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.

Clifford D. May writes at National Review Online today on The Real Palestinian Refugee Problem. He shows the idiocy of UN (and world) policies toward the Palestinians.

After World War II, the British left Palestine, which was to be partitioned into two independent nations. One would have a Jewish majority, the other a Muslim majority. About 750,000 Muslims left the territories that became Israel. A similar number of Jews left Arab/Muslim lands. Today, not one of the Jews remains a refugee. But there are still Palestinian refugees — indeed, their number has mushroomed to almost 5 million. How is that possible? Through two mechanisms. First of all, a refugee, by definition, lives on foreign soil, but for Palestinians the definition has been changed, so that a displaced Palestinian on Palestinian soil also receives refugee status. Second, the international organization responsible for resettling refugees, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), was cut out from the start. A new organization was set up exclusively for Palestinians: the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).

So there are more and more Palestinian “refugees” all the time, and we continue to fund them, even though they are not refugees by any normal definition of the word. Now, possibly for the first time, there may be something sensible done about this absurd and costly situation.

A few members of Congress have figured out what’s going on and plan to do something about it. Senator Mark Kirk (R., Ill.) is working on an amendment to the Fiscal Year 2013 State-Foreign Operations Appropriations bill that, for the first time, would establish as U.S. policy that only a Palestinian refugee can be classified as a Palestinian refugee — not a son, grandson, or great-grandson, and not someone who has resettled and taken citizenship in another country. The Kirk amendment would require the secretary of state to report to Congress on how many Palestinians serviced by UNRWA fit the traditional definition of a refugee.

It’s a good start. Let’s hope it gets somewhere.