Category: Israel and refugees

Why don’t Palestinian leaders get the “refugees” out of their camps?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Israeli diplomat Lenny Ben-David writes on National Review’s Corner:

Recently announced plans for a new, upscale Palestinian settlement in the West Bank are impressive. The projected town, some six miles north of Ramallah, will one day house some 40,000 people, making it the same size as the Israeli settlement towns of Beitar and Modiin. The settlement is named Rawabi, and Qatar is a primary investor. Details are being negotiated with Israeli authorities on issues such as free access across Israeli-controlled areas.

He goes on:

Meanwhile, in a pro-peace op-ed in the Washington Post this summer, Crown Prince Khalifa of Bahrain lamented that “far too many [Palestinians] live in refugee camps in deplorable conditions.” Such camps exist in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, and Lebanon, but Khalifa’s contention is particularly true for those living in areas under Hamas and Palestinian Authority control. Why are these Palestinians stuck in teeming refugee camps when new towns like Rawabi could be built for them?

Ben-David points out that this new town is for the elite of the West Bank. Arab leaders do not want to do anything for the suffering masses. Why? First,

Because “Palestinian” is an artificial category, and a very weakly felt one. The track record dating back to 1947 provides little evidence that the Palestinians’ new-found national identity trumps their clan, religious, political, or class differences. In Israel, we shuddered at the barbarism of the Fatah-Hamas fratricide in Gaza in 2006 — the Palestinian “wakseh” or humiliation — when Palestinian families were gunned down by other Palestinians and political opponents were thrown from tall buildings.

And second,

Beyond the Palestinians’ lack of community feeling lies the so-called “right of return.” Palestinian leaders claim that each family has a right to reoccupy the land it held before Israel’s war for independence. Settling refugees comfortably in other areas would weaken their claim to this “right,” while keeping them in camps is a harsh but effective way to maintain pressure against Israel from the international community. What stands in the way of prosperity for Palestinian-controlled areas is the deep brainwashing of Palestinian children that there must be an actual physical return to their ancestral homes, along with an international and Israeli recognition of the “injustice” done to them.

His diagnosis is better than his prescription. Briefly,

When new communities for the Palestinian refugees are established within the PA- and Hamas-controlled areas — and not before — “Palestinian Heritage Houses” will also be constructed inside a number of Israeli communities or regions.

Okay, but he doesn’t address how you get Arabs to give up the “right of return,” which is the key to the whole thing.  Usefully, though, he has pointed out that there are some Arab leaders thinking about a way out.

Jeffrey Goldberg takes on myths about Gaza “refugees”

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

In The Lucrative Business of Israel-Bashing in the current Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg quotes an Israel-bashing statement from a current MacArthur grant recipient, James Longley, and corrects every single sentence in it. Great job. Read it if you want the Gaza “refugee” situation in a nutshell.  The reason for the title of his piece is that MacArthur “geniuses” receive $100,000 a year for five years, no strings attached.

Palestinian “refugees” are getting restless, and so is their staff

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

ISRIA, a Paris-based consulting and information publishing service, reports: 

The United Nations agency tasked with assisting millions of Palestinian refugees may not be able to pay the salaries of its 29,000 staff through the end of this year because of a funding crisis, its top official said today as she urged Member States to donate more generously.

….Most of UNRWA’s running costs go to staff salaries, she said, and without an injection of nearly USD 17 million each month the agency will not be able to guarantee salaries into 2010.

Ms. AbuZayd said she has written in the past week to every country that has ever donated to UNRWA to ask them to contribute “special pledges” given the current situation, and she hopes they will respond urgently.

All the donor countries have fulfilled their pledges, but the agency needs more because of inflation, exchange rates, and other issues. Imagine that! Has an agency anywhere of any sort ever announced it needed less?

Two points to note. One is this:

She said that both staff and refugees were “becoming restless” about the funding problem and contingency plans may have to be taken unless money is provided soon.

What contingency plans would those be? Stepping up terrorist attacks so donor nations would realize they really, really, really need more money? And as for “both staff and refugees,” they are often the same people as most of the staff is drawn from the local population. In Gaza that means most are from Hamas, and we’ve written about how much of the donated money goes to Hamas. With all the, um, obligations Hamas has in other areas, it’s no wonder UNRWA’s humanitarian mission is running short.

The second point is this:

UNRWA… provides education, health care, social services, microfinance, camp improvement and emergency aid to an estimated 4.6 million Palestinian refugees living in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.

Refugees living in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Has the world lost sight of how weird that is? How many Jewish refugees are living in Israel? None, because Israel takes in every Jew who wants to come, including the 900,000 who were expelled from Arab countries. But do Arab countries take in Palestinians, who are also Arabs? No! We’ve written about the Iraqi Palestinians, who were not welcomed back into Iraq, and now the U.S. is taking some in. What is wrong with these Arab governments? Oh, maybe it’s because the Jews whom Israel takes in don’t produce suicide bombers. They don’t plot against their host government. The Arab governments created the Palestinian refugee problem, and they don’t want anything to do with the pathology they brought about. So the civilized nations of the earth have to keep ponying up money to keep these “refugees” quiet.

(See our Israel and refugees category for our previous posts on this subject.)

UN releases budget: plenty for all, especially Palestinian “refugees”

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

A column by George Russell, executive editor of Fox News, gives a detailed account of the UN budget and explains all the accounting tricks that make it so difficult to know what the UN actually spends. The headline says the budget is $13.9 billion, but the first paragraph says it is $4.9 billion. It takes most of the article to explain all the additions and tricks that get the total from the lower figure to the higher. Let’s just say that UN bureaucrats are experienced and skilled at presenting one thing to the public and another to each other.

Even the $13.9 figure is low:

“It’s easier to work your way through the U.S. budget — which is immensely bigger — than through the U.N. budget,” observes Brett Shaefer, a U.N. expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation, who has just edited a new book on U.N. reform entitled ConUNdrum: The Limits of the United Nations and the Search for Alternatives. “What you see is the U.N. doing a bit of sleight of hand.”

Nor does the sleight of hand end there. Even the $13.9 billion number does not include the cost of some of the U.N.’s biggest and most sprawling organizations, which submit their own budgets to separate panels of U.N. member states, even as their programs increasingly intertwine and overlap.

Here’s the relevant section on refugees:

Among other things, a substantial portion of the extra-budgetary increase, Ban’s report notes, has gone to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees — $282.2 million — and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNWRA) — $186.9 million.

(As it happens, Ban’s initial budget report for 2008-2009 said very similar things, noting that big increases from hikes in extra-budgetary resources went to UNHCR — $423.3 million — and UNWRA — 122.9 million.)

That is simply obscene. There are more than 12 million refugees worldwide. The number of so-called refugees in Gaza and the West Bank number well under 2 million. And the vast majority of these have nothing in common with real refugees. They live in houses in cities and towns in defined territories governed by their own elected governments. Yet the Palestinian’s refugee agency gets two-thirds of what the real refugee agency gets. And the Palestinians get lots and lots of aid from governments as well.

The United States gave $900 million for Palestinian aid in 2009. As far as I can tell (Ann will correct me if I’m wrong), our government spent about  “$809 million for basic life-sustaining support and protection of refugees, conflict victims, and internally displaced persons overseas,” and about the same for refugee resettlement in the U.S.  These numbers are almost as slippery as the UN ones — you can’t really find all the spending, either abroad or at home, because it’s often split among different agencies and budget line items. The point is that the Palestinians receive enormous amounts of aid. And as we’ve reported, much of the aid goes right to Hamas, a terrorist group and America’s declared enemy. 

If the UN and the U.S. shifted their money from the Palestinians to real refugees, many more people would have better lives. See more about UNRWA here, and in other articles in our “Israel and refugees” category.

Addendum, September 19: I want to add a link to a great post by David Horowitz on his great new blog, Newsreal.  It’s called The UN Is a Morally Disgusting Institution and a Global Menace.

More on Iraqi Palestinians and how Arab countries don’t help them

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I have so much backed up to write about, I’m just going to have to put up a few posts and not say much (maybe that is a good thing!).  Here is one from a blog called ‘Elder of Ziyon’ about how the UNRWA (UN Relief and Works Agency), the special agency set up just to oversee Palestinian refugees, isn’t doing its job.  This post is entitled, “UNHCR decreases real refugees, UNRWA increases fake ones.” 

Incidentally we might argue that UNHCR (UN High Commissioner for Refugees) isn’t doing such a hot job either.

Here is an archive for all of our previous posts on UNRWA.

More information literally moments later!  I had just posted this when this appeared in my in-box, it’s an economic analysis of the lives of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza showing that they are better off there than in most any other country in the Arab world!