By Barry Shaw
NETANYA, Israel — Through the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the Palestinians have received 25 times more aid per capita than did the whole of Europe to rebuild their shattered countries after World War Two. And yet, many decades later, Palestinians still use the victimhood card of poverty and statelessness, even though massive funding flows through the hands of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas.
UNRWA is the only UN refugee agency dedicated to a single group of people. It does not solve the refugee problem. It inflates it. One needs to ask why.
Palestinians do not absorb their refugees. Instead, with cooperation from UNRWA, they increase their refugee numbers with each generation. Compare this to Israel that absorbed more refugees from Arab and Muslim countries than the number of Arabs fleeing the Arab-inflicted wars against the Jewish State.
On top of this, Israel absorbed millions of immigrants from around the world, all absorbed as citizens.
Israel rejected the humiliation and shame of maintaining people in refugee-status and worked hard to absorb and assimilate millions of incomers, many of whom came as legitimate refugees.
As for the Palestinians, 90% of their so-called refugees were never displaced, therefore should not carry the status of refugees. Another obscenity is that 40% of the ‘refugee’ recipients are not refugees at all, having been given citizenship in Jordan. Syria, and Lebanon. Yet their numbers still appear in the UNRWA and Palestinian Authority ledgers. A fraud and a political obscenity.
International funding to UNRWA in 2016 was in excess of $1.2 BILLION to an agency that deals exclusively with the Palestinians, and ignores the 50 million genuine refugees elsewhere in the world.
Saudi Arabia was the only Muslim country in the top ten international donor countries. All the rest were United States, EU, Japan, and European nations. Apart from the Saudis, the Islamic world was nowhere to be seen, despite their pro-Palestinian rhetoric.
UNRWA is an anti-Semitic obscenity because it perpetuates the Palestinian conflict against Israel, the Jewish State, and has no intention of reforming itself to operate as other refugee agencies do, to reduce their number of refugees, and to address the fraud of Palestinian refugee status.
How is it possible for Palestinians born and living under the security and civil administration of the Palestinian Authority, or their opposite number, Palestinian Hamas in Gaza, continue to call themselves refugees?
Refugees from where? They are living under a Palestinian authority, for heaven’s sake! They are home, surely?
The answer is that the Palestinian leadership, both Fatah and Hamas, are in deep collaboration with UNRWA to perpetuate the fraud of Palestinian refugeehood as a political pawn against Israel, the Jewish State.
And that is a racial obscenity of international proportions.
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Barry Shaw is the Senior Associate for Public Diplomacy at the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies. He may be contacted via barry.shaw@sdjewishworld.com
If the so-called Palestinian refugees disappeared or were absorbed by their brethren in the lands in which they live, that would acknowledge the intolerable to the Arabs: that Israel had won.