CNN reports that “the United States is ending all funding to the United Nations agency tasked with supporting Palestinian refugees, the U.S. State Department said Friday, describing the body as ‘irredeemably flawed.’”
Indeed it is, and this Trump administration move is courageous and welcome.
Palestinian “refugee” status is as trumped-up as the “Palestinian” nationality itself, and there is no reason why U.S. taxpayer dollars should continue to prop up this jihadist fiction.
The Trump administration’s decision to cut off U.S. funding to the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) is a significant blow to this corrupt and dishonest organization. as the United States has been its largest donor. U.S. taxpayers doled out $350 million to UNRWA in 2017 alone.
All that money went towards perpetuating fictions which aided the Islamic jihad against Israel. World Israel News noted recently that when UNRWA was established, it offered aid only to “the original refugees who had lost their ‘home and means of livelihood’ as a result of the Arab-Israeli War of Independence in 1948.” However, “it was only several years later that the eligibility requirements changed to include the refugees’ descendants, which meant that instead of the numbers steadily dropping as the years pass, they have jumped exponentially.”
This has never happened before in the history of the world. Refugee status has never before been passed on to one’s children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
In 1948, when the State of Israel was established, millions of people were refugees, having been displaced from their homes in Europe by World War II, or in Asia by the partition of India and Pakistan. Almost all of Europe’s surviving Jews had lost their homes, and nearly a million Jews were exiled from Muslim countries when Israel was founded.
Czechoslovakia expelled the Sudeten Germans; Germans were likewise expelled from East Prussia and other Eastern territories that it lost as a result of the war. Millions of Poles and other Europeans were also refugees.
Yet today we never hear about Hindu or Muslim refugees from the time of the Partition, or Jewish refugees from Muslim countries, or Germans or Poles or other refugees in Europe. Why not? Because those people for the most part moved elsewhere and got on with their lives.
Most of them would have been appalled at the idea that they should pass on their refugee status to their children or grandchildren. The fact that they were refugees at all was not to them a badge of honor, but a time of difficulty in their lives that they were glad to have survived and put behind them.
Not so the Palestinians. After the Muslim countries surrounding Israel failed to destroy the Jewish State in 1948, all of them except Jordan refused to grant the displaced Palestinians citizenship. This was not due, at least overtly, to hostility to their cause, but it was due to an indifference to their plight, and a determination to use them as political pawns. The fact that there are any Palestinian refugees at all today is due solely to the fact that Muslim countries have wanted to keep the “refugee crisis” alive as a stick they could use to beat Israel.
Refugee status has been passed on from generation to generation like a family heirloom in order to milk the United States and other Western countries for support for these spurious refugees, and to serve as a constant reminder to the world that Israel exists on “stolen land.”
Even that isn’t true. Most of the actual refugees — that is, the people who actually left Israeli territory in 1948 — were not displaced by the Israelis. They were told to leave by Muslim leaders. Those leaders told them to get out of the line of fire, and assured them that once the Jewish state was destroyed, they would be able to return to their homes. It didn’t work out that way. The 1948 jihad against Israel was defeated, and the everlasting Palestinian refugee was born.
President Trump is right to put a long-overdue end to the American underwriting of this charade.
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