WHY TWO AGENCIES?
An international agency created by the United Nations is responsible for assisting all refugees in the world: the UNHCR, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. It was established in 1950, after the Second World War, to assist millions of refugees from all corners of the world fleeing war or persecution in their countries of origin. To date, this agency has assisted more than 108 million people. Currently, there are more than 30 million refugees in the world, with Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, Syria, and Sudan being some of the countries with the highest numbers.
This agency’s primary mission is resettling these refugees in other countries worldwide. For example, Europe, the United States, and Canada have absorbed tens of millions of refugees from Africa, the Middle East, and South America in recent decades.
The mission of UNHCR culminates once these refugees are resettled in another country and acquire citizenship. Their refugee status ends there, as they no longer depend on UNHCR for assistance because the country that has absorbed them assumes responsibility.
There is only one exception to this simple rule of international refugees: the Palestinians.
THE GAME OF THE FIVE DIFFERENCES
Several key elements must be understood to grasp this difference.
Firstly, the Palestinians are the only refugees in the world who have an independent agency: it’s called UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees.
UNRWA assists more than 5 million Palestinian refugees and has a budget of $220 per refugee, employing about 30,000 workers, meaning one social worker per 180 refugees.
How many refugees does UNHCR assist? The international refugee aid organization assists more than 30 million refugees from 134 countries worldwide.
How many workers does this organization employ?
16,000 workers. That is one social worker for every 4,213 refugees. The allocated budget is $121 per refugee, almost half of what Palestinian refugees receive.
RIPLEY’S BELIEVE IT OR NOT
Why do Palestinians have their independent agency? Why so many employees in UNRWA? Why are Palestinians the only refugees who enjoy these extra privileges?
Before answering this question, we must refer to another issue, perhaps the most important one.
The problem of Palestinian refugees arose in 1948 when around 700,000 Palestinians left their places of residence in Israel. The majority did so because the Arab countries, which decided to declare war on Israel when the Jewish state declared its independence, invited Palestinians living there to leave their homes temporarily until “they drove the Jews into the sea”. Now, how many “real” Palestinian refugees exist today? What is the approximate number of refugees who lived at that time, left their place of residence, and would be entitled to maintain their status? In 2018, an article in The Washington Post suggested that only 30 or 40 thousand refugees had survived from 1948.
But then, how is it that UNRWA assists 5 million Palestinian refugees?
The incredible, scandalous, and little-known reason is that the United Nations grants Palestinian refugees, and only Palestinian refugees, the right for their refugee status to be hereditary, meaning that the status of refugee passes to the children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, etc., of those Palestinians who left their land in 1948!
Thanks to these incredible exceptions, there are more than 5 million Palestinian refugees, the majority of whom have never lived a single day there.
And as if that weren’t enough, the United Nations established another additional rule for these privileged human beings: Palestinian refugees, and only them, can maintain refugee status even when they obtain citizenship of another country and enjoy the legal and social benefits of those countries.
So UNRWA, unlike UNHCR, does not dedicate itself to resettling Palestinian refugees in other countries to free them from refugee status. UNRWA’s mission is to maintain and maximize the number of Palestinian refugees in the world “claiming the right to live in Palestine,” that is, Israel. UNRWA does not provide a solution to the problem of Palestinian refugees; it perpetuates and multiplies it
WHY?
Unfortunately, the world does not care about Palestinian refugees, and that is why we do not see any country offering at this moment to absorb the hundreds of thousands of refugees from Gaza. Not even their Egyptian Muslim brothers, who see from 50 meters away everything these refugees suffer in Rafah.
The Palestinians are “used against Israel” because they have the perfect enemy: the Jews. If Tibetan refugees conflicted with Israel, Tibetans would be the “celebrity” refugees of the world.
ARE WE ALONE?
What hurts the most is that the rest of the world knows all this very well. It knows very well that the privileges of these VIP refugees are a formula designed to promote the demographic destruction of Israel, pressing for “5 million made-up refugees” to claim to settle in Israel and thus try to prevent the viability and continuity of a Jewish state.
In my opinion, the case of Palestinian refugees is unmistakable evidence of global antisemitism represented by the United Nations.
Natan Sharansky said that modern antisemitism is defined by the 3 “D”s:
- Demonization of Israel,
- Delegitimization of Israel, and
- The double standard against Israel is making laws and rules for Israel that do not apply to any other country on the planet.
Rabbi Yosef Bitton
