Israel Matzav

Calling the 'Palestinians' bluff

If one were to assume that the Arabs did not wish to destroy the Jewish state, the main stumbling block to solving the Israeli-Arab dispute would be the 'Palestinian refugees.' This article presents itself as a recipe for resolving the 'Palestinian refugee' problem, but what it is really doing is calling the 'Palestinians' bluff. But to understand the solution, one must understand the problem. So a bit of history is in order.

Initially, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which administers the refugee camps, defined Palestine refugees as persons 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 camps opened in 1950, in the wake of the first Arab war to destroy Israel. The precise number of Arab refugees as a result of that war is uncertain, the estimates ranging from 450,000 to 700,000. Even experts who lean toward the higher side believe that no more than 550,000 wound up in refugee camps, since some fled to families settled in other Arab countries and fleeing Bedouin resumed their nomadic life style in Jordan.

UNRWA would set up 59 camps in what is now Judea and Samaria, Gaza (then part of Egypt), Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. Certainly no one, including UNWRA and its donors, imagined that refugee status would become a heritable trust to be bestowed on the refugees' cousins, sisters and their aunts, their children, grandchildren, by now their great grandchildren. Yet now the world (including the world's Jews) accept without protest UNRWA's assertion (on its 2009 homepage) that it provides education, healthcare, social services and emergency aid to over 4.6 million Palestinian refugees. UNWRA, which has relocated headquarters from Amman to Gaza, the better to serve Hamas, has a staff of over 29,000 persons and its General Assembly-approved budget for 2008 was $541 million (www.un.org/unrwa/finances/index.htm). As of May 31, 2008, the Agency's largest contributors are the United States, the European Commission, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Norway and the Netherlands. The Arab states contribute almost nothing in hard cash but millions in lip service.

Although long forgotten by the media and general public, the number of Jewish refugees from Arab countries was substantially greater. On May 16, 1948, the day following Israel's declaration of independence, the New York Times headlined an article: "Jews in Grave Danger in All Moslem Lands: Nine Hundred Thousand in Africa and Asia Face Wrath of Their Foes." And indeed within 15 years (the last great wave was from Algeria, after it gained independence from France in 1962), Jews had fled the Arab world en masse (until the Shah's ouster, in 1979, there remained one viable Jewish community in the Moslem world, in non-Arab Iran). Today there are barely 5,000, chiefly elderly, Jews in the entire Arab world.

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It should be noted that UNWRA only gradually became transformed from an agency seeking to settle Arab refugees into one dedicated to perpetuating their refugee status. In a report he submitted in November 1951, UNRWA director John Blandford Jr. said he expected the Arab governments to assume responsibility for relief operations by July 1952. The international community assumed the refugees should be resettled as soon as possible, said Blandford, because, as he put it, "sustained relief operations inevitably contain the germ of human deterioration." By the late 1950s, the early UNRWA leaders were disillusioned and voiced their disgust. Ralph Garroway, who also served as an UNRWA director, said in August 1958: "The Arab states do not want to solve the refugee problem. They want to keep it as an open sore, as an affront to the United Nations and as a weapon against Israel. Arab leaders don't give a damn whether the refugees live or die." Elfan Rees, who worked closely with UNRWA, noted in 1959 that the Arab refugee problem should be the easiest in the world to solve, for there was, in countries like Syria and Iraq, "a developing demand for the manpower they represent and their new settlements would be distinct economic assets." Unfortunately, said Dr. Rees, "the organized intransigence of the refugees and the calculated indifference of the Arabs states concerned have brought all its [UNRWA's] plans to nought." Even in 1959, Dr. Rees noted that UNRWA, because of Arab "chicanery" was "feeding the dead" and "by political pressure it is feeding non-refugees." (Interview in New York Post, June 11, 1959)

Nothing better illustrates UNRWA's transformation than its response to an Israeli effort, in the mid 1980s, to improve the lives of Arab refugees in the Gaza Strip by constructing new housing for them. UNRWA protested to the UN and on December 3, 1986, the General Assembly passed a resolution demanding Israel "desist from the removal and resettlement of Palestinian refugees in the Gaza Strip and from the destruction of their shelters." It declared that "measures to resettle Palestinian refugees in the Gaza Strip away from the homes and property from which they were displaced constitute a violation of their inalienable right of return." Similarly, when Israel built new homes for residents of a camp near Nablus, UNRWA forbade anyone to move into them and posted a guard at the empty houses to make sure no one moved in. The Shuafat camp is within the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem and the city offered to give it full services in street paving, sewers and other urban amenities; UNRWA forbade it.

The camps have become centers of recruitment, training and storage of weapons for terrorists. Camp ambulances are used for transportation of men and armaments; their schools teach hatred and Jihad; they glorify suicide bombers; some of their “honor students” have become notorious terrorists; corruption and profiteering with aid is endemic. In September 2008 a bipartisan group headed by Representative Steve Rothman (D.N.) submitted a report documenting those abuses and citing specific examples of UNRWA ambulances, schools and hospitals used to shield terrorists and build bombs and rockets.

Nonetheless, the Obama administration (which hectors Israel about the "natural growth" of settlements while ignoring the "unnatural growth" of the Arab refugee population) has pledged an additional $900 million for Gaza and the Palestinian Authority, including an extra $160 million for UNRWA. Thus the United States, struggling with a severe economic crisis, is involved in a morally and strategically indefensible contradiction to its avowed goals: it funds and enables suicide bombing, rocket launching and other forms of Middle East terrorism.

And then the authors, Ruth S. King and Rael Jean Isaac, go on to make the most logical suggestion I have ever heard for resettling the 'Palestinian refugees.'

Leaving the camps and their populations where they are permanently entrenches what the media calls “the cycle of violence.” They must be resettled elsewhere in the Arab world. If the United States were to announce, "Millions for permanent resettlement in Arab states, not a penny more for perpetuating victimhood," the dynamic would be transformed overnight. Here would be a demand for a tangible concession by the Arabs instead of minor gestures that can be flouted within hours of being proffered.

Does this sound like a surprising, even shocking suggestion? Consider the absurdity of the alternatives. The "right to return" of over four million Arabs to a Jewish state that comprises a mere 8,000 square miles is in itself an insane demand. Nor is there any way a resourceless miniscule West Bank area – combined with Gaza comprising only 2,400 square miles, a fourth of the size of tiny Israel – can economically support the millions of UNRWA-defined refugees.

The fairest, most equitable, way to end the problem of the refugees is to base their resettlement on the population exchange that followed the 1948 Arab-Israel war. If 1948 is the starting point for the Arabs, it must also be the starting point for the Jews. Because so many Arab states had a substantial Jewish population, this also has the advantage of forcing a number of Arab states to take some share of responsibility for the refugees, without singling out or overwhelming any one of them. Wealthy countries like Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates, that did not have a Jewish population, could shoulder a disproportionate share of the cost.

Returning to the population exchange also has the merit of throwing out reparations claims. The Jews left far more property behind in Arab lands than Arabs in what became Israel; generously, Israel can offer to declare a washout. Making the Arab states face up to the task of resettlement will also have the merit of encouraging them to evaluate honestly claims to refugee status. While the international community footed the bill and the larger the number of refugees, the greater pressure on Israel, the attitude of the Arab states was "the more the better." Once the burden is on them, phony claims are no longer welcome and it is safe to assume it will rapidly be discovered that there are far fewer refugees than UNRWA now claims.

Of course, this would only resolve the problem if the Arab states truly wish to resolve it. What is more likely is that the Arab states and the 'Palestinians' will reject this solution, and will insist on the 'right of return' and on holding the 'refugees' in their 'refugee camps' until the 'right of return' is fully realized. But that would expose the 'Palestinian' bluff. It would show that the Arabs and the 'Palestinian leadership' are not seeking the refugees' best interests, but rather that they are seeking to use the 'refugees' as a tool to destroy the Jewish state.

Unfortunately, this solution can only be presented if the Obama administration adopts a real change by threatening "no more money for UNRWA but millions for resettlement," and then backs up that threat. Unfortunately, the odds of the Obama administration making that threat, let alone following through on it, are somewhere between slim and none.

Read the whole thing.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:19 PM