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Dear Reader:
Steven J. Rosen, head of the Middle East
Forum's Washington Project, has for the past 1½ years led our effort to find
innovative ways to challenge UNRWA's malign reign. He and I decided not to
concentrate on the sins of this organization but instead to focus on the
anomaly that it counted 750,000 refugees in 1949 and counts 5 million
refugees today; no other refugee population grows in size.
In the course of his study, Steve discovered
much new information concerning the extension of the refugee status from
actual refugees to babies born even today. At the request of U.S. Sen. Mark
Kirk's office, he made these findings available. For what followed, read
below.
Yours sincerely,
Daniel Pipes
Count Palestine Refugees?
  Be the first of your
friends to like this.
The fetid, dark heart of the Arab war on
Israel, I have long argued,
lies not in disputes over Jerusalem, checkpoints, or "settlements."
Rather, it concerns the so-called Palestine refugees.
So called because of the nearly 5 million
official refugees served by UNRWA (short for the "United Nations Relief
and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East"), only about 1
percent are real refugees who fit the agency's definition of
"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 other 99 percent are descendants
of those refugees, or what I call fake refugees.
Worse: those alive in 1948 are dying off and
in about fifty years not a single real refugee will remain alive, whereas
(extrapolating from an authoritative estimate in Refugee Survey Quarterly
by Mike
Dumper) their fake refugee descendants will number about 20 million.
Unchecked, that population will grow like
Topsy until the end of time.
This matters because the refugee status has
harmful effects: It blights the lives of these millions of non-refugees by
disenfranchising them while imposing an ugly, unrealistic irredentist dream
on them; worse, the refugee status preserves them as a permanent dagger aimed
at Israel's heart, threatening the Jewish state and disrupting the Middle
East.
Solving the Arab-Israeli conflict, in short,
requires ending the absurd and damaging farce of proliferating fake Palestine
refugees and permanently settling them. 1948 happened; time to get real.
I am proud to report that, in part based on
the work carried out by the Middle East Forum's Steven J. Rosen and myself
over the past year, the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee on May 24 unanimously passed a limited but potentially
momentous amendment to the $52.1 billion fiscal
2013 State Department and foreign operations appropriations bill.
The amendment, proposed by Mark Kirk
(Republican of Illinois) requires the State Department to inform Congress
about the use of the annual $240
million of direct American taxpayer funds donated to Palestine refugees
via UNRWA. How many recipients, Kirk asks, meet the UNRWA definition cited
above, making them real refugees? And how many do not, but are descendants of
those refugees?
The Kirk amendment does not call for
eliminating or even reducing benefits to fake refugees. Despite its limited
nature, Kirk calls the reporting requirement a "watershed."
Indeed, it inspired what a senior Senate GOP
aide called "enormous opposition" from the Jordanian
government and UNRWA
itself, bringing on what Foreign Policy magazine's Josh
Rogin called a raging battle.
Why the rage? Because, were the State
Department compelled to differentiate real Palestine refugees from fake ones,
the U.S. and other Western governments (who, together, cover over 80 percent
of UNRWA's budget) could eventually decide to cut out the fakes and thereby undermine
their claim to a "right of
return" to Israel.
Sadly, the Obama administration has badly
botched this issue. A letter from Deputy Secretary of State Thomas
R. Nides opposing an earlier version
of the Kirk amendment demonstrates complete incoherence. On the one hand,
Nides states that Kirk would, by forcing the U.S. government "to make a
public judgment on the number and status of Palestinian refugees … prejudge
and determine the outcome of this sensitive issue." On the other, Nides
himself refers to "approximately five million [Palestine]
refugees," thereby lumping together real and fake refugees – and
prejudging exactly the issue he insists on leaving open. That 5-million refugee
statement was no fluke; when asked about it, State Department spokesman Patrick
Ventrell confirmed that "the U.S. government supports" the
guiding principle to "recognize descendants of refugees as
refugees."
Also, by predicting a "very strong
negative reaction [to the amendment] from the Palestinians and our allies in
the region, particularly Jordan," Nides invited Arabs to pressure the
U.S. Senate, a shoddy maneuver unworthy of the State Department.
Through all of Israel's 64-year existence,
one American president after another has resolved to resolve the Arab-Israeli
conflict, yet every one of them ignored the ugliest aspect of this
confrontation – the purposeful exploitation of a refugee issue to challenge
the very existence of the Jewish state. Bravo to Senator Kirk and his staff
for the wisdom and courage to begin the effort to address unpleasant
realities, initiating a change that finally goes to the heart of the
conflict.
Mr. Pipes (DanielPipes.org) is president of the
Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover
Institution of Stanford University. © 2012 by Daniel Pipes. All rights
reserved.
Related
Topics: Palestinians, US policy This
text may be reposted or forwarded so long as it is presented as an integral
whole with complete information provided about its author, date, place of
publication, and original URL.
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