One of the red-line conditions of the Palestinian Authority has always been the return of all “Palestinian refugees” to their original homes. But who is a “Palestinian refugee”? The original definition was set to include anyone who had lived in Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948. This conveniently eliminated the problem of Arab refugees who had immigrated to Palestine from Syria, Jordan Iraq and Lebanon before 1946. That situation might have included much more than a simple majority of all those recorded as Palestinian refugees. But since the Arabs refused to sit down and negotiate anything with Israel, years passed, and the original refugees began to die. So the Arabs began to modify this condition. First, they added all descendants of such refugees. Then they made the return of those refugees to their “original homes” mandatory. These changes were designed to further the actual Arab objective of destroying Israel. That objective is still part of the Fatah charter adhered to by the Palestinian Authority.
Refugees from war are not a new phenomenon. As early as 1943 the United States created a “Relief and Repatriation Agency” to handle people who were displaced (i.e. refugees) as a result of World War II. That Agency was transferred to the control of the United Nations (as UNRRA) in 1945. It closed down in 1947 when it had no more victims to help. That did not put an end to the existence of refugees. The Arab League pushed for the creation of a new Agency to handle the case of the Palestinians. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) was created in 1949 as a result. Since UNRWA was designated specifically to handle Palestinians, the UN created a new body, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) as a solution for the ongoing problem of all refugees. The Arabs swiftly exempted the Palestinians from control of UNHCR by claiming there was already a body that dealt with their problems. Of course, UNHCR is charged with EITHER resettling or repatriating refugees. UNRWA does not have that option. Palestinian “refugees” found themselves in de facto prison camps in Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan without the ability to leave the camps, or integrate into the population of the host countries where the camps were located.
The entire political game described above created an Arab hostage population whose care was paid for by the UN. UNRWA provided homes, health care and education facilities and the Arab politicians were given a “humanitarian” weapon to use against Israel. In fact, Israel did not work hard to close UNRWA. The Israelis lodged complaints about what was taught in UNRWA schools, and against the use of UNRWA facilities as shelters for terrorist groups. But after 1967 Israel was not going to object to having UNRWA provide services that the Israeli government might otherwise have been asked to deal with. In any case, at that time, Israel envisioned a negotiated agreement that would give control of the population in those areas to some kind of Palestinian or Arab government. Those negotiations never took place. Today we are left with a large captive body of people, almost all of them, and their forefathers, never had any real residence in what was once Palestine. The Syrian Civil War recently allowed many of these people to escape from their endless bondage. They became refugees from a different war, and therefore fell under the auspices of the UNHCR, thereby gaining the option of being resettled somewhere else.
Wetherhorn 