Perpetuating a crisis

Editorial

The Canadian government has just announced that it will reallocate funding to specific programs of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, the umbrella that operates the infrastructure that sustains 4.5 million Palestinian “refugees.”

The term refugees, as applied to Palestinians, differs from the definition used in any other case. All refugees in the world, except Palestinians, are represented by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Only the Palestinians have their own agency. Moreover, of all the refugees in the world, only Palestinian refugees are calculated using a method that includes the children and grandchildren of refugees, ensuring that the numbers of dispossessed are ever-increasing, rather than incrementally resolving. This is only possible because the Arab states, excluding only Jordan, have segregated Palestinians from their general populations and refused to grant them citizenship. And then they and their overseas allies have the audacity to use the term “apartheid” to describe Israel.

UNRWA’s budget, funded mostly by North American and European countries, receives only about three percent of its funding from the oil-drenched Arab states. Last week, Canada, which has been the seventh-largest contributor to UNRWA, announced that it would fund projects on an individual basis. This is the most sensible approach to the situation and it should be a source of pride that our country is the one leading the world in finally recognizing the real cause of the Palestinian “refugee” crisis.

Keeping Palestinian refugees miserable, stateless and angry seems to be the primary goal of both the Arab world and UNRWA. This has been aided not only through the assurance of poverty and misery, but more proactively through UNRWA-funded textbooks that have taught three generations of refugee children that Israel is an illegal occupier, that Jews deserve nothing but death and that refugee children must grow up to avenge their parents and their grandparents, even if it means being martyred for the cause.

Last week, the head of JIMENA – Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa – spoke in Vancouver and Victoria. Regina Waldman, a Libyan-born Jew, fled Tripoli in 1967 when the streets exploded in antisemitic rage after the Six Day War. She shared her story and the film The Forgotten Refugees, which outlines the desolation of Jewish communities in Muslim countries since 1948 and the 900,000 Jews made refugees from Arab countries and Iran in the past six decades.

Of those 900,000, about 650,000 were taken in by Israel. Given that these refugees arrived in the earliest years of the state and that the economic situation was such that they had to live in refugee camps for as long as 12 years, logic would dictate that international relief agencies would have poured money into Israeli coffers to support these destitute people. Not a penny. The only cash that flowed to support these refugees was from Diaspora communities and from the tight budgets of Israeli governments trying to build a state while pouring money into the military infrastructure that has meant the difference between life and death for the entire Israeli population forced to fend off her neighbors.

Compromise, which was the foundation of the 1947 Partition Resolution and remains the only possibility for permanent peace, is disdained by the Arab world as dishonorable collaboration with the Jews.

The treatment of Arabs in Israel has been orders of magnitude better than the treatment of Palestinian refugees in Arab countries. Arabs within Israel’s borders in 1949 were made citizens. Palestinian Arabs elsewhere in the Middle East have been kept as stateless people in refugee camps. The now-4.5 million Palestinian refugees (as accounted using UNRWA’s inclusive method) are corralled in camps, millions of human lives and potentials stunted by inhuman conditions just so that the Arab world and others can point to them and say, “Look what the Zionists have done.” The truth is that it is the Arab world, the United Nations and anti-Israel rabble who have perpetuated this humanitarian naqba, this catastrophe, inhibiting the progress of millions of human beings for political gain. And where is the outrage?

Peace will never come through a process of one-sided demonization and the incessant stoking of discontent. The Canadian government’s decision to reallocate its funding should be applauded by Canadians and replicated by other countries.

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