The Rogers Plan of 1969, like all subsequent and ill-fated efforts to resolve the Arab-Israel conflict, tabled the issue of the Palestinian "refugees," leaving it for "final status" negotiations. "It is our hope," said the Rogers Plan, "that agreement on the key issues of peace, security, withdrawal and territory will create a climate in which these questions of refugees...can be resolved as part of the overall settlement." In retrospect, the issue of "refugees" remains the defining obstacle to any reconciliation in the region. Pretending to negotiate, without addressing this issue at the outset, is like operating on a patient and leaving a growing cancer intact. Had it been confronted in 1949, the prospects for finding a subsequent modus vivendi between Israel and the Arabs would have been vastly improved.
When the problem was at last put on the table at Camp David in the year 2000, the issue blew up the tattered remnant of the "peace process." Then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak thought he had a winning formula with a virtually total territorial withdrawal to the 1949 armistice lines in return for the Palestinian Authority abandoning the "right to return," i.e. to eliminate, via demography, the Jewish state. He had been encouraged in this belief by negotiations conducted through the so-called "Swedish channel" but when it came to the point, Arafat refused the deal and launched outright war, including the most deadly series of terrorist attacks in Israel's history.
In embarking on a repeat of the Oslo process, all those involved, from Bush to Sharon to the European Union, are ignoring the adage "If a man deceives me once, shame on him; if he deceives me twice, shame on me." Moreover, when the Road Map runs into the same impasse, the resulting explosion is likely to make the recent intifada look like pale beer.
There is a widespread impression that the Arab refugee problem is immutable, that nothing can be done without an Arab consensus. But the U.S. and Europe between them have huge clout on this issue, for they fund (to the tune of over $300 million a year) and thus perpetuate, the Arab refugee disaster. The U.S. alone contributes roughly 40% of the budget. The Arab states contribute almost nothing: Saudi Arabia, by far the largest Arab contributor, provides only a fourth of what Sweden gives. As things stand, the U.S., which sent $120 million into the sinkhole of the refugee camps in 2002, is the great enabler of the scandal of permanent refugee squalor through the generations. (In 2001, the U.S. voluntarily contributed $101 million above its UN dues!) And, because the camps have become centers of recruitment and training of terrorists and storage of their weapons, the U.S. -- in a morally and strategically indefensible contradiction to its avowed goals -- has become funder and enabler of suicide bombing and other forms of Middle East terrorism. If the United States were to announce "Millions for permanent resettlement, not a penny more for perpetuating victimhood," the dynamic would be transformed overnight.
Pretending to negotiate, without addressing this issue at the outset, is like operating on a patient and leaving a growing cancer intact.
Does this sound like a surprising, even shocking suggestion? If so, it is precisely because the camps have festered for so long that their existence has ceased to be a policy issue, open to alternative approaches. But this is all the more reason why we need to examine the background of the Arab refugee camps -- and of UNRWA, the UN agency which runs the program.
The camps opened in 1950, in the wake of the first Arab war to destroy Israel. The precise number of Arab refugees as a result of that war is uncertain, the estimates ranging from 450,000 to 700,000. Even experts who lean toward the higher side believe that no more than 550,000 wound up in refugee camps, since some fled to families settled in other Arab countries and fleeing Bedouin resumed their nomadic life style in Jordan. In the 1950s, in the wake of World War II, Elfan Rees, leader of World Refugee Year, reported the existence of 36 million refugees in Africa, Asia and Europe. In this period Arabs numbered only one in 72 refugees. Yet though the UN already had an agency for refugees, the UN High Commission for Refugees, it established a second organization -- UNRWA -- to care for only one group -- Arabs fleeing newly established Israel. It set up 59 camps in Judea and Samaria, Gaza (then part of Egypt), Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon.
Who is a "refugee" according to UNRWA? Their home page, http://www.un.org/unrwa/, defines it as follows: "Under UNRWA's operational definition, Palestine refugees are persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948, who lost both their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict. UNRWA's definition of a refugee also covers the descendants of persons who
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September 2003 - 3 - Outpost