| |
A double refugee problem
The immediate cause of the plight of Palestinian refugees was the
Arab leadership's rejection of UN Partition Resolution 181
of 1947, and the war they then started
in the hope of destroying Israel. During the hostilities, many Arabs
abandoned their homes. This created a double refugee problem: scholars
such as Bernard Lewis agree that an estimated 900 000 Jews were expelled
from Arab countries and Iran as a result of violence directed against
them, and an estimated 600 000 Arabs (according to census figures)
fled from British Palestine. Therefore, the Palestinian refugee problem
is actually an Arab-Jewish refugee problem. But while the Jewish state
has solved this problem by integrating Jewish refugees, the Arab states
have purposely maintained this problem by keeping Arab refugees in
refugee camps for three generations to use them as political pawns.
Most of the Arabs who fled during the war were encouraged to do
so by Arab countries who promised them that they would return after
Israel was defeated, although there were also cases of Arabs being
forced out of their homes during the fighting. However, those Arabs
who did not flee and remained in the Jewish state became full and
equal citizens of Israel.
The UN criterion to determine who is a Palestinian refugee is flawed.
The UN defines a Palestinian refugee as any Arab who had lived in
Israel for two years before leaving. Moreover, an Arab is counted
as a Palestinian refugee even if he moved just a few miles from
one part of Palestine to another, as many Arabs and Jews did during
the 1947-1949 war. On the other hand, the Jews who moved from one
part of Palestine to another to escape Arab assault and massacres
were never defined as refugees by the UN. If the standard definition
of refugee (which applies to all other refugee groups) were to apply
to the Palestinians, the number of Palestinian refugees would fall
dramatically. By contrast, the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees
from Arab and Muslim countries had lived there for hundreds and
sometimes thousands of years, even before the advent of Islam. When
the War
of Independence broke out in 1947, 300 Jewish homes
and 11 synagogues were destroyed in Aleppo, and 82 Jews were killed
in Aden. Riots in Iraq and Egypt forced Jews out of those countries.
Thousands of Arabs and their descendants have been kept in refugee
camps for over half a century, to be used as hostages in an effort
to demonize Israel. Meanwhile, many refugee problems have been solved
around the world by their integration into another country, something
which could have been done, for example, by Jordan between 1948
and 1967. During those years, an independent Palestinian state could
have been established.
Even after the Palestinian
Authority assumed control over all the major cities
of the West Bank and in Gaza (following the initial implementation
of the Oslo
II Agreement in 1995), no effort was made to integrate Palestinian
refugees by dismantling refugee camps and building permanent homes.
The international community has also played a role in perpetuating
the Palestinian refugee problem. It has averted efforts to resettle
the refugees, as is the international norm. The UN High Commissioner
for Refugees, responsible for finding permanent homes for all refugee
groups around the world, does not do so for the Palestinians. Instead,
a special agency was set up to handle Palestinian refugees. This
organization, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNWRA),
operates solely to maintain and support the Palestinians in refugee
camps.
|