New UN push against statelessness ignores Palestinians. Angelina Jolie can help.

From Al Arabiya:

U.S. actress Angelina Jolie, along with Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu, backed the United Nation’s global campaign to end statelessness, a situation at least 10 million people around the world suffer from, according to the Reuters Thomson Foundation.

The U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR) estimates that a child is born stateless every 10 minutes, and has launched the “I Belong” campaign in an effort to end the plight of those without citizenship.

“Statelessness makes people feel like their very existence is a crime,” UNHCR head António Guterres said. “We have a historic opportunity to end the scourge of statelessness within 10 years, and give back hope to millions of people.”

Jolie, Guterres, and Tutu are leading the campaign calling for “10 million signatures to change 10 million lives” on an open letter.

Stateless people are denied the rights and benefits most people take for granted. These “legal ghosts” often live in destitution and are at high risk of detention and exploitation, including slavery.

“This is absolutely unacceptable. It is ... an anomaly in the 21st century,” Guterres said.

Statelessness exacerbates poverty, creates social tensions, breaks up families and can even fuel conflict.

The largest stateless population is in Myanmar where more than 1 million ethnic Rohingya are refused nationality.

Other countries with high numbers of stateless people include Ivory Coast, Thailand, Nepal, Latvia and Dominican Republic.

Isn't it fascinating that this high-profile initiative is being launched - and it is ignoring at least 1.5 million Palestinians who live stateless, by law, in the Arab world!

UNRWA claims that there are over 450,000 stateless Palestinians in Lebanon (actually, it is about half that number.) There were 472,000 stateless Palestinians in Syria before the war. About 240,000 live in Saudi Arabia without citizenship rights. About 150,000 live in Jordan without citizenship (those that fled from Gaza in 1967 and their descendants.) As many as 50,000 Palestinians are without any rights in Egypt. There may be as many as 100,000 in Dubai. More are living in other Gulf countries, as well as tens of thousands in Tunisia and Libya.

The only Palestinian Arabs who aren't stateless are those who live in Israel and most of those who live in Jordan. Besides that, the few times that some were offered citizenship in Egypt and Lebanon tens of thousands applied. (The ones who live in the West Bank and Gaza have some benefits of citizenship in the PA, and cannot be considered refugees by any real definition. )

Clearly, a large percentage of these stateless people would be eager to become citizens of the countries that they are living in and were often born in.

But the UN is not including them in this initiative.

This is because this project is from UNHCR - the only UN organization that actually is tasked with helping settle refugees. Palestinian Arabs (except for a tiny number) do not fit under UNHCR's domain, but under UNRWA's, and UNRWA is actively interested in increasing the number of stateless Palestinians and prolonging their statelessness, not solving the problem.

Someone should tell Angelina Jolie that some 1.5 million stateless people are being purposefully excluded from her humanitarian initiative. If she would prioritize pressuring Arab nations to treat Palestinian Arabs with equal rights and to offer citizenship to those born on their soil, it could help bring peace to the Middle East - because the "refugee" issue has been kept purposefully alive, and millions of Arabs kept in misery, simply to cynically use them as a weapon against Israel.

Arab nations have been systematically discriminating against Palestinians since 1948, and their primary means of discrimination has been to ensure that they remain stateless and miserable.

UNRWA and other NGOs claim that Palestinians in Arab countries do not want citizenship. History proves that this is a lie. But don't believe me - no one is saying that they should be forced to become citizens, only that they be given the choice. UNRWA and Arab leaders know very well what they would choose and that freedom is what they want to take away from the Palestinians they pretend to love.

If Jolie would have the guts to publicly speak out against UNRWA's and Arab leaders' sickening agenda to promote statelessness, she could do more for peace than any politician or diplomat could.