Forget the Two State Solution

Make no mistake, the palestinian cause is nothing more than a tool to bring about the dismantlement of Israel. The UNRWA was established and continues to be perpetuated for the sole purpose of keeping the palestinian Arabs in misery, languishing in refugee camps in Gaza and Judea and Samaria when they should have been resettled in any of the 21 already existing Arab states decades ago, just as every other refugee population around the world was resettled. Especially when it was the Arabs who caused their displacement when they started the war against Israel in 1947. These other refugee populations, whether they be ethnic Germans who got kicked out of Czechoslovakia after WWII or Hindus and muslims who's populations were exchanged after the establishment of Pakistan in 1947, and of course the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from Arab countries which Israel absorbed. All of these refugees moved on with their lives in new countries and never demanded a "right of return", let alone second, third and fourth generations still being considered refugees. The palestinian Arabs have uniquely been made perpetual refugees, along with their descendants who were never born in Israel. In fact the UNRWA has actually resisted efforts by Israel to make life better for the palestinians. When Israel built new homes for the palestinians, the UNRWA went so far as to physically prevent them from moving in. Now why would an organization which supposedly exists to provide for the humanitarian needs of these people, so strongly resist any attempt to better their lives? And why do the Arab countries with palestinian refugees refuse to make them citizens? The answer to these questions are quite obvious. Neither the Arab countries, western leftists or "humanitarian" organizations who tout the palestinian cause actually give a damn about the welfare of these people, in fact the more they suffer the better as far as they are concerned. All the better to channel their anger at Israel. The same parties who are actually responsible for their plight, which would be the Arab countries and their leftist allies in the west, fill them with lies that their suffering has been caused by Israel and that the Jews stole their land. The irony is that Israel has treated them better than anyone else. They built them schools, hospitals, increased their life expectancy, education and economic prosperity. A new way of thinking must emerge. Instead of the west pushing a two-state solution, they should be pressuring Arab countries, with their vast lands, to absorb the palestinians. There is absolutely no justification for the creation of a 22nd Arab state at the expense of the only Jewish state. If Obama was truly a bold leader, he would go against the grain and propose this solution.

Disband UNRWA if you want peace

By Ted Belman
President Obama has promised a fresh perspective on issues, to bring “change” in the old ways of doing things. There is no better place to start than by confronting the core issue of the Arab refugees head on – and putting responsibility for solving it on the only ones who can do so, the Arab states.

So wrote Ruth King and Rael Jean Isaac in Putting First Things First – Solving the Arab Refugee Problem. In contrast to the perpetuation of this problem, they point out,
What happened in Israel (resettlement of Jewish refugees from Arab countries) was a replay, on a far smaller scale, of the vast population exchange that took place on the Indian subcontinent when England gave up rule of its last great colony. In that case, 8,500,000 Hindus fled Pakistan to India and 6,500,000 Muslims fled to Pakistan.

In the 1950s, in the wake of World War II, Elfan Rees, leader of World Refugee Year, reported the existence of 36 million refugees in Africa, Asia and Europe. Arab refugees numbered only one in 72 refugees. All but the Arab refugees from Palestine have been forgotten because they were integrated into the lands in which they sought refuge. No one today seeks the “right to return” of the ethnic Germans, probably 12 million in all, expelled after WWII from nations of Eastern Europe, including Czechoslovakia, or the Japanese expelled from Manchuria and Korea or the 3 million North Koreans who fled to South Korea. More recently, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, 1.6 million refugees from Vietnam, including the “boat people” who escaped so perilously to freedom, have been resettled. And, this is what the official website of the boat people concluded in 2003: “Yes, we suffered in the past and we lost everything. But we’ve managed to overcome the difficult times, settle, rebuild our lives and bring up our children. And that’s something to celebrate.”

They point out that UNRWA started out with the intention of resettling the Arab refugees but was thwarted by the Arab countries. Gradually it was transported into a vehicle for their maintenance rather than resettlement.
Nothing better illustrates UNRWA’s transformation than its response to an Israeli effort, in the mid 1980s, to improve the lives of Arab refugees in the Gaza Strip by constructing new housing for them. UNRWA protested to the UN and on December 3, 1986, the General Assembly passed a resolution demanding Israel “desist from the removal and resettlement of Palestinian refugees in the Gaza Strip and from the destruction of their shelters.” It declared that “measures to resettle Palestinian refugees in the Gaza Strip away from the homes and property from which they were displaced constitute a violation of their inalienable right of return.” Similarly, when Israel built new homes for residents of a camp near Nablus, UNRWA forbade anyone to move into them and posted a guard at the empty houses to make sure no one moved in. The Shuafat camp is within the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem and the city offered to give it full services in street paving, sewers and other urban amenities; UNRWA forbade it.

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