UNHCR succeeds where UNRWA fails

From AFP:

UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) chief Antonio Guterres announced on Friday the body has referred 100,000 Iraqi refugees in the Middle East for resettlement in third countries since 2007.

"100,000 submissions of Iraqi refugees is a tremendous achievement. Many have been living in limbo for years," he said at the start of a three-day visit to Syria, which says it hosts one million refugees, mostly from Iraq.

Of the 100,000 submissions of Iraqi refugees over the past three years, 52,173 people left the Middle East up to May 2010, the UNHCR said in a statement. In 2007, 3,500 Iraqis departed for third countries from the region.

"Lengthy security checks and the time it has taken for state processing mechanisms to be established have led to considerable delays in the departure of refugees to their new homes," it said.

Guterres called on countries "to facilitate the speedy departure of refugees they have accepted for resettlement."

The acceptance rate by resettlement countries of UNHCR?s referrals now stands at 80 percent, of which nearly 76 percent have been accepted by the United States, the UNHCR said.

The UN agency said that around 1.8 million Iraqis are currently seeking refuge in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt and Turkey.

The UNHCR is working tirelessly to resettle these Arab refugees, and even though the going is slow, they are making progress. Tens of thousands of the refugees are being resettled in Syria, which is now hosting about one million of them.

The UNHCR managed to resettle 100,000 refugees in three years with an annual budget of about $80 million. (Correction: this seems to be wrong; the UNHCR budget is actually between $1 billion and $1.5 billion, from its website. -EoZ) And they are not exclusively concerned with Iraqi refugees - they are responsible for every refugee worldwide who is not considered "Palestinian."

Compare this to UNRWA, an agency dedicated to a single class of "refugees" - the Palestinian Arabs. UNRWA has not even attempted to resettle Palestinian Arab "refugees" (really, descendants of refugees) since the 1950s. Their annual budget, which is exclusively used to perpetuate the Palestinian Arab "refugee" problem, $1.2 billion dollars. Yes, the annual budget to keep Palestinian Arabs in camps is roughly the same that the UN grants the other refugee organization, UNHCR, from spending on the entire rest of the world's refugees combined.

Imagine what would happen if the UNHCR took over the UNRWA's  budget and the responsibility for Palestinian Arabs!

Here is a study of contrasts of the needs of the different populations.

From the UNHCR website:

Refugees complained during lunch with the High Commissioner of extremely harsh conditions in the desert. Al Hassakeh has suffered from a drought during the past four years. In addition to the shortage of water, refugees said they could not sleep at night for fear of being bitten by deadly scorpions and poisonous snakes.

At the exact same time UNRWA's Gaza "refugees" are complaining about the high fees of renting beach houses on the Mediterranean for their families to vacation.

The only thing they have in common is...sand.

It seems that there is a bit of a problem with how the UN is prioritizing the budgets of its agencies. Maybe it is past the time to fix this problem.

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The worst "ethnic cleansing" in history

Official Palestinian Arab figures released today say that there are now 10.9 million Palestinian Arabs worldwide, eight times the number in 1948.

Of those, some 4.7 million are considered "refugees" registered to UNRWA, meaning that the number of "refugees" have increased by a factor of eight as well.

This is due to UNRWA's dual policies of defining the descendants of Palestinian Arab refugees to be "refugees" themselves and of working against the resettlement of Arabs of Palestinian descent into their neighboring Arab countries. A problem that could have been solved decades ago instead is growing continuously because of the UNRWA, and even if there is a Palestinian Arab state declared tomorrow, there are millions of people who will have nowhere to go. This is not Israel's fault - it is squarely the fault of UNRWA and the Arab nations that want to keep Palestinian Arabs in misery as political footballs.

The study also claimed that there were 379,000 Arabs living in Jerusalem, of which 62% live in the parts that Israel redeemed in 1967. If that is true, that means that 38% of Jerusalem's Arabs live in the "Jewish" side of the city. Sounds like racism to me!

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UNRWA starts funding UNHCR Iraq refugees

I cannot find details yet, but Palestine Today quotes UN Radio as saying that the European Commission of UNRWA is donating a million euros to help the 2300 refugees of Palestinian Arab ancestry who fled Iraq and are now on the Iraqi-Syrian border.

These refugees do not fall under UNRWA, but rather under UNHCR, which has been diligently trying to resettle them in other countries - the way a UN refugee agency should act.

Their Arab brethren have treated them as pariahs.

Since their grandparents lived in Palestine in 1947, Arab nations refuse to let them become citizens. Syria took in hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees but refused to support the ones who are termed "Palestinian" because of Arab League rulings that they should always be treated differently to enforce their fake nationalism. So Arabs who lived in Iraq for generations are not Iraqi nor are they Iraqi refugees.

Arabs have not been happy with UNHCR's resettling hundred of these refugees to the West, preferring that they stay in misery in order to strengthen the "Palestinian" cause.

The question is, is UNRWA contributing out of humanitarian considerations or is this the beginning of a power play to take over the refugees from UNHCR?

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PalArab "refugees" killing each other in Lebanon again

From Naharnet:

An uneasy calm has returned to Ain el-Hilweh refugee camp in southern Lebanon as a ceasefire halted clashes between Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's mainstream Fatah faction and the Islamist movement Usbat al-Ansar.

At least two people were killed in the clashes which broke out following the murder of Fatah officer Mohammed Tamim in Ain el-Hiwleh.

A Palestinian official said the small Islamist movement Usbat al-Ansar ambushed Tamim at the main entrance to the camp.

He said the killing prompted gun battles between supporters of the two rival factions who were using rocket-propelled grenades and automatic weapons.

The other fatality was a woman identified as Nejmah Ali Younes.

Lebanese troops cordoned off all entrances to Ain el-Hilweh as many residents fled in fear, seeking refuge in a nearby mosque.

The Lebanese army does not enter Palestinian camps, leaving security inside the shantytowns in Palestinian hands.

Other sources say 4 were killed.

I cannot be certain, but I do not recall any UN fact-finding missions after the 2007 Lebanon fighting in the camps that killed hundreds. Maybe the UN only cares about Palestinian Arab lives when they are killed by certain, special types of people.

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Funny: Arab MKs defining "refugees"

Palestine Today reports that the Knesset passed a motion that any future peace deal with Arab countries include compensation for Jewish refugees.

Two Arab MKs, Talab El-Sana and Jamal Zahalka, objected - because they don't think there were any Jewish refugees from Arab countries!

Zahalka's argument is nonsensical. He claims that the word "refugee" refers only to people who are forced to leave their country against their will, and that they must want to return to that country. The only problem is that this is a complete fabrication, as the UN definition of "refugee" is "any person who is outside their country of origin and unable or unwilling to return there or to avail themselves of its protection, on account of a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular group, or political opinion."

It is not news when a politician lies, but to lie so egregiously seems to be the particular skill of Palestinian Arab politicians.

El-Sana said that by the UN's definition of the word "refugee" the Jews wouldn't qualify, because they weren't seeking asylum from persecution. This is news to the hundreds of thousands of Jews from Arab countries whose lives turned into hell after 1948. It is also amusing to hear a Palestinian Arab try to talk about the definition of "refugee" when the real definition of "refugee" would exclude nearly all Palestinian Arabs alive today.

As the quoted article notes laconically that "For particular, political reasons, the Convention puts Palestinian refugees outside its scope..." So for El-Sana to quote the UN definition of refugees when his own people do not qualify is just another example of how, to Palestinian Arabs, laws are malleable to their own desires.

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PLO hypocrisy on "Right of Return"

Looking a little further at the PLO's official positions as mentioned in their Mission to the US website, we see this stunning piece of hypocrisy:

Refugees and the Right of Return

Palestinian refugees must be given the option to exercise their right of return (as well as receive compensation for their losses arising from their dispossession and displacement) though refugees may prefer other options such as: (i) resettlement in third countries, (ii) resettlement in a newly independent Palestine (even though they originate from that part of Palestine which became Israel) or (iii) normalization of their legal status in the host country where they currently reside. What is important is that individual refugees decide for themselves which option they prefer – a decision must not be imposed upon them.

If Option (iii) is on the table, then why does there have to be a Palestinian Arab state beforehand? The stateless Palestinian Arabs could simply choose to become residents of their host countries today!

There are two groups of people that prevent that from happening: Arab leaders and Palestinian Arab leaders, including the leader of the PLO today.

The Arab League specified in 1959 that Palestinian Arabs, alone among all Arabs, were excluded from becoming citizens of Arab countries (see page 144-145 here.)

And how does the PLO leader react to this obvious case of injustice and discrimination? By agreeing with it, of course. On at least three occasions in the past couple of years, Mahmoud Abbas confirmed that he does not want Palestinian Arabs in Lebanon to have the option of becoming full citizens of the country they were born in.

The only recognized Palestinian Arab leader has said many times that he does not want Palestinian "refugees" to have the option of becoming citizens in their host countries. Yet the PLO website lies, to a Western audience, by claiming that they want to give the refugees a choice as to where they want to live!

See also this article where we learn that Arafat had zero interest in helping out the "refugees." The only time that Palestinian Arab leaders show interest in the refugees is if they think that they can help destroy Israel - otherwise, they like to see them rot.

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Abbas to Lebanese PalArabs: "Screw you"

From Ma'an:

Palestinian refugees in Lebanon will not be offered Lebanese passports, President Mahmoud Abbas said on Monday following his meeting with Lebanese President Michel Suleiman at the Republican Palace. Abbas’ remark quashed recent rumors concerning the issuing of Lebanese passports to Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, adding that the refugees’ presence in the country is temporary, particularly as Lebanon’s membership in the UN Security Council next year will help the Palestinian cause.

Generations have grown up in Lebanon, raised families, and died, but their supposed "leader" is more interested in them keeping their stateless status rather than giving them the simple choice of allowing them to be more integrated into the land of their birth. Mahmoud Abbas, that supposedly moderate leader of the PA, the PLO and Fatah, who claims to represent millions of people of Palestinian Arab descent, has once again told his people to go screw themselves rather than give them the option of happiness as full citizens of other Arab lands. He arrogantly claims to know what is best for his people, and is dead-set against giving them the option of making their own decisions. Because he knows that the majority them would not choose to put their families through the hell that they have gone through thanks to the decisions of Arab leaders over the past six decades. Palestinian Arabs who choose to become citizens of Arab countries will, by and large, never choose to move to an eventual "Palestine." They will identify only peripherally as "Palestinian." They will lose their value as pawns to corrupt, arrogant "leaders" who pretend to know what is best for them, and whose power derives from their very misery. Moreover, if Arab countries would give PalArabs full citizenship, a significant number of Palestinian Arabs in the territories - hundreds of thousands, if not over a million - would happily move to Saudi Arabia or Kuwait or Dubai. (Ironically, they would also have a positive influence on most of their host Arab countries, as they tend to be better educated and harder working, and Gulf countries import many workers from Indonesia and Africa, causing many problems that could be avoided if Palestinian Arab workers replaced them.) The operative word here is "choice." Palestinian Arabs are not given the power to choose where to live, and Arab nations specifically deny them the ability to become citizens that they give all other Arabs. Yet there are no "pro-Palestinian" organizations tha lobby on behalf of real Palestinian Arabs. They all repeat the lie that they can best help them by fighting Israel, militarily or politically. It is a myth, and one that is easily disproven - it has not helped them one bit in 61 years. "Human rights" organizations may mention some of these problems in isolation but they do not push for the simplest, fairest and cheapest solution to the problem of millions of stateless people. Abbas, the one person who pretends to represent his people the best, tells his suffering would-be constituents that their six-decade old problem is "temporary." This is a travesty of human rights. The way to tell if someone is truly pro-Palestinian Arab or is simply using the Palestinian Arabs as pawns to help destroy Israel is to ask him one simple question: Do you support giving all Palestinian Arabs the choice to become full citizens of any Arab country that they desire, according to the existing naturalization rules that they have for other Arabs? This is the question that needs to be asked of every Arab leader, every Palestinian Arab leader, every NGO, every human rights organization. It should be hammered in during every interview. They must be forced to answer the question clearly and forcefully. Unless they can answer that question in the affirmative, the inescapable conclusion is that most people who pretend to be "pro-Palestinian" are nothing more than liars and hypocrites who support discrimination against the very people they claim they want to help.

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Suffering "Palestinians" treated like dirt in Lebanon

From Al-Arabiya:

Saeed Mohamed Hammo technically does not exist as far as the world is concerned. But as he recounts his life as a Palestinian refugee in Lebanon, his story is very much real.

Hammo, 61, is among an estimated 3,000 to 5,000 so-called "non-ID Palestinians" in Lebanon who are considered illegal aliens and who have lived in legal limbo, many of them for decades.

They have no freedom of movement, no right to work and no access to medical services or education.

Lebanon recognizes as refugees only Palestinians who fled here following the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

The majority of the non-ID Palestinians came to Lebanon in the 1970s following the events known as Black September, when Jordan kicked out the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and thousands of Palestinian fighters.

As such, they are not considered refugees by Lebanese authorities and have no official status.

"Non-ID Palestinians live in harsh conditions and are deprived of some of the most important and basic human rights," Mireille Chiha, of the Danish Refugee Council office in Beirut, told AFP.

"They have no freedom of movement, can't purchase a car or motorbike and they don't benefit from the services of the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees," she added. "Even within the refugee camps, they are referred to as the 'ghareeb' or foreigner.

Jamileh Mohammed Salloum, 40, is Lebanese and married a non-ID Palestinian at the age of 18 without realizing the hardships that awaited her and the three children she would bear.

A Lebanese woman is legally not entitled to pass on her citizenship to her children or spouse.

"I never in my wildest dreams imagined that my children would have no rights and that my country would treat me like this," she said angrily. "Where are the human rights that everyone likes to talk about?

"My children don't even know Palestine, they are Lebanese."

Even though regular Palestinian Arab descendants of 1948 refugees have limited rights in Lebanon, the ones who were driven out of Jordan - the PLO heroes - are in even worse shape. This is an entirely Arab-created problem, of "Palestinians" who have never been in Palestine and whose troubles have been exclusively the result of Arab decisions.

Notice also that it appears likely that UNRWA's bizarre definition of "refugee" that inflates the number of real refugees from 1948 by a factor of 10 or so is now being used by Lebanon against the children of Jordanian "Palestinian" refugees from the 1970s. These children born in Lebanon should be Lebanese citizens by any definition - even UNRWA's - but the notion of descendants of Palestinian Arabs being "refugees" is so ingrained by the UN that thousands of people are suffering because of it.

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Shame is the best weapon

From Ma'an:

The UNRWA budget will reach zero by the New Year and threaten the regular payment of salaries for UNRWA workers as well as the level of services for refugees, the organization’s media consultant Adnan Abu Hasana said Tuesday from Gaza.

Large international donors are not paying what they used to, the number of individuals depending on UNRWA services are increasing, and several Arab states have failed to follow-through on aid pledges, the spokesman said.

...Additionally, Abu Hasana said, Arab countries have not fulfilled their commitments to the League of Arab States, which pledged to pay 8% of UNRWA’s budget. The official added that last year the Arab League was only able to transfer payments amounting to 1% of the UNRWA budget.

I am no fan of UNRWA. However, most of the world feels that giving Arabs of Palestinian descent welfare forever while not pressuring Arab states to give them citizenship is a good thing. Given that, how can the Arab states justify their reprehensible role in withholding funds for their fellow Arabs?

Here are the top nation-donors to UNRWA's General Fund in 2008:

1	EC	139,685,831
2	USA	95,726,691
3	Sweden	40,645,161
4	UK	37,498,826
5	Norway	27,574,498
6	Netherlands	23,328,149
7	Canada	16,763,476
8	Denmark	15,005,168
9	Italy	14,749,262
10	France	12,655,279
11	Switzerland	11,069,216
12	Germany	10,680,660
13	Spain	10,349,288
14	Japan	8,516,725
15	Ireland	5,919,003
16	Finland	4,672,897
17	Luxembourg	4,569,763
18	Australia	3,764,130
19	Belgium	3,009,532
20	Kuwait	2,499,958

Yes, Luxembourg gives nearly twice the money to UNRWA than any Arab country does.

So Arab nations deliberately keep their Palestinian Arab brethren stateless, and they don't even pretend to help the "refugees" - most of whom were born and will die in their host Arab nations.

With all the pressure that the EU and US like to put on Israel, why is there none to demand that Arab states step up to help solve the problem that they created? Why does the West not call out the Arabs on their hypocrisy of pretending to be in solidarity with the "Palestinian cause" while doing everything they can to perpetuate it?

Here is a beautiful example of where the West could use the honor/shame dynamic of Arab and Muslim countries to everyone's advantage. Sweden or the UK or even the UN could publicly chide Arab states for their complicity in Palestinian Arab misery, and the chart above is Exhibit A. If the West is so anti-Islam, why does it pay for 99% of the budget of the major organization that keeps these Arabs alive? More importantly, why do Arabs not even pay 87% of the pittance they pledge?

Why, in short, is the welfare of the Palestinian Arabs exclusively a Western problem?

Shame the rich Gulf states into paying at least half of the UNRWA budget. Create a ten or twenty year plan to take away the "refugee" status of Arabs born in Arab states and integrate them into their surrounding Arab society, and shame the Arab states into naturalizing the people that have been their "guests" for decades.

The weapon of shame costs nothing and would have better results than six decades of Western welfare. It would help the West, and it would help the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs who would happily become citizens of Arab countries. More importantly, using shame would nullify the usual self-serving Arab arguments for keeping Palestinian Arabs in misery. It exposes their hypocrisy and helps the very people who everyone agrees needs help.

There is no downside, except for the hypocrites who want to keep Palestinian Arabs in misery as pawns against Israel.

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Must read: The tragedy of the Palestinian Arab diaspora

The Independent has an excellent, and lengthy, article about the plight of Palestinian Arab "refugees" stuck in Arab countries and how they are treated. It starkly brings up points that this blog has been emphasizing for years about how Arab leaders have used them as pawns and how their definition of "refugees" has allowed these nations to flout their legal responsibilities. Here are some highlights:

It is a cynical but time-honoured practice in Middle Eastern politics: the statesmen who decry the political and humanitarian crisis of the approximately 3.9 million Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and in Gaza ignore the plight of an estimated 4.6 million Palestinians who live in Arab countries. For decades, Arab governments have justified their decision to maintain millions of stateless Palestinians as refugees in squalid camps as a means of applying pressure to Israel. The refugee problem will be solved, they say, when Israel agrees to let the Palestinians have their own state.

Yet in the two decades since the end of the Cold War, after two Gulf wars, and the rise and fall of the Oslo peace process, not a single Palestinian refugee has returned to Israel – and only a handful of ageing political functionaries have returned from neighbouring Arab countries to the West Bank and Gaza. Instead, failed peace plans and shifting political priorities have resulted in a second Palestinian "Nakba", or catastrophe – this one at hands of the Arab governments.

The inclusion of the descendants of Palestinian refugees as refugees in UNRWA's mandate has no parallel in international humanitarian law and is responsible for the growth of the official numbers of Palestinian refugees in foreign countries from 711,000 to 4.6 million during decades when the number of ageing refugees from the 1948 Israeli war of independence in was in fact declining. UNRWA's grant of refugee status to the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the original Palestinian refugees according to the principle of patrilineal descent, with no limit on the generations that can obtain refugee status, has made it easy for host countries to flout their obligations under international law. According to Article 34 of the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, "The Contracting States shall as far as possible facilitate the assimilation and naturalisation of refugees," and must "make every effort to expedite naturalisation proceedings" – the opposite of what happened to the Palestinians in every Arab country in which they settled, save Jordan.

[T]he doveish former Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben Ami, who negotiated directly with Yasser Arafat at the failed Camp David meetings in 2000, asserted that...[i]ndifference to the refugees' plight was shared by Israel's negotiating partner in the Oslo years – Yasser Arafat. "He was not a refugee man," Ben Ami said flatly. "He was much more centred on the question of Jerusalem. I heard him say to [Mahmood Abbas] in my presence, 'leave me alone with your refugees'."

[T]he record of Arafat's Palestinian Authority in its territories during the 1990s attests to the truth of Ben Ami's observation, which applies both to Arafat's Fatah and to Hamas. Despite $10bn in foreign aid, not one refugee camp in the West Bank or Gaza has been replaced by modern housing.

After 60 years of failed wars, and failed peace, it is time to put politics aside and to insist that the basic rights of the Palestinian refugees in Arab countries be respected – whether or not their children's children return to Haifa anytime soon. While Saudi Arabia may not wish to host Israeli tourists, it can easily afford to integrate the estimated 240,000 Palestinian refugees who already live in the kingdom – just as Egypt, which has received close to $60bn in US aid, and has a population of 81 million, can grant legal rights to an estimated 70,000 Palestinian refugees and their descendants. One can only imagine the outrage that the world community would rightly visit upon Israel if Israeli Arabs were subject to the vile discriminatory laws applied to Palestinians living in Arab countries. Surely, Palestinian Arabs can keep their own national dream alive in the countries where they were born, while also enjoying the freedom to work, vote and own property?

...[E]ven in Jordan, which is in many ways a model for the humane treatment of a large refugee population, Palestinians today feel markedly less secure than they did two decades ago, or even five years ago.

The fact that the living standard of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon has been deemed "catastrophic" by both UNRWA and by the Lebanese government can therefore be understood as a deliberate result of official state policy that is supported by all parties across Lebanon's divided confessional spectrum. As a member of the Lebanese parliament, Ghassan Moukheiber, explained in an interview with the ICG, "our official policy is to maintain Palestinians in a vulnerable, precarious situation to diminish prospects for their naturalisation or permanent settlement".

The article emphasizes the political reasons that Arab countries do not want to integrate millions of people who were born and live their entire lives there, but it only touches upon (as I quoted above) how the Palestinian Arab leadership has encouraged this decades-long abuse of their brethren. The fact is that the PalArab leaders are afraid that their nationalism, carefully and artificially nutured by misery, would disappear if Palestinian Arabs would have full rights in Arab countries. This passage illustrates what would happen:

He seems perplexed when asked which is his country – Jordan or Palestine. "We have no security here, but we are Jordanians," replies Mustapha, who lounges on a mattress in a two-storey cement house down the road while one of his five daughters offers tiny glasses of steaming herbal tea and cardamom-scented coffee. "Everything I have is here. This house. My car. My job. What would I have in Nablus or Be'ersheba?" he declares. "My children know nothing but Jordan. And we will stay here."

So would millions of others, if given the chance. And the sixty-year old fear is that if that happens, the world will realize that Palestinian nationalism and identity is a purely 20th century phenomenon, artificially nurtured by twin policies of demonization of Israel and purposeful abuse of millions of people.

This article is way overdue and will hopefully be followed by others in other outlets.
(h/t Media Backspin)

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UNHCR decreases real refugees; UNRWA increases fake ones

From Ma'an:

One hundred and forty Palestinian refugees who fled Iraq to Syria left that country for Norway this week, where they were granted asylum.

The Palestinians were living in three refugee camps: Al-Walid camp, on the Iraqi side of the Syrian border which houses 1,549 refugees; Al-Tanf camp, also located on the border and home to 747 refugees; Al-Hol camp, in Syrian territory and houses 331 Palestinian refugees.

In a statement, the National Organization for Human Rights in Syria called on “the Syrian and the Jordanian governments to allow the entry of Palestinian refugees from Iraq and asked for their protection from persecution, and respect and protection for their human rights.”

In July, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees said it planned to move 98 Palestinians from Syria to a temporary “transit camp” in Slovakia.

Romania opened a similar camp last year, and the US, Chile, and several European countries have taken in many of the thousands of Palestinians who were stranded after the start of the US-led occupation of Iraq in 2003.

The UNHCR moves these Arab refugees from Iraq, of Palestinian ancestry, to countries where they will be welcomed and become normal citizens.

And none of those countries are Arab.

The only "Palestinian refugees" that exist in Arab countries are the ones who cannot become citizens and that fall under the control of UNRWA, not UNHCR. Because UNRWA happily allows Arab countries to practice discrimination against Palestinian Arabs, and it happily goes along with their keeping them stateless and often homeless. It does not make an attempt anymore to move the grandchildren of the refugees out of "refugee" camps and into real houses. It doesn't chide Lebanon for limiting the types of jobs Arabs of Palestinian origin can have or for not allowing them to buy land. UNRWA is happy to define children and grandchildren and great-granchildren of Palestinian Arabs as "refugees" (of course, they explicitly exclude the Palestinian Jews who were forced to move out of Gush Etzion and east Jerusalem from being considered "Palestinian refugees.")

UNHCR tries to make the refugee problem go away. UNRWA is invested in keeping the problem going forever.

And as such, they are partners with the Palestinian Arab leadership who have enshrined their own desire to keep people in camps forever in the Fatah platform I mentioned yesterday:

The [Fatah] Movement believes in the need to preserve the camp[s], [which are] a key symbol to the political refugees who have been deprived from returning to their homes until a solution to their cause, and the need to adhere to the administration of an international relief agency [UNRWA] and a recognition of the cause of refugees until they return to their homes and their country.

See? Everyone agrees that Palestinian Arabs should be in misery! Arab leaders enforce it, the PLO/Fatah enshrines it, and the UNRWA perpetuates it.

The only people who disagree are the Palestinian Arabs themselves.

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