The following article, written by ECAJ Executive Director Peter Wertheim, was ori­gin­ally published on J‑Wire on 25^th January, 2018.

Should the US cut aid to the Palestinians? … asks Peter Wertheim

Peter Wertheim
J‑Wire
January 25, 2018

The US gov­ern­ment recently announced that it will reduce its funding to the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which provides aid to Palestini­ans, to $125 million per annum, down by $60 million. It accuses UNRWA of having close con­nec­tions to Hamas and its racist, rejec­tion­ist ideology towards Jews and Israel, and of per­petu­at­ing rather than resolving the problem of Palestini­an state­less­ness.¹
As well-founded as the accus­a­tion appears to be, many people will non­ethe­less feel uneasy about a funding cut that could jeop­ard­ise the provision of vital health, edu­ca­tion­al and food services to ordinary people in need.
An altern­at­ive might be for the US to continue to provide the same level of aid, but have it admin­istered by the United Nations High Com­mis­sion­er for Refugees (UNHCR).
Not many people realise that the UN has one defin­i­tion of “refugee” for Palestini­an refugees, and a com­pletely different defin­i­tion for all of the world’s other refugees, and one agency that deals with Palestini­an refugees (UNRWA) and a com­pletely different agency to look after all of the world’s other refugees (UNHCR).²
UNRWA was estab­lished in December 1949 by UN General Assembly res­ol­u­tion 302.³ It defines “Palestine refugees” not only as “persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of live­li­hood as a result of the 1948 conflict”, but also their des­cend­ants - ad infinitum.⁴ Fewer than 1 percent of the people currently served by UNRWA fled from their homes during the 1948 or 1967 wars against Israel.⁵ The rest are des­cend­ants of refugees, many of whom are natives of other countries or enjoy full cit­izen­ship rights or permanent residency in other countries. Some have become refugees from other conflicts, such as the civil war in Syria.
The notion of refugee status being inherited and passed down in per­petu­ity to remote des­cend­ants who have never fled from their homes is without parallel in inter­na­tion­al law. It is not applied to, nor is it claimed by, any other refugee group.
The total Palestini­an refugee pop­u­la­tion, which was 711,000 in 1948 plus a further 155,000 who were added as a result of the 1967 war,⁶ has now grown to approx­im­ately 5 million people because of the arti­fi­cial inclusion of their des­cend­ants.⁷ Not only does this falsely inflate the current total number of refugees, it ensures that their numbers will grow into the future, making it increas­ingly unlikely that the refugee problem will ever be resolved.
This is despite the fact that the total number of actual Palestini­an refugees from the 1948 conflict who are still alive is now estimated to be down to about 30,000,8 numbers which would make the refugee problem much easier to resolve.
Palestini­an refugees and their des­cend­ants also attract a dis­pro­por­tion­ately high level of the UN’s resources. As at 31 October 2016:

• UNRWA provided services to 5.2 million people registered as ‘Palestine refugees’ and had 30,000 employees⁹;
• The UNHCR provided services to 16.1 million refugees and a further 10 million stateless persons who are not refugees,¹⁰ and had 10,700 employees¹¹.

The UNHCR operates under the 1951 Con­ven­tion Relating to the Status of Refugees (Refugee Con­ven­tion) which defines as a refugee any person who “owing to well founded fear of being per­se­cuted for reasons of race, religion, nation­al­ity, mem­ber­ship of a par­tic­u­lar social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nation­al­ity and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the pro­tec­tion of that country; or who, not having a nation­al­ity and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return it.”¹²
It can be readily observed that this defin­i­tion does not in any way extend to the des­cend­ants of refugees unless those des­cend­ants them­selves satisfy the criteria of the defin­i­tion. The vast majority of des­cend­ants of Palestini­an refugees would therefore not be con­sidered refugees according to the standard inter­na­tion­ally-accepted criteria set out in the Refugee Con­ven­tion. Even under a more generous defin­i­tion that would consider anyone who has been forced to flee from their home to be a refugee, the vast majority of des­cend­ants of Palestine refugees would not be con­sidered to be refugees.
Attempts have been made to justify the favoured treatment the UN gives to des­cend­ants of refugees who happen to be Palestini­an. It has been argued that if Jews have returned to their land with inter­na­tion­al endorse­ment after 1,800 years of dis­per­sion, the Palestini­ans should have the same right after 70 years.
This just does not stand up to scrutiny. Jews returning to their ancient homeland have never claimed to be exer­cising an indi­vidu­al right of return as refugees. They have never claimed to be returning to their indi­vidu­al homes. Rather, they have claimed  col­lect­ive right of national self-determ­in­a­tion which entitles Jews, wherever they may live, to return to their national home, the State of Israel.
For the 99% of Palestini­ans clas­si­fied by UNRWA as “refugees” who are in fact des­cend­ants of refugees, and have never fled from their homes, Israel has long accepted that they too have a col­lect­ive right of national self-determ­in­a­tion which would entitle them, wherever they may live, to return to a future State of Palestine, but not to Israel. Israel has also long accepted that they have a right to be com­pensated for the property they or their forebears lost in the 1948 war.¹³ The Arab states have yet to make a similar com­mit­ment to com­pensate the 820,000 Jews they expelled from their own countries after 1948.
There appears to be no good reason why there is one UN agency and one set of rules for Palestini­an refugees and another agency and another set of rules for all of the world’s other refugees. UNRWA explains this anomaly thus: “As UNRWA was set up in 1949, Palestine refugees were spe­cific­ally and inten­tion­ally excluded from the inter­na­tion­al refugee law regime estab­lished in 1951”.¹⁴
However, this explan­a­tion only provides the his­tor­ic­al reason for the existence of the two agencies, not a jus­ti­fic­a­tion, and does not give a reason why the two agencies should not be merged, and why the criteria for determ­in­ing who is a refugee should not be stand­ard­ised, so that the same rules apply to everybody.

1. Elliott Abrahams (blog), ‘Trump Gets UNRWA Right’, Council on Foreign Relations, 17 January 2018: https://www.cfr.org/blog/trump-gets-unrwa-right
2. ‘About us’, UNHCR website: http://www.unhcr.org/en-au/about-us.html
3. See http://www.unrwa.org/content/general-assembly-resolution-302
4. ‘Persons who meet UNRWA’s Palestine Refugee criteria’, UNRWA website:
   http://www.unrwa.org/userfiles/2010011995652.pdf
5. ‘US Senate dra­mat­ic­ally scales down defin­i­tion of Palestini­an “refugees”’, Times of Israel, 2 May 2012: http://www.timesofisrael.com/us-senate-dramatically-redefines-definition-of-palestinian-refugees/
6. Robert P. G. Bowker, Palestini­an Refugees: Mythology, Identity, and the Search for Peace, (Boulder, Colorado; Lynne Rienner Pub­lish­ers, 2003), p.81
7. UNRWA home page: http://www.unrwa.org/?id=86
8. ‘US Senate dra­mat­ic­ally scales down defin­i­tion of Palestini­an “refugees”’, Times of Israel, 2 May 2012: http://www.timesofisrael.com/us-senate-dramatically-redefines-definition-of-palestinian-refugees/
9. UNRWA website: http://www.unrwa.org/careers/working-unrwa
10. UNHCR Figures at a glance, UNHCR website: http://www.unhcr.org/en-au/figures-at-a-glance.html
11. UNHCR Staff figures as at 31.10.2016, UNHCR website: http://www.unhcr.org/en-au/figures-at-aglance.html
12. Article 1(2): http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/other/dfat/treaties/1954/5.html
13. For a complete account of the relevant history, see Don Peretz, Palestini­an Refugee Com­pens­a­tion,
    The Centre for Policy Analysis on Palestine, Wash­ing­ton DC, 1995:
    http://www.thejerusalemfund.org/images/PalestinianRefugeeCompensation.pdf
14. UNRWA web site: http://www.unrwa.org/who-we-are/frequently-asked-questions