From the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs: Examining the international community's long-standing double standard on refugees

Is it time for some tough-love for the Palestinian refugees? What role has the international community played in keeping the Palestinians as perpetual victims? If hundreds of thousands of Jews expelled from Arab lands can be resettled, why can't the Palestinians?

From the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs: Examining the international community's long-standing double standard on refugees, written by Natalie Hilderan, editor-at-large for the J'accuse Coalition for Justice.

The following steps, in particular, are necessary to make progress toward improving the status of Palestinian refugees:

1. ...UNRWA ought to be replaced by a program that promotes self-governance for Palestinians currently in the Palestinian Authority, and citizenship for Palestinians living in other Arab countries, rather than simply welfare for an ever-ballooning refugee population....

2. ...Arab governments hosting Palestinian refugees must embrace the benefits of integration, beginning with full citizenship....

3. ...In addition to pursuing economic prosperity for Palestinians, Arab governments must abandon culturally and/or religiously motivated retribution against Israel because such an attitude allows Palestinians to prioritize resistance ahead of reconciliation....

4. Non-governmental organizations and individuals must be empowered to step in where the government is unable or unwilling....

Read it all here

UNRWA perpetuates the Palestinian refugee problem

Written by Jay Sekulow, in Foreign Policy  

UNRWA Has Changed the Definition of Refugee.  The U.N.'s agency for Palestinians should stop playing word games and do its job

UNRWA was founded in 1949 through U.N. General Assembly Resolution 302 at the conclusion of the Arab-Israeli conflict of 1948, aiming for “the alleviation of the conditions of starvation and distress among the Palestine refugees” from that conflict. The agency defines Palestinian refugees as “persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict.”

In 1965, UNRWA changed the eligibility requirements to be a Palestinian refugee to include third-generation descendants, and in 1982, it extended it again, to include all descendants of Palestine refugee males, including legally adopted children, regardless of whether they had been granted citizenship elsewhere. This classification process is inconsistent with how all other refugees in the world are classified, including the definition used by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the laws concerning refugees in the United States.

Under Article I(c)(3) of the 1951 U.N. Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, a person is no longer a refugee if, for example, he or she has “acquired a new nationality, and enjoys the protection of the country of his new nationality.” UNRWA’s definition of a Palestinian refugee, which is not anchored in treaty, includes no such provision.

Sekulow concludes with a quote from Lt. Gen. Alexander Galloway,  1952 director of UNRWA in Jordan:

It is perfectly clear that Arab nations do not want to solve the Arab refugee problem. They want to keep it as an open sore, as an affront against the United Nations and as a weapon against Israel. Arab leaders don’t give a damn whether the refugees live or die.

Read this important article here, and ask yourself and your elected representative, why is America the number one funder of this travesty?

The USA is the top funder of UNRWA

Eleanor Roosevelt on the "Nakba"

We have history.

They have narrative.

Eleanor Roosevelt was  more than the wife of Franklin- she was one of  the most articulate champions for human rights of her generation.

Her archives are digitized and are available online

In her March 23, 1956 column  "My Day", read what she has to say about the Arab refugees who fled Israel (In 1956, they were not yet called "Palestinians")

NEW YORK—I have an anonymous letter which asks me what is being done by the United Nations about the plight of the nearly one million Arab refugees of Israel aggression.

Isn't it astonishing how many mistakes can creep into one sentence.

There are 800,000 refugees who are being cared for by the U.N. and have been cared for since, during the war, their own Moslem mufti in Jerusalem called upon the Arabs in Israel to leave.

Israel was not the aggressor in this war. The Arabs were the aggressors. The partition of Palestine and the creation of the State of Israel was the result of U.N. action.

The Arabs did not accept the new state. So Israel fought and gained more land, holding it by defeating her Arab attackers.

The Arabs who did not heed the call of the Mufti and leave Israel during the war are still living there. As a minority, they have certain grievances. But, by and large, with eight representatives in the Knesset (the parliament), they have a voice, as citizens of Israel, to demand redress for their wrongs.

No one can blame the poor people who left Israel. They were told that in a few weeks they would be back and would receive not only their own land and belongings but that of the Israelis, who would be driven into the sea.

Unfortunately for the Arabs, this did not come to pass. Israel remained a state and those poor refugees were the saddest and most miserable people I have seen in any refugee camps.

The worst of their plight was that, being in Arab countries where they didn't want to feel they were permanently settled, they were not even allowed to find jobs to keep up their skills, to set up work within the refugee camps for this purpose or to train young people...

Its been nearly 68 years, and nothing has changed.

That is the real "Nakba"

How many Refugees?

Under UNRWA’s operational definition, "Palestine refugees are people whose normal place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948, who lost both their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict." The Palestinians are the only group of people in the world whose status is defined this way.



From an article by Elliott Abrams
How many Refugees?

"Today the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (or PCBS) commemorated World Refugee Day by releasing new statistics on Palestinian refugees. Therein lies a tale.

The PCBS reported that there are now 5.1 million Palestinian refugees. Here is what it said about their age:

The Palestinian Refugees are characterized as young population where 41.7% of them are under the age of 15 years for Palestinian refugees in Palestinian territory, 35.9% of Palestinian refugees in Jordan in 2007, and 33.1% for Palestinian refugees in Syria in 2009, while 30.4% for Palestinian refugees in Lebanon in 2010.
This means, for example, that more than a third of Palestinian “refugees” in Jordan were born after 1997. That is either thirty years (if after the 1967 war) or almost fifty years (if they fled when Israel was established in 1948) after their parents or more likely grandparents arrived in Jordan. Those in Jordan have full Jordanian citizenship and vote in Jordan, which means this: a young Jordanian of Palestinian origin, whose family has lived in Jordan for thirty years and who has himself or herself always lived in Jordan, is still considered a “refugee.”

This is bizarre, and the new statistics are a reminder of the unique definition applied to Palestinian “refugees.” For every other category of refugees in the world, the 1951 UN Convention on the status of refugees clearly applies to the refugee only and not subsequent generations. This is the definition used by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees today. Only in the Palestinian case does a separate organization, the UN Relief and Works Agency, count not only those who actually left their homes but those in succeeding generations, presumably forever, and regardless of whether those progeny were born and are settled elsewhere with full citizenship.

So a young American boy of, say, ten years of age born in Chicago to American parents, but whose grandparents were Palestinians who fled Israel in 1948, is counted by UNRWA as a “Palestinian refugee.”

It is not surprising that the Appropriations Committee of the U.S. Senate on May 31 adopted an amendment defining Palestinian “refugees” the way all other refugees are defined, and rejecting the definition that produces the number 5.1 million today and who knows how many more millions as the years roll by. What’s surprising is that this effort, led by Sen. Mark Kirk of Illinois–who would represent the young boy in my illustration, and his parents–was widely held to be controversial. It is common sense."

The Truth About the Refugees: Israel Palestinian Conflict

Israel's Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Danny Ayalon's latest youtube highlights the issue of the Jewish refugees, forced out of their homes in the Arab world and contrasts them with the Arab refugees perpetuated by UNRWA and the Arab nations.



In 1948, an estimated 500,000 Arabs left their homes in Israel- of those, 160,000 returned and resettled after agreeing to live in peace with their Jewish neighbors. These Arabs, and their descendants make up the 1,300,000 Israeli Arabs who are full citizens of Israel today.

The others? Their number has grown to nearly 5 million today as they languish in refugee camps throughout the Arab world, used as pawns in the perpetual war against Israel.

Incidently, Minister Ayalon, a descendent of Jewish refugees from Algeria gave a talk at the UN High commission for Refugees Ministerial Meeting in Geneva yesterday, saying:

"The State of Israel is a country that was established as a shelter for Jewish refugees from all over the world, including, survivors of the Holocaust and those forced from their homes in North Africa and the Middle East. Our society is a mosaic of people from around 100 countries who returned to their ancestral homeland escaping the horrors of persecutions and violence.

As a result of our experience, Israel was one of the initiators of the Refugees Convention and one of the first countries to join it. Israel is committed to all its articles.

In addition, we support the application of the general principles governing the treatment of refugees worldwide to apply universally, without exception, including those in the Palestinian context. While the UNHCR has found durable solutions for tens of millions of refugees, the agency created specifically for the Palestinian context has found durable solutions for no one."