Let’s Talk About UNWRA

I want to focus this piece on the topic of “refugees” and UNRWA.  You know, I saw this news item the other day declaring that 70-80 percent of the Gaza strip are refugees from Israel’s War of Independence.  This type of misinformation gets passed around without much of a “really, that was almost 70 years ago and I thought the median age in Gaza today is 18 years? (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2177.html)  How is this even possible?”  Good question, no?  So how do we have five, yes, 5 million of Palestinian “refugees” running around claiming their “right of return” when there are  only 30-50,000 alive today from that conflict and not much more from 1967 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_refugee and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Relief_and_Works_Agency_for_Palestine_Refugees_in_the_Near_East)?

This is the magic of politics at its most perverse level.  Obviously, we are talking about descendents.  The total number of Arabs who fled, were enticed to run away by their leaders and, yes, kicked out (that happened when the Arab world invaded the new, U.N.-approved Jewish State and there was serious concern in Israel as to local populations in border regions joining the invading Arab armies) were no more than 720,000; and some sources show this number to be inflated and it is closer to 600,000 while there were about 145,000 new refugees created by the 1967 war.  In fact, more Jews fled or were expelled from Arab countries during this same time but you don’t have any camps or special UN bodies for them because they were absorbed and live as full citizens in Israel.

So how do we get these crazy numbers?  You are going to learn something here that should concern you as you will realize how MANUFACTURED this refugee issue is — specifically manufactured by the Arab world and their allies with majority control of the U.N.  to create an issue that, over the long term, has been intended to discredit and destroy Israel. I must tell you that most of my American and Israeli friends have no idea about this.  And what is especially galling is the fact that the refugee organization at the UN for ALL OTHER refugees (except Israel), which is called UNHCR,  defines a refugee as only that person who is displaced (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_High_Commissioner_for_Refugees) and NOT their descendents?  Crazy, no? A total parallel universe was set up just for one group of refugees and one group only — Palestinians. And while all other refugees are supposed to be “resettled” as quickly as possible, only UNWRA’s Palestinians are not to be resettled and have a non-legal “right of return”. NO OTHER REFUGEE GROUP IN THE WORLD HAS THIS RIGHT.  NO ONE.

So what UNRWA did, as part of this anti-Israel policy (and also to create a co-dependent society with no hope except to return to Israel) was to redefine Palestinian refugees as multi-generational and change the re-settlement policy to a maintenance policy.  Now you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand what is going on here.  The Arab countries and their numerous allies were creating a core issue that they hoped would kill Israel in the long term.  New refugees are being manufactured all the time — 67 years after the conflict.  But I must tell you that Israel has also been complicit since it needed an “address” to deal with the initial problem of refugees and so it supported UNRWA over the years along with the U.S. (which is the biggest financier of UNRWA). So we have been part of the problem and this travesty needs to stop because the unintended (actually intended by our enemies) consequence is a 5 million person bow-wave of “refugees” who have been told, for 67 years, that they will get a chance to go “home”. And they are quite upset that they haven’t yet gotten the keys to my house in Rosh Pina.

Now just to put things in perspective, WW II and it’s aftermath (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_evacuation_and_expulsion) as well as the post-war creation of a number of new states (the biggest being Pakistan and India) resulted, by my estimate, in way over 100 million refugees (all under UNHCR except for you know whom) of which 720,000 were from the Israeli conflict. So how many refugees are left in the world from those 100 million and more other than the Palestinians?  Come on, this is not a hard question and you know the answer already — A BIG FAT ZERO. That’s right nada.  In fact, a nice piece of the UN’s budget is to deal with this ever growing issue of Palestinian refugees and that is how you get statements — unchallenged — that 70-80 percent of the Gaza strip, for example, are Palestinian refugees.

One absurd outcome from this disaster is that it is the stated position of the Palestinians that  refugees in Judea and Samaria (it’s OK to use this name since that is what the British and French used to call it when they were here) — in their own state, in fact,  will not be citizens of their own state!  Read this: http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Politics/2011/Sep-15/148791-interview-refugees-will-not-be-citizens-of-new-state.ashx#axzz38hcN82uj   This is because they have this absurd “right of return” and they really belong in Israel. These people are invented refugees and now they won’t even get full citizenship in their own invented country.  You can’t make this stuff up.  There has been a ton written about this issue and I attended a conference on this a few years ago sponsored by the Middle East Forum under Dr. Daniel Pipes whose organization extensively researched and published  on this topic. Here is the best overview on the subject:   http://www.meforum.org/3344/unrwa-special.

I just got to mention that  this gets really bizarre around issues like the killing of Palestinians in “camps” in Syria with at least 2,000 Palestinians killed so far and over 100,000 displaced. (These “refugee camps” all over the Middle East are really towns today that are kept crowded and in poor condition so the population is hyped for “right of return”. Hell, some of these camps even have large symbolic keys over the entrance gate emphasizing this right. http://mondoweiss.net/2010/01/beautiful-resistance-in-bethlehems-aida-refugee-camp.html) Are these displaced Palestinians part of the UNHCR issue with the millions of other refugees in that conflict or are they being protected by UNRWA? You can imagine how confusing this must be for Palestinian activists since if UNRWA protects them it would impact their message that Israel is the source of all their suffering. So they are abandoned. http://rt.com/op-edge/palestine-conflict-syria-rebels-509/  (I used the mondoweiss website to show the picture of the key. The article is an example of this pathetic romanticizing of Palestinian refugees — this website is quite extreme but you need to know what your enemy thinks so I read their canards.)

One last thing about UNRWA and its impact on Gaza.  Nearly ALL the 30,000 employees of UNRWA  are Palestinians living there and since we know that 44% of the population voted for Hamas, what percentage of the employees are also members of Hamas? I don’t know the answer for sure but it’s a really big number. That could explain why UNRWA facilities have many Islamic teachers, perpetuate a culture of terror, death and hatred of Israel into the next generation and its facilities are often cover for terror activities for Hamas operatives.  I wonder what PTA night is like!  http://elderofziyon.blogspot.co.il/2014/07/unrwa-praised-smuggling-of-cement-into.html?m=1 and http://elderofziyon.blogspot.co.il/2014/07/unrwa-supplies-found-in-terror-tunnel.html#.U9TmjGPiO4Z for some recent UNWRA complicity.

I get really worked up over this because refugees are one of the two main 3rd rail issues in this conflict — the other being “occupation” and we see that the refugee issue is completely manufactured for maximum injury to Israel.