Updates

Update from AIJAC

June 6, 2012
Number 06/12 #02

There has been considerable comment of late, both in Australia and the UN, about the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) in the wake of a legislative proposal being discussed in Washington, and a recent grant of increased aid provided to UNRWA in Canberra. This Update provides some background on the controversy over UNRWA, and the idea behind the UNRWA-related legislative amendment which passed out of a Committee in the US Senate last week. 

First up is a backgrounder on the American UNRWA proposal, sponsored by Senator Mark Kirk, written by American scholars Alexander Joffe and Asaf Romirowsky (Mr. Romirowsky is currently visiting Australia to speak at the annual Limmud Oz conference of Jewish educators.) They make it clear that the intent of the Kirk legislation is not to cut off Palestinians from needed aid, but to provide some clarity about the state of UNRWA’s clients, the vast majority of whom are not refugees by the standards applied to every other refugee population in the world. They also note that this effort to reform UNRWA is unique because, for the first time, there is a constinuency for reform within Israel, which has traditionally feared that tampering with UNRWA could leave Israel forced to take over responsibility for refugee welfare. For their exploration of the issues in full, CLICK HERE. Meanwhile, entries in the Australian debate about increased funding for UNRWA include Greg Sheridan on the weekend, Daniel Pipes on Monday, and Israeli author David Bedein.

Next up, American columnist Cliff May discusses the critics of the American bill, especially the US State Department, and explores the implications of what they are in fact saying. He notes that they are insisting on a definition which not only defies all historical precedents, but which is apparently in violation of both the relevant international conventions and US law.  He also notes that critics who claim that UNRWA’s definition of a Palestinian refugee must be accepted are in effect arguing that essential elements of long-standing US and allied policy on the peace process – that there cannot be a mass “return”  to Israel (as opposed to to a future Palestinian state) of descendants of the refugees from the 1948 war – must be changed in a way which makes peace impossible for the foreseeable future. For his complete argument, CLICK HERE.

Finally, former AIJAC analyst Arsen Ostrovsky comments on the Palestinian response to Israel’s decision, as a goodwill gesture, to release to the Palestinian Authority (PA) the bodies of 91 Palestinians, most of whom died committing acts of terrorism. He notes that the PA response was to hold ceremonies honouring those who committed horrific crimes – many of which the PA publicly condemned at the time, and, in the official media, to refer to the bodies returned as of those “killed in action”, thus treating their actions as legitimate military attacks. He then goes on to list many other recent examples of glorification of terrorism, and what amount to effective calls for more of it, and make the point that this ongoing incitement remains a major barrier to peace. For his argument in full, CLICK HERE. More on the Palestinian treatment of the returned bodies of terrorists and other related incitement comes from an editorial in the Jerusalem Post, and from Palestinian Media Watch, which provides even more details.

Readers may also be interested in:

• A good database of articles over many years on UNRWA controversies.
• Barry Rubin on the problem of disappearing aid to the Palestinian Authority.
• Rubin also had some comments on the two candidates left in the Egyptian presidential election. Meanwhile, the spiritual head of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood says Israel’s creation was “the worst catastrophe ever to befall the peoples of the world” and portrays the Arab Spring as a united effort leading to the “liberation” of Palestine.
• A thinktank  on nuclear issues says Iran may be secretly preparing to do yet more uranium enrichment at a new, third location, in defiance of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) rules. Meanwhile, IAEA head Yukiya Amano voices suspicions Iran has demolished facilities allegedly used for weapons research to prevent their being inspected.
• A video of a Saudi woman defying the Kingdom’s religious police, who are trying to kick her out of a mall for wearing nail polish, which is getting considerable international attention. 
• David Harris of the American Jewish Committee and Dr. Gerald Steinberg both comment on the 45th anniversary of the outbreak of the 1967 Six Day War this week. Plus, Jewish Ideas Daily  has an excellent series of retrospective articles on what happened back then.
• Some examples from the many stories and comments now appearing at AIJAC’s daily “Fresh AIR” blog:
  • A post on Israel’s military relationships in Asia.
  • A post on how contrary to a frequently repeated myth, Israel is not blocking international action to stop the slaughter by Syria’s regime, but actively encouraging such efforts. 
  • A post on the contrast between the past stances and current campaign rhetoric of the Muslim Brotherhood candidate in the Egyptian election, Mohammed Morsi.
  • Allon Lee’s latest Media Week column.
  • Links to the many media appearances by and noted Israeli academic and analyst, and current AIJAC guest in Australia, Dr. Jonathan Spyer.

Palestinians: Refugees forever?

by Asaf Romirowsky and Alexander Joffe

Ha’aretz
June 5, 2012

A couple of weeks ago the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee unanimously passed the Kirk Amendment as part of the State Department and Foreign Operations Appropriations Bill for 2013. The bill requires the State Department to specify to Congress, for the first time, what proportion of the five million Palestinians who are supported by UNWRA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, are refugees who were actually displaced from their homes and what number are descendant of those refugees.

Every year, a sum of $240 million of US public is channeled to the assistance of Palestinian refugees via UNRWA. The Kirk Amendment challenges the notion that being a Palestinian refugee can be passed down through the generations, and thereby questions the ever-expanding numbers of Palestinians that are UNRWA’s target group. The original proposal by Senator Mark Kirk (R-IL), would have made personal displacement from one’s home necessarily for the definition “refugee” as well as the absence of any other citizenship.

Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL) and company should be commended for their sincere efforts to tackle one if not the main ingredients that ensures and exacerbates the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. UNRWA claims that its services will no longer be needed when there is a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But it is UNRWA – set up as a temporary agency – that advocates an unending narrative of occupation and a perpetuation of refugee-hood.

UNRWA is an open-ended educational social welfare system for millions of Palestinians, primarily in the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. But in what sense are any of these individuals truly refugees, those who should fall within UNRWA’s remit?

Publicly, UNRWA defines a Palestinian refugee as anyone 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.” In reality UNRWA has continually expanded the definition to include “the children or grandchildren of such refugees are eligible for agency assistance if they are (a) registered with UNRWA, (b) living in the area of UNRWA’s operations, and (c) in need.” The best estimates are that perhaps 700,000 Palestinians became refugees in 1948-1949. By UNRWA’s accounting, however, virtually every Palestinian born since that time is also a refugee. That number now reaches into the millions.

This is unprecedented in the history of refugee crises. In no other situation has a group been extended specific status that has been continually expanded to include subsequent generations over a period of decades. The result of this 60 year long process is that incentives for the refugees to resettle in Arab countries and elsewhere are minimal, as are those for UNRWA itself to ever end its operations.

UNRWA states that the Palestinians are occupied – indefinitely. UNRWA has financial and political interests in maintaining this fiction: as long as the Palestinians are refugees, UNRWA is in business. Of the 30,000 people that UNRWA employs, the vast majority are Palestinian: UNRWA is the largest single employer of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Contrast this to the UN High Commission for Refugees, that only employs 5-6,000 people globally, and which focuses far more clearly on resettlement and rehabilitation of refugees and building new lives, and not on maintaining services that prop up the status quo.

In 2009, then U.S. Congressmen Mark Kirk (R – IL) and Steve Rothman (D – NJ) introduced provisions for UNRWA Accountability into appropriations bills. They called for transparency and responsibility from UNRWA and sought to ensure that the monies funneled to UNRWA from the United States did not fund acts of terrorism in any way, thereby bringing the funding of Palestinians into compliance with the US Foreign Assistance Act of 1961. The provisions died in committee.

Now, for the first time, Israeli politicians are proposing that UNRWA adopt limits on the numbers of refugees it serves. Inspired by Kirk, Israeli MK Einat Wilf (Independence) has launched a new, international parliamentary campaign to restructure UNRWA and “combat the inflation of numbers of refugees” in order to make a two-state solution possible. Wilf has called for the international community to address the continual inflation in refugee numbers, and plans to appeal to parliamentary committees that are responsible for approving budget contributions to UNRWA.

It is long past the time that limits should be set on the never-ending expansion of Palestinian refugees. With initiatives in play in the US Congress and internationally addressing the core of UNRWA’s rationale and operations, there is finally a possibility that the international community can take a serious look at UNRWA’s role in helping perpetuate the Palestinian refugee number question, which will have a decisive role in any future negotiations towards a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Asaf Romirowsky is an adjunct scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and Middle East Forum. Alexander Joffe is a historian and writer in New York.

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Whose Middle East Policy Is It, Anyway?

By Clifford D. May

National Review, May 31, 2012

If we set up an organization to provide health care, over time more people should get well. If we set up an organization to assist the poor, over time more people should earn a living. If we set up an organization to resettle refugees, over time more displaced persons should find permanent homes, acquire citizenship, and cease being refugees.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency was set up in the late 1940s after Palestinian Arab forces, backed by the armies of five Arab nations, rejected a U.N. partition plan — what we now call a two-state solution — and launched a war to destroy the fledgling State of Israel. Initially, UNRWA’s mission was to “reintegrate” Palestinian Arabs displaced during the fighting into the normal life of the Middle East.

That mission changed about 1960. In a paper soon to be published in The Middle East Quarterly, Steven J. Rosen, Washington director of the Middle East Forum, documents how UNRWA, for the past half-century, has sought not to diminish the Palestinian-refugee problem but to enlarge it — even while Israel was resettling hundreds of thousands of Jews expelled from Arab and other Muslim lands.

I first wrote about this a few weeks ago, noting Senator Mark Kirk’s plan to cut not a dollar of American support for UNRWA but simply to stimulate an honest discussion based on reliable data. He has now done that: Last week the Senate Appropriations Committee, on a unanimous and bipartisan basis, approved legislation requiring the State Department to tell Congress how many of the 5 million Palestinians currently receiving assistance from UNRWA were among the approximately 750,000 individuals displaced during the war against Israel, and how many are their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

A statement from Kirk’s office explained, “With U.S. taxpayers providing more than $4 billion to UNRWA since 1950, the watershed reporting requirement will help taxpayers better understand whether UNRWA truly remains a refugee assistance organization or has become a welfare agency for low-income residents of the Levant.”

Kirk’s legislation was strenuously opposed not just by UNRWA but also by the State Department. When it passed anyway, State communicated its displeasure in both a letter to the senators on the committee and a statement to Josh Rogin, a staff writer at Foreign Policy. By doing so, State dramatically shifted U.S. policy. Back in 1965, the U.S. government objected to UNRWA’s decision to award refugee status to the descendants of refugees. Now, State is saying it supports that decision and, what’s more, it sees no reason for Congress even to have access to basic information about those receiving American aid.

Rogin pointed out that the State Department’s views “appear to conflict with the United States Law on Derivative Refugee Status,” which specifically prohibits extending refugee status to grandchildren. In other words, a Palestinian could not seek admission to the U.S. as a refugee on the grounds that his grandfather was a refugee.

There is a larger issue here: As Rosen explained to Rogin, by calling all 5 million UNRWA aid recipients “refugees,” State is suggesting that this entire population has a “right of return” not to the Palestinian territories (the West Bank and Gaza), but to Israel.

One State Department official complained that the “Kirk amendment, based on commentary surrounding it, is meant to set a stage for the U.S. to intervene now with the determination that 2nd and 3rd generation descendants have no claims and in fact aren’t even Palestinians.”

But Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama all “intervened” with “determinations” that a two-state solution can succeed only if most displaced Palestinians become citizens of a Palestinian state rather than the Jewish state; and only if, as President Clinton phrased it at Camp David in 2000, there is “no specific right of return to Israel itself.” These and other American leaders understood that for Israel to grant citizenship to millions of anti-Israeli Palestinians would mean national suicide. American policy, by tradition, has not been to suggest that allies kill themselves.

As for the “commentary” surrounding Kirk’s measure, I’m not aware of any — certainly not mine or that of my colleague Jonathan Schanzer in Foreign Policy magazine, or that of Jennifer Rubin in the Washington Post — that questions who is a Palestinian.

But there are 1.8 million Palestinians who hold Jordanian citizenship and yet are counted as refugees, despite the fact that under international law — specifically, the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (Article 1C, the “Cessation” Clause) — a person stops being a “refugee” once he “has acquired a new nationality, and enjoys the protection of the country of his new nationality.”

Would anyone suggest that a Pakistani citizen, the descendant of a Muslim who left India following the post–World War II partition of the subcontinent into two states, should be classified as a refugee?

It should be obvious that UNRWA’s beneficiaries are being used as cannon fodder. They have been told by their own leaders that they will be denied Palestinian citizenship even in a future Palestinian state. “They are Palestinians, that’s their identity,” Abdullah Abdullah, the Palestinian ambassador to Lebanon, stated last year. “But . . . they are not automatically citizens. . . . Even Palestinian refugees who are living in [refugee camps] inside the [Palestinian] state, they are still refugees. They will not be considered citizens.”

Why not? Because statelessness makes them more lethal weapons of war. Ambassador Abdullah explained: “When we have a state accepted as a member of the United Nations, this is not the end of the conflict. This is not a solution to the conflict. This is only a new framework that will change the rules of the game.”

That the State Department would provide support for such rejectionism — disregarding the policy of three administrations and failing to comprehend how this undermines any possible “peace process” — is breathtaking. In the days ahead, it will be instructive to see whether President Obama insists that the State Department follow his policies — or whether he permits Foggy Bottom to overrule him.

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No Peace Until Palestinians Stop Glorification of Terror

Arsen Ostrovsky is an international human rights lawyer and currently a Legal Fellow at the American Center for Democracy.

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