The UK on Monday announced a contribution of £1.5 million to UNRWA to assist Palestinian refugees in Lebanon.That bolded statement is delusional.
The UK development agency DFID said the funding would help the UN agency for Palestinian refugees to provide medical supplies to over a thousand families and ensure shelter for 3,500 families.
Over 425,000 Palestinian refugees are registered with UNRWA in Lebanon, and many were displaced again in 2007 during internal fighting in the country in 2007.
DFID Minister Alan Duncan said the support would help these families, especially during winter months, but added that it was not a sustainable solution.
"[T]he only long term solution for Palestinian refugees across the Middle East is a negotiated peace agreement with Israel. The UK is continuing to work with both parties and the international community to achieve a just and fair two state solution."
As the Palestine Papers have shown (if unreported by The Guardian and Al Jazeera), even the Palestinian Authority privately recognizes that the vast majority Lebanese of Palestinian Arab origin will not all go to either Israel or to a Palestinian Arab state, but will need to be integrated into Arab countries and other nations.
The PA explicitly said in their position paper that it can't absorb them, and Israel will never take more than a token amount.
This means that even after a peace agreement, there is no solution for the vast majority of these stateless people besides naturalization in other countries - a move that Arab nations have been bitterly opposing for decades.
Everyone knows this - except, apparently, the Palestinian Arabs themselves, who are incited to hate Israel for 62 years rather than to hate the Arab nations that are jailing them today.
Rather than the UK continuing to repeat this lie, it is way past time for the truth to be stated publicly: Arab nations will need to naturalize their Palestinian Arabs, and every day they delay is a day that they are abusing their "guests."
No one benefits from the lie that a peace treaty will solve the problem, least of all the so-called "refugees" themselves. The West needs to tell the truth, and to hold Arab nations directly responsible for keeping millions of people stateless for over half a century.