"The Palestinians are in the refugee camps because the Arab nations want them in refugee camps in order to perpetuate political hatred against Israel"

The truth is always the first casualty of politics.

How long before the first vicious counterattack?
When does the universal condemnation begin?

Mr. Engel is probably on someones hit list for speaking the truth by pointing out the obvious. Truth-Tellers have a very dangerous job these days.

Ain't that the screaming truth!

He is probably getting scolded by Pelosi at this moment. The DNC and CAIR are demanding a sit down with him to correct his position and issue an apology and possibly have sensitivity training.

The Arabs are threatening to cutoff donations and speaking funds, but also offering a very lucritive lobbyist positions for an Arab company when he leaves office if he will shut up.

"sensitivity training"....LOL! Which would have to include lessons on lying.

Two points: 1) UNRWA is an absolute disgrace and is part of the problem; 2) Unless I'm mistaken, never before in history has refugee status been accorded to succeeding generations of the original refugees, as it has been in this case with Palestinian Arabs.

If it were me, after a couple of decades living in a refugee camp, I think I'd go apartment hunting. We're all different, I guess.

A group of bipartisan US congressmen is urging reform in UNRWA

Urging reform? You have got to be kidding. The UNRWA is hopelessly biased, thoroughly corrupt, it has robbed untold million$ from Palestinian refugees to fund anti-Israeli, anti-Jewish propaganda that is taught to schoolchildren in UN-funded schools in Palestinian camps.

Dismantle it completely.

There is a video on this subject by Pierre Rehov films.

In "The Hostages of Hatred" Pierre Rehov sets out to tell us the real story of those men, women and children, who have been shamefully used as mere pawns for over 50 years, by Arab leaders at first, by Palestinian leaders later on and until this very day but also by the United Nations' body that was specially created to supposedly take care of them: the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, UNWRA
To tell the real story of these people Pierre Rehov has sent teams to film actual refugees in refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, the Gaza Strip and he has shot footage himself in the West Bank. As in all his films, he exposes thus nuggets of truth hidden among the well-rehearsed propaganda speeches. We see the poverty the refugees are deliberately kept in, we see the pain, we see the nurtured hatred, we see the false hopes those people are raised on. But we also see the same hatred combined with a wealth you would not expect.

It is Allah's will they suffer so. Iran has plans to send them all to Paradise, in mass. So don't worry, be happy.

They may all be Muslims, but from different Tribes. There just seems to be the case where some Tribes are just, what? More Pious? One Tribe has always gained at another's expense. It is just their way.

Had we stopped giving our assets to this one Tribe, the problem would have been solved years ago.

Also worth mentioning is the fact that the refugee situation was CREATED by the invading armies during Israel's war of independence. The refugees were instructed to flee from their homes while the Arab armies advanced in order to avoid harm to themselves. After Israel is destroyed, they were told, they would be able to return to their homes. As they fled, they cheered and praised the invading armies.

Too bad things didn't turn out the way they expected. Israel, like any other nation, is under no obligation to allow enemy defectors to return.

The refugee situation was created by, and is perpetuated by, muslim hatred for Israel - NOT the other way around.

"Reform in UNRWA"?

UNRWA is at this point a wholly-owned subsidiary of the PLO, or the "Palestinian" Authority, or of the Arab League, or of the two slightly-diuverting branches of the PLO, the Fast Jihadists of Hamas and the Slow Jihadists of Fatah, who share the same ultimate goals (an end to a non-Muslim nation-state called Israel, with its Jews being forced to cry "give me dhimmitude or give me death")but differ only on tactics and timing.

The personnel of UNRWA, save for a camouflaging handful at the top, are all Arabs -- all "Palestinian" Arabs, adept at promoting the Arab cause, and in misusing funds, and demanding still more, as those funds are used to promote that cause -- the cause not of Arab well-being, but of Arab rage, and Arab propaganda, against the scarcely-to-be-discerned-on-a-world-map tiny Infidel nation-state of Israel.

No one ever dies, practically, who has ever been on the UNRWA rolls, and all kinds of local Arabs, who never lived, and therefore never left, "Palestine" -- in Lebanon, in Jordan, in other places, all saw the UNRWA gravy-train and signed right up as that shape-shifting thing, "refugees."

UNRWA is corrupt and corrupting, a crock, a disgusting if so far successful effort to monopolize the attention and money of the U.N. and the soi-disant "international community" for the sake of the Jihad against Israel, while real refugees, who are not the children or grandchildren of Arabs yet are permitted to hand down, forever it seems, the doubtful-in-the-first-place self-description of themselves as refugees, when of the hundreds of millions of other, much more worthy-of-attention refugees who exist, right now (and have existed during the past fifty years), none of them have received the same kind of monomaniacal attention, and the endless billions of Western aid, and been the cynosure of all those ngo'ed and quango'ed and international-community eyes, and come to be regarded by some dopes and of course the perennial antisemites who make up a small, but nonetheless very committed group -- Jimmy Carter, for example, belongs to both groups, though he would deny membership in at least the latter and assume that no one would think him, a "nuclear engineer," a member of the former.

About 560,000 Arabs actually left Mandatory Palestine in the months before the Arabs attacked the nascent state of Israel, and then during that war. And, during that period and in the few years following, where Jews in all the Arab countries were subject to intermittent pogromos, about a million Jews fled, with certainly far more than 560,000 of them coming to Israel. That is what is called an "exchange of populations," and it happened after World War I, with Greeks in Turkey and Muslims in Greece, and after World War II, during the Partition, with Muslims going to Pakistan (West and East) and Hindus going to India from the territories assigned to Pakistan.

Those Arabs -- or some of them -- who did leave may well believe, at this point, that they really do constitute a separate "Palestinian people," but most of them know perfectly well that they are simply the local Arabs, sharing the same language, religion, culture, and all the other identifying characteristics of a people, with Arabs of the same cult in Jordan, Syria, Egypt, and so on.

And they know, some of them, that their own connection to the land that Israel now possesses is quite recent, for in the nineteenth century the Ottoman vilayats that went later into forming the Mandate for Palestine were reduced to ruin and desolation, and the biggest town, Jerusalem, had a mere 15,000 residents. When the Zionists arrived, this was a late-19th century equivalent of the oil boom in the Gulf, and Arabs swarmed in, before and during and after World War I, and continued to arrive -- more of them arrived as illegal immigrants than did Jews, who were kept out, in many cases, by the unsympathetic British authorities. How many Arabs know this? How many, for that matter, Israelis know this? And, of course, how many in the "international community" know much, know anything, about the land ownership (with 90% of the land being owned by the Ottoman state, land that then devolved to the Mandatory Authority, held essentially in trust for the intended beneficiary of the Mandate for Palestine --- there were other mandates for the Arabs, and besides, they already had vast swaths of territory under their control, as all of the Arabian peninsula, that never fell within the League of Nations' Mandate system -- under the Mandate system -- which was, or became, the state of Israel.

Those Arabs who were called, however inaccurately, the "Arab refugees," after the Six-Day War started to be called "the Palestinians" for obvious propagandistic effect. And those "refugee camps" are not, as the name suggests, places full of transitory tents. They are whole cities, cities which, even in "impoverished Gaza" (where "the worst human rights crisis in the world" according to the well-known antisemite Jimmy Carter, is currently to be seen, and he knows this, because the "Palestinians" including those who staff UNRWA -- there's always a non-Arab, for camouflage purposes, at the top, but the whole thing is Arab-run, Arab-doominated, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Arab war effort against Israel).

Almost all of the Arab states have decided not to allow, uniquely among their "Arab brothers," the "Palestinians" to acquire citizenship or, in Lebanon, to hold jobs. They would, ideally, like those "Palestinians" to be as ostentatiously wretched as possible (even though plenty live very well, their UNRWA dole supplemented by all kinds of activities, not all of them criminal in nature). And while even some of the "Palestinians" have publicly (well, publicly to fellow Arabs) discussed how the Arab states urged the Arabs of Mandatory Palestine to flee, and therefore have a responsbility to help pay for them, no Arab states, though many are swimming in gold, have felt the slightest need to help those "Palestinians."

Of course, the invention of that “Palestinian people” – and the careless way in which Israelis, too, contribute to the propaganda of their enemies by appearing to accept that very notion – did a great deal to harm Israel (and the rest of the West) by providing a “national-liberation” cover for what was, is, and always will be a classic Jihad against an Infidel nation-state, a Jihad not to end, nor its supporters assuaged, by a further reduction in the size of Israel.

The Arabs sometimes have a habit of letting things slip. Zuheir Mohsen, the leader of the terrorist group As Saiqa, happened to give an interview to James Dorsey for the Dutch newspaper Trouw in March 1977:.

"The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct "Palestinian people" to oppose Zionism.
For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan."
Read the U.N. records, the records of what every Arab said, threatening or cajoling, from 1948 or well before 1948, right up to the Six-Day War, and even for a short period beyond, and it is only then that, out of the blue, comes this phrase “the Palestinian people.”

Before all that “Palestinian people” business, and before Israel came into the possession of the unallocated parts of the mandate, the “West Bank” and Gaza, that Jordan and Egypt had seized in 1948-1949, without Ben Gurion, unduly cautious, had not had the wit to seize back, there were far more people who had not been subject to a decades-long onslaught of Arab propaganda, and saw things more clearly.

One such person was Elfan Rees, the Adviser on Refugees to the World Council of Churches on Refugees, who in 1957 wrote in “The Refugee Problem Today and Tomorrow”

”I hold the view that, political issues aside, the Arab refugee problem is by far the easiest postwar refugee problem to solve by integration. By faith, by language, by race and by social organization, they are indistinguishable from their fellows of the host countries. There is room for them, and land for them, in Syria and in Iraq. There is a developing demand for the kind of manpower that they represent. More unusually still, there is the money to make this integration possible. The United Nations General Assembly, five years ago, voted a sum of 200 million dollars to provide 'homes and jobs' for the Arab refugees. That money remains unspent, not because these tragic people are strangers in a strange land, because they are not; not because there is no room for them to be established, because there is; but simply for political reasons."
And that is where things stand now. These are the shock troops of the Jihad, and they are no longer, if they ever were, a “tragic people,” but have managed to turn themselves into people – just look at every photograph of those car-swarms in Gaza, and those Hitlerian rallies, and those Der-Stuermer like photos and television shows that the “Palestinian” Arabs feed themselves, battening on a steady diet of hysteria and hate.
And as long as they are the spoiled children of the “refugee” world, as long as they hog the money and the limelight at the U.N. and in all of its constuent succursales and meetings (in Durban on “Racism” that turned into a kind of lynch-mob against Israel, on Cairo on “the family” that turned into a kind of lynch-mob against Israel, and so on), several hundred millions real refugees, not political pawns, including a great many who are refugees because they are non-Muslims or non-Arab Muslims who have been fleeing the discrimination, persecution, and murder that Musliim Arabs have inflicted on them, will never get the attention they rightly deserve.

When I was in high school some my fellow students were children of the "displaced persons" from after WWII, a very small amount were children who came here as refugees from Cuba in the early 1960's. All of the children had received US citizenship even if they weren't born here. At this point in their lives I assume most have American born grandchildren.

The problems of Eastern Europe have not been completely solved, the problem in Cuba exists today, but those refugees, however nostalgic they may be about home, are no longer someone else's problem.

Whatever is a just solution for the original refugees, one wonders about a world that accepts the idea than an infant cannot get citizenship in the country of his or her birth. That is as unjust as anything the Israelis are accused of.

I have said this for years. To absorb the populations of these camps would have taken the Arab countries that invaded little... It isn't like they provide social services for their own people... what is a few more?

A little secret that Israelis have learned is that you can grow things in the dessert if you use resources for desalinization, irrigation, and educate people for developping strains of plants and fertilizers. The dessert sun that bakes the "Empty quarter" of Saudi Arabia (which imports foreign workers like MAD - why not Palestinians?) could have been covered with 100 sq miles of solar cells. They have the oil money to spend on it!

Did they?

Why not?