Stand for Israel

Despite being one of the hot-button issues that consistently derails “peace talks,” the question of Palestinian refugees has rarely been substantively explored in the media. The conventional wisdom is that, like everything else (including global warming), it’s Israel’s fault.

In actuality, however, as shown in a recent important piece  published in London’s Independent, the refugee problem not only isn’t due to Israeli actions, but is the result of a bizarre combination of Arab leaders’ intransigence and the UN’s strange choice to treat this conflict in a manner different than any other in its history.

Since 1948, Arab governments have refused to grant citizenship to stateless Palestinians and forced them to remain refugees in squalid camps as a means of applying pressure to Israel. The Independent decries Arab leaders’ “cynical but time-honoured practice” of bemoaning the Palestinians’ fate while refusing to do anything to end their legal limbo.

Meanwhile, the UN’s High Committee on Refugees helps out by taking a position unheard of with respect to any other conflict: Granting refugee status to the children, grandchildren and even great-grandchildren of the original refugees — with no limit on the generations that can obtain that status. Hence, the numbers of “official refugees” has climbed from 711,000 to 4.6 million, despite the fact that people who were around in for the 1948 Israeli war of independence has obviously gone down.

This is despite the fact that the UN’s own rules on refugees states that the relevant countries will ”make every effort to expedite naturalization proceedings” – the opposite of what happened to the Palestinians in every Arab country except Jordan. 

Had Arab leaders agreed to grant them citizenship–as occurred in every similar conflict in modern history, such as India and Pakistan exchanging populations–there wouldn’t be a refugee issue in the first place. (And this is without mentioning that when–at the same time–some 850,000 Jews were unceremoniously expelled from the Arab countries they’d lived in for centuries, the fledgling Jewish State absorbed them.)

Thanks to this, millions of Palestinians live in squalid refugee camps–not because of any decision the Israelis made but because it’s better for the Arab leaders, who can use Israel as a…