The Refugee Curse

D. Pipes

The Refugee Curse

by Daniel Pipes
New York Post
August 19, 2003
http://www.danielpipes.org/article/1206
http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/3485.htm

Here's a puzzle: How do Palestinian refugees differ from the other 135 million 20^th-century refugees?

Answer: In every other instance, the pain of dispossession, statelessness, and poverty has diminished over time. Refugees eventually either resettled, returned home or died. Their children - whether living in South Korea, Vietnam, Pakistan, Israel, Turkey, Germany or the United States - then shed the refugee status and joined the mainstream.

Not so the Palestinians. For them, the refugee status continues from one generation to the next, creating an ever-larger pool of anguish and discontent.

Several factors explain this anomaly but one key component - of all things - is the United Nations' bureaucratic structure. It contains two organizations focused on refugee affairs, each with its own definition of "refugee":

The U.N. High Commission for Refugees applies this term worldwide to someone who, "owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted . . . is outside the country of his nationality." Being outside the country of his nationality implies that descendants of refugees are not refugees. Cubans who flee the Castro regime are refugees, but not so their Florida-born children who lack Cuban nationality. Afghans who flee their homeland are refugees, but not their Iranian-born children. And so on.
The U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), an organization set up uniquely for Palestinian refugees in 1949, defines Palestinian refugees differently from all other refugees. They are persons who lived in 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." Especially important is that UNRWA extends the refugee status to "the descendants of persons who became refugees in 1948." It even considers the children of just one Palestinian refugee parent to be refugees.

The High Commission's definition causes refugee populations to vanish over time; UNRWA's causes them to expand without limit. Let's apply each definition to the Palestinian refugees of 1948, who by the U.N.'s (inflated) statistics numbered 726,000. (Scholarly estimates of the number range between 420,000 to 539,000.)

The High Commission definition would restrict the refugee status to those of the 726,000 yet alive. According to a demographer, about 200,000 of those 1948 refugees remain living today.
UNRWA includes the refugees' children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, as well as Palestinians who left their homes in 1967, all of whom add up to 4.25 million refugees.

The 200,000 refugees by the global definition make up less than 5 percent of the 4.25 million by the UNRWA definition. By international standards, those other 95 percent are not refugees at all. By falsely attaching a refugee status to these Palestinians who never fled anywhere, UNRWA condemns a creative and entrepreneurial people to lives of exclusion, self-pity and nihilism.

The policies of Arab governments then make things worse by keeping Palestinians locked in an amber-like refugee status. In Lebanon, for instance, the 400,000 stateless Palestinians are not allowed to attend public school, own property or even improve their housing stock.

It's high time to help these generations of non-refugees escape the refugee status so they can become citizens, assume self-responsibility and build for the future. Best for them would be for UNRWA to close its doors and the U.N. High Commission to absorb the dwindling number of true Palestinian refugees.

That will only happen if the U.S. government recognizes UNRWA's role in perpetuating Palestinian misery. In a misguided spirit of "deep commitment to the welfare of Palestinian refugees," Washington currently provides 40 percent of UNRWA's $306 million annual budget; it should be zeroed out.

Fortunately, the U.S. Congress is waking up. Chris Smith, a Republican on the House International Relations Committee, recently called for expanding the General Accounting Office's investigation into U.S. funding for UNRWA.

Tom Lantos, the ranking Democratic member on that same committee, goes further. Criticizing the "privileged and prolonged manner" of dealing with Palestinian refugees, he calls for shuttering UNRWA and transferring its responsibilities to the High Commission.

Other Western governments should join with Washington to solve the Palestinian refugee problem by withholding authorization for UNRWA when it next comes up for renewal in June 2005.

Now is the time to lay the groundwork to eliminate this malign institution, its mischievous definition, and its monstrous works.

To comment on this article, please go to http://www.danielpipes.org/article/1206#comment

Peace Pipes

Wall St. Journal
August 19, 2003
http://www.danielpipes.org/article/1207

In fighting the war on terror, it would be nice to think there is a role for one of the few U.S. scholars to warn of the danger from militant Islam in advance of September 11. Instead, the nomination of Mideast scholar Daniel Pipes to the board of the U.S. Institute of Peace has turned into one of the nastier confirmation battles of the Bush Presidency.

Bear in mind this is not a lifetime appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. It's a position at a relatively obscure government think tank for a term of four years. The Institute of Peace was set up by Congress in 1984 to research non-military solutions to world conflicts and has earned a reputation as politically centrist, not to mention occasionally as a political sinecure.

Mr. Pipes would be much more than a time-server. He is founder and director of the Middle East Forum in Philadelphia. He's taught at Harvard, the University of Chicago and the Naval War College. He is the author of a dozen books, several on Islam. He runs a useful Web site -- http://www.memri.org/¹ -- that posts English-language translations of the Arabic-language press. (Yesterday's offering: "Al-Qa'ida Claims Responsibility for Last Week's Blackout.") [DP note: this is an error; I am unconnected to http://www.memri.org]

For years Mr. Pipes has been raising the alarm about Islamic terrorist organizations operating in the U.S. -- including in an article with Steven Emerson for this page on August 13, 2001. After 9/11 he made the obvious point that the best hiding place for radical Muslims in the U.S. would be in moderate Muslim communities and in mosques. He favors "profiling," which is to say paying more attention at airports to young Arab men than to American grandmothers. If the polls are correct, most Americans agree with him.

For these insights, Mr. Pipes is now being dubbed a "racist" and a "bigot" -- the equivalent of appointing former Ku Klux Klan figure David Duke to a civil rights position, as one opposition group analogized last week. The Council on American-Islamic Relations is leading the charge, calling Mr. Pipe's appointment "a slap in the face to all those who seek to build bridges of understanding between people of faith."

Anyone who's read Mr. Pipes's work knows such accusations are absurd. Yes, he has a point of view, which he expresses vigorously and with which we sometimes disagree. But he has repeatedly stated that radical Islam, not Islam itself, is the threat. As he's said, in a line oft-quoted by his supporters, "Militant Islam is the problem, and moderate Islam is the solution."

Leading the charge against Mr. Pipes in the Senate is Ted Kennedy, aided by Democrats Tom Harkin and Chris Dodd and their fellow-traveler Jim Jeffords. A committee vote on the nomination was postponed last month after Senator Kennedy rose to attack him. President Bush is now reported to be planning to bypass the Senate and give Mr. Pipes a recess appointment while Congress is on vacation. This would allow Mr. Pipes to serve until the end of next year.

This is a good idea. The subtext of the Pipes confirmation battle is the conflict between two views of how to defeat terrorists. The pro-Pipes side believes they have to be confronted and defeated; the folks opposing him believe they can be mollified and co-opted. Appointing Mr. Pipes would send an important signal about which side is running U.S. foreign policy.

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