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| Pâ•qidꞋ Yi•rᵊmᵊyâhꞋu |
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| Pipes, Daniel Ph.D. History Harvard |
2003.08.19 Excerpts from Daniel Pipes in The New York Post, –
Question: How do Palestinian refugees differ from the other 135 million 20th-century refugees?
Answer: In every other instance, the pain of dispossession, statelessness, and poverty has diminished over time. Refugees eventually either resettled, returned home or died. Their children – whether living in South Korea, Vietnam, Pakistan, Israel, Turkey, Germany or America – then shed the refugee status and joined the mainstream.
Not so the Palestinians. For them, the refugee status continues from one generation to the next, creating an ever-larger pool of anguish and discontent.
Far and away the greatest impediment to their resettlement is the concerted imposition by all Arab countries to prevent ‘Palestinian’ Arabs resettling in their country in order to keep the conflict going, via ‘Palestinian’ proxies, to eliminate Israel from the Middle East, thereby deflecting the attention of their citizens from the failures of their own economies and leaders. As recently as 2003.10.15, Arab TV al Jazeera reported that Lebanon withdrew a proposed bill that would, for the first time, have lifted the ban on ‘Palestinian’ fellow-Arabs purchasing property in Lebanon. The reason given for withdrawing the bill, according to the al Jazeera report, “The acquisition by Palestinians of real estate would damage the Palestinian cause because that way the refugees would remain in Lebanon and never return to Palestine.”
A second key component – of all things – is the United Nations' bureaucratic structure. It contains two organizations focused on refugee affairs, each with its own definition of "refugee":
The U.N. High Commission for Refugees applies this term worldwide to someone who, "owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted … is outside the country of his nationality." Being outside the country of his nationality implies that descendants of refugees are not refugees…
The U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), an organization set up uniquely for Palestinian refugees in 1949, defines Palestinian refugees differently from all other refugees… Especially important is that UNRWA extends the refugee status to "the descendants of persons who became refugees in 1948." It even considers the children of just one Palestinian refugee parent to be refugees.
The High Commission's definition causes refugee populations to vanish over time; UNRWA's causes them to expand without limit. Let's apply each definition to the Palestinian refugees of 1948, who by the U.N.'s (inflated) statistics numbered 726,000. (Scholarly estimates of the number range between 420,000 to 539,000.)
The High Commission definition would restrict the refugee status to those of the 726,000 yet alive. According to a demographer, about 200,000 of those 1948 refugees remain living today.
UNRWA includes the refugees' children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, as well as Palestinians who left their homes in 1967, all of whom add up to 4.25 million refugees.
… By international standards, those other 95 percent are not refugees at all. By falsely attaching a refugee status to these Palestinians who never fled anywhere, UNRWA condemns a creative and entrepreneurial people to lives of exclusion, self-pity and nihilism.
The policies of Arab governments then make things worse by keeping Palestinians locked in an amber-like refugee status. In Lebanon, for instance, the 400,000 stateless Palestinians are not allowed to attend public school, own property or even improve their housing stock.
It's high time to help these generations of non-refugees escape refugee status so they can become citizens, assume self-responsibility and build for the future. Best for them would be for UNRWA to close its doors and the U.N. High Commission to absorb the dwindling number of true Palestinian refugees.
That will only happen if the U.S. government recognizes UNRWA's role in perpetuating Palestinian misery. In a misguided spirit of "deep commitment to the welfare of Palestinian refugees," Washington currently provides 40 percent of UNRWA's $306 million annual budget; it should be zeroed out…
In addition to begging the question that ‘Palestinians’ are an historical entity (for which see the several entries under ‘Palestinian’ and ‘Palestine’ in our ‘Arabs & Islam’ Conference Room Archives), Arabs have no sound legal grounds for demanding a ‘right of return.’
The law that governs these issues is international law, which is based on either treaties between states or on customary rules that are evidence by the general practice of states accepted as law.
The Arabs base their assertion on UN Resolution 194 (III), for which see “Right of Return, Arab – UN Resolution 194 (2003.08.24),” elsewhere in our Web Café Archives.
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