The Jerash UNRWA camp in Jordan is a terrible place. We’ve reported about it for years.
The far-Left Israeli site +972 has finally noticed it as well. Here’s what it tweeted:
Jerash refugee camp is home to an estimated 30,000 Palestinians whose elders fled or were expelled from Gaza in 1967, after Israel occupied the territory.https://t.co/mVLb0oe8sI
— +972 Magazine (@972mag) May 12, 2020
No one was expelled from Gaza in 1967. Some 12,000 Gazans went quite voluntarily to Jordan to avoid living under Jewish rule (which is funny, since they also claim they want to “return” to Israel) and thousands more went to the West Bank, with Israel’s cooperation.
The article itself doesn’t use the word “expelled.” And it is pretty accurate in mentioning how bad things are in Jerash.
Based on a 2013 report by the Fafo Institute for Applied International Studies — the latest UNRWA study released on the socio-economic conditions of Palestinian refugees in Jordan — refugees who were displaced (either for the first or second time in 1967) from Gaza and their descendants are more than three times as likely to be among the most impoverished, living on less than $1.25 a day. Over half of the camp’s refugees have an income below the national poverty line of JD 814 ($1,148). Unemployment rates in the camp are close to 40 percent compared to 14 percent for Palestinian refugees in Jordan, according to a 2018 study by the Palestinian Return Centre.
The camp’s residents were also already facing a myriad of public health issues prior to the pandemic. More than 65 percent of the buildings contain asbestos and corrugated zinc, and have not been overhauled since their construction. There is limited access to clean water and a “reeking sewage system,” states the Palestinian Return Centre report. Garbage is strewn in the streets, as UNRWA had to reduce its trash collection after the United States slashed its funding to the relief agency in 2018.
The article even mentions that Jordan refuses to give the Gazans citizenship as it has done to the vast majority of Palestinians in Jordan.
But in the end, it doesn’t call on Jordan to give citizenship to Jerash residents. it doesn’t call on Jordan to at least extend basic medical services to them, or to fix the laws that don’t allow residents to build or to address any of the other myriad issues that non-citizen Palestinians have in Jordan. It doesn’t ask anything from Jordan at all.
The article concludes this way:
The COVID-19 crisis is highlighting the need for long-term, structural solutions when it comes to the rights and needs of Palestinian refugees — ones that not only respond to their humanitarian and economic difficulties, but that also address the root of their problems: their initial displacement.
There you go. It is Israel’s fault that Arabs in the south fled in 1948 to Gaza and that some of them then decided to move to Jordan in 1967. Egypt mistreated Gazans for 19 years and Jordan for the next 53 years, but that is all irrelevant, because Israel is obligated to commit national suicide by welcoming millions of Arabs who never saw Palestine to move into houses that mostly don’t exist. Only Israel has responsibility to fix the issue of Arabs mistreating other Arabs.
To the Left, Arabs simply have no responsibility.
Which is racist.