Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: refugees

Showing posts with label refugees. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 22, 2023

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Document at UNRWA site admits UNRWA's definition of "refugee" is not valid in international law

The UN Human Rights Council issued a document last week by its reliably anti-Isrsel team of "experts" demanding that Palestinian "refugees" have the right to "return" under international law.

Right of return of Palestinian refugees must be prioritised over political considerations: UN experts

2022 marked the largest ever increase in the number of forcibly displaced persons worldwide, with over 108 million people across the globe uprooted from their homes, more than half are women and girls....

This reality is all too familiar for the Palestinian people, 75 years since the Nakba - the event that shattered Palestinian lives and severed their ancestral connection to their land during the establishment of the State of Israel. Since then, they have endured forced displacement, dispossession, and disenfranchisement, with their rights to self-determination, restitution, and compensation repeatedly denied. For 75 years, their cry for justice, embodied in the demand for the right to return, has resounded with unwavering determination.

For Palestinians, forced displacement has become part of their life for generations, tracing back to 1947-1949 when over 750,000 Palestinians were forced to flee massacres and mass expulsions and forcible transfers during the birth of the State of Israel. The majority, along with their descendants, are still in neighbouring Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, while 40 per cent of them remain under occupation in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, since 1967. Progressively, Palestinian exile has scattered them across various nations globally.

Since 1948, both the General Assembly and the Security Council have consistently called upon Israel to facilitate the return of Palestinian refugees and provide reparations. Despite these repeated appeals, Palestinian refugees have been systematically denied of their right to return and forced to live in exile under precarious and vulnerable conditions outside the borders of Palestine.

The thing is, even the UN admits that these Palestinian Arabs are not legally considered refugees.

The UNHCR's Refugee Survey Quarterly in 2010 has an article by Riccardo Bocco, a professor at the University of Geneva, looking at the history of UNRWA. It is hosted at the UNRWA website, today. ASnd it admits what we have been writing here for years: the UNRWA working definition of "Palestine refugee" has nothing to do with international law.

In looking at who is a Palestinian refugee, there is no definitive response. The definition and the number of Palestinian refugees can differ according to the approach (administrative, juridical, political) used to define Palestinian refugees and also according to the social context of interaction between Palestinians (registered refugees or not) and others and the actors defining them. UNRWA, particularly at the beginning of its mandate, lacked a fixed definition; this changed mainly due to a need to delimit the number of relief recipients. When the Agency began its activities, it inherited a legacy of inflated registration: the United Nations Economic Survey Mission recorded approximately 720,000 people, while the number of recipients on the ration rolls of the United Nations Relief for Palestine Refugees (UNRPR) surpassed 950,000. It is the 1952 definition that has become the accepted one and has remained virtually unchanged: “a Palestine refugee shall mean any person whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period June 1, 1946 to May 15, 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict”.

Some remarks should be noted.... [T]he descendants of original registered refugees inherited UNRWA’s administrative title independently of the fact that they may have obtained a nationality and/or left the Agency’s fields of operation.

It is important to emphasize that the UNRWA definition of a Palestine refugee is an administrative one and does not translate directly into recognition by international law. Furthermore, a tacit understanding seems to prevail: UNRWA’s continued existence (and the associated Palestine refugee status) is directly linked to the realization of a permanent resolution to the Palestine refugee issue.

Four crucial facts are listed here:

1. Over 30% of the original "refugee" population UNRWA registered were not refugees, and took that status illicitly. They have never been purged.

2. The UNRWA definition of "refugee" is administrative, not legal, and has nothing to do with the legal definition of refugee under international law and the Refugee Convention.

3. UNRWA "refugees" and their descendants are still considered "registered refugees" even if they move away from UNRWA areas, even if they obtain citizenship elsewhere - not only Jordan but also EU countries and the US. This is a truly absurd situation that is impossible for any real refugee; it is axiomatic that one cannot be a refugee while simultaneously being a citizen of a state. But millions of Palestinians are. So we have an absurd situation where American multi-millionaire supermodels (whose father's family voluntarily walked away from their home in Safed in 1948) are still considered "Palestine refugees."

4. UNRWA has a conflict of interest between staying in business and a sane definition of "refugee." . This is a major reason why it does not have any cessation clauses as UNHCR does. "Palestine refugees" are forever.

All of these facts are damning,. And they are on UNRWA's own website, today.

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What @UNRWA's head didn't tell the UN Security Council

On Thursday, UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini gave a statement to the UN Security Council saying, as the agency has said every year for decades, that it is in existential danger.

There is plenty UNRWA can do to cut costs, though.

For example, it can close nearly all of its operations in Jordan, with some 2 million so-called refugees. The vast majority of them are Jordanian citizens, and UNRWA has never explained why it is needed to provide services like schooling and free medical care to people who are full citizens of Jordan, and who are not refugees by any definition. Why should Palestinian children in Jordan attend different schools from other Jordanians? Why should they get free housing in "camps" when they have the same opportunities as other Jordanians?

The UNRWA recipients who live in the West Bank and Gaza are not refugees either - after all, they live in the areas of British Mandate Palestine. To call the descendants of those who left from the pre-1967 borders of Israel "refugees" is insane, but it is even crazier to consider them "internally displaced persons" after 73 years. They are citizens of "The State of Palestine." They have passports recognized by most countries. They should be taken care of by their own governments of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas; there is no reason for UNRWA to exist there.

Lazzarini touched upon how UNRWA's Lebanon "refugees" are emigrating to Europe. What he didn't mention is that most of the "registered refugees" have already left, but UNRWA still counts them as people they are helping. UNRWA claims to be helping 479,000 "refugees" in Lebanon, when the actual number is 300,000 less. Hundreds of thousands of UNRWA "registered refugees" live in Europe or the US but UNRWA still claims them as their own. This would be considered a scandal for any other publicly funded institution.

Also left unsaid is why the UN is responsible for the education, housing and medical care of Palestinians - but no other groups. They spout slogans to justify their existence like "Education is a right" - but why does the world have to pay for that right for Palestinians and not for suffering people anywhere else?

Lazzarini did mention the people like me who point out these issues and topics that he avoids answering. "Coordinated campaigns to delegitimize UNRWA with a view to erode the rights of Palestine refugees are increasing in frequency and in maliciousness," he told the Security Council. I didn't know that the many critics of UNRWA throughout the decades were part of a "coordinated campaign." This is Elders of Zion-level conspiracy thinking.

Lazzarini also said, "Shifting geopolitical priorities, shifting regional dynamics, and the emergence of new humanitarian crises have deprioritized the Israeli- Palestinian conflict." In plain English, this means that even though the world has much bigger problems and crises to deal with, it must prioritize Palestinians above all of them - because if they were given the priority commensurate with their actual importance, the UNRWA budget would plummet.

And that is the key issue. UNRWA's existence implies that Palestinian "refugees" are more important, more desperate, needier, poorer, and hungrier than any other refugees and any current victims of war. By any objective measure, they are in better shape than the citizens of many poor countries. The vast majority do not meet the definition of "refugee" in the Refugee Convention.

UNRWA was created to be a temporary agency. Lazzarini's appeal is to ensure that it remains permanent, and that it continues to grow unimpeded, forever.

It is up to the world that created UNRWA to create a plan to phase it out.

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Arab countries again spurn UNRWA at pledging conference

UNRWA held a pledging conference in New York starting on Thursday. While it managed to get an additional $160 million in funding, it says it is still $100 million short of its needs.

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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When Israel tried to give permanent homes to Palestinians in "refugee" camps

From the Christian Science Monitor, May 26, 1992:

Numerous efforts have been made to resettle [Palestinian] refugees, but all have failed. In 1950, long before the territories came under Israeli control, UNRWA suggested moving 150,000 of them to Libya, but Egypt objected. In 1951, UNRWA vetoed a plan to move 50,000 Palestinian refugees from the Gaza Strip to Northern Sinai when Egypt refused permission to use the Nile waters to irrigate proposed agricultural settlements. In 1952, Syria rejected UNRWA's initiative to resettle 85,000 refugees in camps in that country. In 1959, UNRWA reported that of the $250 million fund for rehabilitation created in 1950 to provide homes and jobs for the refugees outside of the camps, only $7 million had been spent.

In the early 1970s, Israel initiated what it called the "build your own home" program. A half a dunam of land outside the camps (equal to about an eighth of an acre) was given to Palestinians who then financed the purchase of building materials and, usually with friends, erected a home. Israel provided the infrastructure: sewers, schools, etc. More than 11,000 camp dwellers were resettled into 10 different neighborhoods before the PLO, using intimidation tactics, ended the program.

Israeli authorities say that if people were able to stand up to the PLO and if it had the funds to invest in the infrastructure, within eight years every camp resident could own a single-dwelling home in a clean and uncongested neighborhood.

I have written about this Israeli initiative beforehand but didn't know the actual numbers of Palestinians who took advantage of moving out of UNRWA camps before the PLO started threatening them.

The UN General Assembly also passed resolutions condemning Israel for giving Palestinians free land and infrastructure as an opportunity to improve their lives.

If it wasn't for PLO threats, by 2000 there could have been no more UNRWA camps in the territories and every resident could have owned their own home and land - for free.

This one episode shows that Israel cares about the well-being of Palestinians more than the PLO ever did. On the contrary, the PLO is invested in keeping its own people in misery .

The "pro-Palestinian" groups who are protesting Israeli normalization with other Arab countries follow that tradition of preferring that Palestinian "refugees" stay without homes they can call their own - so they can blame their situation on Israel.

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Some very progressive people seem to prefer drowned Palestinians to living ones

Israel is again being vilified, this time for revealing last week that it has been working to find ways for Gazans to voluntarily move to Europe.

Israel is actively promoting the emigration of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, and is working to find other countries who may be willing to absorb them, a senior Israeli official said Monday.

Israel is ready to carry the costs of helping Gazans emigrate, and would even be willing to consider allowing them to use an Israeli air field close to Gaza to allow them to leave for their new host countries, the official said, apparently referring to air force bases deep inside Israel.

The senior official, in Ukraine as part of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s delegation to Kiev, spoke on condition of anonymity.

It was not very wise to publicize this plan, given that Israel found no country in Europe willing to take Gazans voluntarily.

People like Haaretz' Amira Hass are clucking about how terrible Israel is for considering such a thing.

While no one doubts it is in Israel's interest to encourage Palestinian migration, these critics who claim to care so much about Palestinians are ignoring the fact that many Palestinians desperately want to leave Gaza and the West Bank - and some are willing to risk their lives to do so.

A month ago, two boats capsized off of Libya's coast, filled with 300 would-be refugees to Europe - including many Palestinians.

Nearly 1400 Palestinians managed to reach Greece in ramshackle boats so far this year alone.

An estimated 35-40,000 Palestinians have left Gaza in the past year alone. That's 2% of the total population of Gaza, and they mostly left through Egypt which has severe restrictions on how many can leave.

If the "pro-Palestinian" side actually cared about Palestinians, wouldn't they want a safe means that Palestinians could leave if they choose?

"Voluntary transfer" is phrased as if it is a means of ethnic cleansing, but it is voluntary. No one is forced to leave. Going through Israel, subsidized, to go to Europe - even though the plan has not worked out - is far more humane than forcing thousands of Palestinians to resort to going on rickety and dangerous boats. Even if Israel has ulterior motives, the plan is still more humane than any alternative.

For members of the supposedly progressive crowd, Israel's support for a plan that can save Palestinian lives is enough reason to oppose it. Think about that.

These critics don't actually care about Palestinians but only want more excuses to use them to attack Israel.

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Something new for "human rights" groups to ignore: Lebanon says it will shut down any shop that employs Palestinians "illegally"

The Arab world's discrimination against Palestinians continues.

On July 10, Lebanese Labor Minister Kamil Abu Sulaiman launched a campaign to combat "illegal foreign workers" in different parts of Lebanon, including the closure of shops that employ foreign workers illegally and the seizing of companies employing foreign workers without work permits, in order to give priority to local Lebanese workers.

It is meant to be a response to the influx of Syrian refugees into Lebanon who need work, but it disproportionately affects the Palestinians who have lived in Lebanon for decades but are still considered foreign workers who are banned, by law, from many jobs.

Lebanese law prohibits Palestinians from practicing more than 60 professions. In addition, they have to go through extra administrative tasks beyond that in order to obtain work permits.

Palestinian factions protested the government move, saying that they are appreciative to Lebanon's government for opposing the "Deal of the Century" but expressing concern over these new laws that will affect them disproportionately.

According to the 2017 census, the number of Palestinians in Lebanon stands at 174,422 individuals living in 12 camps and 156 communities in different areas of Lebanon. UNRWA says there are over 450,000 "registered Palestine refugees." Which means that conditions in Lebanon are so bad for Palestinians that over 60% of them had no choice but to leave with their families.

Needless to say, Palestinians under "occupation" in the West Bank do not emigrate in such high numbers.

This supposedly friendly Arab country treats Palestinians worse than Israel does by every single metric. Yet the media and supposedly "pro-Palestinian" groups are virtually silent at official Lebanese policy to disenfranchise Palestinians.

Which just proves that the real reason anyone pretends to care about Palestinians is because they hate Israel, not because they give a damn about Palestinian human rights.

Indeed, even the criticisms of Lebanon by Palestinians themselves is muted and attenuated with praise for their supposed - and fictional - support for the Palestinian cause. The only vitriol is for Israel, which seems to care more about their actual human rights than most Arabs do.

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