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Students at an UNRWA school in Gaza (from the film “Palestinian Refugee Policy: From Despair to Hope”)

Israel plans to ask the UN to terminate the special UN agency for Palestinian Arab refugees, UNWRA.

As everyone knows, there are almost 5 million people who claim ‘Palestinian refugee’ status, although reasonable estimates of the number of Arabs who fled the area that would become Israel in 1948 range from 550,000 to 750,000.

No other refugee population has ever been granted the ability to pass down this special status — and the right to be maintained indefinitely on the international dole — except the Palestinian Arabs.

Think about that: all other refugee problems are by definition temporary. Wars and natural catastrophes create refugees, and the international community does its best to help them weather the crisis. There have been millions upon millions of refugees since the UN was created; Jews, Palestinian Arabs, Iraqis, Hmong, Somalis — the list is endless. What happens to them? Some are repatriated, some are resettled in other places, some die. Their descendants carry on, perhaps in new homes. The US and Europe are full of them.

But the Palestinian refugees are special, in two ways. One, it is forbidden to consider resettlement. The only way to end their refugee status is for them to ‘return’ to what is now Israel. And two, Palestinian refugee status is hereditary.

A consequence of the first special condition is, ironically, discrimination against Palestinians by host countries. Palestinians in Lebanon, for example, have been denied the right to work in many professions, own property,  go to school with Lebanese, vote, etc. They are restricted to refugee camps, many of which would better be called ‘towns’ — or ghettos — because they are built of permanent structures.

The Arabs living in these ghettos are provided with their needs by UNRWA, which feeds and clothes them, and builds schools and housing. Some 99% of UNRWA employees, of course, are Palestinians, so UNRWA is the main, and in some cases the only, employer of Palestinians in a refugee ghetto. Most of the ghettos are controlled by terrorist factions, and organized crime flourishes.

The hereditary nature of ‘Palestinian-ness’ means that this will continue forever, or until the Arabs succeed in overrunning Israel. Since UNRWA humanely provides assistance in proportion to the size of each family, this encourages the population to grow without bound. It also has given rise to a dangerously youthful demographic pyramid.

UNRWA was created in 1947 by UN GA Resolution 302, which clearly intended it to be temporary:

[The General Assembly] Recognizes that, without prejudice to the provisions of paragraph 11 of General Assembly resolution 194 (III) of 11 December 1948, continued assistance for the relief of the Palestine refugees is necessary to prevent conditions of starvation and distress among them and to further conditions of peace and stability, and that constructive measures should be undertaken at an early date with a view to the termination of international assistance for relief;

Needless to say, the idea that refugee status would be hereditary is nowhere mentioned in this resolution! Today, the UN  funds UNRWA’s budget ($1.2 billion in 2009) with money mostly donated by the US (the biggest donor) and the EU.

It is remarkable that the UN, which produced resolution 302, could later accept a concept that would extend the problem indefinitely into the future. Perhaps by then it was a different UN. But it is even more remarkable that it would accept the Arab insistence that nothing short of ‘return’ could end refugee status. Together they imply agreement with the Arab project to end the Jewish state.

The two special conditions together are a lethal concoction: the ‘refugee’ population is primarily young, alienated, and educated by highly ideological Palestinian teachers. The population is rapidly growing, but there are few outlets for youthful (or adult, for that matter) energy. The only hope held out to them is that some day they will rise up and take back what they believe to be their patrimony.

In other words, the UN has created a monster.

Israel believes that there are no more than 250,000 (in my opinion, this number is high) Arabs who qualify for refugee status by the UN’s traditional definition. It will propose that they be assisted by the usual UN mechanism (the UN High Commission for Refugees, UNHCR), and that the special status be ended.

I would hope that the proposal would also include a demand for an end to the racist policies of discrimination against Palestinians in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Gaza and the Palestinian Authority, where the refugee ghettos exist. ‘Refugees’ that have lived all or most of their lives in these nations should be granted citizenship and full rights (ironically, the Palestinian Authority has said that it will not give resident refugees citizenship if it is granted statehood).

The chance of such a proposal being accepted, despite the fact that it is the only practical way to end the enormously expensive and dangerous Arab refugee problem, is near nil. This is because the root of the problem is not really Arabs, it is Jews. And when has the ‘international community’ ever been rational about Jews?

Technorati Tags: Arab refugees, UNRWA, Israel

News item:

Hamas and Fatah are expected to announce a new unity government on Thursday after reporting over the weekend that they had made a breakthrough in discussions toward a reconciliation agreement…

London-based Al-Quds al-Arabi reported that the new Palestinian government would be headquartered in the Gaza Strip, and its new prime minister would also hail from Gaza. “Fatah and Hamas have concluded that the president’s compound and the parliament will stay in Ramallah. Hamas and Fatah are in complete agreement that the next Palestinian unity government will be seated in the Gaza Strip and its prime minister, too, will be from Gaza,” Hamas official Ahmad Yousef told the newspaper.

After the failure of the PLO attempt to get a Security Council vote on Palestinian statehood, or even to get admitted to a bunch of UN agencies, the latest tactic is to  threaten ‘unity’ with Hamas again.

One of the issues about which there are conflicting reports is whether Salam Fayyad, the US-educated Palestinian Prime Minister, will keep his post. Hamas calls him a tool of Israel and the US, suspecting that he would be happy to settle for a peaceful state alongside Israel — it’s interesting that they don’t seem to suspect Mahmoud Abbas of the same heresy. Of course Fayyad is the only one the Western donors that keep the Palestinian Authority afloat trust to not simply steal all of their money, so there are, er, practical reasons to keep him.

Having said that, it is important to realize that there can never be an actual ‘reconciliation’ between Fatah and Hamas. They have irreconcilable views of the nature of the ‘Palestine’ that they both hope will rise on the ashes of Israel — and plenty of personal blood feuds.

There are examples of radical Islamists putting aside their differences when there is a greater enemy. For example, Shiite Iran was prepared to supply and finance the Sunni extremists of Hamas, whose parent was the Muslim Brotherhood, one of Iran’s great rivals in the struggle for the Middle East. And Iran-backed Syria supported Sunni insurgents in Iraq who were fighting Americans and even attacking Shiite Iraqis! But I think working together in the same government will be more than Fatah and Hamas can manage for any length of tme.

Interestingly, the possible presence of Hamas in the Palestinian ‘government’ seems to make little or no difference to the EU, which — despite its own money troubles, and in the middle of a bruising budget fight — has decided to boost aid to ‘Palestine’ by another 100 million Euros! They either don’t know what Hamas is — and they cannot possibly be that stupid or ill-informed — or their anti-racist, peace-loving, genocide-opposing ideals don’t amount to more than a truckload of horse-pucky.

PM Netanyahu has said that the Palestinians can’t have both Hamas in the government and peace. Israel and the US have threatened to cut off cooperation and funding from the PA if it allows Hamas to join the government (unless Hamas agrees to the the ‘Quartet conditions’ of ending terrorism, recognizing Israel and accepting prior PLO agreements, like the Oslo accord. But this sounds quaint today).

The Obama Administration really doesn’t want to cut off the PA, and indeed recently convinced the head of the House Foreign Relations Committee, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), to remove a hold on $200 million of aid which she had placed as a result of the PA’s UN maneuver. The administration produced 500 pages of documents, presumably to show that without the aid, the PA would collapse and Hamas would take over.

This is a game of diplomatic ‘chicken’. The PLO and perhaps the Europeans think that the the threat of legitimizing Hamas is enough to force Israel into precipitous concessions on issues like settlements, Jerusalem, etc. But the danger is that Hamas really might succeed in overthrowing the Fatah-run PA. One thing that is probably not in the cards is a stable unity government composed of Fatah and Hamas.

My guess is that the PA will keep Fayyad and keep its aid, and do little more than talk about reconciliation with Hamas.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Palestinians

In his book Carnage and Culture, Victor Davis Hanson argues that the success of the West in warfare is a consequence more of the nature of free societies than of resources, skill or bravery of individual warriors, or even technology.

Today, technology — including weapons technology — is available to the highest bidder, and is simple enough to be operated by anyone. A country doesn’t need to have engineers that can design a telecommunications system or a nuclear power plant in order to have one. Illiterate soldiers from tenth-rate powers, or even terrorist gangs, can possess and use weapons that can destroy a tank, bring down an aircraft or sink a ship.

But for an example of why Hanson’s argument still holds, consider the coming conflict between Iran, a nation of 1.6 million sq. km and 74 million people with large oil reserves; and Israel, 21,000 sq. km in area with a population of 7.5 million, and almost no oil.

Israel is a free society in which dissent, free inquiry and the values of self-reliance and adaptability are encouraged and flourish. Iran is a totalitarian theocracy. The combatants are entirely unmatched: Iran doesn’t stand a chance.

In an article with the somewhat silly title “Israel’s Secret Iran Attack Plan: Electronic Warfare,” Eli Lake explains some of the ways that Israel can take advantage of the scientific and technical culture that has developed in its free, capitalist society:

A U.S. intelligence assessment this summer, described to The Daily Beast by current and former U.S. intelligence officials, concluded that any Israeli attack on hardened nuclear sites in Iran would go far beyond airstrikes from F-15 and F-16 fighter planes and likely include electronic warfare against Iran’s electric grid, Internet, cellphone network, and emergency frequencies for firemen and police officers.

For example, Israel has developed a weapon capable of mimicking a maintenance cellphone signal that commands a cell network to “sleep,” effectively stopping transmissions, officials confirmed. The Israelis also have jammers capable of creating interference within Iran’s emergency frequencies for first responders.

In a 2007 attack on a suspected nuclear site at al-Kibar, the Syrian military got a taste of this warfare when Israeli planes “spoofed” the country’s air-defense radars, at first making it appear that no jets were in the sky and then in an instant making the radar believe the sky was filled with hundreds of planes.

Israel also likely would exploit a vulnerability that U.S. officials detected two years ago in Iran’s big-city electric grids, which are not “air-gapped”—meaning they are connected to the Internet and therefore vulnerable to a Stuxnet-style cyberattack—officials say…

The likely delivery method for the electronic elements of this attack would be an unmanned aerial vehicle the size of a jumbo jet. An earlier version of the bird was called the Heron, the latest version is known as the Eitan. According to the Israeli press, the Eitan can fly for 20 straight hours and carry a payload of one ton. Another version of the drone, however, can fly up to 45 straight hours, according to U.S. and Israeli officials.

This only scratches the surface of the potential of electronic warfare (it obviously doesn’t include any “secret” plans). But it’s easy to think of other lines of attack open to an adversary that understands the technology its enemy is employing.

The Stuxnet worm that damaged Iranian nuclear centrifuges, for example, required intimate knowledge of the Microsoft Windows system in which a “zero-day” vulnerability was exploited as a delivery system, and of the Siemens programmable-logic controllers that operated the centrifuges. This kind of expertise simply does not develop in most totalitarian societies.

I’ve used this cartoon before, but it’s as apropos as ever:

Technorati Tags: Israel, Iran, electronic warfare, Carnage and Culture

It's all because of 'the occupation'!

Military occupation can be roughly defined as control over the territory of a state by a hostile army. Occupation can be legal under international law, as long as it can be distinguished from the acquisition of territory by force, which is frowned upon. An example of a legal occupation was the occupation of Japan by the US after WWII.

But the Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria is not an occupation in this sense. One might ask, “what state is occupied?” There is no such entity as ‘Palestine’ and never was. The Jewish people have a prima facie right to settle in the territory of the Palestine Mandate which was guaranteed by the League of Nations. The precise eastern border of the State of Israel has never been delineated. It is certainly not the 1949 armistice line (what is often incorrectly called the “pre-1967 border”), by any reasonable interpretation of UNSC resolutions 242 and 338, which called for “secure and recognized boundaries” which would be arrived at by negotiations between the parties in the dispute.

As a corollary, Israeli settlements east of the armistice lines are not, as the anti-Israel media are fond of saying, “illegal under international law.”

It should be clear by now that when Arabs and their supporters talk about “the occupation,” they are referring to the Jewish state, and not just the Jewish presence beyond the Green Line. Describing her experiences “occupying Birthright [see also here],” activist Kiera Feldman wrote recently:

Human mic speeches began, and my friends spoke eloquently about the dispossession of 750,000 Palestinians in 1948—the occupation of Israel. We were joined by a crew of Palestinians from the Jenin Freedom Theater, a renowned institution in the West Bank. “Where is their Birthright?” shouted my friend Max [Blumenthal].

Palestinian Arabs, led by the PLO, have asked the UN Security council to admit them as a state, although their application does not specify its borders. If they should be successful, it’s certain that they would continue to press their claims against Israel diplomatically and legally (and of course by terrorism, although they don’t admit that) after the UN grants them a toehold.

Their claim is based on nothing more than their chutzpah. According to them there was a flourishing Palestinian society prior to 1948 before the Zionists came along and occupied their land. In fact, the ancestors of the majority of the Arab residents in 1948 arrived in the area of the Mandate since the mid-19th century, mostly from Egypt and Syria. Many came after British and Zionist development created economic opportunities not available under prior oppressive Ottoman rule.

Although they could have coexisted with the Zionists, their reaction to Jewish immigration was vicious and racist, especially after the rise of Haj Amin al-Husseini to Palestinian leadership. In 1947 they could have accepted partition, and created a state of ‘Palestine’. No Arabs would have had to leave their homes, either in the Jewish or Palestinian state.

Instead they chose the path of war, and failed to destroy the Jewish state and expel or kill its inhabitants as they had intended (Husseini himself, who had spent much of WWII in Germany under Hitler’s protection, had plans to establish Nazi-model death camps in Palestine).

After the war, they followed the path of rejectionism, preventing the resettlement of Arab refugees. With the creation of the PLO, they institutionalized terrorism, killing thousands of Israelis and others in hundreds of attacks. The establishment of the Hamas added a new, religious, dimension to the conflict, as well as increasing the level of violence.

Between 1950 and 1973, Arab nationalists, with help from the Soviets, instigated several regional wars. The result was that more territory passed from Arab to Israeli control, which only added to the Palestinian Arabs’ sense of dispossession.

We see, however, that “the plight of the Palestinians” is entirely a result of their actions and those of their allies. And their leadership — the PLO that is the heir to Husseini and Arafat, and the viciously racist and murderous Hamas — continues to reject the existence of a Jewish state in the traditional homeland of the Jewish people. Having learned nothing from their long losing streak, they still think they can eliminate Israel and the Jews.

Despite all this, the Israeli government is prepared to negotiate in good faith to relinquish some of the territory for a state of ‘Palestine’! But this could only happen if the Palestinians could be prepared to once and for all agree that the Jewish state is not ‘occupied’ and does not in fact belong to them, and end their state of war with it. Unfortunately, the chance of this happening with the current Arab leadership is nil.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Palestinian Arabs, occupation