Points to Ponder Number 27 22ndh December, 2014
Further to my letter in the Jerusalem Post today, UNRWA (UN Relief and Welfare Agency) is the organisation which handles Palestinian refugees who left Palestine in 1948 and their descendants while UNHCR (UN High Commissioner for Refugees) takes care of all other refugees world-wide.
UNRWA has over 30,000 employees, most of them defined as “Palestine refugees”, and a small number of international staff. UNHCR has a staff of less than 8,000 covering refugees in 126 countries.
UNRWA has an annual budget of US$ 1.3 billion for work with Palestinian refugees and their descendants who numbered 700,000 in 1948. UNHCR has an annual budget of US$ 4.3 billion for work with 10.5 million refugees (prior to the latest upheavals in the ME).
UNRWA defines Palestine refugees as “persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict.” Do you get that? One who lived in Palestine for a mere two years, irrespective of where lived prior to that. Nowhere does it confer this privileged status on future generations ad infinitum.
UNHCR defines a refugee as someone who “owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable to, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country.”
The difference in the definition of regular refugees and Palestinian refugees is so biased, so blatant and so illogical one can but ponder why it exists and why it is rarely, if ever, mentioned.
Also generally ignored is the fact that so many UNRWA staffers are members of Hamas, that UNRWA schools and facilities in Gaza are used as Hamas command posts and rocket launching sites, that UNRWA school books deny the existence of Israel and incite to violence against the Jewish State and that UNRWA perpetuates the refugee status of Palestinians who have successfully settled in other countries in order to artificially swell the number of Palestinian refugees.
Bassem Eid, a Palestinian human rights activist has courageously tried to show UNRWA for what it is. His op-ed article appeared in the Jerusalem Post and can be read here.
Believe it or not, the response to his article was to call for a boycott of the Jerusalem Post for printing it. If ever there was a classic case of “ignore the facts but kill the messenger” this is it. As for the flagship of liberalism – freedom of the press – apparently that only applies when Israel is being condemned, maligned and berated but never when she is being defended, as this article clearly shows.
See Samantha Power’s response to the boycott call.
Bassem Eid also appealed to Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Malala Yousafzai to keep her promise to share her award money with the children of the Gaza Strip but to prevent the funds from falling into the hands of Hamas – the terrorist organisation the EU is removing from its list.
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Khaled Abu Toameh defines himself as a Moslem, an Arab and a Palestinian who regularly reports on the ME. His comments on the UK, EU and Scandinavian rush to recognize a Palestinian State therefore carry much weight.
In his opinion they are actually acting against the interests of the Palestinians and are “turning a blind eye to the fact that, under the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, there is no respect for the rule of law, free speech, transparency or accountability”.
The Palestinian parliament, known as the Palestinian Legislative Council [PLC], has not functioned since 2007 and PA President Abbas’s term of office came to an end in 2009. That’s correct. Abu Mazen’s term of office came to an end five years ago.
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As the call to boycott Israel spreads from campus to campus, from one ostensibly liberal organisation to another, from one Christian denomination to another, take a moment to listen to this rapper who has the temerity to ponder and ask exactly which Israeli products to the BDS (boycott, divest, sanction) supporters intend to boycott.
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