In his weekly Canadian Jewish News media analysis column "According to Reports," Paul Michaels, CIC Director of Communications, says a recent column explains how the UN perpetuates the Palestinian refugee problem.
How is it that 60 years after Palestinians became refugees following the creation of the State of Israel, those who are still alive, and their descendants, remain refugees? In his Aug. 7 National Post column, "Palestinian refugees frozen in time, addicted to pity," Robert Fulford addressed this important, but largely overlooked, question.
In the aftermath of the Second World War, about 50 million people were made refugees as a direct result of the war and various other conflicts. Typically, they were re-settled and ceased being refugees. Included in this category were approximately 800,000 Jews who were forced to flee Arab countries in the years immediately after Israel was established. Most of these Jews were absorbed into Israel or moved to other countries where they became citizens. Also included were the 12 to 13 million Hindu and Muslim refugees who were compelled to move to India and Pakistan, respectively, when Pakistan was created in 1947.
But as Fulford noted, Palestinian refugees were treated differently and uniquely. "They are a special case… only the Palestinians cling to their 'refugee' status decade after decade. They present themselves as helpless victims of Israeli aggression. They await rescue – as they have been awaiting it for three generations, since Israel was founded in 1948."
Fulford explained how this unique situation came about: "The Palestinians are the only people who have their own private section of the UN, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). It defines 'refugee' as someone who lived in Palestine between June, 1946, and May, 1948, and 'lost both their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict.' The definition includes all their descendants. Entirely credible numbers don't exist, but UNRWA believes there were 711,000 such refugees in 1948, and now more than 4.7 million.'"
All other people who were or have become refugees are handled by another agency of the UN – the High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) which is mandated to resolve their plight. The solution is generally permanent resettlement in a host country. By contrast, UNWRA, mandated only to provide "relief and works programs," in effect perpetuates the status of Palestinian refugees as refugees. As Fulford observed, this plays into the hands of Arab leaders who have used the Palestinian refugees as political pawns in their ongoing refusal to recognize Israel: "The Arab League advises Arab states to deny citizenship to Palestinians, 'to avoid dissolution of their identity and protect their right to return to their homeland.'"
Remarkably, the UNHCR itself has acknowledged the special "political" role that UNRWA plays. In its publication, "The State of the World's Refugees 2000: Fifty years of humanitarian action," the agency wrote that "[u]nlike the work of UNHCR, the scope of UNRWA's work does not [emphasis added] include the search for permanent solutions for the refugees under its care."
A passage that precedes this admission is important to quote at length: "Once UNRWA was established [in December, 1949]…Arab states insisted that Palestinian refugees receiving UNRWA assistance should be excluded from UNHCR's mandate and from the 1951 UN Refugee Convention [which stipulates refugee rights and the obligations of states to recognize these rights]. Arab states were concerned lest the individual refugee definition under discussion in the draft convention undermine the position of Palestinians, whose rights as a group to return [to Israel] had been recognized in General Assembly resolutions [sic!]. Other parties also feared that the non-political character of the work envisaged for the nascent UNHCR was not compatible with the highly politicized nature of the Palestinian question [emphasis added]."
Leave aside the fact that that UNHCR grossly misrepresented General Assembly resolutions allegedly affirming a Palestinian "right of return." The organization's explicit recognition that this so-called right is at the heart of a "politicized" agency, UNRWA, amounts to declaring that in the case of the Palestinians, the UN has no practical interest in resolving their refugee status. Above all, the insistence of the "right of return" (even in principle) of millions of Palestinians to present-day Israel is a prescription for on-going conflict with the Jewish state, if not its destruction.
Fulford precisely encapsulated what's transpired over decades under UNRWA when he called this "a historic con game." No one could have put it better.
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