Middle East Facts: Why is the Palestinian Arab refugee problem still here?

Why is the Palestinian Arab refugee problem still here?

The question of why the Palestinian refugees are still here could be considered sufficiently answered by my page looking at how the UNRWA handles Palestinian refugees. The U.N.’s bloated estimates of how many initial Palestinian Arab refugees were created in the 1948 Palestine War followed by redefining who was to be identified as a refugee gave us the initial exaggerated figures the UN works with. Then owing to the unprecedented inclusion of refugee offspring being considered brand new refugees, the Palestinian Arab refugee population has exploded rather than what traditionally occurs with a refugee population over the years (assuming no new hostilities ¹), which is a decrease in size. Finally, the U.N. sees fit to remove the responsibility for finding a solution to these refugees from the UNRWA, the only organization handling them in the territories.

The U.N. has engineered the failure from the start, and can fix it at any time but doesn’t. It really is quite a stunning example of inhumanity in the midst of the United Nations; the same international arena so often heralded as the cure to humanitarian crisis. As confusing as the U.N. refusing to reverse their earlier incompetence seems on the surface, there are reasons that make the whole situation downright logical. Exploitative to be sure, but logical.

Dr. Pinner writing in the 60’s uses figures from that timeframe to point out “the simple financial interest of the Host-Countries [where the refugees reside]. For the number of Refugees which UNRWA allows them to record … they receive food, educational services and the salaries and wages for 12,000 men as UNRWA’s Area Staff. For every man reported re-settled (with his family an average of at least 5 persons) the country might lose an annual UNRWA-contribution worth 100 Dollars. For 367,500 Non-Refugees and 75,000 duplicated children Jordan might lose nearly 9,000,000 Dollars per year in UNRWA’s allocations and with the number of re-settlers among the genuine Refugees over 10,000,000 Dollars. If UNRWA’s Area Staff salaries would cease to be paid as well, the financial loss to Jordan might be higher by several million Dollars per annum. The figures for Syria or Lebanon are much smaller, but the principle is the same. It is not easy for a country to renounce a source of foreign income which the United Nations have provided for so many years and which the Agency of the United Nations defends with all its moral vigour. But from a purely personal point of view, 12,000 Arab employees of UNRWA might lose their jobs.” ²

Another critical piece of data to keep in mind when pondering why the Palestinian refugees are being perpetuated for so long is the fact that “UNRWA employs some 24,324 staff, of whom more than 99 per cent are locally-recruited Palestinians, almost all of them Palestine refugees.”³ So what we have is an organization that caters exclusively to Palestinian refugees which is also being run almost exclusively by Palestinian refugees. Some would see a problem here. Palestinians in the territories have extremely high rates of unemployment. Close to 25,000 Palestinians view the UNRWA as an employer that will soon be going away, taking their jobs and its aid with it, should the refugees ever be permanently resettled. The implications for the Palestinian economy were that to occur would be huge and something neither the PA, nor Hamas, is ready to deal with. The benefits bestowed upon by the UNRWA upon the Palestinian Arab refugee community is striking in contrast to Arabs in the region who do not enjoy its perpetual assistance:

“Over the course of their 50-year residence, housing within the camp areas radically improved from canvas tents to permanent structured housing that compared … with housing afforded by many non-refugee Arabs living in the host countries. The major difference … is that approximately 70 percent of the refugees living in UNRWA camps owned their own homes, and those who didn’t paid no rent, no municipal taxes, and had access to free water and sanitation services. … UNRWA … provided still a variety of vital medical services, among them prenatal care, medicine, and vaccination. According to conventional health indicators, the outcome for Palestinian refugees was … considerably better than most found in developing countries. But the most enriching form of entitlement … was education. Elementary and secondary education in camps generated literacy rates … that were even higher than rates achieved by non-refugees. In fact, rates for Palestinian refugees in Jordan turned out to be more akin to those in Southern Europe than in the Middle East.”⁴

“… even the 1.2 million refugees remaining in camps … have acquired standards of living that rival many of those in the open economies of the Middle East and continue to be conspicuously superior to the standards of living associated with the millions of UNHCR’s refugee populations and even the hundreds of millions of non-refugee populations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.”⁵

“… many mercenaries remained in the country [Palestine] after the 1936 – 1938 riots. … When the War of Independence broke out … they shed their uniforms and joined the fleeing refugees. They, too, were absorbed in the refugee camps and were treated as full-fledged Palestinian refugees. … they had joined the various ‘Forces of Deliverance’ not only for nationalist reasons. Economic factors and love of adventure provided additional motives. These defeated ‘Foreign Legionnaires’ preferred to remain in the refugee camps, there to enjoy the relative economic security that their refugee status afforded them.”⁶

"Clearly, the population involved, and the UNRWA bureaucracy itself, had an interest in preserving the inflated lists in order to gain extra food rations for households and larger allocations for services (education, health, housing, etc.) in the camps."⁷

Don't Forget the Politics

Financial motivation for prolonging the Palestinian Arab refugee situation is not the only one. They also serve a valuable political purpose; being exploited in almost every way possible as a veritable Swiss Army knife of Arab nationalist and religious grievance. These refugees exist as an ever-present source of outrage the Arab nations can and do use as leverage in most any disagreement or negotiation that may arise with “the West”. Not to mention the convenient justification for violence and killing and perpetual terrorism. Were the Palestinian refugees to have been settled long ago as should have happened, it would be harder for us Westerners to understandwhat leads a human being to strap on a bomb and murder dozens of civilians riding a bus or shopping in a market.

With a constant finger pointed in the refugees’ direction, this and all manner of other violent behavior, which serves as a major tactic in the daily war against Israel, appears much more reasonable than it would on its own and morphs from blatant hatred and racism to a more noble “national struggle” for “independence”. The existence of the refugees fuels the “No justice, no peace” mantra which appeals to the modern Western mind in stark contrast to the historic Middle Eastern reality of “No power, no peace”.

Thanks to the ongoing presence of the Palestinian refugees, a claim can be advanced, however treacherous it may be, that the terrorism is simply the expected result of an occupied and dislocated people acting out their victimhood, an explanation many of today’s world leaders are all too eager to buy into. The fact that the surrounding Arab governments couldn't be happier keeping the refugee problem alive and well escapes them.

"The Arab States do not want to solve the refugee problem. They want to keep it as an open sore, as an affront to the United Nations and as a weapon against Israel. Arab leaders don’t give a damn whether the refugees live or die.⁸

"Since 1948 Arab leaders have approached the Palestine problem in an irresponsible manner. They have not looked into the future. They have no plan or approach. They have used the Palestine people for selfish political purposes. This is ridiculous and, I could say, even criminal."⁹

Benny Morris articulates the strategy behind the Arab states’ refusing to allow the refugees to be resettled, placing them “in a no-lose situation. Israeli refusal to take back the refugees, leaving them in misery, would turn world opinion and perhaps western governments against the Jewish state on humanitarian grounds. Israeli agreement to take back all or many of the refugees would result in the political and demographic destabilization of the Jewish state, with clear military implications. All of Israel’s leaders appreciated this: The refugees had become a ‘political weapon against the Jews’.”¹⁰

“The refugees, wrote Sasson, had become a scapegoat. No one pays attention to them, no one listens to their demands, explanations and suggestions. But … all use their problem for purposes which have almost no connection to the aspirations of the refugees themselves … while all the Arab states demanded the refugees’ repatriation, in practice none of them, ‘save Lebanon’, wanted this. Jordan and Syria wanted to hold on to their refugees in order to receive international relief aid; the Egyptians wanted the problem to remain in order to destabilize Jordan and Israel.”¹¹ “In general, one can say that Arab governments regarded the destruction of the State of Israel as a more pressing matter than the welfare of the Palestinian refugees. Palestinian bitterness and anger had to be kept alive. … this could best be done by ensuring that a great many Palestinians Arabs continued to live under sub-normal conditions, the victims of hunger and poverty."¹² “The status and future of the Arabs living in Palestine is essentially a secondary matter to be settled later, or fought over, among the Arabs themselves. For the time being the resources of the Arab world must be concentrated on camouflaging the reason for Israel’s liquidation as a solution to a human problem – the problem of ‘homeless’ Palestinians. The Egyptian journal El Muswar in December 1968 admitted frankly: ‘The expulsion of our brothers from their homes should not cause us any anxiety, especially as they were driven into Arab countries … The masses of the Palestinian people are only the advance-guard of the Arab nation … a plan for rousing world opinion in stages, as it would not be able to understand or accept a war by a hundred million Arabs against a small state.’”¹³ "Some 30 years later, John McCarthy of the U.S. Catholic Conference described his efforts to work with Arab governments to solve the refugee problem. They refused, he said, even to attempt to resettle the refugees within their own land, insisting that resettlements could only take place in Israel. ‘The Arab countries don’t want to take Arabs. It’s discriminating against their own…” said McCarthy. As for the refugees themselves, ‘These people,’ he said, ‘are simply pawns.’"²¹ "From their Arab brethren in surrounding states, the Palestinian Arabs received little more than verbal support. In the late 1940s, the inter-Arab system was rife with personal and national jealousies. No Arab country stepped forward to promote exclusively the Palestinian Arab cause, and the newly born Arab League was relatively ineffective. Each Arab state was fixated on its own national development ..."²²

"The refugee problem has become a political issue which each country uses in whatever way best suits its purpose. The Lebanese hesitate to naturalize the refugees within their borders for fear of upsetting the control at present exercised by the Christian majority. The Jordanians naturalized most of them immediately because sparsely populated Jordan, an anomalous expression of the nation-State created by fiat of Great Britain, is in need of people in order to strengthen its hand at the council tables. The Syrians and Egyptians can point to the refugees and say, "See what happened because we did not have a strong army," and use that as a refrain in the building up of a strong army. There may even be some people who champion the Arabs' cause against the Zionists in response to latent or subconscious anti-Jewish prejudices, which they had been harboring without even knowing it or admitting it to themselves."²³

On top of all this, the Palestinian refugees are forced to accept no other solution to their refugee status than repatriation (returning to exactly where they left from as opposed to settling elsewhere) no matter how unlikely that may be. The Arab states surrounding the Palestinians have long since contributed to this expectation due to their stubborn refusal to allow the refugees to settle within their co-Arab borders.

“The Palestinians are the only refugees who cannot and must not be absorbed elsewhere; their fate is to be played up as the mirror image of the Wandering Jew.”¹⁴

“The decision to sacrifice them [the Palestinian Aab refugees] to the cause of Israel’s destruction was clearly enunciated in the aftermath of 1948-49 (keep them in camps so they can learn hate and seek revenge), and no action by Arab elites has shown evidence of a change of heart.”¹⁵

“While cooperating with UNRWA … none of the host governments – Jordan excepted – was willing to accept refugees as a matter of policy. Their resistance to resettlement, at least from their point of view, was well reasoned. The 1949 armistice notwithstanding, Arab governments still did not accept Israel’s legitimacy and to agree to resettlement as a resolution to the refugee problem would be tantamount to acknowledging the permanence of Israel. Self preservation was another factor. In the view of the 1954 U.S. Special Study Mission to the Near East: ‘...any Arab political leader suggesting an alternative to repatriation in what was formerly Palestine would have been ousted from office and, perhaps, have run the risk of assassination. … some Arab governments feared that absorption of refugees could well undermine their own political stability. The Lebanese government … believed that adding the large number of Palestinian refugees already in Lebanon … most of whom were Sunni – would undermine Lebanon’s delicate political sectarian balance. The Lebanese concern about internal security was not unique. Historian Benny Morris, commenting on the 1948–49 negotiations concerning repatriation and resettlement argued that the Arab states regarded the refugees as a potential Fifth Column”¹⁶

The collective Arab nations identify the absorption of fellow Arab Palestinian refugees as a national security threat, and for that reason refuse, all the while expecting Israel alone to shoulder the burden. Let me emphasize that the nations who are loathe to accept these Palestinian refugees into their borders based on security concerns are fundamentally brethren, sharing linguistic, religious, and cultural similarities. Israel, on the other hand, shares none of these traits with the refugees, and has instead been the target of their deadly terrorism and racial demonization for generations. But when Israel mentions national security to explain their refusal to welcome a deluge of Palestinians who for the most part are hostile to a Jewish state, her critics more easily see racism than the very real security concerns even Arab nations acknowledge. Yes, that is a double-standard.

“What is significant about 50 years of UNRWA is not that it was a refugee agency that served the Arab Palestinian refugee population with much affect, but that it continues to do so despite the fact that the majority of Palestinians have reintegrated into the open economies of the Middle East and elsewhere defacto, and that most of those who still remain in refugee camps – after 50 years – do so in the Palestinian homeland. By all accounts, the refugee status of the overwhelming numbers of Palestinian refugees should have expired somewhere along that 50-year range. But it continues. And therein lies the essence of its moral hazard. UNRWA was reinvented to serve political agendas unrelated to its initial and honourable mission. Forced to abandon the pursuit of assisting refugees to get on with their lives – repatriation or resettlement – it became strictly a caretaker agency, dispensing entitlements to refugees who, by UNHCR standards, would not be so defined. All this at enormous cost. Its over $250 million annual budgets represent, minimally, a continuing moral hazard. Even more so is the moral hazard associated with the set of disincentives built into UNRWA – political and monetary – that discourages refugees from seeking economic betterment. In the end, UNRWA cannot accomplish what it set out to do and is blamed for and must pay for what it ends up doing.”¹⁷

It is certainly understandable why the Arab states viewed absorbing the Palestinian Arabs with such a skeptical eye. In the 60's, Jordan's King Hussein opened his gates to many Palestinian refugees. These Palestinians proceeded to use Jordan as a base from which to launch terror raids into Israel. While King Hussein was complicit in allowing this to happen, it was his kingdom, not some Palestinian state, that suffered the Israeli reprisals. By 1970, the Palestinians in Jordan had so thoroughly destabilized the kingdom and posed such a grave threat to King Hussein's sovereignty, he was forced to turn the Jordanian army against the PLO and expel them.

The expelled Palestinians made their way to Lebanon where they once again commenced in destabilizing a state through force of arms, antagonizing a Syrian invasion in 1976. Ultimately an Israeli invasion in 1982 was necessary to put an end to the incessant terrorist attacks, this time from the north instead of the now quiet Jordanian border. In varying capacities, the Syrians, Lebanese Christians, and Israelis expelled Palestinians out of a country for a third time.

Arab states have come to adopt a more nuanced reasoning for why they isolate and exclude Palestinian Arabs from integrating into their societies, thereby blocking all but their permanent refugee status. Nowadays the focus is not with the security threat or the ethnic/religious balance that could be disrupted, but instead a concern that the Palestinians' "right of return" might be infringed upon if they become citizens elsewhere. Doesn't that sound more noble? It also functions as reasoning the Israelis can not also invoke, such as was the case with the concern over state security. The Arab League in 1952 instructed the member states not to grant Palestinian Arabs citizenship in their countries, allegedly so the Palestinian national aspirations do not become diluted and ultimately vanish. It is this reasoning we still hear today:

A Saudi Arabian citizenship law passed in October 2004 allows "Expatriates of all nationalities are entitled to apply for Saudi citizenship", but "the naturalization law would not be applicable to Palestinians living in the Kingdom as the Arab League has instructed that Palestinians living in Arab countries should not be given citizenship to avoid dissolution of their identity and protect their right to return to their homeland."¹⁸

Lebanon took this order from the Arab League and ran with it. In addition to blocking Palestinians from citizenship, "They are banned from 73 job categories including professions such as medicine, law and engineering. ... They are not allowed to own property, unlike other foreigners, and are denied access to the Lebanese healthcare system. ... The Lebanese government has said repeatedly it will not allow Palestinian refugees to settle. It says that granting them work permits and rights to own land will encourage them not to leave and jeopardize their right of return. ... those living in other camps are not allowed even to obtain construction tools such as concrete to fix their houses."¹⁹

In response to the Palestinian Arabs living in Kuwait and their support for Saddam Hussein's invasion in 1990, Kuwait expelled over 400,000 of them. This elicited no substantial outrage among the Arabs because stateless Palestinian refugees is precisely the goal. In fact, instead of condemning the expulsions, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas apologized to Kuwait for the Palestinians' support of Saddam!²⁰ Don't expect an apology to Israel, however, for expelling some of the Palestinians for their widespread support of the Arab Higher Committee that preached a doctrine of genocide against the Jews in the months leading up to the civil war stage of the 1948 War.

Related Information: How Many Palestinian Arab Refugees Were Created in the 1948 War? What Caused the Flight of the Palestinian Arab Refugees? What is the Solution to the Palestinian Arab Refugee Problem? What is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA)?

Footnotes:
¹ There were new hostilities that broke out in the June 1967 “Six Day War” creating more refugees. These are included in the current refugee count of 4.3 million. Despite almost 20 years passing between the first wave of refugees in the 1948 War and the ones created in the 1967 War, the UNRWA had not directly settled any and continued counting refugees who resettled themselves in foreign countries, leaving very little confidence the refugee population would have gone down even if there had been no further war.
² Pinner, Walter. The Legend of the Arab Refugees; A Critical Study of UNRWA's Reports and Statistics. Tel Aviv: Economic and Social Research Institute, 1967. 52-53.
³ UNRWA UNRWA Organization - Staff (Site accessed June 21, 2007)
⁴ Gottheil, Fred. "UNRWA and Moral Hazard." Middle Eastern Studies. 42. 3 (2006): 414-415.
⁵ Gottheil, Fred. "UNRWA and Moral Hazard." Middle Eastern Studies. 42. 3 (2006): 417-418.
⁶ Avneri, Aryeh L. The Claim of Dispossession: Jewish Land-Settlement and the Arabs, 1878-1948. New Brunswick, [N.J.] USA: Transaction Books, 1984. 36-37.
⁷ Gilbar, Gad G. Population Dilemmas in the Middle East: Essays in Political Demography and Economy. London: F. Cass, 1997. 21.
⁸ Comay, Naomi. Arabs Speak Frankly on the Arab-Israeli Conflict: With Original Documents and Comments by World Leaders and Writers. [Great Britain]: Printing Miracles, 2005. 26.
⁹ Eigen's Political & Historical Quotations. Hussein ibn Talal, King of Jordan. Quoted by Associated Press, January 1960.
¹⁰ Morris, Benny. The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited. Cambridge Middle East studies, 18. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 550-551.
¹¹ Morris, Benny. The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited. Cambridge Middle East studies, 18. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 572.
¹² Prittie, Terence, and Bernard Dineen. The Double Exodus: A Study of Arab and Jewish Refugees in the Middle East. S.l: s.n, 1974.
¹³ Katz, Shmuel. Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine. Toronto: Bantam Books, 1973. 164.
¹⁴ Givet, Jacques. The Anti-Zionist Complex. Englewood, NJ: SBS Pub, 1982.
¹⁵ Laquer, Walter. The Anomaly of Israel. September 15, 1997.
¹⁶ Gottheil, Fred. "UNRWA and Moral Hazard." Middle Eastern Studies. 42. 3 (2006): 412.
¹⁷ Gottheil, Fred. "UNRWA and Moral Hazard." Middle Eastern Studies. 42. 3 (2006): 418.
¹⁸ Ghafour, Abdul. A Million Expatriates to Benefit from New Citizenship Law (Site accessed April 4, 2007)
¹⁹ Shahine, Alaa. Poverty Trap for Palestinian Refugees (Site accessed Nov 1, 2007)
²⁰ BBC News. Abbas Apology to Kuwait over Iraq (Site accessed Jan 8, 2006)
²¹ Berkley, George E. Jews. Boston: Branden Pub. Co, 1997. 277.
²² Stein, Kenneth W. One Hundred Years of Social Change: The Creation of the Palestinian Refugee Problem. 1991.
²³ Crist, Raymond E. "Land for the Fellahin, VIII: Land Tenure and Land Use in the Near East".American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 18, No. 4 (Jul., 1959). 417

What is the UNRWA?

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) was established December 8th, 1948 to assist refugees created during the 1948 Palestine War. The UNRWA operates in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Gaza and the West Bank where it assists about 4.4 million Palestinian Arab refugees. It is one of two United Nations refugee agencies in operation today, the other being the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR).

The UNRWA is only concerned with assisting Palestinian Arab refugees in the Middle East while the UNHCR handles the rest of the world's refugees, displaced, and stateless persons. The reason the UNRWA is tasked with only one specific ethnic group in one specific part of the world is a remnant of how adhoc refugee organizations were set up in decades past, each concerned with a particular ethnic group turned refugees by a particular conflict.

Soon after the UNRWA was established to help Palestine's Arab refugees, the UNHCR was created on December 14, 1950 to serve as all-encompassing refugee agency that normalized how refugees were identified and solved. The foundational text for these issues was drafted on July 28, 1951 known as the 1951 Refugee Convention, with an additional protocol in 1967 to expand its reach beyond Europe. It has served as the operational framework for the UNHCR's handling of the world's refugees ever since.

The UNRWA for Palestinians is a fundamentally unique refugee agency. It deviates from the agencies preceding it as well as those that came after in matters ranging from its continued existence alongside the capable UNHCR, to how it identifies refugees, to what its goal is for them.

On the surface it would appear rather encouraging that the Palestinian refugees, who remain one of the largest impediments for a resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict, have their own United Nations organization dedicated to their solution. Despite being created as a temporary refugee agency, the UNRWA has been with us for 60 years with no end in sight. Unfortunately, during this 60 year period the UNRWA has not resettled or repatriated any significant number of these refugees, and the refugee population under its jurisdiction has exploded in size. This is not due to any failures on the UNRWA's part; this outcome is by design.

Refugee Identification

Since the earliest international efforts to solve refugee problems, a fundamental requirement for refugee status was that a citizen fled from his/her home country into a different country:

The Nansen Passports in 1921 were only issued to Russians fleeing to non-Russian countries.

Referring to refugee arrangements made throughout the 1920s, the "definition of 'refugee' ... was based on the origin of the persons concerned within a group or category approach. Each group definition was basically premised on two conditions, namely lack of protection and non-effective nationality. These elements were reflected in the definition of Russian refugees, forming a precedent for defining also the Armenian, Assyrian, Assyro-Chaldean and Turk refugees. The definition provided that a Russian refugee was any person of Russian origin who did not enjoy or no longer enjoyed the protection of the U.S.S.R. and who had not acquired any other nationality."²⁴

The Convention of 1933 Relating to the International Status of Refugees "was based largely on the arrangements of 1926 and 1928 regulating the juridical and civil status of Russian, Armenian, Syrian, Chaldean, and assimilated refugees."²³

The High Commissioner for Refugees Coming from Germany (HCRFG) during 1930-1938 "focused on the legal protection of refugees who had already exited Germany and had been seeking refuge in other countries."²²

The Office of the High Commissioner Responsible for All Refugees Under the League of Nations' Protection (OHCAR) took over the operations of the Nansen International Office for Refugees (NIOFR) and the HCRFG in 1938, adopting the refugee definitions used by both previous organizations.

In 1951 the UNHCR adopted the definition provided by the 1951 Refugee Convention that required, among other things, a refugee to be "outside the country of his nationality ..."²⁵

The 1969 Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa does not recognize a refugee as such unless they are "outside the country of his nationality ..."²⁶

The 1984 Cartagena Declaration on Refugees also chose "To adopt the terminology established in the [1951 Refugee] Convention ..."²⁷ which of course required any refugees to have fled their home country for another.

For whatever reason, this longstanding requirement for refugee status was avoided where the Palestinian UNRWA is concerned. Included in the UNRWA's refugee population are Palestinian Arabs who never left Palestine along with many who never even left the territory that became Israel:

"Another distinction between UNRWA and UNHCR on population counts is this: Palestinians who had fled their homes from one location within Palestine to another location within Palestine … are nonetheless defined by UNRWA as refugees, even though they had not fled their homeland."²⁸

"The word refugees is inaccurate as regards two-thirds of this number because they were displaced from their homes in areas that became the State of Israel and came to rest in other parts of Palestine ... and refugees are usually defined as people displaced from their countries."²⁹

"Those who fled, and those who were expelled, both Jews and Palestinians, cannot accurately be called refugees, but rather displaced persons ... A refugee is a person who has fled or been expelled from the land of his birth; a displaced person is someone who has fled or been expelled from his home, but remains within the bounds of the territory of his homeland. The Jews who fled or were expelled by Arabs from the Old City of Jerusalem, the Etzion Bloc, Atarot, Kfar Darom or Beit Ha'arava, into Israeli territory, were never refugees ... However the Palestinians did not call their uprooted people displaced persons. They were instead referred to as refugees, even though most remained in the Palestinian homeland and lived at most only 20 to 40 kilometers away from their homes. For example, the Arabs of Lod and Ramle moved to the Ramallah area, which is 30 or 40 kilometers away from these towns."³⁰

In a totally unprecedented move, the UNRWA has also included within its refugee population all the descendants of the original refugees; their children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, etc. We are currently on the fourth generation of refugee descendants, each one exponentially increasing the refugee count:

"Still less accurate is the definition of the descendants of the bulk of those displaced – their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren – as refugees, because they themselves were never displaced and, in any case, live in areas of Palestine. Nonetheless, the United Nations applied the term to all those displaced from their homes in the course of the war – and to their descendants, wherever they now reside."³⁶

"The 1951 Convention does not define refugees’ descendants as also refugees. UNRWA counts patrilineal descendants. We are currently looking at the fourth generation of Palestinian Arab refugees."³⁷

"... among UNRWA’s refugee population, its size includes not only those who fled their homes but also during the course of over a half-century and in considerably larger numbers their children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren, regardless of where and under what social, political, and economic conditions they live. ... And counted as well among the Palestinian refugees are descendants of refugees born, raised, and living elsewhere in the Middle East and abroad, who, never having seen the Palestinian home land, are free nonetheless to return to it and to live there permanently but choose not to do so. ... They do not satisfy UNHCR’s definition of refugee."³⁸

Another peculiar deviation from the common practice of historic and contemporary refugee agencies is UNRWA's ignoring what is known as a cessation clause. Such clauses dictate the termination of refugee status and are very important in preventing prolonged refugee problems. The particular cessation clause the UNRWA disregards is the acquisition by a refugee of a new nationality. Normally in this scenario, the refugee loses their status and simply becomes a citizen of the new country.

Created in 1946, the International Refugee Organization (IRO) included in its constitution specific cessation clauses including either a "return to the home country" or the "acquisition of new nationality ..."³¹ Likewise, the UNHCR cancels refugee status "if (s)he willingly returns home or obtains a passport or residency in another state."³² In the words of the 1951 Refugee Convention that all modern refugee organizations adhere to, refugee status is terminated if the refugee "has acquired a new nationality, and enjoys the protection of the country of his new nationality ..."³³

But when it comes to the UNRWA:

"The UNRWA definition makes no mention of newly acquired nationality. Those who have such nationality (in particular Palestinian Arab refugees living in Jordan and possessing full Jordanian citizenship) are still classified as refugees.”³⁴

"Yet in the case of the Palestinian Arabs, the UN agreed to unique definitions … and removed them from the definitions contained in the global convention. ... Palestinian Arabs could keep their designation as refugees even if they acquired a new nationality ..."³⁵

To underscore the implications in ignoring just this one cessation clause we must look at the refugees in Jordan. According to the UNRWA's own statistics, there are now 1.7 million registered Palestinian refugees living in Jordan. Every single one of them "whether they live in camps or outside camps, are eligible for UNRWA services."³⁹ With the exception of 120,000 refugees that came from Gaza, "All Palestine refugees in Jordan have full Jordanian citizenship ..." This means that if the UNRWA would cancel refugee status with the acquisition of a new nationality, over a quarter of the bloated 4.7 million Palestinian refugees figure would be instantly solved.

"The most important change, the one most required and least subject to rational disagreement, is the removal of citizens from recognized states - persons who have the oxymoronic status of “citizen refugees”—from UNRWA’s jurisdiction. This would apply to the vast majority of Palestinian “refugees” in Jordan, as well as to some in Lebanon."⁵³

The UNRWA has generated criticism for the very specific timeframe included in their operational definition for refugees. While the UNHCR and other refugee organizations require that a citizen had to have fled from their "habitual" place of residence, the UNRWA counts "... persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948 ..."⁴⁰ Removing this clause and replacing it with the specific date range mentioned above is argued to have broadened the refugee population to many recent immigrants. This criticism appears unjustified because if someone's "normal place of residence" was in Palestine for two years, it is also their "habitual" place of residence, thus qualifying them as refugees either way.

Also, complaints that the UNRWA caters only to Palestinian Arabs are common. As briefly touched on earlier, however, refugee organizations were often created to assist one particular ethnic or national group. Nansen Passports that allowed undocumented refugees to travel internationally were at first issued only to Russians. Soon afterward, Armenian and Syrian refugees had conventions established just for them. The HCRFG focused only on refugees coming from Germany, and while unofficial, some accused the IGCR of being "set up to deal almost exclusively with Jewish refugees."⁴¹

The issue here should not be that the UNRWA was tasked with assisting only Palestinian Arabs, but that it continues with this antiquated modus operandi in the face of the rest of the world's refugees. In any case, the UNRWA acknowledges they have "a unique role as it is the only UN agency ... whose beneficiary population stems from one nation-group."⁵¹

Goals and Methods

Throughout the history of international refugee agreements, organizations, agencies, and conventions the goal of these groups has been to solve refugee problems. The solution is achieved when the refugee population in question has been either repatriated back to the country from which it fled, or resettled to new countries. Success was measured by refugee populations declining in size and ultimately disappearing. Repatriation was always the preferred method, but when it was not feasible the refugees were resettled instead.

"... the NIOFR labored to dispense with refugee populations in accordance with the already established principles of repatriation or resettlement. In a speech delivered during the Nobel Peace Prize acceptance ceremony in 1938, the president of the office, Michael Hansson, could register more than a few success stories along these lines (1972). The settlement of Saar refugees in Paraguay in 1935 and the construction of villages for forty thousand Armenians in Syria and Lebanon were just some of these efforts."⁴²

"Neil Malcolm, the commissioner from early 1938 to the middle of 1938, reported in his final statement to the league that about five thousand refugees had been helped by his office through various schemes of resettlement or through integration."⁴³

The IGCR's methods for solving refugees were "mainly confined to diplomatic representations in an effort to find opportunities for permanent settlement overseas.’".⁴⁴

“After the war was over, the IGCR worked on various schemes facilitating relief work, repatriation, and overseas resettlement.”⁴⁵

"The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA) was established in 1943 with the principal objective of resettling refugees displaced by the war."⁴⁶

“In December 1946, a draft constitution for a specialized agency charged with repatriation, protection, and resettlement or reestablishment of the remaining refugees and displaced persons in Europe was approved by the United Nations Assembly.”⁴⁷

"... genuine refugees and displaced persons should be assisted by international action, either to return to their countries of nationality or former habitual residence, or to find new homes elsewhere ..."⁴⁸

After WWII, "The prospects of integration into the war-ravaged countries of Western Europe, however, were very poor for many. Emigration was regarded as the best way to assist many of the refugees. The United Nations established several agencies to assist in emigration of European refugees ..."⁴⁹

"After World War II the International Refugee Organization successfully resettled, repatriated, transported, and maintained more than one million European and Asian refugees."⁵⁰

The UNHCR's stated purpose is to seek "long-term or so-called 'durable' solutions by helping refugees repatriate to their homeland if conditions warrant, or by helping them to integrate in their countries of asylum or to resettle in third countries."¹⁶

"... refugee status in the post-World War period is linked to the need to provide individuals with places of residence other than their own countries on account of war, natural disaster, internal conflict, fear of persecution, and general instability. This is the basis of refugee identification as it appears in the 1950 Statute of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the 1951 Refugee Convention, and the 1967 United Nations Refugee Protocol."⁸

Standing alone once again is the UNRWA as the only refugee agency currently, or in history, that has not been mandated with repatriating or resettling the refugees under its care. This model that was successfully applied to literally tens of millions of European and Asian refugees was apparently not worthy of being adopted by the UNRWA for Palestinian Arabs. It instead exists only to provide aid, indefinitely, until someone else finds the solution. According to the UNRWA's Website, the differences between it and the UNHCR are as follows:

“UNRWA is only responsible for providing services to one group of refugees, the Palestine refugees, in its areas of operation. UNHCR is responsible for refugees worldwide. UNRWA is mandated to provide the Palestine refugees with humanitarian assistance, whereas UNHCR has the mandate to provide international protection to refugees who fall within the scope of its Statute and to seek permanent solutions for the problem of refugees by assisting Governments.”⁶

Here is a comparison of basic facts between the UNHCR and UNRWA worth looking over:

	UNRWA	UNHCR
Founded	Dec. 8, 1949	Dec. 14, 1950
Staff size	27,000+	6,689
# of countries operated in	3 + Gaza and West Bank ²¹	116 ⁷
Annual budget	US$ 470.9 million ⁸	Over $1 billion dollars
Sources of funding	UNRWA operations are financed almost entirely by voluntary contributions from governments and the European Union, which account for 96 per cent of all income. ⁹ Four per cent of income is from United Nations bodies to cover staffing costs, including the funding of 113 international staff posts by the United Nations Secretariat. ¹⁰	UNHCR is almost entirely funded by direct, voluntary contributions from governments, non-governmental organizations and individuals. There is also a very limited subsidy from the regular budget of the United Nations, which is used exclusively for administrative costs. ¹¹
Refugees resettled or repatriated	N/A: The UNRWA is not mandated with permanent resettlement or repatriation. The UNRWA’s goal is simply to provide aid until other parties find the solution. ¹²	50 million ¹³
Number of dependents assisted	4.4 million ¹⁴	32.8 million¹⁵
Methods of resettlement	N/A: The UNRWA is not mandated with permanent resettlement or repatriation. The UNRWA’s goal is simply to provide aid until other parties find the solution.	The organization seeks long-term or so-called 'durable' solutions by helping refugees repatriate to their homeland if conditions warrant, or by helping them to integrate in their countries of asylum or to resettle in third countries. In the aftermath of World War II, UNHCR concentrated on resettling the bulk of the refugees under its mandate in new countries. ¹⁷ When it is sometimes impossible for civilians to go home, UNHCR helps them either to integrate in countries where they first sought asylum or to go to one of some 16 states which regularly accept refugees for permanent resettlement. ¹⁸

The UNRWA maintains a staff size of over 4 times more than that of UNHCR and requires half the budget, but only operates in a measly 4% of the countries UNHCR does and is concerned with only 13% of the number of people the UNHCR handles. The UNHCR has already settled 50 million refugees and is currently responsible for over 32 million people while the UNRWA is focused only on 4.4 million; a population that not only should have been resettled three or four generations ago, but is exponentially increasing in size.

“All other cases of refugees in the world came under the jurisdiction of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR); for the Palestinian Arabs, the UN established a completely separate agency, the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). The agencies had different missions. UNHCR was supposed to find permanent homes for refugees and thus solve refugee crises. In contrast, UNRWA was designed only to support the Palestinian refugees within the refugee camps that the Arab states created.”⁴

The UNHCR does not offer assistance to Palestinian Arabs where the UNRWA operates and the UNRWA is not tasked with finding a solution … so what about the refugees? Sure they get aid in the forms of food, shelter, education, etc, but the question needs to be asked, is perpetual refugee status with aid better or worse for the Palestinians than permanent resettlement? From both humanitarian and financial points of view, the answer is completely negative.

From the humanitarian perspective, "Ironically, since the refugees are considered to be 'at present receiving [protection and assistance] from organs or agencies of the United Nations other than the United Nations High Commission for Refugees,' namely UNWRA, the Palestinians are not subject to the protections and safeguards of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees or the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees."⁵

The financial burden of perpetual refugee status is obvious. The UNRWA's budget is grossly dispoportionate to the UNHCR They are also a status-based agency as opposed to need-based meaning the economic abilities of its registered refugees are not taken into consideration when dispersing aid. This means a Palestinian refugee could be living in Amman, Jordan making 40,000 dinar annually (equivalent to about $56,000) and still receive aid from the UNRWA by virtue of his refugee status. "No justification exists for millions of dollars in humanitarian aid going to those who can afford to pay for UNRWA services."⁵⁴

Certainly the refugees of the 1948 Palestine war required humanitarian assistance just like other refugee groups from other wars. The United Nations was right to give it. The key phrase, however, is "just like other refugee groups" of which the UNRWA is not. After an examination of its numerous departures from traditional refugee administration, it is difficult to believe those who created this agency were ever sincere about solving the Palestinian refugee problem in the first place. Every attempt to sustain and exacerbate a refugee problem, instead of solving it, has been enshrined in the UNRWA's operating procedures. Those mistakes have been preserved, repeatedly, with each vote to renew the UNRWA's status quo.

Related Information: How Many Palestinian Arab Refugees Were Created in the 1948 War? What Caused the Flight of the Palestinian Arab Refugees? Why are there still so many Palestinian Arab Refugees? What is the Solution to the Palestinian Arab Refugee Problem?

Middle East Facts

Sunday, January 25, 2015

Why is the Palestinian Arab refugee problem still here? - What is the UNRWA?

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