Category: Israel and refugees

Why so many refugees? International elites, the UN and NGOs are to blame.

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

The number of refugees always seems to be increasing. Why? A friend sent me an article that goes a long way toward explaining why. It’s by Edward Luttwak, a military strategist and historian. It was written back in 1999 but its thesis is just as relevant today.  The title: Give War a Chance.  It especially applies to the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Here’s the beginning:

An unpleasant truth often overlooked is that although war is a great evil,
it does have a great virtue: it can resolve political conflicts and lead
to peace. This can happen when all belligerents become exhausted or when
one wins decisively. Either way the key is that the fighting must continue
until a resolution is reached.

If fighting is halted before one side achieves victory, there is no motivation for anyone to give up. The only reason anyone surrenders in a war is that there is no hope for military success. But —

Since the establishment of the United Nations . . . wars among lesser powers have rarely been allowed to run their natural course. Instead, they have typically been interrupted early on, before they could burn themselves out and establish the preconditions for a lasting settlement. Cease-fires and armistices have been imposed under the aegis of the Security Council in order to halt fighting.

Such cease-fires give the combatants time to recover their energy and re-arm.

It intensifies and prolongs the struggle
once the cease-fire ends-and it does usually end. This was true of the
Arab-Israeli war of 1948-49, which might have come to closure in a matter
of weeks if two cease-fires ordained by the Security Council had not let
the combatants recuperate.

Remember, this was written ten years ago. This directly applies to the Gaza war today:

Today cease fires and armistices are imposed on lesser powers by multilateral
agreement … for essentially disinterested and indeed frivolous
motives, such as television audiences’ revulsion at harrowing scenes
of war. But this, perversely, can systematically prevent
the transformation of war into peace.

The self-styled international community does tremendous harm to the prospect of peace.

A variety of multilateral organizations now make it their business to intervene
in other peoples’ wars. The defining characteristic of these entities is
that they insert themselves in war situations while refusing to engage
in combat. In the long run this only adds to the damage.

UN forces’ first priority is to protect themselves. Likewise UN peacekeepers. And they make things worse, because local populations think they are protected and do not realistically assess the dangers. This is what happened in Rwanda.

But the most destructive of all are humanitarian relief effort, Luttwak says. His example is UNRWA and the Palestinians, so listen up. He compares UNRWA to UNRRA, United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency, which ran the displaced persons camps in Europe right after World War II.

The UNRRA camps were bare-bones operations that kept displaced persons alive, but provided no luxury. Thus there was great incentive to resettle everybody, and indeed everybody was resettled.

But UNRWA camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the West Bank, and the
Gaza Strip provided on the whole a higher standard of living than most
Arab villagers had previously enjoyed, with a more varied diet, organized
schooling, superior medical care, and no backbreaking labor in stony fields.
They had, therefore, the opposite effect, becoming desirable homes rather
than eagerly abandoned transit camps. With the encouragement of several
Arab countries, the UNRWA turned escaping civilians into lifelong refugees
who gave birth to refugee children, who have in turn had refugee children
of their own.

And this makes the point even more keenly: 

If each European war had been attended by its own postwar UNRWA, today’s
Europe would be filled with giant camps for millions of descendants of
uprooted Gallo-Romans, abandoned Vandals, defeated Burgundians, and misplaced
Visigoths-not to speak of more recent refugee nations such as post-ig45
Sudeten Germans (three million of whom were expelled from Czechoslovakia
in 1945). Such a Europe would have remained a mosaic of warring tribes,
undigested and unreconciled in their separate feeding camps. It might have
assuaged consciences to help each one at each remove, but it would have
led to permanent instability and violence.

Luttwak touches on a point that Ann has made many times about NGOs, or volags:

…the proliferating, feverishly competitive nongovernmental
organizations (NGOS) that now aid war refugees. Like any other institution,
these NGOs are interested in perpetuating themselves, which means that
their first priority is to attract charitable contributions by being seen
to be active in high-visibility situations. Only the most dramatic natural
disasters attract any significant mass-media attention, and then only briefly;
soon after an earthquake or flood, the cameras depart. War refugees, by
contrast, can win sustained press coverage if kept concentrated in reasonably
accessible camps. Regular warfare among well-developed countries is rare
and offers few opportunities for such NGOS, so they focus their efforts
on aiding refugees in the poorest parts of the world. This ensures that
the food, shelter, and health care offered-although abysmal by Western
standards-exceeds what is locally available to non-refugees. The consequences
are entirely predictable. Among many examples, the huge refugee camps along
the Democratic Republic of Congo’s border with Rwanda stand out. They sustain
a Hutu nation that would otherwise have been dispersed, making the consolidation
of Rwanda impossible and providing a base for radicals to launch more Tutsi-killing
raids across the border. Humanitarian intervention has worsened the chances
of a stable, long-term resolution of the tensions in Rwanda. 

Nothing has changed, has it? And here’s something that again can be applied directly to the Gaza situation:

To keep refugee nations intact and preserve their resentments forever is
bad enough, but inserting material aid into ongoing conflicts is even worse.
Many NGOS that operate in an odor of sanctity routinely supply active combatants.
Defenseless, they cannot exclude armed warriors from their feeding stations,
clinics, and shelters. Since refugees are presumptively on the losing side,
the warriors among them are usually in retreat. By intervening to help,
NGOS systematically impede the progress of their enemies toward a decisive
victory that could end the war. Sometimes NGOS, impartial to a fault, even
help both sides, thus preventing mutual exhaustion and a resulting settlement.
And in some extreme cases, such as Somalia, NGOs even pay protection money
to local war bands, which use those funds to buy arms. Those NGos are therefore
helping prolong the warfare whose consequences they ostensibly seek to
mitigate.

And here is his conclusion, with which I heartily agree:

Policy elites should actively resist the emotional
impulse to intervene in other peoples’ wars-not because they are indifferent
to human suffering but precisely because they care about it and want to
facilitate the advent of peace. The United States should dissuade multilateral
interventions instead of leading them. New rules should be established
for U.N. refugee relief activities to ensure that immediate succor is swiftly
followed by repatriation, local absorption, or emigration, ruling out the
establishment of permanent refugee camps. And although it may not be possible
to constrain interventionist NGOS, they should at least be neither officially
encouraged nor funded.

Hamas and the children

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Here’s a horrifying YouTube video showing how Hamas treats its children. A baby is dressed up like a suicide bomber. Little tots with hoods over their faces are wearing play suicide belts. Elementary-school-age boys are marching around in uniforms, hooded, with guns and flags, in a classroom, or maybe it’s a party or a performance. Then they do a little drill to commands. There’s scene after scene of this kind of thing.

The commentary asks, Where is the UN? Nowhere to be seen.

A little boy is asked, “Do you want to be a martyr ?” “Yes.” “Why do you want to?” “To kill the Jews.”

Then there is footage of Hamas using children as human shields. Hamas gunmen shoot from behind groups of children. Rockets are shot off from places packed with children, such as school playgrounds during school hours.

When I was in Israel I saw a day care center with bullet holes in it. Palestinian snipers (at that time the PLO) had been shooting at it from across a valley in the West Bank. By the time I saw it Israel had built a wall at that spot.

The video asks, “How will these children live in peace when they grow up if they are constantly brainwashed by Hamas and incited to hate and kill?” And I ask, how can they grow up to be anything but professional refugees and terrorists when that is all they are trained to do? The Arab countries are not supporting Hamas in this war. And they will do anything to make sure none of these people end up in their countries. Refugees forever: that’s the fate Hamas and the UN have prepared for them.

Hat tip: Janet.

The Gaza war: a refugee issue

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been posting a lot on Gaza and the war, and in case it’s not clear why Refugee Resettlement Watch is devoting so much space to a foreign war, I’ll explain.

What is happening now in Gaza is wholly the result of a misbegotten refugee policy. After World War II, and with the founding of the United Nations, there was a big emphasis on ending colonialism. Europeans had been made to feel guilty for their countries’ colonializing much of the third world, and country after country was given its independence. The leaders of these countries know how to play on white guilt, and played their hands for all they were worth.

There was some guilt left over for the Jews, six million of whom had died in the holocaust, and many of whom had settled in Palestine, which is what Israel was called before its founding as a modern nation. So Europe and the U.S. allowed the Jews their own country, carved out of land that had belonged to Britain. (There’s a whole history there that I won’t go into.) (My friends, Ron and Allis Radosh, have a book coming out soon about Truman and the Founding of Israel; when I have a link I’ll put it in RRW.)

The Arab governments declared war on Israel. They told Arabs living inside Israel to leave, and when they had defeated Israel they could return. But of course Israel won. The people who left became refugees.

At the same time, the Arab countries forced the Jews living in them to leave. These Jews also became refugees. (Here are our posts on these Jewish refugees.)  And here is the lesson. Almost all these Jews were absorbed by Israel, at great cost. The remainder went to other countries. Jews around the world helped financially. There are no Jewish refugees today.

The Arab refugees, on the other hand, were put in camps. No Arab country offered to resettle them. Further, I believe as a result of white guilt, the UN was convinced by the Arab governments to create a special agency just for them, the UNRWA. Its policy, as we’ve explained many times, was and is to keep the refugees in their homeless status, ostensibly because they were soon going to return to Israel (just as soon as the Arab states destroyed the new country).

After World War II there were massive population shifts. For just one example, Konigsberg, a German city on the Baltic Sea, became Russian and was renamed Kaliningrad. Its entire German population was kicked out and relocated to Germany. There were many, many other such population removals and exchanges, mostly based on the fact that Germany had lost the war. There had been such things after World War I also. So it was not a new idea for populations to move based on post-war facts. And as the Arabs had been allies of Germany, they could be said to have been on the losing side, though that was not the basis for Israel’s founding. If the Arab refugees had been treated like all other refugees, they would have been resettled in Arab countries, and that would have been the end of it.

But Israel did not kick out the Arabs. Those who remained have prospered. About 20 percent of Israel’s population is Arab Muslim. During peace talks they have been eager to remain a part of Israel and not forced to become part of a Palestinian state — even going so far as to present a petition to that effect.

The Arab refugees were a prime target to become radicalized, and the Soviet Union took advantage of the situation to create the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the PLO. It created the concept of “Palestinian,” which was something new under the sun as applied to an Arab people. It taught the Arabs its propaganda techniques. And lo and behold, the “Palestinians” became the world’s favorite oppressed people, so successful that today many otherwise civilized nations act as if Israel has no right to exist.

That’s a very abbreviated history, and here’s the point: By allowing the United Nations to create a mistaken policy on refugees, the western nations created a monster. There is no solution in sight. John Derbyshire at National Review explained why back in 2002, and recently revived the article because nothing has changed. The series of wars against Israel, the intifadas, the ongoing terrorism, the miserable conditions of the “Palestinians,” the excuses provided Islamic radicals to hate the west — all of these are a direct result of the UN’s foolish refugee policy.

We need to think of this when we look at our own country’s refugee policies. (The same thing applies to immigration policy, of course.) What looks like a small thing now can metastisize into a monstrous thing that can shatter communities, import people who wish to destroy us, create unassimilated enclaves of people, and change the very character of America.  I have little hope that the Obama administration will care about such things, if it doesn’t positively want them to happen, but we will keep on here at RRW, exposing under-reported or unreported stories, commenting on refugee matters, and pushing for sanity in our refugee policies.

Hamas and UNRWA: joined at the hip

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Claudia Rosett, who has been writing stellar articles on the United Nations for years, has another winner at Forbes. com today titled “Gaza Bedfellows UNRWA and Hamas: How they keep each other in business.” I wish I could simply paste the whole thing here, but there’s such a thing as copyright laws. It’s not very long, but it tells the whole story very thoroughly. Here are some choice excerpts; I recommend you read it all if you have any interest in seeing to what disgusting uses our tax money is being put, and how we are helping to fund the people whose mission it is to destroy Israel.

In the current violence of Gaza, we are seeing the fruition of one of the most bizarre creations of modern diplomacy: a UN-supported welfare enclave for terrorists.

Behind this lies a straightforward equation. Gaza, with its 1.5 million people, runs almost entirely on international handouts. The UN ranks it among the top per-capita aid recipients on the planet.

Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, and Hamas seized power there, won an election, and consolidated its power by driving out the rival party Fatah.

Since then, Hamas has been running Gaza as a territory reduced to basically two industries: aid and terrorism.

And UNRWA is the enabler.  (Here’s UNRWA’s full name: The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.)

Set up in 1949 with a temporary, three-year mandate to provide aid and jobs for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA has survived for almost 60 years, expanding its scope, budget and influence by extending refugee status to descendants of its beneficiaries.

We’ve posted quite a bit about UNRWA; our 10 posts are here. Here’s a notable statistic from Rosett:

To handle these operations, UNRWA employs more than 24,000 staffers. That’s more than any other UN agency, including the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR, which with some 6,300 staffers–about one-quarter the manpower of UNRWA–is responsible for all other refugees worldwide, totaling more than 11 million.  [There are about 4.6 million Palestinian refugees.]

And 99 percent of UNRWA’s staff are local Palestinians. So the agency represents the agenda of the governments of the countries where the Palestinian “refugees” live rather than that of the UN or of the donor nations (though often it’s hard to tell the UN agenda from that of the Arab governments anyway).  In Gaza, the government is the terrorist group Hamas. Therefore:

Since late December, when Israel began its campaign to end the thousands of rocket and mortar attacks launched by Hamas from Gaza, UNRWA officials have given a parade of briefings via UN headquarters in New York.

Teleconferencing in, they have ignored what UNRWA Commissioner General Karen Koning Abuzayd has described as their “nonpolitical” mandate. With Abuzayd in the lead, they have detailed their outrage on behalf of the Palestinians, excoriated Israel and stepped further into the political arena to demand an immediate ceasefire–something these same UNRWA officials did not do when the attacks were one-way out of Gaza into Israel.

…And while blaming Israel, UNRWA officials also have plenty of incentive to present the worst possible picture. The greater the perceived distress, the better the prospects not only for immediate relief, but for future fundraising.

And oh, how the world has responded! I posted on January 1 about the U.S.’s response — $85 million for Gaza and UNRWA. I quoted the State Department’s press release:

The United States is UNRWA’s largest bilateral donor, and contributed $184.68 million to UNRWA towards its 2008 Appeals, including $99.87 million for UNRWA’s General Fund and $84.81 million for its emergency appeals for Lebanon, the West Bank, and Gaza. The United States plans to provide additional funding for UNRWA’s 2009 appeals in the future.

Rosett next goes into how the aid money is spent. This is an area of “deep murk,” she says. UNRWA is supposed to check for terrorists in hiring their staff, but it is unclear that they actually do.

For years, various U.S. lawmakers, including the late Congressman Tom Lantos, have tried introducing bills asking for genuine transparency and accountability from UNRWA–which has never been subject to a genuinely independent external audit.

Such efforts have gained no traction, opposed by a UN that even under the most benign circumstances is hostile to opening its books, plus a U.S. State Department that prefers to close its eyes and shovel millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars into terrorist-controlled infrastructure.

Legislators have pointed out that UNRWA ambulances and schools have been shown to aid terrorism, and named UNRWA staffers who are known to be involved in terrorism.  But no resolution has been passed in Congress.

Rosett’s summary of UNRWA’s role is spot-on:

In pushing for an ever-bigger dole and in using the UN stage as a megaphone to help elicit sympathy, drum up funds, denounce Israel and drape in UN baby blue the interests and demands of the Iranian-backed terrorists of Hamas, they do a terrible disservice not only to the cause of world peace, but to the prospects of the Palestinians themselves for forsaking terror and building better lives.

UNRWA does a double disservice. In their support, tacit and overt, of terrorism they prevent any movement toward peace, as Rosett says. And in addition, by keeping Palestinians dependent on aid from outside, which is contingent on their retaining their refugee status, they are preventing millions of people from becoming independent, normal human beings. The Palestinians can focus on terrorism and their hatred of Jews and Israel so intensely because they don’t have to work for a living. They don’t have to build an economy. They have no responsibilities; they are like rebellious teenagers whose rich father will always bail them out. But the stakes are far higher.

By this time, after decades of dependency, and schooled from earliest childhood in hatred and bitterness, these “refugees” may not be able to grow into adulthood. They are emotionally and intellectually crippled. Somehow this terrible situation has to be brought to an end.

Media dishonesty on Gaza

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

A blog called Bring Back Freedom brings to our attention a big lie by France 2, the French public television network. Quoting from Ha-aretz:

French public television network France 2 on Tuesday revealed they had aired photographs that allegedly showed destruction caused by the Israel Air Force during Operation Cast Lead, which were in fact taken during a different incident in 2005, one in which Gaza civilians were killed by an explosion caused by militants in the Strip.

The footage aired on Channel 2 on Tuesday afternoon showed dozens of dead bodies, including Hamas gunmen and citizens, which the channel said were killed by an IAF bombing raid on January 1st. It later came to light that the channel had instead aired footage of the devastation caused after a truck full of explosives blew up in the Jabaliya Refugee Camp.

A news editor at France 2 told Le Figaro Tuesday that they had “made a mistake by airing those pictures, which he said depict events from 2005.

2005 versus 2009, what the heck. An attack by Israel versus a mishap by a terrorist group that kills its own, what the heck. If you’re convinced Israel is evil, all carnage can be blamed on Israel anyway, so what’s the big deal?

(Bring Back Freedom gives a hat tip to Jihad Watch, so I guess this item came from Ha-aretz to Robert Spencer to Bring Back Freedom to Refugee Resettlement Watch. Ain’t the Internet wonderful?)