How To Really Help Palestinian Refugees

2005-11-11

David Bedein

The Jewish Week

www.thejewishweek.com/ top/editletcontent.php3 ?artid=4608

Why are Palestinian refugees treated differently by the United Nations than every other group of refugees?

UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, was founded by the U.N. in 1949 with one purpose: to alleviate difficulties faced by Arabs who fled in the course of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Envisioned as a temporary agency, UNRWA was afforded much latitude in terms of formulating policy, even in its definition of "refugee."

In 1950, the U.N. High Commission for Refugees was founded by a U.N. "Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees" with definitions of refugee that remain the UNHCR norm within international law. UNHCR's mandate: to attend to all refugees in the world - except for UNRWA, which operated under its own terms as the only agency devoted to a specific group of refugees.

UNRWA provides for Palestinian Arab refugees at levels that exceed any other refugees in the world. Palestinian Arab refugees are the only ones guaranteed health care, welfare assistance and primary education at a cost of almost twice that provided for refugees under the care of UNHCR.

While UNHCR helps refugees under its jurisdiction to find solutions so they might get on with their lives with permanency, UNRWA operates under the premise that the Palestinian Arab refugees, and even their descendants, are also refugees - even if they acquire a new citizenship, as many have in Jordan - until they return to their homes and villages in Israel from which they or their grandparents fled, even if those villages no longer exist.

U.N. General Assembly Resolution 302, which pioneered UNRWA in 1949, included a reference to the "right of return," from General Assembly Resolution 194. UNRWA officials cite that clause from that resolution, lifting it from a broader context, where resettlement is also mentioned, showing that "the right of return" was not the only option recommended by the General Assembly.

That precise clause read: ". Refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date ."

Subsequent U.N. resolutions over the years have added the phrase "unalienable" to describe the "right of return," and UNRWA functions today on the basis of that presumed "right."

Thus UNRWA accuses Israel of blocking "legitimate rights" of the Palestinian Arab refugees under the premise that Palestinian Arab refugees must be maintained in limbo status until their "return" can be realized. Attempts to provide refugees with permanent residence elsewhere are blocked by UNRWA and by the United Nations itself.

A case in point: In 1985, after Israel, with the help of the Catholic Relief Agency, attempted to move refugees into 1,300 permanent houses built for them near Nablus, a U.N. resolution was passed calling on Israel to desist in this process and claiming that the improvement in living conditions would violate the refugees' "inalienable right of return."

In 1993, at the outset of the Oslo process, Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin declared that the newly formed Palestinian Authority would remove U.N. refugee camps and absorb refugees. Yet the first decision of the new Palestinian Authority was that the UNRWA refugee camps would remain where they are.

Today, with Gaza completely under Palestinian control, what has escaped media attention is the fact that 70 percent of the Palestinian Arab residents of Gaza wallow in UNRWA refugee camps, with UNRWA continuing to encourage repatriation under the "right of return" to their villages inside Israel.

The UNRWA-promoted idea of the "right of return" is far from a nostalgic exercise. The Internet program developed in the UNRWA camps known as www.PalestineRemembered.com prepares a new generation of UNRWA residents to reclaim their homes and villages from 1948.

UNRWA residents, some of whom now spearhead attacks against Israeli towns in the western Negev, have been educated for more than 55 years to believe that these are their villages.

The question is whether UNRWA will continue to advocate the "right of return" by all means possible, or will UNRWA assume the role of a humanitarian relief agency, along the lines of UNHCR, dedicated to helping refugees remove the bondage of refugee status?

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the Florida congresswoman who chairs the Middle East subcommittee of the House International Relations Committee, proposed Sept. 30 that "it is time for UNRWA's separate status to be rescinded and for UNRWA to be integrated into UNHCR."

"After all, it is not the Arab states who finance the UNRWA policy of promoting the right of return," she said.

In fact, it is the West that finances UNRWA: 40 percent from the European Union, 30 percent from the United States, 15 percent from Scandinavia and 11 percent from Canada.

It is long past the time for the care of Palestinian refugees to be given to the UNHCR so their lives can be improved rather than maintain their delusions about the "right of return."

David Bedein is bureau chief of the Israel Resource News Agency in Jerusalem. Special To The Jewish Week

Source: IMRA – Independent Media Review and Analysis