Daniel Pipes' column in the New York Post points out that the UN has two different definitions of the word "refugee":
The U.N. High Commission for Refugees applies this term worldwide to someone who, "owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted . . . is outside the country of his nationality." Being outside the country of his nationality implies that descendants of refugees are not refugees. Cubans who flee the Castro regime are refugees, but not so their Florida-born children who lack Cuban nationality. Afghans who flee their homeland are refugees, but not their Iranian-born children. And so on.
The U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), an organization set up uniquely for Palestinian refugees in 1949, defines Palestinian refugees differently from all other refugees. They are persons who lived in 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." Especially important is that UNRWA extends the refugee status to "the descendants of persons who became refugees in 1948." It even considers the children of just one Palestinian refugee parent to be refugees. [Emphasis mine.]
The High Commission's definition causes refugee populations to vanish over time; UNRWA's causes them to expand without limit. Let's apply each definition to the Palestinian refugees of 1948, who by the U.N.'s (inflated) statistics numbered 726,000. (Scholarly estimates of the number range between 420,000 to 539,000.)
The High Commission definition would restrict the refugee status to those of the 726,000 yet alive. According to a demographer, about 200,000 of those 1948 refugees remain living today.
UNRWA includes the refugees' children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, as well as Palestinians who left their homes in 1967, all of whom add up to 4.25 million refugees.
The 200,000 refugees by the global definition make up less than 5 percent of the 4.25 million by the UNRWA definition. By international standards, those other 95 percent are not refugees at all. By falsely attaching a refugee status to these Palestinians who never fled anywhere, UNRWA condemns a creative and entrepreneurial people to lives of exclusion, self-pity and nihilism.
The policies of Arab governments then make things worse by keeping Palestinians locked in an amber-like refugee status. In Lebanon, for instance, the 400,000 stateless Palestinians are not allowed to attend public school, own property or even improve their housing stock.
It's high time to help these generations of non-refugees escape the refugee status so they can become citizens, assume self-responsibility and build for the future. Best for them would be for UNRWA to close its doors and the U.N. High Commission to absorb the dwindling number of true Palestinian refugees.
Let me add: by the UNRWA's definition --- if applied to Jews for a change --- the vast majority of the Israeli
Jewish population are refugees. Most of you know about Shoah survivors and of other Jews who fled the Nazi juggernaut in the period leading up to the Shoah. It is less commonly known (outside Israel) that just under half of all Israeli Jews descend from refugees from Arab countries (particularly Iraq, Yemen, and Morocco, but also Egypt, Syria, Algeria, Tunisia, Lybia, Lebanon,...) My Brussels acquaintaince Moise Ra
hmani --- himself a refugee from Egypt --- just published a book (in French) entitled
Juifs des pays arabes, l'exode oubliée (Jews from Arab countries, the forgotten refugees). [UPDATE:
see also here about another book by Itamar Levin (in Hebrew).]
UPDATE 2: see the Forgotten Exodus website. If you go "huh?" at their claim that Jerry Seinfeld is a Syrian Jew: yes, his mother was, although his father was an American Jew of Eastern European extraction. (Hat tip.)