FrontPage Magazine reports:

The US Senate Appropriations Committee has approved an important amendment to a bill. Proposed by Republican Senator Mark Kirk of Illinois, the amendment would change the definition of “Palestinian refugee” such that the number of people now given that status would shrink from about five million to about thirty thousand.

The U.S. currently contributes annually about $250 million of the approximately $600 million budget of UNRWA, the UN agency that provides housing, education, and welfare to Palestinian “refugees.” The U.S. has funneled a total of $4.4 billion to UNRWA since it was founded in 1948.

Unlike all other refugees in the history of the world, Palestinian “refugees” include all descendents of the people who left Israel during the war of 1949. The war was initiated by the Arab states, who told their brothers living within Israel’s boundaries to leave and they could return after the Arabs destroyed Israel.

Whoops! They didn’t destroy Israel, and the UN gave the Palestinians who left their own refugee agency, UNRWA. All other refugee groups decline in numbers over the years as they are resettled or, in the long term, die off. The Palestinians continue to grow in number. UNRWA is truly a scam; it scams money out of civilized nations to support the “refugees,” it saves the neighboring Arab countries from having to take them in, and it provides a continuing mass of people festering in hatred and misery which its leaders direct toward Israel.

Meanwhile, those Arabs who remained in Israel in 1949 became Israeli citizens. They and their descendents now constitute about 20 percent of the population. They have full civil rights, have a party in the parliament, and have people in high positions.

This bill is long overdue, and bravo to Senator Kirk for introducing it.