Eleven questions for John Ging

Elder of Ziyon
15 November '10

A reader will be attending an invitation-only lunch today with UNRWA head John Ging, called "The Possibility of Peace Ensuring Human Security in Gaza And National Security in Israel: A Dialogue with John Ging." He asked me if I had any questions for him.

I quickly came up with eleven:

1. UNRWA in the early 1950s tried to quietly encourage Arab governments to resettle the Palestinian Arabs with their works programs, and to transfer responsibility of the refugees to the host countries themselves - and the Arab countries refused to do so. Given that, what exactly was wrong with Andrew Whitley's public statement that "If one doesn’t start a discussion soon with the refugees for them to consider what their own future might be – for them to start debating their own role in the societies where they are rather than being left in a state of limbo where they are helpless but preserve rather the cruel illusions that perhaps they will return one day to their homes – then we are storing up trouble for ourselves." ? Is there anything wrong with that statement? Does Ging think that there is any realistic chance that the "refugees" will ever move to Israel, and if not, why isn't UNRWA or the UN in general in the forefront of addressing this growing problem?

2: UNRWA officially says it is a non-political organization. Then why does Ging explicitly support the flotillas, asking for more of them, when they are self-admittedly political in purpose?

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