Palestinian Authority claims Palestinians remaining "refugees" forever is "international law" - by Elder of Ziyon

In short, there is no international law that singles out Palestinians to be treated differently from other people; that idea is anathema to international law. The claims that Palestinian "refugees" are refugees under international law are ludicrous. But Palestinian leaders have no other arguments, so they have to lie.

Real refugees

Elder of Ziyon..
02 August '18..

Ma'an reported earlier this week:

A new bill was introduced in the United States Congress this past week which several US senators are attempting to pass into law that recognizes only 40,000 Palestinian refugees instead of 5.3 million refugees.
The newly introduced bill would ensure that the contributed to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) would go towards the resettlement of Palestinians displaced by the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, and not their descendants – who are a total number of 5.3 million people.
The bill was initiated by Republican Congressman, Doug Lamborn, who entitled it as "The UNRWA Reform and Refugee Support Act."
Lamborn said in a statement that the "refugee status is not something that can be handed down from generation to generation," referring to the descendants of Palestinian refugees who were born and are living in other countries.

Responses from Palestinian leaders and Arab media have been predictable - and these reactions themselves show how untenable their position is that Palestinians remain refugees forever.

(Continue to Full Post)

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Long Past Time to Expose the Palestinian 'Refugee' Scam - by Richard Goldberg and Jonathan Schanzer

...The inability of Palestinian leaders to detach from this 70-year-old story raises real concerns about whether peace is possible. But if Mr. Trump is committed, he can send a clear message to the millions living in UNRWA camps: Your leaders want to keep you in squalor, while America wants you to prosper. It's the most pro-Palestinian step an American president could take.

Richard Goldberg/Jonathan Schanzer..
Pundicity/Wall Street Journal..
06 July '18..
Link: http://schanzer.pundicity.com/21357/expose-the-palestinian-refugee-scam

If President Trump wants to promote peace in the Middle East, his first step should be to declassify a key State Department report that would end the myth of Palestinian "refugees."

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency is singularly devoted to the Palestinian refugee issue. Unrwa labels more than five million Palestinians "refugees"—an impossible figure. The first Arab-Israeli war, in 1948, yielded roughly 800,000 Palestinian Arab refugees. Perhaps 30,000 remain alive today, but UNRWA has kept the refugee issue alive by labeling their descendants—in some cases great-great-grandchildren—as "refugees," who insist on the "right of return" to their ancestors' homes. Israel categorically rejects this demand.

UNRWA's operations run counter to the broader mission of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, which is to resettle those displaced by war. UNRWA's mission, on the other hand, keeps the conflict's embers glowing by refusing to resettle Palestinians in neighboring countries or even in the Palestinian territories.

If Mr. Trump wants his peace plan to have a chance, he has to challenge false Palestinian narratives. He did this by recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and moving the U.S. Embassy there. For decades, Palestinian leaders issued maximalist claims on Jerusalem. Mr. Trump's move sent the message that making peace requires accepting reality.

Mr. Trump can send the same message by declassifying one document. In 2012 Congress ordered the State Department to disclose how many Palestinians currently served by UNRWA fled the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and how many are merely their descendants. The Obama administration classified the report, citing national security—as if revealing foreign census data were a threat to America.

All refugees are equal, but some refugees are more equal than others

By making the Palestinians the poster children for international victimhood, the Arab states believe they hold a permanent trump card to defame and pressure Israel. While the Arab states are saturated in petrol dollars, the funds mysteriously dry up when it comes to assisting Palestinians and subsidizing UNRWA.

Ron Prosor..
Op-Ed Contributor/JPost..
19 June '13..

For millions of refugees, World Refugee Day is a day like any other. From Mali to South Sudan and from Myanmar to Haiti, countless men, women and children will once again awaken today to an uncertain future.

They are aided in their perilous journey by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which works with governments to advocate and seek asylum for all refugees. That is, all refugee groups but one.

Set apart by the shortsighted interests of the Arab states, Palestinian refugees are the world’s only card-carrying, professional group of refugees.

Unlike other refugees, the Palestinians have their own set of rules, their own funding and even their own international agency, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency or UNRWA. To paraphrase George Orwell, all refugees are equal, but some refugees are more equal than others.

In 2012, the United Nations spent six times more on every Palestinian refugee as compared to all other refugees. Like a favored child, the Palestinians have been on the UN’s permanent payroll for over 60 years and are entitled to every service from healthcare to housing and from food rations to education. When it comes to refugees from Syria or Somalia, responsibility falls to the host country to provide basic assistance.

While UNHCR’s approach teaches independence, UNRWA’s approach prepares the Palestinians to be lifelong dependents. Under UNRWA’s framework, Palestinians can continue to be called refugees long after they acquire citizenship and find permanent housing.

UNRWA’s humanitarian mission is undoubtedly important. However, it is being marred by its unspoken political motto of “once a refugee, always a refugee.” By allowing refugee status to pass to Palestinian children and grandchildren, the number of Palestinian refugees has ballooned from a few hundred thousand in 1948 to over five million today. Left unchecked, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians will continue to be added to the UN’s permanent payroll every year.

Providing preferential treatment at the expense of the entire world

Yoni Dayan..
Israel Opinion/Ynet..
27 May '13..

The time has come to admit the truth: The world cares more about the life of a Palestinian than the life of a Syrian, Sudanese, Kenyan, Colombian or Congolese.

This, quite simply, is an axiom, proven day in and day out since 1949, when the United Nations split the existing global refugee agency to created a special organization tasked with caring only for Palestinian refugees. To this day, the international community has two active refugee agencies: The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine.

An in-depth look at these two agencies reveals the depth of the international community's preferential treatment of Palestinian refugees over other displaced people throughout the world. The UNHCR, which cares for 33.9 million refugees and internally displaced people (IDP) in more than 125 countries throughout the world, has a budget of just $3 billion. UNWRA, which cares for the five million descendents of Palestinian refugees, has a budget of over $1 billion. Per person, that is $88.50 for each refugee/IDP around the world, and $200 for each Palestinian refugee.

It gets worse.

The UNHCR has 7,685 staff members, with a staff-to-client ratio of 1:4,411. UNRWA has more than four times the staff. With 29,602 members, the organization boasts a staff-to-client ratio of 1:168.

Allow me to reiterate: The organization tasked with caring for the descendents of Palestinian refugees has 26 times more staff members per client than the organization tasked with caring for refugees and IDPs in the entire rest of the world put together.

People from all around the world have chosen to adopt the Palestinian cause as their darling, as is their right. But it is important to understand that they do so at a cost. Each dollar sent to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip is a dollar not sent to the survivors of Sudanese genocide, who lost approximately 300,000 of their brethren at the hands of the murderous Janjaweed militia. Each university rally for "Palestinian human rights" is a rally not held for the victims of sexual and gender-based violence in Congo, the DRC and Rwanda. Each flotilla sailing to the Gaza Strip is a flotilla not sailing to Syria, where over the past two years Syrian President Bashar Assad has perpetrated a brutal mass murder against his own civilian population.

Smear intifada

Martin Kramer
martinkramer.org
22 February '10

Ali Abunimah’s Electronic Intifada, a death-to-Israel website, says that in my Herzliya Conference speech, which I posted two weeks ago, I “called for ‘the West’ to take measures to curb the births of Palestinians, a proposal that appears to meet the international legal definition of a call for genocide.” According to the site, “Kramer proposed that the number of Palestinian children born in the Gaza Strip should be deliberately curbed, and alleged that this would ‘happen faster if the West stops providing pro-natal subsidies to Palestinians with refugee status.’” The usual suspects, Philip Weiss and M.J. Rosenberg, have jumped on the bandwagon. Being accused of advocating genocide by people who daily call for Israel to be wiped off the map of the Middle East is rich.

In my speech, I made no such “proposal.” The full quote:

(Read full article)
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UNRWA: Perpetuating the Misery

Isn't it time for UNRWA's chief to do some soul searching and look beyond blaming Israel?

Honest Reporting/Backspin
10 December 09

Writing in The Guardian, Karen AbuZayd, the outgoing commissioner general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) calls to address the Palestininan refugee question. While apportioning responsibility to Israel, she fails to acknowledge the fate of Jewish refugees in 1948, her own organization's role and the neglect of Palestinian refugees by their own leadership and fellow Arab states.

AbuZayd states:

Make no mistake, not a single conflict of contemporary times has been resolved, no durable peace achieved, unless and until the voices of the victims of those conflicts were heard, their losses acknowledged and redress found to injustices they experience. The precedents of recent peacemaking efforts and the methodology of contemporary conflict resolution affirm that giving high priority to resolving dispossession and the plight of refugees is a necessity, an international obligation and a humanitarian imperative.

While UNRWA may be concerned solely with the plight of Palestinians refugees (more on this definition later), how can AbuZayd make the above statement without reference to the Jewish refugees who were forced to flee from their homes in Arab countries after the creation of the State of Israel? As Avi Beker writes:

Although they exceed the numbers of the Palestinian refugees, the Jews who fled are a forgotten case. Whereas the former are at the very heart of the peace process with a huge UN bureaucratic machinery dedicated to keeping them in the camps, the nine hundred thousand Jews who were forced out of Arab countries have not been refugees for many years. Most of them, about 650,000, went to Israel because it was the only country that would admit them. Most of them resided in tents that after several years were replaced by wooden cabins, and stayed in what were actually refugee camps for up to twelve years. They never received any aid or even attention from the UN Relief And Works Agency (UNRWA), the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, or any other international agency. Although their plight was raised almost every year at the UN by Israeli representatives, there was never any other reference to their case at the world body.

Referring to an April 2008 US House of Representatives resolution on Jewish refugees, Lyn Julius argues that it:

(Full article)

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