Biased Reuters article on UNRWA filled with lies

Decades of Palestinian Arab lies are all taken as fact in this incredibly biased article by Noah Browning of Reuters.

For example:

Three generations of Palestinians displaced by the founding of Israel in 1948 know only life in UN refugee camps, going to schools beneath the blue-and-white UN flag and drawing their food stocks from UN warehouses.

The exodus of Arabs pre-dates the founding of Israel by six months, and certainly the first couple of hundred thousand left on their own, as they were mostly the richer ones who left the same way they left during the 1936-9 Arab riots. In other words, they wanted to avoid a conflict started by their fellow Arabs to kill Jews.

For these Palestinians whose long-cherished goal is the right of return to the lands they lost 64 years ago, the camps must be seen as temporary no matter how permanent they might seem to others.

This article seems to be only about those in camps in Palestinian Arab territory - which are, of course, in Palestine.

It is their leaders who "insist" on forcing the people into these "temporary," horrible camps, not the residents themselves. I don't see any residents who insisted to remain in tents in the 1950s when given the chance to move to concrete housing. The residents were - and are- used as pawns, but the lies are swallowed by Reuters.

Which explains why the latest program by the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, or UNRWA, to upgrade the camps' dilapidated facilities is such a delicate operation.

The article could have - and should have - focused on the hypocrisy of the "leaders" who insist on keeping these people in camps rather than allowing them to move on and become productive citizens of territories that they already claim as their own.

Some 700,000 people fled or were driven from their homes when Israel was created after the 1948 war, but now as many as five million refugees and their descendants live in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, many of them in squalid camps.

The vast majority were not "driven" from their homes and about half left before Israel was created, all of them before or during - not after - the war. The number who live in camps is actually about one third of those in the five countries UNRWA operates in.

Founded in 1949, UNRWA is almost as old as the UN itself. Given that prospects for a resolution to Israel's disputes in the Middle East continue to be dismal, it appears to have a long future ahead.

UNRWA's existence is not at all dependent on Israel or its "disputes." It should have disappeared in the 1950s and it almost lost its funding a few times in its first couple of decades. This article implicitly blames Israel for the existence of these so-called" refugees" and doesn't say a word about how most Arab countries refuse to give citizenship to Palestinian Arabs who desire to live in their host countries - even though Arab League countries allow naturalization of every other Arab.

The fate of refugees clinging to the right of return has been one of the toughest issues facing negotiators in two decades of on-off talks aimed at creating an independent Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank.

Israel says the demand for a right to return is a deal breaker in any peace accord, arguing that allowing the refugees into Israel would increase the proportion of Palestinians living within its borders and thus undermine its nature as a Jewish state.

It also disputes the legal basis of the right of return set out in a UN resolution of December 1948 and says the world has not taken into account the plight of Jews forced from their homes across the Arab world in the last 65 years.

The text here takes as a given that UNGA 194 gives the "right of return" when in fact the word "right" was deliberately and consciously taken out of the text of the resolution itself. In other words, this "right" is fictional. Reuters is saying that the "right" exists and only Israel's interpretation is wrong.

In fact, the UN itself wrote an exhaustive analysis on how to interpret UNGA 194 in 1950, proving that there is no such blanket "right to return."

"194, 242, 338," student Alaa al-Homuz rattles in staccato, naming UN Security Council resolutions dealing with Palestinian refugees which he is studying in a class on international law.

194 was not a Security Council resolution. UNSC 338 merely refers to 242, which vaguely requires a "just settlement to the refugee problem" without using the word "Palestinian;" in context it might be referring to those displaced as a result of the 1967 war.

There's lots more incredible bias and outright lies in this article, and the sad part is that the lies are so embedded in the narrative of lies pushed by the Arabs that most Westerners don't recognize the lies any more.