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Tuesday, July 4, 2023

Palestinians Being Refugees Longer Than Any Other Groups

 Nadene Goldfoot                                                  


Has anyone noticed that the Palestinians are being maintained in Refugee Camps, and this has been going on since 1948?  None of the Arab countries want them.  In fact, they insisted that these Palestinians remain in the camps.  They're getting better hand-outs from the other Arab countries this way and sympathy from Europe, always anti-Semitic, who have turned against the Jews and plead for the Palestinians.  Even our own government of USA have felt this way.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) is a UN agency that supports the relief and human development of Palestinian refugees. They were created on December 8, 1949;  74 years ago.                                        

Ben Gurion, Golda Meir, The Israeli Declaration of Independence, formally the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel (Hebrewהכרזה על הקמת מדינת ישראל), was proclaimed on 14 May 1948 (5 Iyar 5708) by David Ben-Gurion, the Executive Head of the World Zionist Organization, Chairman of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, and soon to be first Prime Minister of Israel. It declared the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel, to be known as the State of Israel, which would come into effect on termination of the British Mandate at midnight that day. The event is celebrated annually in Israel as Independence Day, a national holiday on 5 Iyar of every year according to the Hebrew calendar.  The Arabs refer to this as their Nakba-what they promote as 'the "disaster", "catastrophe", or "cataclysm"'), also known as the Palestinian Catastrophe.

The Jewish birthday announcement was ruined when the Arab-Israeli War of 1948 broke out when five Arab nations invaded territory in the former Palestinian mandate immediately following the announcement of the independence of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948.  Arabs ran when their leaders told them to, with them all thinking they could return since it was obvious that the Arabs would win the battle.  They would return and take over all the Jews' holdings; home, etc.  The army didn't win but told them to stay in those refugee camps and they've been there ever since, only multiplying.  

In this 1948 photo from the UNRWA archive, Palestinian refugees stand outside their tent in Khan Younis, Gaza Strip. (photo credit: AP/UNRWA Photo Archives)

Tent camps of the 1950s have turned into urban slums with some alleys so narrow residents can only walk single file past drab multi-story buildings.

After Israel declared its independence on May 14, 1948, the fighting intensified with other Arab forces joining the Palestinian Arabs in attacking territory in the former Palestinian mandate. On the eve of May 14, the Arabs launched an air attack on Tel Aviv, which the Israelis resisted.

Israel 1948-1949: Tel Aviv Street in Tel Aviv with shops, street dealers and shoppers including a woman with a baby stroller.  

                 1948 Tel Aviv, founded in 1909 as a garden suburb of Jaffa--name comes from Herzl's novel, Altneuland (Ezek 3:15). a city Arab workmen helped to build when they joined the Jews in 1882 of return.  It's ironic that then they turned around and bombed the city, and have repeated this attack several times already.  It's what drew the Arabs to the Jewish land; the opportunity of find jobs that would pay more money.  By 1921, Tel Aviv was a separate town from Jaffa.  Its sea front has developed into a major tourist area.  

By the time David Ben-Gurion, head of the Jewish Agency Executive, proclaimed the establishment of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948, more than 300,000 Palestinian Arabs had been turned into refugees (although this predates the 1951 Refugee Convention, historical literature considers Palestinians who fled to have become refugees. This action was followed by the invasion of the former Palestinian mandate by Arab armies from Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Egypt. Saudi Arabia sent a formation that fought under the Egyptian command. British trained forces from Transjordan eventually intervened in the conflict, but only in areas that had been designated as part of the Arab state under the United Nations Partition Plan and the corpus separatum of Jerusalem. After tense early fighting, Israeli forces, now under joint command, were able to gain the offensive.

UNRWA's mandate encompasses Palestinians displaced by the 1948 Palestine War and subsequent conflicts, as well as their descendants, including legally adopted children. As of 2019, more than 5.6 million Palestinians are registered with UNRWA as refugees.  In Jordan, there are 2.2 million Palestine refugees who are registered with UNRWA. Several legal restrictions limit their rights and contribute to their vulnerable living conditions.

Jordan also hosts around 17,000 Palestine refugees from Syria (PRS), 47 per cent of whom are children. While most of them are assessed as highly vulnerable and receive UNRWA assistance, many of them additionally face a difficult protection situation, mainly due to their precarious legal status in the country.

They have increased by the millions!  Generations are counted as a 25 year period.  The camps have maintained  75 years or 3 generations of Palestinians who sit, not working, not learning skills for work, only seething with anger and hatred, and turning themselves into the  terrorists like those in Jenin.  

UNRWA's mandate is subject to periodic renewal every three years; it has consistently been extended since its founding, most recently until 30 June 2023.

UNRWA is the only UN agency dedicated to helping refugees from a specific region or conflict which in this case is Palestine.

 It is distinct from the UNHCR, established in 1950 as the main agency to aid all other refugees worldwide. Unlike UNRWA, UNHCR has a specific mandate to assist refugees in eliminating their refugee status by local integration in the current country, resettlement in a third country or repatriation when possible.One in every 122 humans is now either a refugee, internally displaced, or seeking asylum.  They have a lot of work to do.  With time, our earthly problems have only increased.  

So, UNRWA's job is to just maintain the status of...

They are NOT integrating them in any Arab county...

They are NOT moving them to their original country or another

In fact, they have quite a deal going on.  UNRWA employs over 30,000 people, most of them Palestinian refugees, and a small number of international staff. Originally intended to provide employment and direct relief, its mandate has broadened to include providing education, health care, and social services to its target population. The teaching units are not created to bring peace between Israel and Arab but to stir them up.  Where are they learning how to dig tunnels, make rockets ?  

UNRWA operates in five areas: JordanLebanonSyria, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem; all the hot spots.  

 Aid for Palestinian refugees outside these five areas is provided by United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

To sum it up, approximately 5.9 million registered Palestinian refugees live across the Middle East. Palestinians comprise the largest stateless community worldwide. They constitute the world’s longest protracted refugee situation.  UNRWA's headquarters are in Amman, Jordan and Gaza, with the PA (Palestinian Authority).  This gives you the whole picture where their leanings are.  

The United Nations reports that 11.2 million people were displaced from their homelands in 2020, bringing the total number of displaced persons in the world to 82.4 million. 

Of those forced to flee their homes, 1.4 million had to leave their country. According to the U.N., Turkey hosted the largest number of refugees in 2020, taking in just under 4 million people, the majority coming from Syria. Colombia was next, taking in more than 1.7 million displaced Venezuelans. Germany, Pakistan and Uganda also are in the top five hosting countries, with each resettling more than a million people.

The United States was far below those numbers, resettling 11,814 refugees last year.

Israel's position is to not go along with the destructive Resolution 194 that came out of the UN.  It was something Count Bernadotte was thumping for, and the Arab countries at first voted against it as I would have done, also. It was a right of return for the Arabs that the Arabs didn't want to affect the Jews' returning rights.  As it was, Britain did all they could to keep Jews out of the land.  It should be mentioned that Arabs, being Muslims, take on 4 wives and do not practice birth control.  They multiply 4 times faster than other people usually.  

Israel has, however, offered to repatriate refugees as part of negotiations. At the Lausanne Conference Israel offered to repatriate 100,000 refugees in exchange for a comprehensive peace treaty with the Arab states and for annexation of all territories it had captured up until the 1949 Armistice Agreements. The number would have included 50,000 refugees who had already found their way back to their homes in Israel. The offer was quickly withdrawn by Ben-Gurion.  Another offer came during the 2000 Camp David negotiations in which Israel offered to allow a maximum of 100,000 refugees to return, on the basis of humanitarian considerations or family reunification.

When Israel was pronounced a state over the radio, the Arab surrounding countries went radical and kicked out all their Jews who of course fled to the new state of Israel.  Can you imagine the turmoil then?  Fighting to survive, the new state was suddenly flooded with their own refugees!  The first large-scale exoduses took place in the late 1940s and early 1950s, primarily from Iraq, Yemen and Libya. In these cases over 90% of the Jewish population left, despite the necessity of leaving their property behind. Between 1948 and 1951, 260,000 Jews immigrated to Israel from Arab countries.  Of course, Israelis were unprepared for this, but rose to the occasion.  After all, that's why they became a state in the first place; 


Our original home for us unwanted Jews who need not wander about anymore, stateless and at the mercy, the very whim of foreign, prejudiced people.  They've even named a plant after us;  Wandering Jew.  

       Tel Aviv today:  a population of 467,875, it is the economic and technological center of the country. If East Jerusalem is considered part of Israel, Tel Aviv is the country's second most populous city after Jerusalem; if not, Tel Aviv is the most populous city ahead of West Jerusalem.

Resource:

ILTV News from Israel-youtube 

https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/arab-israeli-war#:~:text=After%20Israel%20declared%20its%20independence,Aviv%2C%20which%20the%20Israelis%20resisted.

https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/palestinian-refugees-dispossession#:~:text=By%20the%20time%20David%20Ben,Palestinians%20who%20fled%20to%20have

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNRWA


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