UNRWA Palestinian Refugee Camps: Will U.S. Dollars Fuel a Future War with Israel?

www.CBN.com (CBN News) – No issue fans the flames of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict more than the so-called “right of return” to Israel for Palestinian refugees. Israelis say the influx of nearly four million Arabs would mean national suicide for the Jewish state. But in the Arab world, the right of return is a part of jihad. The Palestinian refugee camps, largely funded by American tax dollars, are a front line in that battle. When you think of refugees, you might think of oppressed women and children fleeing African tribal wars, or South American drug battles.

The dictionary defines “refugee” as a displaced person, “one who flees to a shelter or place of safety.” These are the Palestinian refugees of South Lebanon. They are a people who may be displaced, but scenes from the Ain el Hilweh camp suggest an environment that is anything but safe. The residents carry and fire weapons, often at each other. They immerse their children in the ways of jihad, and stockpile munitions for a battle they hope to fight against Israel.

The Palestinian refugees are Arabs, and their descendants who left or were driven out of Israel in 1948. That year, modern Israel was born, and the surrounding Arab nations immediately tried to wipe it off the map.

Fifty-six years and four wars later, Israel is a strong democracy, the only one in the Middle East. But the world has done very little to help the Palestinian refugees adapt to that reality.

Most of them are kept in camps run by U.N.R.W.A, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. Last year, the United States gave more than 85 million dollars to U.N.R.W.A. for general funding, and nearly $50 million for emergency aid. But Middle East Analyst Raphael Israeli says it doesn’t translate into any goodwill for America in the Palestinian camps.

Israeli says, “America is the main provider. The more it provides, the more it is hated by the same people who get the benefits.”

Inside the camps, life is dominated by one central thought, and that is a return by force to the land that is now Israel.

Khalid Aref, a PLO representative in the camp, says, “There is no place under the sun but Palestine, whether the enemy will accept our rights or not. The Palestinian people, through armed struggle, is able to make the return possible.”

Abu Ahmed Fadel is a leader of Hamas in South Lebanon. He says, “We have the conviction that the resistance is what will liberate us. The resistance will make the occupation go away. After the liberation, the return will happen.”

Last December, at a demonstration in the Ein al Hilweh camp, protesters called for an Islamic revolution against Americans in Iraq, and for the killing of Jewish residents in the West Bank.

Some find it strange that such messages are coming from UN-sponsored camps, subsidized by American taxpayers, especially when America is in the middle of a war on terrorism.

And while the refugees suffer from poverty and crowded living conditions, the weapons are more advanced than the infrastructure. Critics say many Arab leaders need to keep the Palestinian issue alive, to deflect attention away from their own regimes.

Israeli says: “They want to perpetuate the refugee problem in order to continue to bash Israel for having caused the problem. If it is solved, how could they bash Israel any longer?”

In Lebanon, the Palestinians have built virtually a state within a state. The Lebanese army isn’t about to disarm the PLO. And Hamas factions in the camps. In Syria and Jordan, residents of the refugee camps are severely restricted in their work opportunities and freedom to move.

Israeli’s solution is to make the West Bank part of Jordan, which is in effect a Palestinian state, and to allow the refugees to return there. But that wouldn’t play well with Jordan’s King Abdullah or with Israelis living on the West Bank, in Judea and Samaria.

That solution is also rejected by the refugees themselves, who say they will settle for nothing less than the land of Israel.

Abed Makdeh says, “There will be no peace. If there is no right of return, there will be no stability in the whole world, unless the Palestinian people will return to their homeland.”

In the meantime, the United States continues its money transfers to the UN for the Palestinian camps, with no public plan for disarming the militias or for holding the aid recipients accountable for their actions.

This piece aired on CBN News on February 11, 2004