Apply the Principles of UNHCR to the Operation of UNRWA

The UNHCR Model

The international community and most specifically the supporters of The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East, UNRWA, have for half a century countenanced a situation in which the agency operates as an anomaly:

UNRWA was founded by the General Assembly of the United Nations in December 1949 specifically to provide humanitarian relief to the Arabs who fled from Israel in the course of the war of 1948-49. Envisioned as a temporary agency, it was afforded an extraordinary amount of latitude in terms of formulating its policies and even in its definition of refugee.

Exactly one year later the UN High Commission for Refugees was founded by the same body. Within a matter of months after its founding, the UN Convention relating to the Status of Refugees was adopted in Geneva at The UN Conference on the Status of Refugees and Stateless Persons. The Convention rules and its definition of refugee became binding on UNHCR and remain the norm within international law.

UNHCR’s original mandate was to attend to millions of refugees from World War II who were still stateless; this was later expanded to include all refugees in the world, with the exception of those attended to by another UN agency. In real terms, this meant that UNRWA was permitted to continue to operate under its own terms with its own definitions and policies, and not bound by the Convention. It was, and remains, the only international agency devoted to one specific group of refugees.

One might well imagine that with the founding of UNHCR, the need for UNRWA would have disappeared. And a solid case can be made for the fact that it indeed should have disappeared. The Arab bloc, however, was adamant that it not. A document found on the UNHCR website, “The State of the World’s Refugees, Part 1, The Early Years puts the matter baldly: “[Arab States… ] feared that the non-political character of the work envisioned for the nascent UNHCR was not compatible with the highly politicized nature of the Palestinian question.”

Over the years, UNRWA has developed into a massive bureaucratic agency that provides for Palestinian Arab refugees at a level that exceeds what is given to any other refugees in the world. The Palestinian Arab refugees are the only ones to have guaranteed health care, welfare assistance and primary education. In fact, 50% more per refugee is spent on the Palestinian Arabs than on any other refugees.

One of the reasons this is so is because UNRWA has come to function in a quasi-governmental fashion for a growing population that has remained, according to UNRWA’s rules and definitions, stateless now for 57 years. Whereas UNHCR seeks to help the refugees under their jurisdiction finds solutions so that they might get on with their lives with permanency,

UNWRA operates under the premise that the Palestinian Arab refugees are still refugees even if they acquire a new citizenship, as many have in Jordan until such time as they will return to their homes and villages in Israel, from which they or their grandparents fled.

The question remains: Why do western nations who finance UNRWA (That includes the 31% contribution from the US) not demand that UNRWA operate according to the principles of UNHCR – to resettle refugees instead of implementing a policy that perpetuates their suffering, while fostering their delusions about the “right of return” ?

THE “RIGHT OF RETURN” DELUSION When UNRWA was founded by the UN General Assembly Resolution 302, it included a “particular” reference to paragraph 11 of General Assembly Resolution 194. This resolution, passed during the 1948-49 war in an effort to bring it to closure, had not been supported by a single nation within the Arab bloc because it recognized Israel’s right to exist.

After the war, that same Arab bloc, influential in the drafting of UNRWA’s mandate, saw fit to call upon a specific clause from that resolution lifted from its broader context. That clause read:

“…Refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date…”

This phrase has been used since as the basis for the claim that the Palestinian Arab refugees have a “right of return,” often referred to as “unalienable.”

What is more, when the entire resolution 194 is examined, references to resettlement are found, and it becomes clear that return was not the only option being recommended by the General Assembly.

Nonetheless, UNRWA has functioned on the basis of this presumed right.

Thus UNRWA accuses Israel of blocking the “legitimate rights” of the Palestinian Arab refugees and operate under the premise that they must be maintained in a limbo status under its care until such time as “return” can be realized. Any attempts to provide the refugees with permanent residence elsewhere are blocked by UNRWA as when, in 1985, when Israel attempted to move refugees into 1,300 permanent houses built for them near Nablus and a UN resolution was passed demanding that Israel not move refugees.

While claiming to protect the “rights” of the refugees, the question remains as to whether this UNRWA policy violates fundamental human rights.

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the Florida Congresswoman who chairs the Middle East subcommittee of the US House international relations committee, proposed on September 30th, 2005 that at a time “when the issue of U.N. reform is at the forefront, it is time for the Refugee Convention’s inapplicability to Palestinians to be reconsidered. It is time for UNRWA’s separate status to be rescinded, and for UNRWA to be integrated into UNHCR”.