooperation.
A godawful mess was made 59 years ago. Cleaning it up is proving to be difficult. Todays question is: is the UNRWA helping or hurting?
For some reason I cannot properly post links:
https://www.protestwarrior.com/store/product.php?productid=
That's one way to put it.
@Yankev: The url you posted doesn't work. Wanna try again?
@davod: Actually, it is difficult to say what the Security Council can or cannot do, under the UN Charter. This matter was discussed in the first case decided by the Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the Tadic case. In this case, the court, and the appelate chamber, addressed arguments by Tadic saying that the decision by the Security Council to create the Tribunal was ultra vires, and therefore unlawful. The prosecution, on the other hand, argued, amongst others, that the court did not have the jurisdiction to second-guess the Security Council. Ultimately, of course, the Tribunal ruled that it did have jurisdiction to rule on Tadic's case, but the arguments why were quite interesting.
Mr. Kopel's post can be summarized as: The Palestinians should be treated like any other displaced persons, and as adults. Clearly, Mr. Kopel must be a nutcase to hold views so far from the mainstream.
I suggest Germany. I hate to sound like Mahmoud Ahmadinnerjacket, but it really was the Germans' penchant for genocide that ultimately made the case for the necessity of a Jewish homeland. And yet, what sacrifices have the Germans made to atone for the Holocaust? Perhaps ceding a chunk of Bavaria to the Palestinians would be in order. I can see it now...in a pristine alpine meadow, young frauleins are ululating to the sounds of "the hills are alive with the sound of jihad!!!" while their brothers, now members of Das Hamas, throw rocks at the Polizei with Teutonic precision.
Maybe they're silent because it's less than the aid we give to Sudan, Peru, Kenya, Bolivia, Uganda, Indonesia and many other garden spots. I guess some think the only legitimate number is zero.
The cynic would point out that U.S. aid to the Palestinian Authority comes with strings attached that limit the use of the funds, and that those funds arguably work to reduce the financial burden on Israel as the occupying power.
It's noteworthy that aid to Israel has a string also, in that much of the military aid must be spent in the U.S., thereby making both AIPAC and the defense lobby happy. Nishkosheh.
I suspect that quite a few Palestinians could, from their own personal experience, name another entity more deserving of that charge.
When I read stuff like this my initial reaction is "A plague on both their houses." The current peace talks have made me wonder once again: Why can't the Israelis and Arabs work this out on their own? Why is resolving this issue -- truly a Sisyphean task -- the responsibility of the American President? Who will enforce whatever agreements come out of these meetings, and what are the penalties for non-compliance?
For everyone's peace of mind, the Palestinians need to be assimilated. It's hard to blow up the nice family next door; it's easy to demonize people who live outside your compound.
For this reason, Singapore enforces racial harmony by mixing up ethnic Chinese, Indians, and Malays in their public housing.
Many reasons. Israelis and Arabs don't even agree among themselves. To the extent you can put them on one side or the other, the two sides do not trust anything the other one says, and the two sides cannot even mutually agree on a neutral mediating force. They have no incentive for peace after they have greatly discounted the real cost associated with human death and suffering. There is a great disparity of bargaining power. When unique parcels of earth are the contentious matter, the negotiations become a zero sum game.
Presidents fancy themselves in the role of that neutral mediator, and giving the Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech. Fat chance.
That reminds me, along with disparity of bargaining power there is disparity of enforcement power. Yeah, I ducked the question.
[This is mirthful]
Well, one factor is that everyone who works for UNRWA is actively trying to prevent them from doing so, because then they'd have to find real jobs (see origin of thread).
Because the obvious thing to do would be for Israel to declare war on the Palestinian state and they are too nice to do so. The refugees thus created would have no place to go and the whole thing would just make them look bad and get them accused of 'ethnic cleansing.'
I am basically totally pro-Israel, as I feel their people have been victimized by two intifadas and countless punk jihadi bastards and bastardinas strapping bombs to themselves and entering daycares and discos. But. There are a lot of Arabs that the Jewish state cannot simply wish away, and there has to be a political solution eventually.
The other arab nations have a shameful past vis a vis the displaced arabs by the creation of Israel.
It would suck to have to go through checkpoints all the time, and an indignity, and all that, but come on, it doesn't happen in a vaccuum. There has been treachery, perfidy and evil perpetrated thousands of times by arab terrorists against Israelis.
I love the idea about das Hamas in Germany that's a funny post.
Essentially, a bunch of people with a cohesive religion plopped down in a place where other people with a different religion were already living, and then were able to get the international community, for various reasons, to sanction the creation of a religious/ethnically identified state there. Of course, there were good justifications for doing this-- if the Holocaust taught us anything, it taught us that Jews needed a homeland and refuge from virulent anti-semitism. But that doesn't mean it was fair to the people who were already living there. Think about how you would feel if whatever city or town you live in was declared a "homeland" to a group of foreigners, who plopped down there and declared their own government which would specifically identify with their culture and interests, not yours. And, of course, the Israelis drove out many Palestinians to obtain an ethnic majority-- some Palestinians fled as well, but is that a surprise given how Israel was plopped down on the land they were living on without their consent?
Essentially, the international community made a people who had nothing to do with the crimes against Jews pay the cost to form a Jewish homeland. No, it wasn't fair.
Now you will note something here. I don't really give a crap that Jews had a historical connection to Jerusalem and some parts of mandate Palestine. That is completely true, but it is also irrelevant. The biblical "God" who "gave" the land to Israelites is a made up superstition. The fact that someone once lived on a piece of land does not give his or her descendants the right, generations later, to reclaim it.
BUT-- having said all that, the UN should still not commemorate the anniversary, because while Israel was founded in a state of original sin, there is nothing that can or should be done about it now. The fact remains, we need a Jewish homeland, there is still virulent anti-semitism, and Israelis, just like the Arabs before them, have set down roots there. Reopening the wound of Israel's founding every year is counterproductive to peace.
Britain took the Palestine mandate in 1920 with the express intent of enabling the Zionist project. Britain opened Palestine to large-scale Jewish immigration. Later, after various violent Arab reactions, Britain restricted Jewish immigration and even stopped it; but Britain's original intent and policy was to bring Jews into Palestine. Of the 600,000 or so Jews in Palestine circa 1940, well over half were from legal immigration under British rule (The Third, Fourth, and Fifth Aliyahs). About 100,000 were from the pre-Zionist "Yishuv" and the two pre-1914 Aliyahs.
Yeah, I can't get it to wrok either. Sorry. It's the link to a t-shirt at the protestwarrior.org store, with the scene from the first (best/only one worth watching) Star Wars movie, where Obi wan Kenobe tells his friends "You will never see a more wrteched hive of scum and villainy", with the words quoted below the picture. But instead of pointing at the space port, he's pointing at the UN Building.
So, Israel was created when one group of people who believed they had a valid claim to a piece of land took it from another group who thought they had a valid claim to it. That's pretty much the way every country on the planet was formed.
What year of history do you propose we go back to in order to fairly redistribute the world's land?
The Palestinians had a right to resist the creation of Israel by force, but they lost. And they will not win control of the whole territory. The current Palestinian attacks on Israel hurt the Palestinians far more than the Israelis. That makes no sense.
As I said in my first post, the status quo is the only teneble solution to the refugee situation until the Palestinians start caring more about promoting their own interests than attacking Israel.
I'll ask the Native Americans who used to live where I do. And do the Moors get Spain back?
There was a lot of these events at the end of WWII and during decolonization:
About ten million Germans had to flee their centuries-old homes in eastern Europe in 1945. A million died; another million were raped. They were not welcomed in western Germany, and there was much suffering. None of these people or their descendants is blowing up discos in Danzig.
About seven million Hindus had to flee from what became Pakistan (and an equal number of Muslims fled from India). No Hindus are blowing up schoolyards filled with students in Islamabad.
The number of Palestinian refugees resulting from the Nakbah of 1948 is about 750,000. Bernard Lewis is right: the number of Jewish refugees expelled from Muslim states between 1948 and 1960 was larger: about 850,000. These Jews were forced to leave everything behind (uncompensated). Some Muslim is enjoying their property even as we speak (perhaps this illegally-seized property could be a source of compensation for the Palestinians!). None of these people is blowing up supermarkets in Marakesh or Aden.
About 300,000 Greeks were intentionally forced from Egypt by the Nasser government policies 1953 and 1960--in order to Egyptianize and Muslimize Egypt; ethnic and religious cleansing to the max. Most of these Greeks had come to Egypt in the early 19th century; but some had been in Egypt for 2,300 years. The refugees weren't happy, nor was it easy for them to assimilate where they ended up. They had to leave everything behind (uncompensated); some Muslim is enjoying their property as we speak. No Greeks are blowing up buses in Cairo.
Millions of Greeks were forced from western Turkey in 1922; the ethnic cleansing of Greeks by the Turkish government went on as late as 1955 in the area called "Pontus" on the south coast of the Black Sea; the refugees remain bitter and when a Greek "Pontic" refugee girl won a gold medal in the Olympics in 1992 the bitterness in Greece was very public. None of these Greeks or their descendants is blowing up restaurants in Ankara.
About 50,000 Hindu Indians were driven from Uganda in 1972 by Idi Amin in a program of ethnic and religious cleansing. Their property was confiscated (uncompensated). None of these people or their descendants are intentionally shooting rockets at civilians in Uganda.
When I pointed out these parallel tragedies to a Palestinian, his response is revealing: "None of these people is as honorable as the Palestinians are."
I wish I was making up this psychologically revealing story. I assure you that, unfortunately, I am not.
NO WAY!!!!!
Most of it goes to my people--the Celts--according to the "go back where you came from and give us back our land" prototype/rule that is now being tested in Occupied Palestine (Clearly with the intention of applying it worldwide when the grant money comes through).
So you stinkin' Teutons will have to LEAVE WESTERN EUROPE! Including the BRITISH ISLES: The whole "bloody place"!!!
And you Franks: Don't think you can play that "But vee are not, oww you say, zee Jair-mons" stuff with us. We are SERIOUS this time. Got it?
Get ready, Krauts of various stripes: You're going back to Scandanavia. From now on, Western Europe is gonna be filled with US! Painting ourselves blue, placing large rocks in odd places, and speaking languages that sound EVEN UGLIER THAN YOURS! Ha-HA!
Thank you, Palestinians and allies. Thank you for making our dream a reality! When do we get to move in? (By the way: The UN offices in Switzerland and Vienna are gonna hafta go. We never said that the Weiner-eaters could give away our real estate. You'll have to deal with the Algonqians about the New York location. Perhaps you might move your offices to Ramallah?)
Except for many it wasn't a 'return' as they had never been near Japan.
Yep. A bunch of, for example, the Donauschwaben ended up in the Midwest. One of them married my great-uncle. They live in Florida now.
Like I said, we could take in all the so-called Palestinian refugees.
Two out of three ain't bad, right? And, really, give us women with full balconies, and you can keep the beer.
Set aside that the "existing people" included Jews -- and did not include the vast majority of people styling themselves as Palestinians today, or their ancestors. The "existing people" certainly had a right to the land they personally owned -- as do all people -- but why did they have veto rights over people moving to land they didn't own and had NEVER exercised political sovereignty over?
Benefits to Israel of U.S. Aid
Since 1949 (As of November 1, 1997)
Foreign Aid Grants and Loans
$74,157,600,000
Other U.S. Aid (12.2% of Foreign Aid)
$9,047,227,200
Interest to Israel from Advanced Payments (all other countries receive annual aid payments throughout the year; Israel receives aid payments in a lump sum at the beginning of the year, gaining interest on the aid):
$1,650,000,000
Grand Total
$84,854,827,200
Israel, with a population smaller than that of Hong Kong, receives about one-third of U.S. bilateral foreign aid worldwide. And this does not include the US aid to Egypt, which is in large part payment of a bribe to sign a peace treaty with Israel, and thus not unreasonably considered further aid to Israel. Including this brings US aid to Israel up to about 50% of all US aid given. To a country with about 0.1% of the world's population.
West Bank &Gaza Program Budget (1993-2004)
USAID funding for the West Bank and Gaza between 1993 and 2004 totaled approximately $1.5 billion.
Summary: Over the 49 year period listed above, Israel received in US grants over $1.7 BILLION/year.
Over the 12 year period listed above, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza received $125 MILLION/year.
This is an approximately 14 to 1 ratio. The population of Israel is approximately 7.2M, of which a percentage is Arab Palestinian. The Palestinian population in the occupied territory is approximately 5-5.5M.
Perhaps David now has a better understanding of why some libertarians might object to US aid to Israel but less frequently bring up US aid to Palestinians. It is objectively less important.
Sorry, but Jordan treats Palestinians worse than Israel does. That "solution" would just make the Palestinians lives worse. One pipe dream of the Religious Right in Israel is that Jordan will happily abosrb Israel's Palestinian problem.
The solution is to give the West Bank and Gaza to the Palestinans once they get tired of banging their heads against the wall. In the mean time, Israel has to defend itself withing defensible borders.
One of my biggest criticisms of Israel is that their settlement "policy" allows religious nutcases to occupy just enough of the West Bank to make a viable Palestinian state difficult (and increase Palestinian suffering) without occupying enough to truly take control.
@Bill Poser: I'm sure the king of Jordan would love that. His late father was only just able to stop the PLO/Arafat from taking over the country in the 1980s (I think). Even though the present king is himself married to a palestinian, there is no reason to believe sending a million more palestinians that way would go off without a hitch.
Which reminds me: there is a limit to which we can "send" anyone anywhere they do not want to go. Or are you proposing an ethnic cleansing campaign?
One item that you left out was that when Israel tried building permanent houses for the Palestinians in the 1970's they were stopped by a General Assembly resolution. (I know that you wrote that GA resolutions have no force of law, but they can still have political effects.)
In "Lots of Advice for Israel" (Washington Post, Jan 8, 1988) Charles Krauthammer wrote:
This isn't to say that your case isn't comprehensive. It's just that this is one of my pet peeves.
95% of the "settlements" (some of them look a lot like those things in the US that we call "suburbs" or "bedroom communities") are located within 5 miles or less of the Green Line. They were build on undeveloped land purchased from the legal owners. They tend to overlook highways, and were built so that the locals could no longer direct rifle fire or rocks at the hih speed traffic on the highways below. The checkpoints and the security wall are indeed an inconvenience for the Arabs, but they were build in response to the nasty habit of shooting and bombing attacks against both the "settlements" and pre-1967 Israel. Those attacks often kill Arab and Jew indiscriminately. The security measures are there to save lives, and not for the purpose of making people miserable.
And given how many leftists, anti-semites, Islamofascists and other assorted weenies it pisses off, I'd say it's a bargain at twice the price.
What did the Jordanians do for their wards? Nothing, really, except to keep the pot simmering against Israel by making conditions practically unlivable. And prevented any developments that might lead to better lives and hopes for the Palestinians.
There are now Arabic-language universities in the West Bank. Anyone want to guess what percentage of them were built *after* 1967? So Jordan won't be a good "fit," as they say in faculty hiring committees when they want to reject a candidate for reasons that cannot be said aloud.
I wasn't criticizing the settlements around the edge of the West Bank, I was criticizing the ones in the middle, which serve no purpose other than to keep Palestinians miserable.
The Israelis wouldn't have to worry about the high ground in the middle of the West Bank if they didn't put settlers there. Plus, many of the settlements in the middle were done against the wishes of the Israeli military specificially because they are so difficult to defend.
That's why Israel was smart to remove settlements from inside Gaza. That got Israeli soldiers off of Paletinian streets and at the border, which is a lot safer for the soldiers and a lot more secure for the State of Israel.
Israel really has two choices. It can ethnically cleanse the West Bank and Gaza by mass deportation, or it can fight from defensible borders until the Palestinians stop the terrorism.
Whether this such a deal could be made is unclear, but what are the alternatives? Settlement of the Palestinians in the US or Germany or really anywhere else is not feasible. A Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza is not feasible either. All the evidence is that as things stand the Palestinians are incapable of governing themselves. Given a state, they will continue to attack Israel as well as each other. Giving them a reasonable life in an Arab state while disarming them and diluting the anger, factionalism, and spurious sense of nationhood and entitlement is the only viable option.
The mandate was to Britain issued under Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, which says
(emphasis added)
The political community of Palestine encompassed the whole territory not just the bits explicitly owned by Arabs. Besides which, the British policy did not admit Jews to some distinct area, separate from all Arab population, but to Palestine in general, and the immigrants were generally scattered through the country.
Yes - a small number of recent immigrants and a very small number of Old Yishuv.
That's an assertion some Zionists really like, but the evidence for it is very dubious. Pre-1948 Palestine was overwhelmingly Arab. Also remember Arab fertility. The 150,000 or so Arabs left in Israel after 1948 now number 1.2M. The other 750,000 (400,000 refugees, 350,000 already in the West Bank and Gaza) should now number about 6M. There are probably more nominal Palestinians, due to availability of UNRWA milk and goodies.
400,000 Palestinians were expelled from Kuwait at the end of 1991 because they had been primary indigenous supporters of Saddam Hussein's invasion of the country, though many had lived in Kuwait since 1948. The decision of the restored Kuwait govt was pure ethnic cleansing, yet this was never a big issue internationally (not much agonizing at the UN)--nor do we see these people or their descendants blowing up universities in Kuwait.
Once more, as in my post above, we see that it is only the Israeli case that is kept unique, viewed as unique as if such things as the Nakbah (and much larger things and worse things than the Nakhbah) had never happened internationally and as if the Israeli "original sin" was somehow beyond parallel. Beyond parallel to the point that the left now looks the other way when faced with the current Palestinian genocidal program for Jews.
I'm curious how you see this complete reversal of opinion as viable. Based on the past forty years of history, even giving the 'refugees' a slice of Bavaria sounds more viable. The 'refugees' will say that if the Jews have a right of return to Israel, so do they -- and theirs is 1800 years fresher. Comparing themselves to Israeli Jews, they have plenty of reason -- in their minds -- to justify anger, factionalism, a spurious sense of nationhood, and entitlement. Americans are too busy to nourish a sense of historic grievance -- let them come here.
Which is why Jordan was comprised of 80% of that Mandate, Israel 10% and the remaining 10% would have gone to yet another Arab state, likely "Palestine" or otherwise named. (And Jews of that era comprised well over 10% of the population.) Yet at no time - from the 1920 riots and the emergence of the Mufti, Amin al-Husseini - have surrounding Arab states and interests evidenced themselves as being amenable to reason; not one isolated time of note. Not pre-holocaust nor post-holocaust; not taking the 900,000 Jewish refugees from surrounding Arab states into account, who often were living under some form of dhimmi status or more severe persecution; not taking the manifest and manifold enculturated hatreds of Jews and some others, from pre-school and forward into account; etc.; etc.
BTW, Trans-Jordan was established by Britain from territory previously governed from Damascus; the area west of the Jordan was a different district. Furthermore, Trans-Jordan was established by Britain in 1920, well before the League mandate was issued, and the Mandate accepted Britain's separation of Trans-Jordan from Palestine.
It's all part of the hatetred. When I stand at the T Junction to Beit El and Ramallah and see all the UN and diplomatic cars go by. They've made this
terrorterrible mess.Those refugees produce massive millions, while Israel has absorbed so many more Jews without being funded.