Palestinian Refugees?

James Doogue

Palestinian Refugees - The Facts​

ISRAEL
​​Paragraph 13 of of Israel's Declaration of Independence provides that the State of Israel would be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.
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- Israel is the only Democracy in The Middle East
- Approximately 21% of Israels citizens are Arabs.
- There are 10 current Arab members of the 120 seat Parliament called the ​Knesset.
- There are 30 female members of the Knesset, ​that's 25%!
- In 2020 the Knesset swore in their 6th openly gay member making that 5% of the total parliament, the 4th highest in the world.
- In December 2022 the Knesset voted openly Gay member Amir Ohana​ as it's Speaker in the 37th Government.
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THE ARAB WORLD - Statistically Jews make up an average of 0% of citizens in Arab countries. ​​
- The Arab Human Development Report published by a group of Arab researchers from the UN Development Program concluded that out of the seven regions of the world, Arab countries had the lowest freedom score.
- ​According to UN data, the proportion of women's representation in Arab parliaments is only 3.4% (as opposed to 11.4% in the rest of the world).
- 55% of Arab women are illiterate.
- Male same-sex activity is illegal and punishable by imprisonment in Kuwait, Egypt, Oman and Syria. It is also punishable by death in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. In Yemen and the Gaza Strip, the punishment might differ between death and imprisonment depending on the act committed. Jordan and Bahrain are the only Arab countries where homosexuality is legal. In Gaza, having "unnatural intercourse" of a sexual nature, understood to include same-sex relationships, is a crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison. In February 2016, Hamas's armed wing executed one of its fighters ostensibly for "​ and moral violations", which Hamas officials acknowledged meant same-sex relations.

​PARTITIONING OF ​PALESTINE
On November 29, 1947, the UN voted into existence two new states: one called Israel for the Jews, and one for the Arabs, which never came into existence and never received a name.

When the Arabs rejected the Peel commission’s recommendation for partition and the subsequent UN endorsement of that recommendation, between August-October of 1947, months before the UN partition plan would come into effect, it was clear that there would be war no matter what course of action the UN took.

In anticipation of this war, many of the well-to-do Arabs (about 85,000 of them) of the Western Galilee, from Haifa to Acco and villages in between, closed down their houses and went to Beirut or Damascus, where, with their wealth and connections, they could wait for the end of hostilities in safety. This happened between August-October 1947. They thought that once the war was over (no one imagined that Israel could win), they would come back to their homes.

In the Galilee, around November 1947, some 100,000 of the Arab peasantry fled as well, following their leaders’ example. Lacking the effendis’ (wealthy Arabs) money and connections, many of the fellahin (Arab peasants) simply walked with whatever they could carry to Lebanon or Syria.

At this point, neither Israel nor the Arab states were encouraging, frightening, or ordering these masses to flee. The war had not yet even begun.

From December 1947 full hostilities between the Jews and the Arabs erupted even though the Mandate was still in effect.​

Anyway, with the termination of British control and the declaration of the State of Israel (14th May 1948), and freed from British obstruction, seven Arab armies (Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Morocco) invaded at once.

When the war ended, up to an estimated 700, 000 Arabs had fled.

Some anecdotal Arab accounts offered a candid explanation as to why they fled: "We feared that they would do to us what we would have done to them had we won.”

Considering the massacres of Jews by Arabs in Hebron, Gush Etzion, and the Jerusalem Jewish Quarter, it is understandable that the Arabs would project their own bloody fantasies onto Israel.
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To the best of my knowledge, it was only in Ramle and Lod that Arab residents were forced to leave because:

- They opened a hot war against the Hagana and
- They actively threatened strategically important sites and roads, particularly the approach to Jerusalem.

In other areas such as Yafo, kibbutzim in parts of the Galil and the hill country, and parts of West Jerusalem, in large part, the Jews adopted scare tactics in these areas ​ the Arab press and political elite were persistent in their messaging that this was to be a war of annihilation.

Thus, Israel was fighting not a war of independence, but one of survival.

However, lest the haters claim otherwise, in Haifa for example, the senior Jewish official there as well as the Hagana’s high command, drove through the Arab section of the city with a loudspeaker on April 26, 1948 (the State of Israel had STILL not been declared!!!), calling out in Arabic to the residents of his city to remain on their land and in their homes. A communique issued by the Haifa headquarters of the British police noted, "Every effort is being made by the Jews to persuade the Arab populace to stay and carry on with their normal lives, to get their shops and businesses open and to be assured that their lives and interests will be safe.” (see point 4 below)

For their part, Arab leaders of the paramilitary forces, and the forces of Syria, were blunt in their announcements that they wanted Arabs to leave these areas so that the Arab armies would have a clear field in which to initiate their genocide of the Jews.

In the words of the Nuri Said, Iraqi Prime Minister, "We will smash the country with our guns and obliterate every place the Jews seek shelter in (he estimated it would take 6-8 weeks to wipe out the Jews). The Arabs should conduct their wives and children to safe areas until the fighting has died down.”

In 1953, the Jordanian newspaper Al Urdun wrote, "For the flight and fall of the other villages it is our leaders who are responsible because of their dissemination of rumours exaggerating Jewish crimes and describing them as atrocities in order to inflame the Arabs…. By spreading rumours of Jewish atrocities, killings of women and children etc., they instilled fear and terror in the hearts of the Arabs in Palestine, until they fled leaving their homes and properties to the enemy.”

Nothing like hearin​g it from the horse’s mouth…….

Other than that:

1. Israel empl​​oyed de​fensive actions to hold the territory assigned to it by the Uni​ted Nations. Against 7 Arab armies explicitly promising a genocide.

2. As mentioned above, part of that defensive action included driving Arab civilians from their homes in a few Arab villages located at strategically important sites or sitting upon major arteries, especially the road to Jerusalem.

3. The above Hagana actions were both legal and commonplace in war since time immemorial (Muhammad is praised for doing the same thing to Jewish villages near Mecca before he besieged it).

4. The REAL cause of the refugees’ flight was the Arab invasion. Had there been no war, there would have been no refugees. This is evidenced by peaceful Arabs who stayed in Israel and became citizens of Israel and who prospered (approximately 170,000 in 1949, now in excess of 2,000,000).

Today, Arab Israelis serve as members of parliament (the Knesset), faculty in universities, highly educated professionals in just about every field of endeavour, and enjoy a standard of living, political and personal freedom, and economic opportunity unparalleled anywhere in the Arab world. That is apart from the dictators and Monarchs in the Arab countries.

The demonstrable truth is, Israel treated the Arabs who stayed well. Why would they do that if their plan was to force Arabs to flee? In contrast, there's no Arab country which can be pointed to as having treated the Jews who remained after 1948 in a similar fashion. So why does the world believe that up to 800,000 Palestinians were forced to flee Israel?

As Isa Blagden (The Crown of Life, 1869) stated, ” If a lie is only printed often enough it becomes a quasi-truth and if such a truth is repeated often enough, it becomes an article of belief, a dogma and men will die for it.”

Why have those Palestinians not returned to their Israel homes since 1948? Firstly, they have been waiting for the Arab world to rid Israel of the Jews. That ​​ was attempted in 1967 and is still threatened today. Secondly, Israel will not allow the security risk of allowing those who expected the Jews to be destroyed, to return. They chose not to stay as invited by the Jews in 1947/48.

JEWISH REFUGEES
- It is estimated that around 900,000 Jews from Arab countries and Iran, fled or were expelled, mainly from 1948 to the early 1970s, though with one final exodus from Iran in 1979–80 following the Iranian Revolution.

- An estimated 650,000 of these refugees were settled in Israel​

- The UN General Assembly did not make a resolution for the return of Jews to their homes in Arab countries after hostilities were settled, or that if they choose not to return that they be fairly compensated for their losses.

- The UN didn't establish an agency to assist Jewish refugees from the Arab world.

- The UN budget in 2022 for assisting Jewish refugees was US$0.

- All refugees have been assimilated into other countries, mainly Israel and the US, but also throughout the world.

PALESTINIAN REFUGEES
- The estimated number of initial Palestinian Arab refugees range from between 450,000 and 500,000 (according to a 1948 report by the United Nations and Israeli sources) to 750,000 (according to UNRWA).

- United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194 is a resolution adopted near the end of the 1947–1949 Palestine war. The Resolution defines principles for reaching a final settlement and returning Palestine refugees to their homes in Israeli territory. Article 11 of the resolution resolves that:

'...refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.'

- On 8th December 1949 The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) ​was established by the UN General Assembly
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- In 2022 UNRWA had a budget of US$1.6 billion to assist almost 6 million Palestinian refugees.

THIS WOULD BE COMICAL IF IT ​WERE NOT TRUE​
The millions of claimed Palestinian Arab refugees live in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, including those living in the refugee camps. Which mostly are not camps as we would normally envisage with tents and other temporary accommodation, Most so called refugee camps cannot be discerned from any Arab city in the Middle East.

According to UNRWA, a Palestinian refugee is defined as someone who had lived in the British Mandate of Palestine between June 1, 1946, and May 15, 1948 (the day after the establishment of the State of Israel), and was displaced by the conflict.

Thus, for someone to claim refugee status, they need only have lived in the British Mandate of Palestine for a short period of time.

In addition, this definition also grants refugee status to those who were outside the country but were unable to return to their homes.

What separates the Palestinian refugees the most from other refugee populations are the special dispensations granted them by UNRWA.

For most international refugees, whose status is determined by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the refugee status is held by the displaced person and can also be granted to their immediate family members as part of "family unity.”

However, under the special arrangement granted to Palestinian refugees by UNRWA resolutions in 1965 and 1982, all descendants of male Palestinian refugees are automatically granted refugee status. This includes grandchildren (which is not granted under the UNHCR) and adopted children.

In addition, the original Palestinian refugee does not need to be alive for their descendants to be granted refugee status. This dispensation does not exist under the UNHCR.

A further difference between Palestinian refugees and other refugees is that the UNHCR only allows those who have not been granted citizenship or been given the rights of a citizen (even without citizenship) by their places of refuge to claim refugee status.

However, this does not exist under UNRWA’s definition of a Palestinian refugee.

Thus, a Palestinian living in Jordan with Jordanian citizenship is still considered to be a Palestinian refugee as are their descendants.

Similarly, even though a Palestinian refugee living under the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank or Gaza is treated no differently than the non-refugee population, they still maintain their refugee status according to UNRWA.

Since 80% of registered Palestinian refugees live in Gaza, the West Bank and Jordan, that means that a huge proportion of those claiming refugee status are only able to do so under UNRWA, not the normative UNHCR. In other words, in the real world, they are not refugees.

Interestingly the American government announced in January 2021 that approximately 200,000 Palestinian Arabs who were displaced in the 1940s were still alive, a far cry from the the nearly 6 million (!) Palestinian refugees that UNRWA continues to support with over a billion dollars in international funding. And many of those 200,000 may well have residence rights and even citizenship in other countries.
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The inflated number of Palestinian refugees is not only a concern for those states that currently fund UNRWA. As the future of the Palestinian refugees is one of the issues intended to be resolved by a final status agreement under the Oslo Accords, it is important that a proper number of refugees be determined in order to have good faith negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

UNRWA’s claim of nearly 6 million million refugees is a cynical manipulation of the Palestinian refugee issue in an effort to undermine the security and interests of the State of Israel.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 09:20 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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