Showing posts with label arab refugees. Show all posts
Showing posts with label arab refugees. Show all posts

Friday, July 08, 2022

This is a fun article from JTA in 1951 describing how useless the UN had been in the Middle East - -and how the Arab enemies of Israel were hijacking it for their purposes even then.






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Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 



Sunday, June 26, 2022



UNRWA held a pledging conference in New York starting on Thursday. While it managed to get an additional $160 million in funding, it says it is still $100 million short of its needs.

At his opening remarks, UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini inadvertently described UNRWA's exact problem:

UNRWA cannot be compared to any other UN humanitarian agency.

You have mandated UNRWA to provide government-like services.  But we do not have the fiscal and financial tools of a government. 
Yet no one is asking why a humanitarian agency is performing government-like functions? Palestinians live under governments in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria - why don't those governments do their jobs and provide medical, educational and housing aid to these faux refugees who have lived under these governments' rule far longer than the Syrian and other real refugees that they do take care of?

The US representative speech highlights the problem:
[The] United States reiterates our support to UNRWA and urges other donors to provide robust, reliable funding to help address the Agency’s long-term sustainability.
UNRWA was always meant to be a temporary agency. Its plans should be to dismantle itself over time, and move the responsibility for the Palestinian "refugees" to where they belong - with their host governments. It shouldn't have long-term sustainability - it should have a strategy to eliminate itself.

The Palestinian Director of the Authority (302) for the Defense of Refugee Rights, Ali Huwaidi, noted that the Arab world did not pledge anything at this conference:

We noticed in the pledges conference that no Arab country contributed any additional amount to what it provided at the beginning of 2022, and there is a Qatari, Kuwaiti and Saudi regression, and it is known that the UAE stopped its support completely in February 2022, although the Arab countries are obligated to pay 7.8 percent of the general budget.
They know that UNRWA is part of the problem, not part of the solution. UNRWA exists to keep a culture of permanent victimhood and hate, and to give Palestinians false hope that one day they will "return" to a country they have never seen and destroy Israel demographically. This justifies treating them like garbage in the meanwhile. 

UNRWA should work with the host countries to redirect its budget towards having its responsibilities transitioned to real governments. There is no reason Palestinians who are nearly all Jordanian citizens should live in "refugee"camps. There is no reason Palestinians in Lebanon should have no rights to even buy land or hold many jobs in the land they have lived in for over 70 years. There is no reason Palestinians in the areas of British Mandate Palestine should be considered "refugees." There is no reason the very definition of "Palestine refugee" should not be the same as that of every other refugee. There is no reason why descendants of refugees should automatically inherit that designation.

The reason UNRWA has failed is because for decades UNRWA has not tried to solve the original refugee problem - they exist to perpetuate it, and to justify perpetuating it. 




Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Sunday, October 13, 2013

The PFLP-GC claims that some 23,000 Palestinian Arabs from the Yarmouk camp in Syria have fled to Sweden during the civil war.

Yarmouk camp
The group, which supports the Syrian regime, blames the opposition for setting up their forces in the camp.

I couldn't find verification of the numbers, but they are not unrealistic. In 2012 there were over 2000 Palestinian Arabs along with some 8000 Syrians who sought asylum in Sweden, and things have gotten far worse this year.

There is of course one additional factor: Arab nations have been treating the Palestinian Arab refugees from Syria like garbage, either turning them back at the border (Jordan, Egypt) or putting inhuman restrictions on them (Lebanon.) (I have been unable to determine if Iraq is letting any Palestinian Arab refugees into its camps.)

Oil-rich Gulf countries don't want any of them, either.

It is not surprising that the ones that make it successfully to Sweden will communicate with their relatives and friends and tell them that Europe is far more friendly to Palestinians than their Arab brothers are.

For some reason, "pro-Palestinian" groups are silent as to how their pets are being treated by Arab countries. No rallies, flotillas, or other campaigns against Jordan, Egypt, and Lebanon.  And the last time there was a Palestinian Arab refugee crisis - when they were expelled from Iraq by the thousands - Arab leaders were dead-set against them becoming naturalized in the West, because happy European Palestinian Arabs are no longer useful as cannon fodder against Israel.

It is remarkable how much the very people who pretend to love the Palestinian Arabs the most are the ones who care about them the least. Even more remarkable is that the Western media and "human rights" organizations all but ignore the discrimination and hate by Arabs for their own. 

Friday, August 09, 2013

Once again, the Arab world shows its derision for their Palestinian brethren. And once again, the world ignores blatant discrimination against Palestinians - when done by Arabs.

From HRW:
The Lebanese government began on August 6, 2013, to bar Palestinians from entering the country from Syria. Refusing to allow asylum seekers to enter the country violates Lebanon’s international obligations.

Two Palestinians told Human Rights Watch that they were among about 200 Palestinian asylum seekers barred from crossing the border, after Lebanese General Security on August 6 abruptly changed its entry policies for Palestinians living in Syria.

The Palestinians stranded at Lebanon’s border include entire families, children, the elderly, and the sick. Some spent the night in the area between the two countries’ border posts, fearing for their safety if they returned to Syria, without shelter or bathroom facilities. Some have family members waiting for them in Lebanon. Others say they have no homes to return to in Syria as they have been destroyed during the war, or no money to return home, even if it were safe.

A Palestinian asylum seeker stuck at the border told Human Rights Watch that at approximately 6:45 p.m. on August 6, Lebanese border guards told him and other Palestinian asylum seekers waiting to enter that the guards had received a call from the Lebanese General Security office telling them not to allow any more Palestinians to enter the country. After this announcement, the only Palestinians allowed to enter Lebanon were Palestinians with Lebanese wives or mothers, or who had plane tickets to leave Beirut that day. General Security made no public announcement of the change in policy.
Lebanon is still allowing tens of thousands of Syrians to enter the country. It is only discriminating against Palestinians.

Jordan has a similar policy and Egypt also discriminates against Palestinian Syrians.

Blatant, explicit and rampant discrimination against Palestinian Arabs happens every day, and is indeed enshrined in the laws of every Arab country which does not allow them to become citizens while all other Arabs can.

Keep this in mind the next hundred times you hear Arabs say that the "Palestinian issue" is their number one priority, and the key to solving all the problems in the region. They don't mean that they care about Palestinians - it means that they regard the destruction of Israel is their number one priority, and the Palestinian Arabs are useful only as pawns in that goal.

In reality, the Arab world hates Palestinians nearly as much as they hate Jews.

But there are no "pro-Palestinian" groups that can be bothered to point that out.

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

The New York Times mentions the new Lebanese law allowing Palestinian Arabs some new rights to employment - but notes that this supposed improvement is, in many way, only on paper:

The law lifts restrictions on Palestinians’ employment in the formal labor market, though they would still be officially treated as foreigners. They would be barred from working as engineers, lawyers and doctors, occupations that are regulated by professional syndicates limited to Lebanese citizens.

The NYT, of course, mostly avoids the main issue of full rights - which would include citizenship for those born in Lebanon. It also refers to them as "refugees," even though they are nothing of the sort. This section is telling:
I am 51 years old, born and raised here, and this is the first time I feel like I am a human being,” said Abu Luay Issawi, who owns a grocery store in Mar Elias, a refugee camp in Beirut.

Electricity was out in the camp on Tuesday. No water was running, as is the case almost every day in Mar Elias, which is overcrowded and lacks basic infrastructure.

Mr. Issawi said he had graduated among the top of his class from Beirut Arab University more than two decades ago with a degree in engineering, but was never able to find a job here. “I don’t remember anything about engineering,” he said. “But it is nice to know that my son will have a better future.”

His neighbor interrupted him. “If I am going to live and die here, then I want all my rights,” Youssef Ahmad, 52, said.
The Times gratingly quotes a Human Rights Watch spokesman, who righteously claims that "This should be the start and not the finish line in the march toward achieving human rights for Palestinians."

In fact, Human Rights Watch does not want Lebanese Palestinians to have their full rights. For them to have full rights would involve the right to become full citizens of Lebanon if they so choose, and HRW is against that right.

HRW twists international law to make the "right of return" apply to descendants. In a remarkably convoluted argument, HRW says:

The right [to return] is held not only by those who fled a territory initially but also by their descendants, so long as they have maintained appropriate links with the relevant territory. The right persists even when sovereignty over the territory is contested or has changed hands. If a former home no longer exists or is occupied by an innocent third party, return should be permitted to the vicinity of the former home.

They link to their definition of "appropriate links". They first quote a UN committee comment on Article 12 of the International Covenant on civil and Political Rights:
Thus, the persons entitled to exercise this right can be identified only by interpreting the meaning of the phrase "his own country". The scope of "his own country" is broader than the concept "country of his nationality". It is not limited to nationality in a formal sense, that is, nationality acquired at birth or by conferral; it embraces, at the very least, an individual who, because of his or her special ties to or claims in relation to a given country, cannot be considered to be a mere alien. This would be the case, for example, for nationals of a country who have been stripped of their nationality in violation of international law, and of individuals whose country of nationality has been incorporated in or transferred to another national entity, whose nationality is being denied them.

Note that this in no way includes descendants.

HRW goes way beyond this:

In the view of Human Rights Watch, the clearest guidance in international law for defining the basis on which an individual can exercise a claim to return to his or her "own country" is provided by the convergence of the wording of the General Comments of the Human Rights Committee -- "an individual who, because of his or her special ties to or claims in relation to a given country, cannot be considered to be a mere alien"-- and the concept of a "genuine and effective link," which arose out of the International Court of Justice's Nottebohm case (2). While the Nottebohm case addressed the issue of nationality, the criteria that it sets forth are the most comprehensive, Human Rights Watch considers, for determining the existence of the right to return., it says :

"Different factors are taken into consideration, and their importance will vary from one case to the next: there is the habitual residence of the individual concerned but also the centre of his interests, his family ties, his participation in public life, attachment shown by him for a given country and inculcated in his children, etc."

The Nottebohm case did not in any way deal with the children of the person contesting his nationality.

Here is another case where HRW substitutes lex ferenda for lex lata - the law as they want it to be with the law as it is.

In their zeal to "protect" a non-existent "right of return" for Lebanese Palestinians who were born in Lebanon, Human Rights Watch is denying Palestinians in Lebanon their human rights to citizenship in the country of one's birth! Human rights are individual, not collective, but HRW is de facto adopting the Arab lie that "Palestinian unity" is more important than individual rights.

Yes, there are political issues involved in allowing hundreds of thousands of Sunnis to become citizens of Lebanon. Yes, there are political issues in the Arab world against the concept of naturalization of millions of people. But since when should HRW twist international law in order to justify these ultimately political decisions?

The entire issue is one of individual choice. If Palestinian Arabs in Lebanon are afraid that by becoming citizens, they would compromise on the miniscule chance that they would eventually be allowed to move to Israel and rebuild a village destroyed in 1948, they can choose not to become naturalized. History shows that most Lebanese Palestinians would become citizens in a minute if they could, and when HRW parrots Arab lies about how the "right of return" is more important than their rights to citizenship, then HRW shows itself to be a mere parody of a human rights organization.

Another issue is simple realism. The fact is that the majority of Lebanese Palestinians will never immigrate to "Palestine" or to Israel even with a peace agreement. The Lebanese will still insist on restricting the PalArabs' rights even afterwards. HRW, evidently, prefers the Arab cop-out of an unrestricted "right of return" and its concomitant sentencing of an entire population to misery rather than working to help them attain truly equal rights.

If Human Rights Watch really wanted to protect the human rights of these people, it would call on Lebanon to allow people born in that country to become citizens of that country should they so choose. Their choice to misinterpret international law instead says volumes about how HRW is, effectively, a political pawn of the Arabs.

(h/t BC)

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

UNRWA has again warned that it is running with a large deficit and will be forced to close schools or other programs if it does not get some cash quickly.

Filippo Grandi, the Commissioner General of UNRWA, said that a deficit of $84 million needs to be covered this month or else services will be affected.

Given that the real or imagined population of "refugees" that UNRWA takes responsibility for is increasing at a high rate, UNRWA has done surprisingly little planning on how to reduce the problem. In 2005, UNRWA came out with a five year plan that pretended "to create conditions for the human development and sustainable self reliance for Palestine refugees." Yet the only concrete tactics were a microfinance plan and vocational training - important but largely symbolic initiatives that are not designed to make a real dent in reducing Palestinian Arab dependence a UN welfare agency.

I have yet to see a real, long-term strategy by UNRWA to continue its operations for the next decade. It is obvious that they cannot continue to receive more and more money from the West (Arab nations pay only a small part of the UNRWA budget, and often renege on their pledges.)

Even if there was a peace plan tomorrow and a Palestinian Arab state the day after that, there would still be nearly five million officially registered "refugees", a continuously growing population. The PA cannot afford to keep its own economy going; they sure couldn't absorb millions of Arabs kept stateless by their host countries, many of them radicalized by being stuck in miserable conditions for so many years.

And nobody is thinking about how to solve this issue.

Arab states are more than happy to keep the status quo - it costs them nothing to give these squalid camps to UNRWA and they have no responsibility. The millions of pseudo-refugees are being kept in limbo for Phase 2 of the plan to destroy Israel, namely, the non-existent "right of return." No matter what agreement Israel signs that says that it will never happen, that issue will come up as a legitimate issue within a few years.

There is only one solution: The Arab states need to assume responsibility for their role in keeping the Palestinian Arabs stateless, discriminated against and in misery. They need to start implementing plans to integrate their "guests" into their own societies, the way every other refugee population in history has been integrated in their host countries.

The only way this can happen is by shaming them.

Publicize the endemic discrimination that the Palestinian Arabs have been subject to since 1948. Tell the world how desperate these people are to become a normal part of society. Show how Palestinian Arabs, alone among all Arabs, cannot become citizens of other Arab countries - at the urging of the Arab League itself.

UNRWA could actually do something positive for once. They can tell the world a simple fact: Even if the events in 1948 were a catastrophe for Palestinian Arabs, the problems that they have 62 years later are squarely the responsibility of the Arab states that have treated them like subhuman pawns. If UNRWA would publish a single, simple press release laying out these facts that everybody knows, they could do more to help the population of "refugees" than they have accomplished in six decades.

Human rights organizations that pretend to care about Palestinian Arabs should also be in the forefront of this initiative. The time to use Palestinian Arabs as pawns needs to end, and they should be given the choice of becoming citizens in any Arab country they want, under the same naturalization laws that any other Arab citizen would go through.

Everyone has their heads in the sand pretending that a "peace plan" can solve the problem. But this fact is clear: The status quo is unsustainable and something needs to be done to reduce and eliminate the scourge of stateless people being cynically used solely as a weapon to hurt Israel.

Monday, August 16, 2010

It is always notable when reporters who cover a country ignore a huge story for years.

Arabs in Lebanon, who happen to have ancestors who lived in British Mandate Palestine in 1947, have lived under often-horrific conditions. For decades they have been discriminated against.

None of this was a secret.

Yet the media simply ignored them, even when fighting would flare up in "refugee" camps.

Now that the Lebanese parliament has debated the issue, the mainstream media is starting to tiptoe around the topic - an area that they should have been covering since the 1970s.

Here's AP discovering the obvious:

Mohammed al-Amin spends his days doing little more than playing billiards and smoking cigarettes in this sprawling Palestinian refugee camp, where gunmen roam narrow alleyways dotted with tin-roofed, cement-block homes.

The 25-year-old studied dental lab technology but works at a small, grubby coffee shop in the camp, making $100 a month. He dreams of working with a respected doctor in Lebanese society and being welcomed like any other foreigner, without being looked down on.

"Sometimes I feel like a pressurized bottle that's about to explode," said al-Amin, who was born in Ein el-Hilweh years after his family fled what is now Israel. "Why should three quarters of the Palestinian people here be selling coffee on the street?"

The approximately 400,000 Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, many of them born here, are barred by law from any but the most menial professions and are denied many basic rights.

Now parliament is debating a new law that would allow Palestinians to work in any profession and own property, as well as give them social security benefits. The bill, due for a vote on Aug. 17, is the most serious effort yet by Lebanon to transform its policies toward the refugees.
Even so, practically no one is stepping up and saying that these increased human rights should include the right of nationality in the country of one's birth. That, apparently, is way over the line.

Friday, August 13, 2010

Last week, I saw a video (sent out to the Free Gaza mailing list) of an earnest, self-righteous folksinger, singing his heart out about how those evil Zionists have been oppressing innocent Palestinian Arabs, up to and including the Mavi Marmara. If you want to barf, you can see the video here.

The lyrics are filled with what can only be called outright lies, but lies that are accepted as truth by a huge percentage of the world. Here is how it starts:

In 1948 they were driven out at the point of a machine gun
Families fled in fear to Jordan, Syria and Lebanon
They fled around the globe, firmly held in terror's grip
And about a million refugees ended up in the tiny Gaza Strip
In 1967 the IDF moved in
And the refugees in Gaza became refugees again
Settlers took their farmland, soldiers took the ports
And the people were surrounded by military forts

In 2007 they cut it off completely
No access to the borders, no access to the sea
The world began to see this unavoidable stamp
The most crowded place on Earth was now a concentration camp
Israeli jet fighters bombed Gaza from the air
And they kept out the supplies needed to rebuild and repair
They kept out the convoys of humanitarian aid
Anemic children going hungry, crushed and burned in bombing raids

Now, people listening to this in a concert have next to zero ability to think critically about these sincere-sounding libels. They get caught up in the moment - a purely emotional moment that has no bearing on logic or reality - and the hate that underlies these lyrics become, subconsciously, a part of them.

So yesterday I decided that it is time to write a folk song that actually tells the truth about Palestinian Arabs. Unfortunately, I cannot play guitar nor can I sing very well, so I cannot upload it to YouTube and cause countless clueless leftist heads to explode at the confluence of folk singing about an oppressed people and the truth about who is oppressing them.

But maybe one of my readers can.

So, without further ado, here is my song:

The pawns of the Middle East


In 1948 their leaders abandoned them
The rich Arabs packed up and went to Lebanon
Their confident leaders told them to get out of the way
So the Jews could be slaughtered and then they'll be back to stay

But that's not what happened. Their fighters didn't fight.
Wild rumors scared them, and most then joined the flight
They ended up in Egypt, Syria, Jordan
The Palestinian Arabs thought they'd start over again

They thought that they'd be welcomed by the Arabs who said that they loved them
But they were placed in giant camps, and had to stay in tents
They thought that they were all Arabs, but they were only that in name
The other Arabs didn't want them to remind them of their shame

Chorus:
Decade after decade, the Arabs let them down
They treated them like animals, and just used them as pawns
They thought that their problem was that they didn't have a state
But the real problem was that they were taught only to hate.

They wanted jobs, they wanted land, they wanted to fit in
Their hosts only wanted the millions given by the UN
They kept them stuck in camps, in disgusting misery
They did everything possible to ensure they'd never be free.

The Arab states passed laws to let them know where they stand
They couldn't work in certain jobs, couldn't own any land
They had no choice, no rights, no control over their fate
And they raised a generation who was taught nothing but hate.

Chorus

Jordan never gave them an inch of "historic Palestine"
The entire world had no problem. They thought that this was fine.
The only land that Arabs would allow them to receive
Was the land that would be left over when they forced the Jews to leave.

Their new leaders taught terror, for them not to be so meek
Jordan slaughtered thousands of them in a matter of just weeks
And so it went, year after year, kept in dire straits
400,000 of them got kicked out of Kuwait

Decade after decade, the Arabs let them down
They treated them like animals, and just used them as pawns
They thought that their problem was that they didn't have a state
But the real problem was that they were taught only to hate.



It didn't take long  to write - maybe 45 minutes. I could write an entire album in a couple of days. Political folk-singers are overrated.

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

From Ha'aretz:
The United Nations' relief agency for Palestinian refugees, lashed out Tuesday at the Israel Broadcasting Authority for airing what it called a a dishonest portrayal of the organization on Saturday in "Ro'im Olam" on Channel 1 television.

Right-wing journalist David Bedein's "For the Nakba", UNRWA said, contains numerous inaccuracies about its operations in Palestinian refugee camps and educational institutions. It depicts large graffiti that lionize Palestinian suicide bombers and includes an interview with Palestinian children who profess a desire to become "martyrs."

"Ro'im Olam" presenter Yaakov Ahimeir sought comment from UNRWA's Christopher Gunness, who watched the segment before it aired. Gunness said he warned of numerous inaccuracies, which were never corrected.

In a letter written prior to the airing, Gunness said UNRWA schools do not contain murals of suicide bombers, and that the textbooks shown are for use by 12th graders, while UNRWA schools do not go beyond ninth grade.

Gunness said students making derogatory statements about Israel are not enrolled at UNRWA schools, whose pupils are identifiable by their school uniforms. The spokesperson added that UNRWA does not sanction events that officially mark the Nakba, as the segment suggested. Gunness denied the film's assertion that a student in an agency-run school was an 18-year-old suicide bomber.

Gunness accused Channel 1 of airing "a stack of lies," and said editing the errors was "a matter of integrity."

In response, Ahimeir said: "Chris Gunness viewed the film before the broadcast, and his response was broadcast in full." After he sent me additional material, Ahimeir said, "This was also read on the air by me as UNRWA's response."

Bedein denied Gunness' claims. Palestinian kids, he said, study the materials from the textbooks at a young age, and the mural of the suicide bomber was seen at the entrance of the UNRWA school at the Deheisheh refugee camp near Bethlehem.
I am not in a position to determine who is telling the truth for most of these issues, but I did find out one fact.

Gunness claims that UNRWA "does not sanction events that officially mark the Nakba," according to the article. I was surprised to see no evidence of UNRWA activities on Nakba day in the territories. However, UNRWA in Lebanon definitely commemorated "Nakba Day". This is from a UNRWA newsletter:

In remembrance of the 1948 Nakba and what the community describes as the “Second Nakba” caused by the conflict in Nahr el Bared in 2007, the Factions and Popular Committee will be running a series of activities including marches, sit-ins and distribution of black flags to commemorate the plight of the Palestinians.

Nazareth School in cooperation with Palestinian Arab Cultural Club held on May 13 an exhibit day to commemorate AL-Nakba anniversary.

To Set a New Guinness World Record in Commemoration of Al Nakba

On May 15, a group of Palestinian youth will draw the UN resolution 194 that endorses the Palestinian right to return with 6000 scarves. By that they will attempt to beat the current Guinness world record for the longest chain of scarves. The attempt is designed to commemorate the anniversary of Nakba day. A Guinness World Records Adjudicator will be present to officially verify the record attempt, which will involve a drawing of six thousand scarves connected in the shape of the UN Resolution 194, in an effort to break the current record of 2,932 m 5 cm (9,619 ft 6.81 in) made of 5,000 scarves and set in Spain on 29 August 2009. Art bands presenting folkloric dances, songs, and heritage sketches will entertain participants at the festivities, while organizers connect the scarves to achieve a total length of 6,000 m. All are invited to go commemorate Al Nakba in Beirut.

When: Saturday May 15
What Time: 3:00pm
Where: Sportive city of Beirut- Bir Hassan
The Nazareth school in Beddawi is a UNRWA school.

UPDATE: Here is the video (h/t Jed)



UPDATE 2: Adam at CiFWatch just happened to have a snapshot of a heroic Palestinian Arab throwing an incendiary device at the entrance to a UNRWA community center in Deheisheh:

UPDATE 3: The Arabic phrase has these peaceful words: (h/t Ali)

"My enemy, enemy of the sun, I will not compromise and I will resist till the last pulse in my veins"


Apparently, UNRWA has some 'splaining to do.

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Did you know that there were well over 100,000 Gazans in Jordan with limited rights -  and no easy way to get out?

An Arab researcher named Oroub El Abed has been documenting the plight of two little-known groups of Palestinian Arabs - the Gazans who live in Jordan and the PalArabs who live in Egypt.

Here is an excerpt from an article she wrote in Forced Migration Review about the Gazans in Jordan:
Gazans in Jordan are doubly displaced refugees. Forced to move to Gaza as a result of the 1948 war, they fled once more when Israel occupied the Gaza Strip in 1967. Guesstimates of the number of Gazans in Jordan range between 118,000 and 150,000. A small number have entered the Jordanian citizenship scheme via naturalisation or have had the financial resources to acquire citizenship.

On arrival in Jordan, the ex-residents of Gaza were granted temporary Jordanian passports valid for two years but were not granted citizenship rights. The so-called ‘passport’ serves two purposes: it indicates to the Jordanian authorities that the Gazans and their dependents are temporary residents in Jordan and provides them with an international travel document (‘laissez-passer’) potentially enabling access to countries other than Jordan.

The ‘passport’ – which is expensive – has value as an international travel document only if receiving states permit the entry of temporary passport holders. Few countries admit them, because they have no official proof of citizenship. Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and some Gulf States are among those who refuse to honour the document. Any delay in renewing the temporary passport or in applying for one puts an individual at risk of becoming undocumented.

Since 1986 it has been harder for Gazans to compete for places in Jordanian universities as they must secure places within the 5% quota reserved for Arab foreigners. Entry to professions is blocked as Gazans are not allowed to register with professional societies/unions or to establish their own offices, firms or clinics. Only those with security clearance can gain private sector employment. Those who work in the informal sector are vulnerable to being exploited. Many Gazans are keen to leave Jordan to seek employment elsewhere but are constrained from doing so. Some have attempted to leave clandestinely.

Rami was brought up in Jordan, studied law and worked for over two years for a law firm in the West Bank city of Hebron. Lacking a West Bank Israeli-issued ID, he was forced to return to Jordan every three months to renew his visitor’s visa. Due to the high cost of living he returned to Jordan in 1999 only to find himself stripped of his Jordanian temporary passport. Now without any form of identity, he notes that “being Gazan in Jordan is like being guilty.”

In Jordan, as in most other Middle-Eastern countries, women cannot pass on their citizenship to their children. Neither is citizenship granted to a child born on the territory of a state from a foreign father. Married women are forced to depend on their fathers or husbands to process documents related to their children. Because of this patriarchal conception of citizenship, children of Jordanian women married to Gazans are at risk of being left without a legal existence.

Heba, a Jordanian national, married Ahmad, a Gazan with an Egyptian travel document. A year after their marriage, Ahmad was arrested for being in Jordan without a residence permit. Deported from Jordan, he was refused re-entry to Egypt and ended up in Sudan. Heba had a child but has been unable to register the birth due to the absence of her husband. She cannot afford to go to Sudan to be with him.
So there is a significant population of up to 150,000 Palestinian Arabs, living in the one Arab country that has granted other Palestinian Arabs full citizenship, who are left in legal limbo and danger of being deported. They are discriminated against and cannot leave. Even worse, most major Arab countries do not recognize their "travel documents" and effectively discriminate against them, forcing them to stay in Jordan or get deported forever.

How many times have you read about this "open-air prison?" How many human rights groups have championed the cause of Jordanian Gazans? What op-eds have ever been written, shaming the Hashemite Kingdom on how poorly they treat their Arab brethren? How many flotillas and convoys are being organized to help out the women and children? How many people are working to divest from Jordanian products because of this shameful discrimination?

Zero, zero, zero, zero and zero.

Monday, August 09, 2010

An astonishingly good piece in the National Post (Canada):

Refugees? Canadians, even if their families have lived here for centuries, know something about refugees. We know Hungarians, we know Vietnamese, we know many others. We admire their energy and their accomplishments. Observing them can be a bracing lesson in human tenacity under adverse circumstances.

But that pattern doesn't cover Palestinian refugees. They are a special case. For many reasons, various populations across the planet are displaced; 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. Members of other history-battered groups choose to live by an urgent ethic: Get up, get going, make a new life. Palestinians have a different approach: Sit down, wait, stay angry till the world provides for you.

Andrew Roberts, a much-admired British historian, raised the issue of Palestinian refugees in a speech excerpted in the National Post on Tuesday. He argued, correctly, that Arab governments "are rich enough to have economically solved the Palestinian refugee problem decades ago." The 5,000 or so members of the Saudi royal family could probably handle it by themselves.

Why haven't they done so? They much prefer to let Palestinians remain poor. Every wretched, ill-fed and ill-housed Palestinian can be used as a living rebuke to Israel.

Read the whole thing.

(h/t Israel Matzav)

Monday, August 02, 2010

Historian Efraim Karsh notices the same poll that I noticed a week ago:

What... are we to make of a recent survey for the Al Arabiya television network finding that a staggering 71 percent of the Arabic respondents have no interest in the Palestinian-Israeli peace talks? “This is an alarming indicator,” lamented Saleh Qallab, a columnist for the pan-Arab newspaper Al Sharq al Awsat. “The Arabs, people and regimes alike, have always been as interested in the peace process, its developments and particulars, as they were committed to the Palestinian cause itself.”

But the truth is that Arab policies since the mid-1930s suggest otherwise. While the “Palestine question” has long been central to inter-Arab politics, Arab states have shown far less concern for the well-being of the Palestinians than for their own interests.

For example, it was common knowledge that the May 1948 pan-Arab invasion of the nascent state of Israel was more a scramble for Palestinian territory than a fight for Palestinian national rights. As the first secretary-general of the Arab League, Abdel Rahman Azzam, once admitted to a British reporter, the goal of King Abdullah of Transjordan “was to swallow up the central hill regions of Palestine, with access to the Mediterranean at Gaza. The Egyptians would get the Negev. Galilee would go to Syria, except that the coastal part as far as Acre would be added to the Lebanon.”

From 1948 to 1967, when Egypt and Jordan ruled the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, the Arab states failed to put these populations on the road to statehood. They also showed little interest in protecting their human rights or even in improving their quality of life — which is part of the reason why 120,000 West Bank Palestinians moved to the East Bank of the Jordan River and about 300,000 others emigrated abroad. “We couldn’t care less if all the refugees die,” an Egyptian diplomat once remarked. “There are enough Arabs around.”

Not surprisingly, the Arab states have never hesitated to sacrifice Palestinians on a grand scale whenever it suited their needs. In 1970, when his throne came under threat from the Palestine Liberation Organization, the affable and thoroughly Westernized King Hussein of Jordan ordered the deaths of thousands of Palestinians, an event known as “Black September.”

Six years later, Lebanese Christian militias, backed by the Syrian Army, massacred some 3,500 Palestinians, mostly civilians, in the Beirut refugee camp of Tel al-Zaatar. These militias again slaughtered hundreds of Palestinians in 1982 in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, this time under Israel’s watchful eye. None of the Arab states came to the Palestinians’ rescue.

Worse, in the mid-’80s, when the P.L.O. — officially designated by the Arab League as the “sole representative of the Palestinian people” — tried to re-establish its military presence in Lebanon, it was unceremoniously expelled by President Hafez al-Assad of Syria.

This history of Arab leaders manipulating the Palestinian cause for their own ends while ignoring the fate of the Palestinians goes on and on. Saddam Hussein, in an effort to ennoble his predatory designs, claimed that he wouldn’t consider ending his August 1990 invasion of Kuwait without “the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Israel from the occupied Arab territories in Palestine.”

Shortly after the Persian Gulf War, Kuwaitis then set about punishing the P.L.O. for its support of Hussein — cutting off financial sponsorship, expelling hundreds of thousands of Palestinian workers and slaughtering thousands. Their retribution was so severe that Arafat was forced to acknowledge that “what Kuwait did to the Palestinian people is worse than what has been done by Israel to Palestinians in the occupied territories.”

Against this backdrop, it is a positive sign that so many Arabs have apparently grown so apathetic about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. For if the Arab regimes’ self-serving interventionism has denied Palestinians the right to determine their own fate, then the best, indeed only, hope of peace between Arabs and Israelis lies in rejecting the spurious link between this particular issue and other regional and global problems.

The sooner the Palestinians recognize that their cause is theirs alone, the sooner they are likely to make peace with the existence of the State of Israel and to understand the need for a negotiated settlement.
(h/t JSing)

Thursday, July 29, 2010

Last month, Mahmoud Abbas spoke to leaders of American Jewish organizations. According to reports, at the meeting he said, "I would never deny [the] Jewish right to the land of Israel."

The reaction to this speech was surprisingly muted in the Arabic press. However, an all-star roster of Palestinian Arab intellectuals have come out squarely against Abbas' statement, pretty much admitting that they do not believe that Jews have any right to live in Israel.

Al Quds al Arabi reports:

Dozens of Palestinian activists and intellectuals signed a message to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, saying that they considered a statement attributed to him as 'a serious compromise of the collective rights of Palestinian people'.

The letter said "During a meeting of your collection with representatives of AIPAC on June 9, you said, as reported in the media, that you 'can not deny that the Jewish right to the land of Israel', a statement that you have not yet disavowed. We consider this announcement, which adopts the central principle of Zionism, a wasting of serious collective rights of the Palestinian people. It is a waiver of the right of the Palestinian citizens of Israel to live on an equal footing in their home, which stood against a backdrop of the apartheid system imposed on them for decades, and it is also a concession the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes."

The letter said 'the institution or the Palestinian leadership has never at any time before this accepted' the exclusive Jewish right to Palestine; it is contrary to the internationally recognized rights of the Palestinian people, and our right is with us as a people, which you do not have the authority to treat as you want.'

I never quite understood how these academics, allegedly so concerned over equal rights, consider Israel's definition of itself as a Jewish state as more racist and exclusionary than the self-definition of every Arab nation as either an Arab or Muslim state (most often, both.)

The signatories include Birzeit University history professor Saleh Abd al-Jawad, University of California professor George Bisharat, Omar Barghouti, who is a founder of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel - and yet currently attends Tel Aviv University, and Columbia University professor Joseph Massad.

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Khaled Abu Toameh touches on one of the major themes of this blog:
When was the last time the United Nations Security Council met to condemn an Arab government for its mistreatment of Palestinians?

How come groups and individuals on university campuses in the US and Canada that call themselves "pro-Palestinian" remain silent when Jordan revokes the citizenship of thousands of Palestinians?

The plight of Palestinians living in Arab countries in general, and Lebanon in particular, is one that is often ignored by the mainstream media in West.

How come they turn a blind eye to the fact that Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and many more Arab countries continue to impose severe travel restrictions on Palestinians?

And where do these groups and individuals stand regarding the current debate in Lebanon about whether to grant Palestinians long-denied basic rights, including employment, social security and medical care?

Or have they not heard about this debate at all? Probably not, since the case has failed to draw the attention of most Middle East correspondents and commentators.

A news story on the Palestinians that does not include an anti-Israel angle rarely makes it to the front pages of Western newspapers.

The demolition of an Arab-owned illegal building in Jerusalem is, for most of these correspondents, much more important than the fact that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Lebanon continue to suffer from a series of humiliating restrictions.

Not only are Palestinians living in Lebanon denied the right to own property, but they also do not qualify for health care, and are banned by law from working in a large number of jobs.

Can someone imagine what would be the reaction in the international community if Israel tomorrow passed a law that prohibits its Arab citizens from working as taxi drivers, journalists, physicians, cooks, waiters, engineers and lawyers? Or if the Israeli Ministry of Education issued a directive prohibiting Arab children from enrolling in universities and schools?

Ironically, it is much easier for a Palestinian to acquire American and Canadian citizenship than a passport of an Arab country. In the past, Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip were even entitled to Israeli citizenship if they married an Israeli citizen, or were reunited with their families inside the country.

Lebanese politicians are now debating new legislation that would grant "civil rights" to Palestinians for the first time in 62 years. The new bill includes the right to own property, social security payments and medical care.

Many Lebanese are said to be opposed to the legislation out of fear that it would pave the way for the integration of Palestinians into their society and would constitute a burden to the economy.
I would add that there a a couple of other major reasons why the Lebanese are almost all against granting Palestinian Arabs equal rights.

One is that there is still a legally mandated balance between Shiites, Sunnis and Christians in Lebanon. A new influx of hundreds of thousands of mostly Sunni Palestinians would upset the demographics, and Lebanon is very sensitive to demographics. In fact, Lebanon has avoided doing a census for that very reason - the fear that it will be discovered that the number of Christians has been shrinking and that Sunnis and Shiites have been growing.

The other reason is that there is still a lot of resentment over the PLO's role in the civil war that killed hundreds of thousands of people in the 1970s and 1980s. For all the pro-Palestinian Arab rhetoric that Lebanon spews, in the end they really don't love their Palestinians at all - quite the opposite.

The Arab supposed support for their Palestinian brethren is pretty much  limited to only how they can be used as pawns to hurt Israel. When it comes to concrete actions that would actually help the Palestinian Arab economy, or their quality of life, Arab nations are far less forthcoming.

And this answers Toameh's question of why Arab mistreatment of their Palestinians is muted - because it does not have anything to do with Israel, and that is the entire reason that the Palestinian Arabs exist as a people today. Practically their entire quasi-nationhood is a fiction that was foisted upon them by decades of abuse by their Arab neighbors, and if they would have been integrated into Arab societies the way that a similar number of Jews from Arab countries were integrated into Israel, there would be very few people identifying as "Palestinian" today - and the major weapon that the Arabs have against Israel would disappear.

Modern Palestinian Arab nationalism began as a purely anti-Israel movement (Fatah and the PLO were founded in the early 1960s, before any "occupation.") It is not an expression of hundreds of years of any sort of cohesive unity - there never was any, and there still isn't. Their peoplehood is from 62 years of being treated like garbage mostly by their Arab brothers, and those are the people who should take their fair share of the responsibility to eliminate the scourge of millions of fake "refugees" that they have hosted and persecuted for six decades.

Thursday, July 01, 2010

I was astonished to find this quote from Mahmoud Abbas in 2005:

In an unexpected move, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas called upon Arab countries hosting Palestinian refugees to give them citizenship, asserting that such action would not compromise the Right of Return. "I call upon every Arab government wishing to give citizenship [to Palestinian refugees] to do so.

The Palestinian Authority president insisted that obtaining citizenship in a host country would not compromise the refugees' right to return to their homeland. Palestinians have sought to assert this right since being forced from their homeland 50 years ago.

Abbas explained: "This does not mean resettlement [of refugees]. A Palestinian would return to his homeland whenever he is allowed, whether he carried an Arab or non-Arab citizenship."

In the interview, Abbas criticized claims that the Arab League had banned naturalization of refugees, calling these claims "mere excuses."

"There is no decision, as the Arab League only recommended [not to grant citizenship], but this was not a decision," he said, referring to the recommendation made in the early 1950s when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians became refugees following the creation of the State of Israel in 1948.

While Abbas boldly stated during his visit to Lebanon that he "speaks for all Palestinians," a number of Palestinian officials and refugees in Lebanon disagree with his push for citizenship. Some expressed great surprise over his statement.

Suhail Natour, a member of the Central Committee of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, said: "It comes as a great surprise, as this move is very dangerous."

Natour explained: "Once a Palestinian becomes a citizen of another country, he can't claim his right of return to Israel, as Israel can easily turn around and say, 'you now have a country and can't claim refugee status.'"

"Slowly, as more Palestinian refugees get naturalized, the Right of Return will turn from a national case to a mere personal case against Israel," he said.

According to Natour, naturalizing Palestinian refugees would add to what are "already" serious legal, political and social problems involved with the Right of Return.
Notice that they interview a leader of a terrorist organization as a representative of Palestinian Arabs in Lebanon to say they oppose the right to be naturalized citizens - but they didn't interview any real citizens. As usual, self-appointed "leaders" do everything they can to quash their people they are supposedly leading.

On the cached Lebanese forum page from which I found the rest of the Daily Star article, one of the members posted in reaction to this:

Do you think the 350,000 Palestinians in the refugee camps want to be here? Me and my buddies are a group of five guys. One of them is Palestinian who lives in Kfarchima. Four of us are not in Lebanon, scattered between the US, Canada and Australia. The only one left behind is the Palestinian guy, who is stuck in Lebanon with no future to look forward to, and not being able to leave Lebanon because he's not able to get either a travel document from the Lebanese authorities, or a visa to get out...

Abbas must have been pilloried for making his pro-naturalization statement, because he changed his tune pretty quickly after this rare show of true leadership. In 2008, he completely contradicted his 2005 statement:

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was quoted Wednesday as rejecting the naturalization of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. "We would never accept any settlement that leads to naturalizing Palestinians in Lebanon," Abbas told pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat.
And in 2009, he went even beyond that:

Palestinian refugees in Lebanon will not be offered Palestinian Authority passports, President Mahmoud Abbas said on Monday following his meeting with Lebanese President Michel Suleiman at the Republican Palace.

Abbas’ remark quashed recent rumors concerning the issuing of PA passports to Palestinian refugees in Lebanon...
Abbas could have acted as the conscience of the Arab world and pushed for his people to have the right to live in dignity - and he instead (apparently) caved to pressure and now advocates keeping his people in misery, as permanent second-class citizens in their host countries, without even the basic ability to leave their hellholes of "refugee" camps.

What a great leader the Palestinian Arabs have!

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

PA prime minister Salam Fayyad, in his weekly radio address, spoke about the growing movement to give more rights to Arabs of Palestinian descent who are stuck in Lebanese "refugee" camps with few rights.

While he said that he supported giving them more civil rights, he stopped well short of asking that they should have the rights of other refugees worldwide - the right of citizenship in the country in which one is born. Instead, he called for UNRWA to continue to perpetuate the issue of being a caretaker for them, insisting that people who have been stateless for decades remain so until a complete solution is found for these "refugees," which he called "the core of the Palestinian issue."

He pointed out that the PLO is responsible for the political life and security in the camps, which helps explain why no Palestinian Arab leader is keen on actually helping these people/pawns and why no one is even beginning to talk about what would happen to millions of these people if a Palestinian Arab state is declared - for they certainly cannot all fit in the West Bank and Gaza.

Inevitably, they would have to become citizens of Arab countries, and there is no reason why those who choose to do so today cannot start the process.

Well, there is one reason: because the Arab leaders and the PA all agree that it is better to leave them as pawns rather than give them the basic right to choose what to do with their own lives. A lot of the loud complaints about Israel is a smokescreen to hide this 60 year Arab conspiracy to deny millions of people their basic rights.

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Thousands attended a rally in Beirut on Sunday demanding the government giving Lebanese Palestinians their civil rights.

The arguments that Lebanese politicians are using to justify their endemic discrimination against Palestinian Arabs are hilariously specious. They will all claim to love the Palestinian Arabs, but then they add that big "but:"

For example:

Free Patriotic Movement leader MP Michel Aoun stressed on Tuesday granting Palestinian refugees in Lebanon their rights, but noted that this requires funds that are unavailable.

He added after the FPM's weekly meeting that they cannot be granted right of ownership in Lebanon, and said that houses for Palestinians should be built in refugee camps, similar to those that were constructed at the Nahr al-Bared camp.

The MP stressed: "We cannot scatter the refugees throughout the Lebanese territories because if they lose their communication then they will lose their cause."
In other words, they must remain confined in squalid "refugee camps" and not be allowed to purchase land in the rest of Lebanon because if they are treated the same as other Lebanese, they would lose their Palestinian identities!

If Palestinian Arab nationalism is so weak that it cannot survive a nation treating its members like human beings, how strong was that nationalism to begin with?

Another MP is more explicit:
In an interview with OTV on Saturday MP Nematallah Abi Nasr , a member of the Free patriotic Movement said that he is concerned that the extended presence of the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon would lead to their naturalization.

“Keeping the Palestinians in Lebanon kills the country and grants Israel a favor,” Abi Nasr said.

He said that the issue of granting foreigners property rights in Lebanon should be well-studied.

It is not acceptable to grant the Palestinians civil rights while there are still armed Palestinian factions in the country ,” the MP added.
That's funny - there is an armed Hezbollah faction in the country; should that mean that Shiites should lose their property rights?

Prime Minister Hariri used different code-words in his remarks but said the same thing:

Prime Minister Saad Hariri on Tuesday said Lebanon has a duty to fulfill towards Palestinians' civil rights and vowed not abandon the Palestinian right of return.
"Lebanon has to ensure the safety of residents on its territory," Hariri told a conference at the Grand Serail under the title "Achievements: vision and future" at the invitation of the Lebanese-Palestinian Dialogue Committee.

Hariri, however, stressed that "building the Lebanese state is a priority."

"This small country has paid price in blood for the Palestine cause, and Lebanon is still committed to the cause," Hariri said.

Equally, Hariri, said, Palestinians living in Lebanon should realize the importance of stability in Lebanon for their cause.
 “But in Lebanon’s duties toward the Palestinians, there is no window of naturalization,” Hariri also said, adding, “We confirm our commitment to rejecting naturalization and to deal with the issue of weapons in and outside the Palestinian refugee camps.”

What he is saying is that there is no way that Lebanon will allow the Palestinian Arabs to gain equal rights, because that might destabilize Lebanon. Therefore, by denying them those rights, Hariri is saying that this preserves their fake "right of return." You see, it is for their own good!

Lebanon has reason to be worried about Palestinian Arabs, of course - Fatah was in no small part responsible for the Lebanese civil war. Even so, the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs  would jump at the opportunity to become normal, productive members of Lebanese society. They were born there, their parents were born there, and they have never set foot in "Palestine." And for most of them there is very little likelihood that this will change.


There are two subtexts in this drama that everyone in the Middle East knows very well, but they keep hidden from the Western world.


The first is that no Arab country likes the Palestinian Arab people enough to want to actually give them equal rights. The Arab League says that every Arab country must allow any Arab to become a citizen - unless they are Palestinian. Individual Arab countries have their own reasons not to allow PalArabs to become citizens. In Lebanon, the reason is obvious - it would upset the delicate (and, by now, fictional) demographic balance between Christians, Shiites and Sunnis. Other countries would be worried about an influx of relatively educated (thanks to UNRWA) and relatively liberal new citizens which could challenge existing dictatorships. The bottom line, though, is that Arab nations have no desire to integrate hundreds of thousands of their bretheren."


The second subtext is that Palestinian Arab nationalism is weak. The public excuse used to oppose naturalization is that this would dilute or destroy the Palestinian Arab "cause," which is a ridiculous argument on the face of it - unless you are worried that most Palestinian Arabs would happily integrate into their new societies and never agitate to "return" to a land that most of them never lived in. If their sense of a national self was so strong, then citizenship in other countries would not be considered a threat to that sense of solidarity. In reality, there is no such sense - it is a fiction that is peddled to the West. To the extent that it exists at all, it is a recent phenomenon and it is only alove due to the misery that PalArabs have been living under in their host countries.


The massive effort to hide these truths from the world is the reason that Palestinian Arabs are stateless today. The solution to their problems must acknowledge this reality, as well as the real aspirations of the stateless and how their needs have been actively opposed by the Arab leaders for decades.


This entire new Palestinian Lebanese civil rights movement, which was ironically sparked by the flotilla, has the potential to truly expose the first truth to the world. That is a start.

Friday, June 25, 2010

As UNRWA passed its third year, it was starting to notice that the refugees were not quite cooperating with what UNRWA was trying to accomplish, and neither were their hosts:

13. Although they have been sheltered in their host countries, and in the notable instance of Jordan have been offered full citizenship, the refugees are people apart, lacking, for the most part, status, homes, land, assets, proper clothing and means of livelihood. Many cling to their only evidence of nationality--a worn, dogeared Palestine passport issued in Mandate days by a government that no longer legally exists. In Lebanon they cannot be issued working permits and by law cannot hold jobs; in Egypt, they cannot receive Agency relief and assistance unless they are physically located in the 5 by 25 mile Gaza strip; in Syria, although they are permitted to work when they can find jobs, they have not been offered citizenship...

Even though at this point UNRWA was still committed to reducing the numbers of refugees on its rolls, the Palestinian Arabs were not keen on losing their free services - and their host governments weren't, either:


16. The Agency has unceasingly endeavoured to limit the granting of relief only to those recipients who genuinely need it. Its field teams constantly investigate ration entitlement so as to eliminate forged ration cards and duplicate registrations, and to remove from ration rolls those fortunate individuals who have managed to obtain an income which approximates the average for the local inhabitant. Efforts along these lines have been frustrating and only moderately successful. The difficulty of obtaining accurate figures of income, when desperate measures are taken to conceal the income, is particularly unfortunate, so that the Agency's attempt to apply throughout its area of operations an "income scale" designed to eliminate from ration rolls refugees whose cash income, usually by reason of employment, is considered adequate to enable the refugee to be self-supporting has not been very effective. In addition, in Syria, Jordan and Gaza, the agreement of the government must be obtained to the removal of ration recipients for reason of income, but in these countries, due to government insistence, such a high scale has been established that seldom does removal for this reason occur. Indeed, there are numerous instances of fulltime government employees remaining on ration rolls because of the high "income scale". With sharply declining funds for relief, the Agency at the end of the year was making new plans for concentrating its limited resources on the most needy.
UNRWA at this point was still trying to find decent jobs for the refugees, but the welfare mentality was starting to strengthen:
26. The existence of vast numbers of able-bodied individuals who for four years have looked to the United Nations for the provision of all their basic needs--medical and health care, education, shelter, clothing and food--is a social and economic blight of incalculable dimensions.
And UNRWA also started to realize that its relief programs were having an adverse effect on the surrounding population, as Palestinian Arabs on the dole could afford to work for little money. In fact, they had incentive to work for low wages, because if it was found out that they were doing well they would risk losing free food, medicine and schooling for their kids:
27. The need for aggressive steps to be taken to terminate relief operations is not only emphasized by the psychologically debilitating effect of giving relief over long periods of time, with the consequent development of a professional refugee mentality, but also by the crushing economic burden--apart from the cost of the care of the individual, which the presence of the refugees has placed upon the host countries. In the absence of advanced plans for economic development, the presence of refugees has in many instances and in many areas glutted the labour market, thus depressing wages. With the assurance that his basic need for food and shelter will be met by the international community at no cost to himself, the refugee suffers less from the prevailing low wages for casual work than his indigenous neighbour. In Lebanon, despite the ban on refugee employment, much of the seasonal work in the fields is done by refugees, who are able to work for exceptionally low wages. In Jordan, the average wage level has fallen markedly in recent years, due to the presence of the refugees, who are there in such numbers that every third person in the entire country is an Agency ration recipient. In Egypt, where cultivable areas are overcrowded by Egypt's own nationals, the presence of 200,000 refugees in the Gaza strip has forced the Government not only to contribute heavily to the relief of the refugees, but also to provide relief to the non-refugee Gaza population of 80,000 who are in an even worse economic position than the refugees. Thus, in all countries where the refugees are concentrated, a heavy primary and secondary economic burden is placed upon the economy despite the fact that the basic costs of refugee care are met by the contributing governments.
No wonder the refugees would cheat to stay on the dole - they didn't want to end up as badly off as their non-refugee neighbors!

Meanwhile, UNRWA phased out its most "successful" works programs, again because they were being taken advantage of by the host countries. It's biggest success was a massive failure.

32. During the Agency's first year, work relief projects were vigorously planned and pushed forward by the Agency. Governments and refugees viewed the projects with suspicion, feared resettlement implications, and were slow in acceptance. Finally, a start was made because refugees wanted wages and governments wanted public works. At the peak of employment on those works programmes, more than 12,000 refugees were employed. As governments and refugees discovered advantages in the programme the Agency began to see liabilities. Local governments contributed no funds; the full burden of wages fell on the Agency; the cost was five times that of simple relief. The approved projects were typically roads and public structures, and when they were finished the refugees returned to tents and ration lines. In short the Agency found itself financing and operating labour camps to build public works which the governments themselves would have built the following year. There was no enduring benefit for the refugee nor financial relief for the Agency, and the programme was gradually brought to a conclusion as funds ran out.
So, UNRWA started a "new programme" that tried to eliminate the shortfalls of its earlier works program:

46. The objective is to be accomplished through the following activities:

(1) Helping refugees find employment where there is need for their services;
(2) Training refugees for occupations where there is a shortage of trained workers;
(3) Making loans or grants to refugees to enable them to establish small enterprises to improve their economic position;
(4) Building houses in or near urban areas where employment is available;
(5) Establishing rural villages in areas where land is available for cultivation;
(6) Developing agricultural lands through well drilling, irrigation works, access roads and similar activities;
(7) Generally, financing economic development and providing technical assistance where there are assurances of proportionate benefit to refugees.
The Arab countries looked upon this program as an opportunity for more free money without any commitment whatsoever to permanently improve the lives of the refugees, and they agreed to this new program.

Also in 1952, some refugees moved to Iraq, and Libya expressed interest in taking some of the highly-skilled workers.


UNRWA remained cautiously optimistic in this report, but made sure that they would assure the Arab countries that they would not pressure them to do anything they were not comfortable with:

78. (3) The Agency operates with the deepest respect for the sovereignties of the governments of the area. Through its trusteeship of large contributions, and with the acquiescence of governments, the Agency has present responsibilities which it is endeavouring to discharge with the help of a small international staff and thousands of Palestinians. The Agency is looking forward to, and preparing for, the day when it may transfer this responsibility. Meanwhile, there is much that can be done by governments to smooth the way for assistance to refugees. Privileges and immunities are not aims in themselves, nor challenges to sovereignty, but rather facilitating arrangements of benefit to refugees.

Thursday, June 24, 2010

As a follow-up to my post on the 1950 UNRWA report, here are some highlights from the 1951 report.

5.... In the large towns such as Haifa, Jaffa and Jerusalem, there was, in addition, a fairly large floating population of unskilled labourers, working in the ports, or for the oil companies, who had migrated from the country owing to the pressure on the land. Since the last census under the Mandate was taken, as far back as 1931, such persons were mostly registered in their village of origin, although for many years they had lived and worked in the large towns. The effect of this unrecorded movement of population has been to introduce a double source of error into any estimates of the number of persons who could have become refugees; since more people came out of towns in Israeli-held territory than were registered there and fewer people were actually living in the villages of the area which was later annexed to Jordan.
Here is another source of error of counting the numbers of refugees: People who really lived in Jordan and the West Bank would work in the coastal cities for much of the year. They fled along with the other Arabs, but they had homes to go to. Even so, they seem to have been counted as "refugees" anyway.

15. Today, after nearly three years, the refugees are still scattered over 100,000 square miles of territory in five different countries; still dependent on relief and without knowledge of the future; the victims of circumstances they are unable to grasp. Legally, humanly and economically speaking, they are little better off than they were when they first left Palestine, since against the sporadic and low-paid work that some of them have found must be set the exhaustion of the resources that others managed to bring out. No government, except in Jordan, has proclaimed their right to stay.

28. The number of refugees housed in UNRWAPRNE camps has risen by some twenty per cent since May 1950, and is still rising. Many thousands of new applications are received each month. These originate from (I) families who have hitherto managed to maintain themselves in lodgings but are now too poor to pay the rent however small; (II) new arrivals from Israel; (III) refugees who have been evicted for quarrelling with the villagers or for cutting down the fruit trees for fuel; and, lately (IV), some considerable movement of the population in the search of water, particularly in Jordan, as a result of the severe drought that has dried up wells and cisterns.
Why were there new arrivals from Israel in 1950 and 1951? I am not aware of any expulsions or mass flight during that time period; on the contrary, as I showed in the previous post, Israel bent over backwards to accommodate the refugees and displaced persons. My only guess is that some Arabs either wanted to go to the same camps as their families; they were disgusted at the idea of living in a Jewish state; or they decided that it would be better to move to a camp with free lodging, education and medical care than to try to find jobs in Israel.

This next section is probably the most accurate description of how Palestinian Arab refugees thought, written before UNRWA became hopelessly corrupt:
(c) The morale of the refugee

32. Owing to his intense individualism, the refugee has little sense of solidarity with his fellows. The concept of giving increased relief to the very needy is incomprehensible to him, making it very difficult for the Agency to distribute welfare goods to special cases. In the same way, much persuasion is necessary before he is willing to contribute labour for the greater good of the camp, or even for mending his own tent, unless he is paid for it.
In 1951, Arabs from Palestine exhibited zero sense of nationalism or unity. The idea that they self-identified with a nation called Palestine is a joke. To be sure, they were attached to their homes, but these ties were familial and tribal, not national. As we saw during the 1948 war, Palestinian Arabs would not fight for any other villages besides their own.

33. To his natural individualistic tendencies has now been added the characteristics of the typical refugee mentality, and its passive expectation of continued benefits. In the crowded and abnormal existence that the refugee leads, moral values tend to deteriorate and the authority of the head of the family, which would formerly have kept such behaviour in check, has seriously declined; yet, in spite of this, he has retained his inherent dignity to a remarkable degree.
A welfare state generates laziness. To be sure, many Palestinian Arabs took the initiative and started finding jobs; tens of thousands moved to Gulf states in the 1950s and helped build countries there from scratch. However, the camps tended to attract the ones who felt a sense of entitlement, and they in turn bred more of the same. This mentality infested UNRWA itself over the years, as the agency lost interest in finding jobs for the PalArabs.
34. It is probably true to say that the refugees are physically better off than the poorest levels of the population of the host countries; and in some cases better off, in the way of social services, than they were in Palestine; but, in their minds, the overwhelming fact of being uprooted from their homes, dependent and yet insecure, is more than enough to cancel out these benefits.
The mentality can be understood in 1951, but the fact that it has become institutionalized today is one of the greatest failings of UNRWA. The report mentions a number of times how its services were very attractive to neighboring Arabs who were not directly affected by the war.
35. The United Nations, in particular certain of the great Powers, are considered by the refugee to be entirely responsible for both his past and present misfortunes, and for his future fate. They say that they have lost faith in United Nations action since, after more than thirty months, the General Assembly resolution recommending their return home, although not revoked, has never been implemented and no progress has been made towards compensation.

36. The relief given by the Agency is therefore considered as a right, and as such is regarded as inadequate. Individual efforts to explain the situation to them are usually in vain; the refugee will listen politely but in the end remains convinced both of the bitter injustice done to him, and the fact that little or nothing is being done to rectify it.

37. The desire to go back to their homes is general among all classes; it is proclaimed orally at all meetings and organized demonstrations, and, in writing, in all letters addressed to the Agency and all complaints handed in to the area officers. Many refugees are ceasing to believe in a possible return, yet this does not prevent them from insisting on it, since they feel that to agree to consider any other solution would be to show their weakness and to relinquish their fundamental right, acknowledged even by the General Assembly. They are, moreover, sceptical of the promised payment of compensation.

38. This sense of injustice, frustration and disappointment has made the refugee irritable and unstable. There are occasional strikes, demonstrations and small riots. There have been demonstrations over the census operation, strikes against the medical and welfare services, strikes for cash payment instead of relief, strikes against making any improvements, such as school buildings, in camps in case this might mean permanent resettlement; experimental houses to replace tents, erected by the Agency, have been torn down; and for many months, in Syria and Lebanon, there was widespread refusal to work on agency road-building and afforestation schemes.
This mentality became institutionalized, and eventually accepted by the UN. The nadir of the same counterproductive thinking that caused the 1951 refugees to tear down houses may have occurred in 1977, with UN Resolution 32/90, in response to Israel's having built permanent housing for Palestinian Arabs in the Gaza Strip. The resolution called on Israel to return the Arabs to the camps rather than let them have real homes, thus showing how important the perpetuation of the "refugee" problem had become to the UN itself thirty years after it had started.

39. This then is rich and tempting soil for exploitation by those with other motives than the welfare of the refugee. Happily, there are defences that blunt this effort. There are enduring religious defences and there still exist resistant strengths of communal ties and leadership. There are sustaining services of food, shelter, health and education from many sources. There are refugees who left no assets in Palestine. There are refugees who wish to live in Arab countries. There are refugees who have sought and found new roots.
The refugees who no longer needed to be on the UN dole were therefore ignored in future reports, and the idea that all Palestinian Arabs are needy refugees became the conventional wisdom in part since UNRWA had no responsibility for the many who actually took control of their lives.
UNRWA's first report on its progress, A/1451/Rev.1, is a fascinating document on many levels. It describes its progress in the first six months of its existence.

Here are some excerpts:
HISTORY

6. When UNRPR was set up by the General Assembly, it was presumably with the idea that the problem would be resolved in a matter of months. During the summer of 1949 it became obvious that some other approach was needed, and the United Nations Economic Survey Mission for the Middle East was dispatched to study and report on conditions and to make recommendations concerning future activity. After three months of exhaustive study in the field, the Mission's interim report to the General Assembly in November 1949(1) recommended the creation of a new agency, which would not only carry out relief on a diminishing scale, but would inaugurate a works programme in which able-bodied refugees could become self-supporting and at the same time create works of lasting benefit to the refugees and the countries concerned. The recommendations of the report were embodied in resolution 302 (IV) which provided for the setting up of UNRWAPRNE. The final report signed in Paris in December covered the subject comprehensively and has been accepted by the Agency as its guide.2
UNRWA did not intend at first to be a permanent agency. It really tried to provide jobs for the Palestinian Arabs and to work with Arab governments to help integrate them. The Arabs' recalcitrance is the single major reason we still have so many "refugees" today, and after a few years UNRWA gave up and turned into a giant, self-perpetuating welfare system.
NUMBERS OF REFUGEES

16. The Agency has accepted as realistic the figures set forth in appendix B of the first interim report of the United Nations Economic Survey Mission, but recognizes that the numbers have increased in conformity with the extremely high birthrate of the refugees. There is reason to believe that births are always registered for ration purposes, but deaths are often, if not usually, concealed so that the family may continue to collect rations for the deceased.

17...The figures for Lebanon (128,000) are confused due to the fact that many Lebanese nationals along the Palestinian frontier habitually worked most of the year on the farms or in the citrus groves of Palestine. With the advent of war they came back across the border and claimed status as refugees. Only an exhaustive and expensive census, now under way although ardently opposed by those concerned, will divide worthy from false claimants.

18. The former Trans-Jordan and the portion of Palestine remaining in Arab hands and now annexed to the Hashimite Kingdom of the Jordan received the greatest influx of refugees of any of the countries adjacent to Israel -- probably more than half of all the refugees. For various reasons, the largest number of fictitious names on the ration lists pertain to refugees in this area. All earlier attempts at a close census of those entitled to relief have been frustrated, but a comprehensive survey, now under way, is achieving worthwhile results in casting up names of dead people for which rations are still drawn, fraudulent claims regarding numbers of dependents (it is alleged that it is a common practice for refugees to hire children from other families at census time), and in eliminating duplications where families have two or more ration cards. The census, though stubbornly resisted, will eliminate many thousands from the lists of refugees now in receipt of rations.

19. Unauthorized movement between camps, and sometimes across international boundaries, as well as deep-rooted reluctance of refugees to reveal personal information to census-takers, make it very difficult to obtain accurate statistics concerning them.
As far as I know, the census was never completed and the problems of exaggerated numbers of refugees remain, even today. A sense of entitlement will turn many people into lazy opportunists, and if they have no disincentive to act that way this behavior gets passed on to the next generation, and the following ones as well.


MORALE

26. Strangely enough the general morale of the refugees is higher than might be expected after spending more than two years in exile under most trying conditions. Real trouble-makers are confined to a very small proportion of the total number of refugees, and food strikes and work stoppages are generally considered to be the result of organized pressure groups.

27. During August, a campaign of bitter criticism of the Agency, its motives and personnel, was carried on in a large section of the Arab Press. The rather unvaried monotony of the charges gave indication of central inspiration. An organized series of work stoppages occurred in Lebanon in early September wherein small groups threatened the workers in such a manner that they declined to work for a time. The Syrian office of the Agency, located in Damascus, was destroyed by explosives and a bomb was thrown at a truckload of workers in Lebanon. Threats of violence have been made against individual employees of the Agency. It seems likely that the two campaigns--denunciations in certain sections of the Arab Press and violence--are closely related and spring from the same source which fostered the food strikes in the early days of the Agency.
Arab governments in general considered UNRWA the enemy, and they did everything possible to thwart any chance of solving the refugee crisis, instead wanting to use the refugees as pawns to pressure Israel. This attitude has not changed in sixty years.

REFUGEES IN ISRAEL

30. In Israel, the Agency has provided relief to two types of refugees, Jews who fled inside the borders of Israel during the fighting, and Arabs in most instances displaced from one area in Palestine to another. Jewish refugees at first numbered 17,000 but, during the current summer, all but 3,000 of these have been absorbed into the economic life of the new State. Arabs on relief were first numbered at 31,000 but many have been placed in circumstances in which they are self-supporting, so that it was possible to reduce the number to 24,000 at the end of August 1950.

31. Recent discussions with the Israel Government indicate that the idea of relief distribution is repugnant to it, and the Agency was informed that already many of the 24,000 remaining refugees were employed and that all able-bodied refugees desiring employment could be absorbed on works projects if they would register at the government registry offices for that purpose. It was stated that they all have status as citizens of Israel and are entitled to treatment as such. It was claimed that after cessation of relief, aged and infirm refugees would be cared for under the normal social welfare machinery of Israel. The Agency was requested to share financially in a programme of re-establishment of displaced Arabs now within the boundaries of Israel.
How great a contrast is there between how Israel treated its Arab refugees and how the Arab nations did! Within a short time after the war, Israel managed to fully integrate every single Arab refugee as citizens (and they eventually allowed tens of thousands more to come into Israel for family re-unification.) Not only did Israel inform the UNRWA that its services would not be needed for long, but said that the very idea of an outside agency taking responsibility for its Arab citizens is repugnant!

So while the number of Arab claimants for UNRWA services went down from 31,000 to zero in a relatively short time, in every Arab country those numbers only increased.

Fully half of the report deals with specific works projects that were attempted to allow the refugees to find jobs. As we now know, most of these projects went nowhere because of fears by Arab countries that their Palestinian Arab brethren would want to actually stay in their countries as equal citizens.

The appendix of charity organizations and NGOs that contributed to help the Palestinian Arabs does not mention a single Muslim charity.


UNRWA just had a meeting where they described their financial problems in providing services - works programs are now tiny initiatives run by UNRWA itself, and in many ways UNRWA itself is a Palestinian Arab work program as it employs many descendants of refugees. It has become rabidly anti-Israel and intensely political.Even though there are far more "refugees" today than could ever fit in a nascent "Palestine," UNRWA still refuses to request that Arab governments do their part to reduce the number of stateless Arabs.

Jordan hosts some 41% of all "refugees" today. Yet Jordan was the only Arab country to extend citizenship to non-Jewish Palestinians. One must wonder, why there are still refugee camps in Jordan 62 years after 1948? The vast majority of camp residents are full Jordanian citizens! Yet, because UNRWA is now a mere self-perpetuating technocracy, Jordan has no incentive to integrate these citizens into its population even today - 60 years after Israel did exactly that.

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