Arabs and their UN propagandists blame the "homelessness" of over three million Palestinian "refugees" for the continuing Arab war against Israel. In fact, it is UNRWA (and the countries that fund it) that bear much of the responsibility for the continued existence of these "refugees." The "progressive opinion-makers" in the West who have accepted this notion of the refugees as "root cause" of the conflict -- and there is no doubt their existence exacerbates Arab hatred -- should be clamoring for an end to UNRWA.
The original purpose of the camps was to provide "temporary" relief to approximately half a million Arabs who left their homes in Israel during the War of Independence. In a report submitted in 1952 (fifty years ago!) then-UNRWA director John Blandford Jr. recommended that the refugees be resettled immediately because "sustained relief operations inevitably contain the germ of human deterioration."
Today, UNRWA on its own web site rejects this view of the organization's mission, originally approved by the UN High Commission on Refugees, claiming instead that UNRWA is mandated to provide relief, not seek a solution. Yet former UNRWA director Ralph Garroway admitted in 1958: "Arab states do not want to solve the refugee problem. They want to keep it as an open sore...as a weapon against Israel. Arab leaders don't give a damn whether the refugees live or die."
King Abdullah can choose life among the glamorous royal exiles of Switzerland or accept Jordan's Mandated role as Arab Palestine.
As a result, during fifty years in which over 100,000,000 refugees were resettled in countries with differing religions, climates, languages and cultures, a half million Arabs, dislocated to states with compatible language, religion and mores, have remained in the status of "refugees." Forced to remain in squalid conditions, their numbers hugely augmented over three generations, they have become a growing and permanent source of recruitment, training and planning for terrorism. According to the UNRWA report of June 2002, the number of "refugees" in Gaza is 626,977 and in Judea and Samaria 878,977. To these numbers one may add residents of camps throughout the Middle East, totaling almost four million Arabs. With the partial exception of Jordan, Arab host nations do not permit them to leave or buy land or gain citizenship.
The U.S. contributes to perpetuating this situation by providing most of the UNRWA budget, even as the agency itself permits the recruitment and training of suicide bombers and the establishment of weapons depots in the camps.
It is high time to stop funding UNRWA, to relieve the agency of all its obligations in the Middle East, to demand the destruction of the existing camps and the relocation and resettlement of their occupants. To begin with, a real census must be taken. It is well known that the residents often inflate the number of dependents in order to get more provisions. When responding to a count, they have often included relatives living and working in the United States or the oil kingdoms and even those long dead and buried.
Arab nations should be prodded into assimilating the "refugees" instead of offering them the promise of return to Israel. The Jewish nation, the only non-Muslim state in the area and already host to a large problematic Arab minority, must reject all repatriation. Those Arabs who find it unbearable to live among Jews should be free to go to "occupied" Jordan and demand citizenship in the ancestral land of Palestine. And King Abdullah can choose life among the glamorous royal exiles of Switzerland or accept Jordan's Mandated role as Arab Palestine.
When the American Taliban John Walker Lindh was sentenced, his unrepentant father stated that after his twenty years in prison, he might be thought of as an American Mandela. He was much ridiculed by admirers of Mandela.
Maybe the old man was on to something. The following is from James Taranto's "Best of the Web":
"Bad Company. South African statesman Nelson Mandela is also standing up for human rights in Egypt. 'What is happening to Ibrahim is exactly the same as what happened to me,' Mandela, who spent 26 years as a political prisoner of the apartheid regime, tells Britain's Guardian.
"Oh wait, sorry. We got that wrong. Actually, Mandela was referring not to Ibrahim but to Marwan Barghouti, the Palestinian terrorist leader on trial for murder and other charges in Israel. The Guardian reports Mandela has agreed to 'observe' Barghouti's trial. The Jerusalem Post reports he has joined 'an interna-
[(Continued on p.11)]
Outpost - 10 - October 2002