In its beginnings, UNRWA was not quite as corrupt as it soon became. It publicly bewailed the fact that it could not arrive at accurate numbers: the Palestinian refugees were constantly moving, now to this country and now to that, and many non-Palestinian Arabs joined the queue. “The Palestinian refugee hoax,” by Mitchell Bard, Israel Hayom, January 31, 2021:
In 1951, UNRWA lamented the inability to conduct an accurate census. “It is still not possible to give an absolute figure of the true number of refugees as understood by the working definition of ‘a person normally resident in Palestine who has lost his home and his livelihood as a result of the hostilities, and who is in need.’ “
UNRWA at that point was still willing to admit to its inability to have an accurate account, and in early 1951 it seemed as if it would adhere to the traditional definition of a refugee: “a person normally resident in Country X who has lost his home and his livelihood as a result of the hostilities, and who is in need.” But that went quickly by the wayside.
UNRWA now says, “When the Agency began operations in 1950, it was responding to the needs of about 750,000 Palestine refugees. Today, some 5 million Palestine refugees are eligible for UNRWA services.”…
UNRWA passes over without comment the unique definition of a “Palestinian refugee” to include all of his progeny. It makes no remark, either, about its inability to arrive at an accurate census in 1951, and blandly remarks that it was – justifiably – “responding to the needs of about 750,000 Palestine refugees” without discussing the various kinds of frauds that were perpetrated to increase those refugee numbers. And then, without explaining how such an explosion in its rolls occurred, it simply states that “today some 5 million Palestine refugees are eligible for UNRWA services.
It is important to remember that the original refugees could have been settled soon after the war if the Arab states were willing to accept them. They were not, however, and confined them to camps where they could stew and become radicalized. Israel offered to take back 100,000 in the context of a peace agreement, but Arab leaders were still committed to Israel’s destruction. In the interim, the refugees were useful propaganda tools – evidence, Arabs claimed, of Israel’s aggression and perfidy.
The Arab refugees might have been settled in the countries to which they fled — tiny Israel succeeded in swiftly integrating some 800,000 Jewish refugees from Arab lands — but the Arab states didn’t want to integrate them into their own societies, and believed that their uncertain status, and often wretched living conditions, would only help their cause in the eyes of the world.
In 1957 Dr. Elfan Rees, the Adviser on Refugees to the World Council of Churches, wrote of the failure of Arab states to integrate the Palestinian Arab refugees:
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 their host countries. There is room for them, in Syria and Iraq. There is a developing demand for the kind of manpower 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, and here I quote the phrase, “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 which, I re-emphasize it is not my business to discuss. (From the report of Dr. Elfan Rees, Commission of the Churches on International Affairs and World Council of Churches’ Adviser on Refugees, Geneva, 1957.)
Mitchell Bard resumes his remarks on this deliberate failure by Arab states to integrate their populations of Palestinian Arab refugees:
Even today, more than 70 years after the war, only Jordan has accepted Palestinians as citizens. More than 1 million Palestinians are citizens of Israel, but none are citizens of Lebanon, Syria, Egypt or other Arab countries. Palestinians can be citizens in the United States, Europe – almost anyplace else.
UNRWA operates 58 refugee camps with nearly 1.6 million inhabitants. That is more than twice the Palestinian population in 1948. Twenty-seven of those camps (19 in the West Bank, eight in Gaza), with more than 800,000 “refugees,” are controlled by the Palestinians. Nothing prevents the Palestinian Authority and Hamas from closing the camps, moving the refugees into permanent housing and thereby solving the problem.”
The “Palestinian refugees” have been kept in camps not only by the governments of other Arab states – Syria, Lebanon, Jordan – but also by Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, that is, by their own leaders. Those leaders, who have taken great care to supply for their own wellbeing (two Hamas leaders, Khaled Meshaal and Mousa Abu Marzouk, have each amassed fortunes of at least $2.5 billion, while the PA’s Mahmoud Abbas has a $400 million nest egg), don’t want permanent housing, that might promise better lives, for the “refugees”; their unsettled status wins them sympathy in the “international community,” and promotes greater animosity toward Israel, seen — quite unfairly — as the cause of their continuing distress.
When Israel controlled Gaza, it routinely proposed closing the camps and building permanent homes for the Palestinians, but the Arab states objected and voted at the United Nations to condemn Israel for even proposing such an idea….
Israel, trying to improve the lot of the Palestinians in Gaza, and the West Bank, repeatedly suggested two decades ago that it could help move Gazan and West Bank Arabs still living in camps into permanent housing. And as with similar proposals for placing Palestinian “refugees” in Arab states into permanent housing, this plan was turned down, and Israel attacked for its offer of trying to ameliorate the lives of Palestinians then under its jurisdiction, which the Arabs described as an insidious attempt to put an end to the Palestinians’ claims on the world’s sympathy.
If the accepted number of Palestinian refugees was less than 35,000, as it should be, how difficult would it be to solve the problem? Israel should have no problem accepting that number of Palestinians over 65 as a humanitarian gesture (more than 150,000 have been admitted in the past). Problem solved.
What about the other 5 million? Well, they’re not refugees from 1948 and are not Israel’s concern. They are the problem of the PA and the Arab states where they are living now.
Israel would certainly be willing to accept those Palestinian Arabs who meet the definition of refugees applied to all other refugee groups. Bard has done the arithmetic for us, and shown his work: there cannot possibly be more than 35,000 legitimate Palestinian refugees still alive in the world, and Israel can live with that number. What it cannot tolerate any longer is the pretense that Palestinian Arabs are different from all other groups of refugees, for they alone can hand down to their children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren (and so on, world without end). Israel is not going to admit five million more Arabs west of the Jordan; this would, Bard calculates, give Israel a population of at least 7 million Arabs and 6.9 million Jews. Israeli leaders have certainly made errors over the years, been too willing, for example, to accept uncomplainingly a “cold peace” with Egypt and Jordan, but even the most left-leaning among them will not accept national suicide.
mortimer says
About half of these ‘Palestinians’ have surnames that betray the national origin and recent arrival of the families: “Masri” or “al-Masri” = from Egypt. (literally means “the Egyptian” in Arabic), “Khamis” = from Bahrain, “Salem Hanna Khamis”, “al-Ubayyidi” or “al-Obeidi”= from Sudan “al-Ubayyid”, “al-Faruqi” = Mosul, Iraq, “al-Araj” = Morocco, a member of the Saadi Dynasty “Hussein al-Araj”, “al-Lubnani” = the Lebanese, “al-Mughrabi” = the Moroccan (“Maghreb,” meaning “West” in Arabic, and usually is referring to North Africa or specifically to Morocco), “Dalal Mughrabi”, “al-Djazair” = the Algerian, “al-Qurashi” = Saudi Arabia “clan of Quraish”, “al-Azd” = Yemen “Azd tribe”, “al-Yamani”= the Yemeni “Issam Al Yamani”, “al-Afghani” = the Afghan, “al-Sidawi” = from “Sidon” Lebanon, “al-Fayyumi” = from “Faiyum” Egypt, “al-Hijazi” or “Hijazi” = present-day Saudi Arabia, “al-Hindi” = the Indian “Amin al-Hindi”, “al-Tamimi” or “Tamimi” = from the tribe or clan of Banu-Tamim “Azzam Tamimi”, “Hamati” = from Syria ( Hama city), “Omayya” = from Saudi Arabia “Banu Omayya tribe”, “Othman” = Ottoman Turkey, “Murad” = Yemen “Murad tribe”, “Alawi” = from Syria (minority religious group in Syria), “Iraqi” = from Iraq, “Halabi” = from Aleppo, Syria, “Dajani” = from Saudi Arabia, “Mattar” = from Yemen (the village of Bani Mattar), “al-baghdadi” = from Bagdad, Iraq, “Tarabulsi” = Tarabulus-Tripoli, Lebanon.
Muslim immigrants from Morocco, Bosnia, Turkey or Iran have no particular ancestry to make them ‘Palestinian’, far from it.
gravenimage says
Fine points, Mortimer. Most of these “Palestinians” are anything but.
David says
They are ‘Pale Stinians’ i.e. dubious. They are ‘refugees ‘ for purely political purposes.
PRCS says
EVERYTHING they do is for purely political purposes.
Buraq says
I recall that the left-wing Press and fellow travelers used to say that the solution for the problem of Islamic violence was to stop talking about it; to stop mentioning it in the media. Well, why not do the same for this perennial nonsense about the so-called Palestinian problem?
The left-wing Press and the left-wing online media should stop talking about it. Just shut up and then it’s not a problem anymore.
But will they? No, these clowns keep harping on about ‘a refugee problem’ that does not really exist; a manufactured problem that can only be solved by the destruction of the only truly democratic State in the region – Israel.
Infidel says
So does UNRWA count Palis living in Gaza or Judea and Samaria as ‘refugees’? Under that definition, everybody in the world who lives in their own country and own home is a refugee. And that’s not even counting the number of generations that consider refugees
One thing the Arab countries need to be made to do – particularly the Arab League – would be to allow the naturalization of Palis and others who live there for a certain number of years. Most countries in the world have a finite period after which a person who has lived there becomes eligible to naturalize and become a citizen. Not Arab countries, particularly wrt Palis, and that needs to change
americanpatriot says
I never ever think this Palestinian problem and any similar so-called Muslim-refugee-related issues like Rohingya problem can be solved by meaningful discussion and compromise on both sides. Even if it can be solved, it will involve enormous sacrifices from other sides such as handing over a large section of the land to them, removing other non-Muslim populace from area they took or letting it carved out as an independent place etc.
Why? Because these problems are either intentionally prolonged or created more new problems, in order to fool around very ignorant non-Muslims, to squeeze out more aid, to perpetually portray other non-Muslim side as perpetrator evils, to portray Muslims as eternal victims of discrimination, persecution by non-Muslims.
Muslim countries will never accept, except a few concessions, their brethren because their land has been already dar-al-Islam. So, no need to accept their brethren Muslims as a strategy of Islamization of only non-Muslim lands. They only need to scatter the seeds of Islam, i.e. Muslims, all over the remaining non-Islamic lands so that all the face of Earth is fully Islam in the long-term after a few centuries later.
If Muslims and Islamic ideology is actually based on harmony, basic humanitarian goodwill, mutual respect, reciprocal treatment, there will be no more faith-based violence or jihad killings in every day news which are taking place all over the world. The reality is opposite of it.
gravenimage says
How to End the Palestinian Refugee Crisis
……………
Admit the whole thing is a hoax?
David says
I would say the reason why it is not admitted, is for anti-Semitic reasons. Biden is supposed to be pro Israel. So how can he be pro-Iran? He of course has the ‘Squad ‘ to deal with.
OLD GUY says
Palestinian crisis is a fraud. And along with that why are the muslim countries not taking in these islamic refugees? Seems that would make more sense than sending them to Christian or western countries where they have a hard time adjusting to our society or culture. But that’s not the plan for islam, they see this as a chance to invade through migration.