Disir
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- Sep 30, 2011
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Have you guys seen this op-ed piece?
What UNRWA did with the weaponry it found on its premises is far from the worst of Israels problems with the UN agency, however. The extent of the problem is rooted in the fact that UNRWAs actual name is not, as widely believed, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency a moniker that would imply an organization with worldwide responsibilities. UNRWAs full name is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. It has existed since 1949, that is, to look after Palestinian refugees only, and the scale and scope of its mandate uniquely for a UN refugee organization has been expanding continuously day after day, thanks to its definition of what constitutes a Palestinian refugee.
Broadly speaking, everywhere but here, the UN defines a refugee as someone who, credibly fearing persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, and so on, is outside his country or former habitual residence. If the normal UN definition had been applied to the estimated 650,000 Palestinians who fled or were expelled from what became Israel in the late 1940s, the Palestinian refugee problem today would extend to the relatively few survivors among those 650,000 a number estimated in the low tens of thousands. Were that the case, one of the key final status issues of profound dispute between Israel and the Palestinians would become instantly manageable, clearing a central obstacle to the two-state solution that some Palestinians, many in Israel, and the UN, ostensibly seek so urgently.
Thus, rather than a refugee problem in the low of tens of thousands, there are today five to six million Palestinian refugees impossibly awaiting a return to Israel. And their healthcare, social services and, critically, education is funded via UNRWA.
As Israel sees it, an organization ostensibly designed to resolve a problem became the organization perpetuating the problem.
The trouble with UNRWA | The Times of Israel