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UNRWA

Comparative institutional context — Rohingya refugees

UNRWA’s dedicated Palestine-refugee mandate is one part of a larger Palestine-specific UN architecture. Rohingya refugees, including more than a million in Bangladesh and over 125,000 registered in Malaysia, fall under the general UNHCR system; Myanmar also has a special rapporteur, an investigative mechanism, recurring resolutions, and an ICJ case. The defensible comparison is therefore not “the UN ignores Rohingya,” but that Palestine receives a uniquely permanent and specialized set of UN bodies and agenda structures. See Rohingya Parallel - Selective Attention and the Nakba Analogy and Myanmar and Malaysia - Rohingya Persecution and Refugee Treatment.

Reports

Review of UNRWA Schools Headed by Hamas Principals (file not included in this release)
foreignpolicy.com-UNRWA Has Changed the Definition of Refugee.pdf (file not included in this release)
2023-Report-UNRWA.pdf (file not included in this release)

The war of return - Adi Schwartz, Einat Wilf (Annotated), p.99 (file not included in this release)

In order to launch its rehabilitation plan and deliver aid to needy refugees, the Economic Survey Mission recommended establishing a new UN agency. This agency would operate for a limited time period, and one of its roles would be to enable the Arab states to prepare for the eventual discontinuation of international aid for the refugees.

The war of return - Adi Schwartz, Einat Wilf (Annotated), p.99 (file not included in this release)

the original draft intended to set an end date— after a single year of operation—but the Arabs asked to insert the proviso “unless otherwise determined by the General Assembly”

The war of return - Adi Schwartz, Einat Wilf (Annotated), p.105 (file not included in this release)

Throughout the world, in the 1940s and 1950s, millions and millions of refugees were rehabilitated in the countries that had given them shelter: some 600,000 Chinese fled China after the communist victory in 1949, finding shelter in British Hong Kong; nearly a million refugees from North Vietnam were rehabilitated in South Vietnam in the 1950s; some fourteen million Hindu and Muslim refugees found shelter in India and Pakistan, respectively, following the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947; more than ten million ethnic Germans, who were brutally and savagely expelled from Eastern Europe long after WWII was over and Germany surrendered, found shelter in West Germany; and hundreds of thousands of Jews, who were forced to leave Arab lands despite never raising their hands against Arab societies, were rehabilitated in Israel. In each of these situations, the refugees were assimilated in countries with people who were linguistically and culturally similar to them

The war of return - Adi Schwartz, Einat Wilf (Annotated), p.106 (file not included in this release)

By 1958, the agency completed its work after every North Korean refugee had been rehabilitated and naturalized by the South Korean government. Seoul cooperated fully with the agency in its rehabilitation efforts These efforts bore substantial fruit: registering impressive economic growth in the early 1960s, South Korea went from one of the world’s poorest countries, with a similar GDP per capita to impoverished African nations, to one of the world’s strongest economies.

The war of return - Adi Schwartz, Einat Wilf (Annotated), p.107 (file not included in this release)

Immediately after their expulsions, the ethnic German refugees set up their own political parties, newspapers, and organizations. They held demonstrations and public meetings, and published articles in the press. They saw their expulsion as a terrible crime and the root of all evil in postwar Europe. Their representatives declared that they would never recognize Germany’s new border with Poland along the Oder and Neisse rivers—which was created by transferring the eastern territories of Germany, from which they were expelled, to Poland. Their declared aim was for Germany to return to rule the areas on its eastern border so that the expellees could return home. They spoke of their right of return to their birthplaces (Heimkehr in German) as an inalienable right. They announced that they would not return to live as a minority under foreign (i.e., Polish) rule, meaning that they hoped for Germany to once again rule the territories forcefully ceded to Poland at the end of the war as part of Germany’s unconditional surrender. One refugee leader said in 1953 that their objective was that “the whole east and southeast

The war of return - Adi Schwartz, Einat Wilf (Annotated), p.111 (file not included in this release)

Alami’s experimental farm was the biggest rehabilitation project of the 1950s for Palestinian refugees. It effectively amounted to the practical realization of UNRWA’s vision, but the UN agency was not involved in its establishment. The farm incorporated the construction of permanent housing, agricultural livelihoods, and the integration of refugee communities into the local economy: everything the UN General Assembly had instructed UNRWA to do.

The war of return - Adi Schwartz, Einat Wilf (Annotated), p.134 (file not included in this release)

In school, they sang songs about returning to Palestine; throughout the camp, they saw graffiti on the walls of houses, with bombastic and heroic descriptions of the day when they would return home to embrace their olive trees and kiss their soil For all of them, this coveted return, always described in violent terms, became a kind of obsession, without which there was no meaning to life

The war of return - Adi Schwartz, Einat Wilf (Annotated), p.136 (file not included in this release)

Six of the eight terrorists in the Munich Massacre were sons of the refugee camps like Gashey. Some lived next door to each other in the Shatila Camp and played football together. “We were all alike, children of the refugee camps,” Gashey recalled, “with a shared cause and a shared aim.”9 Abu Iyad, Arafat’s deputy in Fatah and the commander of Black September, recalled how the young men behind the massacre were deliberately chosen from the refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. They were his most faithful soldiers: “[They] all burned with impatience to be among the lucky ones chosen,” he recounted

The war of return - Adi Schwartz, Einat Wilf (Annotated), p.139 (file not included in this release)

The appearance of the refugee camps also completely changed. Transforming from tent cities exposed to the wind and rain, the camps became neighborhoods of permanent housing on the outskirts of cities. Given the provision of universal free education and quality health care, the residents enjoyed a higher quality of life than refugees elsewhere, such as India, Pakistan, or Hong Kong, and greater than the poorer strata of Arab countries as well. The camps no longer appeared quite so temporary, and the sense of urgency that defined UNRWA’s first days was gone.

The war of return - Adi Schwartz, Einat Wilf (Annotated), p.144 (file not included in this release)

UNRWA subsequently lost track of the identities of the camps’ residents, who were joined by a constant flow of newcomers. In some camps, these new residents soon amounted to half of the total population. They were mostly Palestinians who used to live in the towns but whose personal circumstances had taken a turn for the worse. The unemployed, the elderly, and the infirm moved to the camps because of their many advantages, especially the food rations; while residency in the camps did not automatically guarantee food rations, the disorder meant that whoever lived there generally received this benefit. Benefits also included free access to health clinics, water, and sanitation facilities, as well as an exemption from municipal taxes. Population figures from the West Bank from 1948 to 1968 attest to this phenomenon of an influx of new arrivals to the refugee camps quite clearly: while the total population grew by only 13 percent, the population of the camps grew by 53 percent.

The war of return - Adi Schwartz, Einat Wilf (Annotated), p.145 (file not included in this release)

The most glaring phenomenon in this regard was the emigration of hundreds of thousands of young Palestinians from the refugee camps to Persian Gulf states in the 1960s and 1970s, which did not result in the subtraction of a single refugee from the numbers UNRWA reported. The Gulf emirates, which had just won independence, were clamoring for skilled labor, which duly arrived from the refugee camps in the Gaza Strip, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. Palestinian researchers estimate that one in three Palestinians left the refugee camps in this period; by accepted estimates, by the summer of 1967 at least 100,000 refugees had left the West Bank and Gaza Strip alone Thus the Palestinian population of Kuwait, presumably a large share of whom were UNRWAregistered refugees, grew from 35,000 in 1961 to roughly 140,000 in 1970, and to approximately 400,000 in 1990 on the eve of Saddam Hussein’s invasion.

The war of return - Adi Schwartz, Einat Wilf (Annotated), p.151 (file not included in this release)

When Western nations abandoned their intentions to rehabilitate the refugees in the late 1950s, a vacuum was created at the heart of UNRWA. Since the agency had been emptied of any clear objective or substance, the Palestinians—led by the PLO—were able to fill it with their own agenda. Thus UNRWA was transformed from being a failed agency for refugee rehabilitation to a very successful organization for the development of a Palestinian national identity and consciousness. The problem was that in the Palestinian case, this national consciousness was being built exclusively on the negation of the aspirations of the Jewish people to national self-determination in the land. This specific formulation of a national consciousness was

The war of return - Adi Schwartz, Einat Wilf (Annotated), p.156 (file not included in this release)

UNRWA’s schools repeatedly emphasized the idea of a violent return to the territory of the state of Israel. Here, for example, is the oath that schoolchildren recited every morning in the beginning of the 1960s in UNRWA schools in the Gaza Strip—funded and supported by Western states. Standing in a line and facing the direction of Israel, the pupils used to recite these words:
Palestine is our country, Our aim is to return. Death does not frighten us, Palestine is ours. We will never forget her. Another homeland we will never accept! Our Palestine, witness, O God and History: We promise to shed our blood for you!

The war of return - Adi Schwartz, Einat Wilf (Annotated), p.163 (file not included in this release)

These anti-Israel views did not infiltrate UNRWA in a vacuum. At the same time, the United Nations was undergoing some far-reaching changes that had a dramatic influence on the international climate and on UNRWA’s working environment. In the 1950s, the world began to undergo a process of decolonization, which meant a substantial growth in the number of UN member states in a very short time—from 51 at its foundation in 1945 to 144 by 1975. These were nations in Africa and Asia that had just won their independence after liberation from the yoke of colonial rule, mostly by France and Britain. Many disliked the Western states because they had just been their despotic colonial masters, and they formed the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in 1961, declaring that they identified neither with the capitalist West nor the communist East (although in practice they were mostly inclined toward the Eastern bloc).

The war of return - Adi Schwartz, Einat Wilf (Annotated), p.174 (file not included in this release)

The refugee camps and the PLO played a central role in the outbreak of the fighting:

The war of return - Adi Schwartz, Einat Wilf (Annotated), p.231 (file not included in this release)

Decades after it was created for operational and ostensibly temporary purposes, the term “registered refugee” remains UNRWA’s unique invention. Not only does it underpin UNRWA’s entire registration system, enabling it to escape international standards and practices, but it also enables Palestinians to leverage the image of refugees in the popular imagination as having just fled a conflict zone, suffering and in dire need of help, even when reality has long ago divorced from that image. One does not normally imagine refugees as middle-class individuals who have never fled their homes, live in permanent housing, work in white-collar professions, and enjoy the citizenship of a functioning state. But this description matches that of many more Palestinians than people might imagine just from the fact that they are still registered as refugees by UNRWA.

The war of return - Adi Schwartz, Einat Wilf (Annotated), p.231 (file not included in this release)

The vast majority of those registered by UNRWA have never fled their homes. They are the descendants, by now into the fifth generation, of the original refugees. In 1965, UNRWA changed the eligibility requirements to be a Palestinian refugee to include third-generation descendants, and in 1982, it extended it again, to include all descendants of Palestine refugee males, including legally adopted children The result of this was the creation of a permanent and perpetually growing population of Palestinian refugees. This is one of the main reasons how a war that ended in 1949 with several hundreds of thousands of refugees can now be said to have produced more than five million.

The war of return - Adi Schwartz, Einat Wilf (Annotated), p.233 (file not included in this release)

A different but also highly problematic situation regarding UNRWA’s registration system exists with respect to the West Bank and Gaza. There, the Palestinian registered refugees live in territories governed by either the Palestinian Authority (800,000 in the West Bank, not including East Jerusalem) or Hamas (1.4 million in the Gaza Strip) and consider themselves to be living in Palestine. They engage in efforts, many of which are successful, to have Palestine recognized as an existing state, either in international forums, or bilaterally. This means that 2.2 million people who are registered as Palestinian refugees are actually living in what they themselves claim, and seek recognition of, as Palestine.

The war of return - Adi Schwartz, Einat Wilf (Annotated), p.235 (file not included in this release)

For UNRWA to register Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza as refugees, and for the West to sustain that, means in effect accepting the Palestinian claim that not only the West Bank and Gaza are Palestine but that the state of Israel should be Palestine

The war of return - Adi Schwartz, Einat Wilf (Annotated), p.238 (file not included in this release)

When all of UNRWA’s unique and inflationary practices of refugee registration are reviewed and placed aside, it emerges that probably fewer than 5 percent (250,000 out of 5.5 million) of those currently registered by UNRWA as refugees could be seriously considered refugees. The other 95 percent are either citizens of a functioning state (in Jordan), or living in the Palestine they seek recognition of in the West Bank and Gaza, or pursuing new lives elsewhere.

The war of return - Adi Schwartz, Einat Wilf (Annotated), p.239 (file not included in this release)

South Korea would still be the wasteland it was after the Korean War, rather than an Asian economic tiger. On both sides of the India–Pakistan border, tens of millions of refugees would sit seething, generation after generation, continuing to claim the other country as their own. The United States would be deprived of much of its energy and become a country of refugees who refuse to build a future in it while constantly looking back to their mythologized previous lives, or actually to those of their great-grandparents. Hundreds of millions of refugees in Africa and Europe would sit in camps, nurturing resentments and fantasies of revenge, and no single nation’s borders would be settled. Had the people in the rest of the world been registered as refugees in the same manner as UNRWA does for Palestinians, the long (relative) peace that has marked much of the world since the end of WWII would have been replaced by constant war.

The war of return - Adi Schwartz, Einat Wilf (Annotated), p.240 (file not included in this release)

Even the Swiss foreign minister, Ignazio Cassis, who thought that UNRWA “worked as a solution for a long time,” pointed out after visiting a refugee camp in the West Bank in May 2018 that “today it has become part of the problem.” Cassis added that UNRWA “provides ammunition to continue the conflict” and that “by supporting UNRWA we are keeping the conflict alive.”

The war of return - Adi Schwartz, Einat Wilf (Annotated), p.244 (file not included in this release)

For comparison’s sake: in 2019, UNHCR dealt with approximately 20 million refugees using a staff of nearly 17,000 employees, who were not refugees but agency personnel UNRWA registered 5.5 million refugees serviced by a staff of over 30,000, nearly all of whom are Palestinian. This means that the ratio of staff to registered refugees at UNRWA is seven times higher than in UNHCR. For all intents and purposes, UNRWA is a Palestinian organization under the international cover of the United Nations.

Files

UNRWA.base (file not included in this release)