Tag: Palestinian refugees

Palestinian human rights activist says UNRWA is using Palestinians as pawns

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

He wants the UNHCR to come up with a plan to permanently resettle the Palestinians and forget the “right of return.”

Bassam Eid. Photo: http://israelmatzav.blogspot.com/2010/07/bassam-eid-iran-perpetuating.html

Unbelievable that a Palestinian would have the guts to say that the special UN agency (UN Relief and Works Agency) set up more than sixty years ago to supposedly care for Palestinian refugees, is basically corrupt, too cozy with Hamas, not being watched closely enough by donor countries like the US, and is using the Palestinians as pawns.  Whew!

From The Algemeiner (emphasis is mine):

Bassam Eid, a prominent Palestinian human rights activist, has issued an urgent plea for a serious overhaul of UNRWA, the UN agency tasked with caring for the Palestinian refugees of the 1948 war in which Arab armies failed to prevent the creation of the State of Israel.

Eid, the Director of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, is currently visiting London, where he addressed a meeting at the British parliament organized by the Henry Jackson Society, an international relations think-tank, entitled “Perpetuating Statelessness? UNRWA, Its Activities and Funding.” In that presentation, Eid, who was raised in the UNRWA refugee camp in Shu’afat, east of Jerusalem, harshly criticized the agency for perpetuating the plight of the refugees as well as for its political relationship with Hamas.

“Sixty-six years after it was created, UNRWA is still promising Palestinians that they will return to their homeland,” Eid told The Algemeiner by telephone. “In my opinion, causing five million Palestinian refugees to suffer more and more under the umbrella of the ‘right of return’ is a war crime. They are being used as pawns in a war strategy.”

Eid, however, does not advocate the dissolution of UNRWA, which operates on a budget of $1.2 billion provided by donor nations led by the United States, which donated nearly $300 million in 2013. Doing so, he argues, would create a vacuum that would inevitably be exploited by wealthy Arab states like Qatar, the principal funder of Hamas. Instead, he is urging a reform program ambitious enough to transform the agency’s core mission.

“As a refugee, I want to see UNRWA submitting audited reports to donor countries,” Eid said. “I want to UNRWA to present to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees a plan for the permanent resettlement of the Palestinian refugees. And I want UNRWA to abolish the curriculum they teach in their schools, which promotes war and terror and jihad.”

Eid is particularly concerned by UNRWA’s relationship with Hamas, advocating that all UNRWA employees with Hamas ties be dismissed from their posts. “During the war in Gaza over the summer, it was well known that Hamas was hiding rockets in UNRWA schools,” Eid said. “So what did UNRWA do? They called Hamas on the phone and said, ‘please come and collect your rockets.’ This by itself shows the degree of cooperation between them.”

For all of our previous posts on UNRWA see our ‘Israel and refugees’ category.

 

Palestinians vs. other refugees

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Michael Curtis in American Thinker shows how the Palestinian “refugees” are treated completely different from all other refugees in The Right of Return to Manhattan and Other Places and how absurd it is.   I don’t have time to write anything at length, but here are a few excerpts:

On why there were Palestinian refugees:

The problem started with Arab opposition to Jewish settlement in the area of Palestine even before the establishment of the State of Israel. As a result of the violent Arab Revolt of 1936-39, mainly led and orchestrated by the Arab High Command under Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, over ten per cent of the adult Palestinian population was killed, injured, or imprisoned. This Arab wave of terror directed against British personnel, Jews, and other Arabs opposed to the Mufti and his followers resulted in the first wave of refugees, perhaps as many as 40,000 Arabs who fled the area.

But the main refugee problem was caused by the militant Arab activity in the mid 1940s and then by the 1948-49 War that was initiated by the Arabs. The “catastrophe,” as the war is named by the Palestinians, was brought on by the invasion of Israel immediately after its establishment on May 14, 1948, by troops from Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and other Arab countries. As a result of the fighting, and for reasons that are still disputed, Palestinians fled their home in large numbers.

On the origin of the Palestinian refugee organization:

Oppressed Palestinians in Gaza. For more, see http://www.idfblog.com/2013/08/12/what-happened-to-the-humanitarian-crisis-in-gaza/

Before the end of the war, the United Nations General Assembly on November 19, 1948 passed Resolution 212 (III) to create the UN Relief for Palestinian Refugees (UNRPR). This body was replaced by decision of UNGA Resolution 302 (IV) on December 8, 1949, by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).

About this UN concern for Palestinian refugees, two aspects are worth noting. One is the fact the UN ignored, and indeed still ignores, the reality that 700,000 Jews, probably a larger number than the actual number of Palestinian refugees, made exodus from the Arab lands in which their families had lived for centuries. The second is that this instance is the only time that the UN has set up an agency only for one group of people and that this unique agency has remained in existence for 64 years.

 Putting this in context:

The initiation of a Palestinian refugee relief agency was a remarkable and inexplicable departure from established relief activity. On December 14, 1950 the UNGA set up the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHRC), originally with a three-year mandate. Its function remains to coordinate international action to protect refugees and to resolve refugee problems worldwide. Since then it has helped more than 50 million people restart their lives. Among the various refugee populations it has assisted are the 4 million from Afghanistan, the 12 million ethnic Germans after World War II, the 5.5 million from Sudan, and the 15 million Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs after the 1947 Indian-Pakistani war.

Then contrasting the staff and budgets for the two agencies:

With a budget in 2012 of $3.59 billion the UNHRC has a staff of 7,600 in more than 125 countries. Currently, it is concerned with 33 million people. About 14.7 million are internally displaced; 10.5 million are refugees; 3.1 million are returnees; 3.5 million are stateless; 800,000 are asylum seekers; and 1.3 million considered to be in danger. To these figures must be added the millions now fleeing countries like Syria, Iraq, Mali, South Sudan, and Libya.

These figures make an extraordinary contrast with the existence and activity of UNRWA involved with much smaller numbers but with a much larger staff at its disposal. It employees 29,000 people, mostly Palestinians, and has 2 headquarters, 5 field offices, and representatives abroad, including in Washington, DC. A member of the latter group was Chris McGrath, former aide to Senator Harry Reid.

He concludes that UNRWA keeps up a welfare state for Palestinians, something which does them a great disservice.  The cause of the whole thing was an order to Arab states long ago not to take in any of the refugees so they could be used as an ongoing weapon against Israel.

Arabs continue to abuse Palestinian Refugees’ rights

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

That is the title of yet another story blasting Arab countries for mistreating their fellow Arabs—Palestinians.  Our earlier post on the same topic is here.

Arab countries do not “welcome” Palestinians!

Author Sameh Habeeb, an activist and journalist, writing in the Palestine Telegraph is not unexpectedly critical of Israel, but the gist of his report is that Palestinian refugees are treated like c*** in Muslim countries!

Habeeb begins:

Palestinian communities around the world, especially in the Arab states, have suffered forced exile or onward migration time and time again.

Most recently, Palestinian refugees living in Syria have had to flee the fighting in that country, and have fled to many parts of the world including neighbouring Arab countries like Jordan and Lebanon. In Jordan, Palestinian refugees are not given many of their rights as refugees and this even if they are able to get into the country. Many are denied entry.　 In some cases whole families are separated across the border because they are Palestinian refugees with a Syrian travel document.

Habeeb then goes on to list all the Muslim countries which mistreat Palestinians.

So much for that Muslim charity the UNHCR was bragging about here in 2009—1400-year-old Islamic tradition of “welcoming” the persecuted—what a joke!  And, it isn’t just Palestinians, rich Arab countries like Saudi Arabia take NO refugees.

Do you remember the Jewish refugees of 1948?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Probably not because it is one of those inconvenient historical truths that is buried by the media and policy-makers in their six-decades-old lament about “Palestinian refugees.”

Jewish refugees cross the desert in Yemen. Photo: Courtesy Israeli National Photo Archive

There is a good summary at Frontpage magazine earlier this month (hat tip: Richard Falknor at Blue Ridge Forum).  We have covered this subject in several previous posts which can be found in our Israel and refugees category, here.

June 20 was World Refugee Day, dedicated to nearly 60 million people worldwide who were forcibly displaced by conflict or persecution. One group of refugees rarely acknowledged is the Jews who were indigenous to Muslim lands but compelled to flee around the time that the State of Israel was established.

A Google search for “1948 refugees” produces about 6 million results. All but a few (at least through page six) are about the Palestinian Arab refugees, as if they were the only refugees of 1948. But it is estimated that from the beginning of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War through the early 1970s, up to 1,000,000 Jews fled or were expelled from their ancestral homes in Muslim countries. 260,000 of those refugees reached Israel between 1948 and 1951 and comprised 56% of all immigration to the fledgling state. By 1972, their numbers had reached 600,000.

In 1948, Middle East and North African countries had considerable Jewish populations: Morocco (250,000), Algeria (140,000), Iraq (140,000), Iran (120,000), Egypt (75,000), Tunisia (50,000), Yemen (50,000), Libya (35,000), and Syria (20,000). Today, the indigenous Jews of those countries are virtually extinct (although Morocco and Iran each still has under 10,000 Jews). In most cases, the Jewish population had lived there for millennia.

Read it all.

Photo is from this 2012 article at the Jerusalem Post.

Crime and death rates rising in Gaza Strip (so they say)

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Palestinians, of course, blame it on Israel.

Just have a look at some of the reasons they are dying in Gaza—family disputes, misuse of weapons and tunnel collapses—and it is all Israel’s fault!

Dying in tunnel collapses! But, we can’t live without our KFC smuggled under the border with Egypt. AFP/Getty Images

 

From Al-Monitor:

Mustafa Ibrahim, a researcher for the Independent Commission for Citizens’ Rights, told Al-Monitor that eight citizens were killed in the Gaza Strip in May. The deaths were the result of family disputes, robberies, tunnel collapses and suicides.

He pointed out that the commission observed a significant increase in the rate of violence in the West Bank and Gaza from the beginning of the year until April compared to the same period last year.

He added that about 61 people were killed in Gaza and the West Bank because of family disputes, misuse of weapons, tunnel collapses on the border with Egypt, apartment building collapses and the lack of safety measures in industrial workshops and other places.

Wait for it!  You knew it would be in the article somewhere!

Ibrahim said that the crime rate is related to the living conditions, particularly in Gaza. He said that the high unemployment rate, the Israeli blockade and the continual power outages are frustrating the people.

This reminds me, take 5 minutes and watch “We con the World!” from Latma.  2.6 million views to date!