Sunday, June 26, 2022
Elder of Ziyon
At his opening remarks, UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini inadvertently described UNRWA's exact problem:
UNRWA cannot be compared to any other UN humanitarian agency.You have mandated UNRWA to provide government-like services. But we do not have the fiscal and financial tools of a government.
Yet no one is asking why a humanitarian agency is performing government-like functions? Palestinians live under governments in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria - why don't those governments do their jobs and provide medical, educational and housing aid to these faux refugees who have lived under these governments' rule far longer than the Syrian and other real refugees that they do take care of?
The US representative speech highlights the problem:
[The] United States reiterates our support to UNRWA and urges other donors to provide robust, reliable funding to help address the Agency’s long-term sustainability.
UNRWA was always meant to be a temporary agency. Its plans should be to dismantle itself over time, and move the responsibility for the Palestinian "refugees" to where they belong - with their host governments. It shouldn't have long-term sustainability - it should have a strategy to eliminate itself.
The Palestinian Director of the Authority (302) for the Defense of Refugee Rights, Ali Huwaidi, noted that the Arab world did not pledge anything at this conference:
We noticed in the pledges conference that no Arab country contributed any additional amount to what it provided at the beginning of 2022, and there is a Qatari, Kuwaiti and Saudi regression, and it is known that the UAE stopped its support completely in February 2022, although the Arab countries are obligated to pay 7.8 percent of the general budget.
They know that UNRWA is part of the problem, not part of the solution. UNRWA exists to keep a culture of permanent victimhood and hate, and to give Palestinians false hope that one day they will "return" to a country they have never seen and destroy Israel demographically. This justifies treating them like garbage in the meanwhile.
UNRWA should work with the host countries to redirect its budget towards having its responsibilities transitioned to real governments. There is no reason Palestinians who are nearly all Jordanian citizens should live in "refugee"camps. There is no reason Palestinians in Lebanon should have no rights to even buy land or hold many jobs in the land they have lived in for over 70 years. There is no reason Palestinians in the areas of British Mandate Palestine should be considered "refugees." There is no reason the very definition of "Palestine refugee" should not be the same as that of every other refugee. There is no reason why descendants of refugees should automatically inherit that designation.
The reason UNRWA has failed is because for decades UNRWA has not tried to solve the original refugee problem - they exist to perpetuate it, and to justify perpetuating it.
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