The refugee curse: Daniel Pipes tells on recognizing U.N.'s role in perpetuating misery

Here's a puzzle: How do Palestinian refugees differ from the other 135 million 20th-century refugees?

Answer: In every other instance, the pain of dispossession, statelessness, and poverty has diminished over time. Refugees eventually either resettled, returned home or died. Their children - whether living in South Korea, Vietnam, Pakistan, Israel, Turkey, Germany or the United States - then shed the refugee status and joined the mainstream.

Not so the Palestinians. For them, the refugee status continues from one generation to the next, creating an ever-larger pool of anguish and discontent.

Several factors explain this anomaly but one key component - of all things - is the United Nations' bureaucratic structure. It contains two organizations focused on refugee affairs, each with its own definition of "refugee":

The U.N. High Commission for Refugees applies this term worldwide to someone who, "owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted . . . is outside the country of his nationality." Being outside the country of his nationality implies that descendants of refugees are not refugees. Cubans who flee the Castro regime are refugees, but not so their Florida-born children who lack Cuban nationality. Afghans who flee their homeland are refugees, but not their Iranian-born children. And so on. The U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), an organization set up uniquely for Palestinian refugees in 1949, defines Palestinian refugees differently from all other refugees. They are persons who lived in Palestine "between June 1946 and May 1948, who lost both their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict." Especially important is that UNRWA extends the refugee status to "the descendants of persons who became refugees in 1948." It even considers the children of just one Palestinian refugee parent to be refugees. The High Commission's definition causes refugee populations to vanish over time; UNRWA's causes them to expand without limit. Let's apply each definition to the Palestinian refugees of 1948, who by the U.N.'s (inflated) statistics numbered 726,000. (Scholarly estimates of the number range between 420,000 to 539,000.)

The High Commission definition would restrict the refugee status to those of the 726,000 yet alive. According to a demographer, about 200,000 of those 1948 refugees remain living today. UNRWA includes the refugees' children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, as well as Palestinians who left their homes in 1967, all of whom add up to 4.25 million refugees. The 200,000 refugees by the global definition make up less than 5 percent of the 4.25 million by the UNRWA definition. By international standards, those other 95 percent are not refugees at all. By falsely attaching a refugee status to these Palestinians who never fled anywhere, UNRWA condemns a creative and entrepreneurial people to lives of exclusion, self-pity and nihilism.

The policies of Arab governments then make things worse by keeping Palestinians locked in an amber-like refugee status. In Lebanon, for instance, the 400,000 stateless Palestinians are not allowed to attend public school, own property or even improve their housing stock.

It's high time to help these generations of non-refugees escape the refugee status so they can become citizens, assume self-responsibility and build for the future. Best for them would be for UNRWA to close its doors and the U.N. High Commission to absorb the dwindling number of true Palestinian refugees.

That will only happen if the U.S. government recognizes UNRWA's role in perpetuating Palestinian misery. In a misguided spirit of "deep commitment to the welfare of Palestinian refugees," Washington currently provides 40 percent of UNRWA's $306 million annual budget; it should be zeroed out.

Fortunately, the U.S. Congress is waking up. Chris Smith, a Republican on the House International Relations Committee, recently called for expanding the General Accounting Office's investigation into U.S. funding for UNRWA.

Tom Lantos, the ranking Democratic member on that same committee, goes further. Criticizing the "privileged and prolonged manner" of dealing with Palestinian refugees, he calls for shuttering UNRWA and transferring its responsibilities to the High Commission.

Other Western governments should join with Washington to solve the Palestinian refugee problem by withholding authorization for UNRWA when it next comes up for renewal in June 2005.

Now is the time to lay the groundwork to eliminate this malign institution, its mischievous definition, and its monstrous works.

It's like anything else in the world. Interference by a governmental, quasigovernmantal or NGO bueauracracy has the long term opposite effect of its supposed intended consequence. Rather than remedying the problem, the interference perpetuates it, preventing its natural resolution. As conservatives know, life is not "fair". When someone starts working to ensure a "fair outcome", it is a safe assumption that an unviable situation is going to be artificially bolstered, ultimately becoming a strain on everything around it. At the same time, those "supported" by this interference become increasingly resentful with each generation - becoming inclined to strike out.

This is, in its essence, no different than what occurred when we bolstered the welfare system during Johnson's "War on Poverty". Poverty was not reduced, but a lot of families became dysfunctional.

He makes some excellent points in this. I have long felt that the Palestinians' peculiar condition as UN-declared "refugees," living in "refugee camps," is one of the things that contributes to the problem and makes it so difficult to solve.

This has benefitted certain Palestinians enormously (Arafat, for one), giving them money and influence that they would never have had otherwise, but I think it has genuinely confused and alienated the average Palestinian.

It's a part of the problem that gets very little analysis, and I would like to see more of our foreign affairs personnel give it more attention.

Immediately after WW2, the UN adopted a definition of "refugee" that recognized refugee status in an individual until he had been in another country for three years - at which point he was evidently considered an immigrant who had put down roots in his adopted country, and ceased to be a refugee. But around 1950, just for the so-called Arabs from Israel, a different definition was concocted by the UN - Arabs from Israel remain refugees forever, no matter how solid their roots in their new home - even if they would rather stay in Detroit or Paris or wherever rather than go back to the sand and the camels. The PLO went even farther and dreamed up refugees who were actually born in the country they're still living in; imagine, native born refugees!

This is ridiculous, and the most ridiculous part of it is that the US is legitimizing this flimflam by treating it seriously.

There are two definitions of "nationality" here. The original definition was the land and country of a People, with shared ancestry, history, hopes and dreams. By this original definition a person is his "nationality" because of what group he was born into. The Japanese use this definition, as do the Chinese, the Russians, and the Palestinians. The Americans used to, but those days are gone with the wind.

This definition of "nation" is anathema to modern "multiculturalists" who consider the whole idea sinful. Redefining words to mean whatever you want is a very old technique, remember Alice's Red Queen, or the cautions of Orwell. People who hold to the original definition of "nation" consider the new definition "Newspeak", as Orwell put it, that is, as an attempt at cultural and ethnic genocide.

Needless to say, Pipes is using the modern, "liberal, multicultural," definition of "nation" that hopes and plans for the destruction of the underlying old reality, now called prejudice, intolerance, and lack of "love your neighbor".

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