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Peculiar Proliferation of Palestine Refugees

(Washington Times) Daniel Pipes - The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), founded in 1949, defines its wards with great specificity: "Palestine refugees are people whose normal place of residence was 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." Accepting UNRWA's (exaggerated) number of 750,000 original Palestine refugees, only a fraction of that number, about 150,000, remain alive. But contrary to universal practice, UNRWA made a little-noticed decision in 1965 that extended the definition of "Palestine refugee" to the descendants of those refugees who are male, a shift that permits Palestine refugees uniquely to pass their refugee status on to subsequent generations. In contrast to all other refugee populations, which diminish in number as people settle down or die, the Palestine refugee population has grown over time to 5 million today. Thus is the "Palestine refugee" status set to swell indefinitely. All other refugees from the World War II era (including my own parents) have been long settled. The Palestine refugee status already has endured too long and needs to be narrowed down to actual refugees before it does further damage. The writer is president of the Middle East Forum and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.
2012-02-24 00:00:00
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