The media are reporting about more “poor Palestinians” being displaced from their homes in a few West Bank (Palestinian Authority controlled?) cities. What they are not telling you is the background to these events. Israel broke ties with UNRWA recently. (Reminder: There were no UNRWA facilities in Israel until some fell into Israeli hands with the liberation of the formerly Jordanian held West Bank). The UNRWA facilities that still operated were located in “refugee camps” (i.e. slum neighborhoods) in cities allocated to the PA. With the latest break with UNRWA, Israel is taking back possession of the land UNRWA took for building those camps. Some of them had been erected on land that had been purchased by the Jewish Agency before 1948. People living in those camps were, de facto, prisoners. Their being defined as Palestinian refugees did not allow most of them to get travel documents to go elsewhere. The original UNRWA founding documents said they had to be returned to their original (no longer extant?) homes, and not resettled. In a manner similar to what occurs with other poor, deprived, and hopeless populations, these people became a natural target for recruitment by extremist terrorist groups. Their miserable living quarters also doubled as hiding places for illegal arms and explosives used against Jews.
The camps, where potential terrorists had lived, rent free, for decades, were now being returned to previous owners. The schools and clinics where they had received free education (indoctrination?) and treatment are now closed. They can look for work in the Palestinian Authority. But that same PA now has a new influx of needy citizens who are no longer being supported by UN member states donations. How the PA deals with their new social welfare cases is NOT an Israeli problem. The PA gets enough donations to maintain most of their institutions if they eliminate the rampant corruption that infests their regime. This is especially true if the PA really stops paying their citizens for conducting terror attacks.
In case you missed it, there is an element of irony in the fact that the PA and UNRWA were benefiting from land that was originally Jewish owned and confiscated without compensation by a UN agency. Children in UNRWA schools were taught the same irredentist drivel (and anti-Semitic hatred) that their counterparts in Gaza learned under Hamas control. There’s a lot of background to this story that the media do not seem to be interested in showing us.
Wetherhorn 