Wednesday, January 11, 2017
The Refugee Crisis and the Abomination that is UNRWA
David Milliband (President and CEO of the International Rescue Committee, former British Foreign Secretary and former head of the British Labour Party) boasted that Britain “led the drive to codify the rights of refugees after the Second World War.” If that includes taking responsibility for the UN abomination that is The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) then we have nothing of which to be proud. But more about that later.
There were tens of millions of refugees after the war. Germany accepted twelve million ethnically German refugees from European countries. “Between 13.5 and 16.5 million Germans were expelled, evacuated or fled from Central and Eastern Europe, making this the largest single instance of ethnic cleansing in recorded history.” (Deaths are estimated at between half and three million people).
The UN Refugee Agency claims however that the largest single mass migration (expulsion) in history occurred after the partition of India in 1947. Some 14.5 million refugees fled or were exchanged between India and the newly created state of Pakistan.
Korea expelled millions of Japanese after the war.
In terms of scale the Jewish – Arab population exchange is relatively small. It involved up to two million people in roughly equal numbers (over a period of 26 years, between 1947 and 1973). Over 600,000 Mizrahi Jews came to Palestine-Israel. At least 300,000 more went, predominantly, to France but also to Britain and the USA. Jews integrated into their host societies. It has to be a conscious choice to do so.
The conspiracy, if one exists, is that at no time was there ever any intent to integrate Arabs from Israel into the host countries that absorbed them. It was fundamental hostility to the non-Arab, and Arab anti-Jewish racial prejudice, that created a desire to flee an independent Jewish polity. Arab refugees remain uninterested in integration; unless it helps them create a virtue out of their self-inflicted victimhood. And the United Nations, instead of solving global conflicts, perpetuates them. The Palestinian Arab’s greatest collaborator in undermining resolution of the Israel-Arab conflict is UNRWA.
The Arab and greater Muslim world is afflicted by ages old prejudice and this prejudice is fed by its successes throughout the history of the last 1,400 years during which they conquered vast tracts of land and enslaved tens of millions of human beings. We rarely publicly speak of it and we do not ever teach this silent history.
UNRWA (The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) uniquely defines a Palestinian refugee as “persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1st June 1946 to 15th May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict.”...“The descendants of Palestine refugee males, including legally adopted children, are also eligible for registration.”
It means that any temporary worker who resided in Israel (or can “prove” that they did) during a two year period that ended on the 15th May 1948, became a refugee even when they had a home to return to; even better, in terms of eligibility for money transfers from Western nations to Arab nations.
It also means that they have no incentive whatsoever to ever forgo their refugee status.
If I were David Milliband I would not boast about UK complicity in the creation of UNRWA. We could so easily speculate that setting up UNRWA was a Western European conspiracy to undermine regional stability in the Near East (with a secondary antisemitic aim to overthrow Jewish self-determination) by creating an organization that could only ever be a force for lasting regional conflict.
The inheritance of refugee status, in perpetuity, is an ongoing act of regional destabilization! There can be no other explanation for the United Nation’s active collaboration in the creation of a unique, perpetual Palestinian victim-hood. UNRWA created an Arab (Palestinian) underclass, infected by hate and viewing re-conquest of Israel as a pan-Arab racial obligation; as an Arab political and Muslim theological imperative. UNRWA has inculcated three generations of refugees with a desire and an undiluted, blind, passion for revenge against a Jewish enemy it has always held in religious ridicule; colonial domination and pure ethno-religious contempt.
Jews have no reason to want to return to the ugly conditions of permanent, inferior status and intermittent persecution under Arab rule. For too many centuries they lived and died at the caprice of others.
UNRWA has only ever been a vehicle for Arab grievance and a message to any minority in the Arab colonial enterprise that minority aspirations for freedom from Arab persecution is a non starter. UNRWA is nothing less than a European – Arab cabal that stimulates chaos and precludes reconciliation between Jew and Arab. It exists to prevent the modernization of the Arab world, which in turn would end Islamism in the Arab world.