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-diverging branches of the PLO, the Fast Jihadists of Hamas and the Slow Jihadists of Fatah, who share the same ultimate goals but differ only on tactics and timing. Those goals are an end to a non-Muslim nation-state called Israel, with its Jews being forced to cry “give me dhimmitude or give me death.”
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 is 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 in, 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. It is 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. Meanwhile, all the real refugees, the ones deserving of the most sympathy — that is, not the children or grandchildren of this unique (and ever-expanding) group of local Arabs who are now so carefully called “Palestinians” — are neither encouraged nor permitted to hand down forever the doubtful-in-the-first-place self-description of themselves as refugees. Hundreds of millions of much more worthy-of-attention refugees exist right now have existed during the past fifty years all over the world. None of them have received the same kind of monomaniacal attention that the “Palestinians” have. None have been the recipients of the endless billions of Western aid. None have been the cynosure of all those ngo’ed and quango’ed and international-community eyes. None have come to be regarded as their pet project by some dopes, along with, of course, the perennial antisemites who make up a small, but nonetheless very committed group. Jimmy Carter, for example, belongs to both groups, dopes and antisemites, 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, Jews in all the Arab countries were subject to intermittent pogroms. 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? 90% of the land was owned by the Ottoman state. It then devolved to the Mandatory Authority, and was 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.
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, even in “impoverished Gaza.” There “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, tell him so.
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 responsibility 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. That Jihad will not end, nor will its supporters be 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, in which he said this:
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, whether in a threatening or a cajoling tone, from 1948 or well before 1948, right up to the Six-Day War, and even for a short period beyond. 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, and which 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 this 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. They are no longer, if they ever were, a “tragic people.” They have managed to turn themselves into people battening on a steady diet of hysteria and hate. 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.
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 constituent succursales and meetings (in Durban on “Racism” that turned into a kind of lynch-mob against Israel, in Cairo on “the family” that turned into a kind of lynch-mob against Israel, and so on), several hundred millions real refugees who are 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 Muslim Arabs have inflicted on them, will never get the attention they rightly deserve.