Of all the issues that drive the Arab–Israeli conflict, none is more central, malign, primal, enduring, emotional, and complex than the status of those persons known as Palestinian refugees.
The origins of this unique case, notes Nitza Nachmias of Tel Aviv University, goes back to Count Folke Bernadotte, the United Nations Security Council’s mediator. Referring to those Arabs who fled the British mandate of Palestine, he argued in 1948 that the U.N. had a “responsibility for their relief” because it was a U.N. decision, the establishment of Israel, that had made them refugees. However inaccurate his view, it still remains alive and potent and helps explain why the U.N. devotes unique attention to Palestine refugees pending their own state.
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True to Bernadotte’s legacy, the UN set up a range of special institutions exclusively for refugees from Palestine. Of these, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), founded in 1949, stands out as the most important. It is both the only refugee organization to deal with a specific people (the United Nations High Commission for Refugees takes care of all non-Palestinian refugees) and the largest U.N. organization (in terms of staff).
UNRWA seemingly defines its wards with great specificity: “Palestine refugees are people 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.” The ranks of these refugees (who initially included some Jews) have, of course, much diminished over the past 64 years. Accepting UNRWA’s (exaggerated) number of 750,000 original Palestine refugees, only a fraction of that number, about 150,000 persons, remain alive.
UNRWA’s staff has taken three major steps over the years to expand the definition of Palestine refugees. First, and contrary to universal practice, it continued the refugee status of those who became citizens of an Arab state (Jordan in particular). Second, it made a little-noticed decision in 1965 that extended the definition of “Palestine refugee” to the descendants of those refugees who are male, a shift that permits Palestine refugees uniquely to pass their refugee status on to subsequent generations. The U.S. government, the agency’s largest donor, only mildly protested this momentous change. The U.N. General Assembly endorsed it in 1982, so that now the definition of a Palestine refugee officially includes “descendants of Palestine refugee males, including legally adopted children.” Third, UNRWA in 1967 added refugees from the Six Day War to its rolls; today they constitute about a fifth of the Palestine refugee total.
These changes had dramatic results. In contrast to all other refugee populations, which diminish in number as people settle down or die, the Palestine refugee population has grown over time. UNRWA acknowledges this bizarre phenomenon: “When the Agency started working in 1950, it was responding to the needs of about 750,000 Palestine refugees. Today, 5 million Palestine refugees are eligible for UNRWA services.” Further, according to James G. Lindsay, a former UNRWA general counsel, under UNRWA’s definition, that 5 million figure represents only half of those potentially eligible for Palestine-refugee status.
In other words, rather than the population diminishing to a fifth of its original size over six decades, UNRWA has the population of refugees increasing almost sevenfold. That number could grow faster yet due to the growing sentiment that female refugees should also pass on their refugee status. Even when, in about 40 years, the last actual refugee from mandatory Palestine dies, pseudo-refugees will continue to proliferate. Thus is the “Palestine refugee” status set to swell indefinitely. Put differently, as Steven J. Rosen of the Middle East Forum notes, “given UNRWA’s standards, eventually all humans will be Palestine refugees.”
Were the Palestine-refugee status a healthy one, this infinite expansion would hardly matter. But the status has destructive implications for two parties: Israel, which suffers from the depredations of a category of persons whose lives are truncated and distorted by an impossible dream of return to their great-grandparents’ houses; and the “refugees” themselves, whose status implies a culture of dependency, grievance, rage, and futility.
All other refugees from the World War II era (including my own parents) have been long settled; the Palestine-refugee status has already endured too long and needs to be narrowed down to actual refugees before it does further damage.
Hardly. There have been tens of millions of refugees from the World War II era, none of whom were the Jews who were driven from their homes in Arab countries with the founding of the State of Israel.
The biggest group of refugees from the 40s ("world war II era") were Indian refugees from Pakistan and Pakistani refugees from India. They fled their respective homelands in 1948, at the same time as the Palestinian refugees. They number in about 10 million each, more than 10 times the numbers of arab refugees from Israel and jewish refugees from arab countries. It turns there's no UN agency dedicated to their plight?! Oh, my! Former Pakistani President Musharraf was born in Delhi in 1943 and became a refugee at the tender age of 5! I'm sure he spends his time daydreaming about his grandfather's home in Delhi (he still has the keys) and of the day when vicious indians will implement the right of return and let him and millions of other suffering refugees back home!
More seriously, have you seen a Palestinian refugee becoming a president of Lebanon or prime minister of Jordan? Perhaps the crust of the matter is how Palestinian refugees are treated by their Arab brothers in other Arab countries, as opposed to how Indian refugees are treated in Pakistan.
The Palestinians are not World War II era refugees! They are people who were displaced or chose to flee because of the establishment of a Jewish State (the dream of European Jews) in 1948. They have been political pawns ever since then. What is ironic about most of this is that the recreation of Israel was a product of 19th Century European Jewish intellectuals. However, many 19th Century European Jews did not want to go to the "Holy Land" and become farmers, so many of them went to the United States. And then during World War II the majority of European Jews were murdered by the Nazis which left the early Jewish population of Israel with more than a few "Arabicized" Jews who were kicked out of countries like Iraq, the Yemen, and Morocco and could not afford to flee to the United States. However, these Jews don't run Israel, but the remnants of European Jewry and American Jews run the place, and "Arabic" Jews tend to be second class citizens only one step or two above the Muslim, Arab Palestinians.
A Mizrahi myself, I dispute most of your contentions. For example:
"What is ironic about most of this is that the recreation of Israel was a product of 19th Century European Jewish intellectuals."
False. Return to Zion is a thread running through both Mizrahi and Ashkenazi Jewry for the past 20 centuries.
"However, these Jews don't run Israel, but the remnants of European Jewry and American Jews run the place, and "Arabic" Jews tend to be second class citizens only one step or two above the Muslim, Arab Palestinians."
False. As every immigration wave to every country, assimilation takes time. MIzrahim were a decade or two behind Ashkenazim, but by now have integrated into every aspect of Israeli life at all levels of power.
How you define the people who live in the "occupied" territories hardly resolves the issue of what to do with them. “Refugees” or not they are a dispossessed people and they will continue to multiply.
The "Palestinians" are not refugees any more. Most of them were never "displaced" from anywhere. Most of them are citizens of Jordan,Egypt,or Syria/Lebanon,or residents of a Stateless area,the West Bank. As for the originals that fled (by order of the Mufti and Arab leaders...)what is now Israel,they ABANDONED their lands,homes,and rights to them when they stayed away after the wars were over.
As for who runs Israel,that is Israel's decision,and it's been made democratically,by free,honest elections that no Arab nation has had. The reason the "Arabized"(Sephardic) Jews went to Israel is because they were sorely persecuted in their original lands,by the muslims-Arabs. I note that even muslim-Arab Israelis have the right to vote and have political representation in the Knesset. No Jew in any Arab land has that.
Most importantly,by the Arabs own religion of Islam,Jews and Muslims cannot mix. There's no going back for the "Palestinians";that is REALITY.
Apart from women and children, very few of the refugees who fled did so under orders of any Arab. And fleeing a war torn area no more mean that you relinquish your right to return than fleeing a burning house says that it's up for grabs.
It was the leadership of Israel that blocked the Palestinians from returning once the war was over. I'm not saying that the story would have ended any more happily had they been allowed to return. But let's at least be clear on who did what.
"The origins of this unique case, notes Nitza Nachmias of Tel Aviv University, goes back to Count Folke Bernadotte, the United Nations Security Council’s mediator."
Is that a way of justifying the brutal murder of Count Bernadotte by a Jewish terrorist gang led by Begin, who became PM of Israel? Incredible! The Jabotinski acolytes - Begin ( an Israeli PM), Shamir ( an Israeli PM) , Netanyahu Snr (father of the current PM ) - these were the founding fathers of Middle East terrorism. You would not get that from MEMRI or the Neo-conservative likudniks, woulf you?.
"of all the issues that drive the Arab–Israeli conflict, none is more central, malign, primal, enduring, emotional, and complex than the status of those persons known as Palestinian refugees."
Actually the central issue is the '67 borders - not the refugees. As soon as Israel and the USA publicly and without reservation accept two-state solution based on the '67 borders, the Israel-Palestinian problem will be resolved. There is a consensus in the world that there should be a 2 state solution, using the '67 borders, and that the Palestinian refugees would be resettled in the Palestinian state. The only thing that blocks peace is that Israel does not accept the '67 borders. This is the only issue that stands in the way of peace. Since re-negotiating borders is difficult, if impossible, without one side capitulating in full - the only resolution is the world to enforce the '67 borders and be done with it!
alan borrows: Wrong; there will no be peace if Israel returns to the '67 borders. The Arabs were offerred almost all the land of the '67 borders and turned it down. What the Arabs want is simple: The elimination of Israel and the expulsion (or destruction) of most of the Jews there. As someone said: If the Arabs put their swords down there would be peace, if Israel put its sword down, there would be no Israel.
12-15 million ethnic Germans were moved out of their homelands at gunpoint in 1946. 500,000 of them died in the process. Yet we never hear about the right of return to occupied Prussia or occupied Czech Republic.
The vast majority of people who wax indignant about the plight of the so-called Palestinians don't give a fig about them. As has been said, if a few million Estonians held the sliver of land that is now Israel, it would be a matter of supreme indifference to all the handwringing folk. But no. It's the Jews, and so...
Obviously the millions of Sudeten Germans, and Germans kicked out of Poland, among other countries, in 1945-6, should start blowing up Czech and Polish bus stations, and launching rockets into those countries, if they want the world community to take their plight seriously. Because that's the way irredentism proves its moral superiority, right?
Pipes is creating a straw man out of the Palestinian diaspora. No serious commentator really believes that any but a very few of these "refugees" will ever return to Israel proper. The ultimate destination of this population will have to be part of the overall resolution of this conflict - as willl be the ultimate destination of most of the illegal Jewish settlers in the West Bank. You can take it that most of the refugees will go to the new Palistinian state, and most of the settlers will go to the Israel side of the final border. It is hardly realistic for either side to concede the refugee/settler resettlement issue ahead of an overall settlement of all issues.
I suspect that Pipes is raising this issue to push the preference of the Greater Israel constituency for yet more Palestinian concessions without any corresponding concessions on the part of the Palestinians while the endless settlement and expropriation continues unabated, and talks drag out endlessly and fruitlessly until the Palestinians have nothing left with which to negotiate.
