Dear Editor,

There is a fundamental misunderstanding in one of the Forward’s articles, dated October 17 and titled, “If Israel Lets In Palestinian Refugees, Will It Lose Its Jewish Character?

The five million descendants of Arab refugees from the 1948 war who continue to live in 59 refugee facilities administered by UNRWA in Israel, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan have been educated by a new curriculum introduced by the Palestinian Authority since 2000, which prepares every family to forcibly take back the villages and homes that they left during and after the Israel War of Independence.

Our agency acquired and translated copies of this curriculum, and we have been filming the UNRWA schools over the past 12 years.

While the often-referred-to UN Right of Return Resolution 194 (passed in December, 1948) encourages Israel to take back Arab refugees who would live in peace with Israel, what is now clear is that the UNRWA refugee population is seething with the results of a war education that has indoctrinated an entire generation to believe that they have the “inalienable right of return by force of arms”, and that they have a right to expel the Jews who built cities, kibbutzim and forests to replace villages that they lost in 1948.

The inherent Israeli opposition to the right of return for the descendants of Arab refugees has nothing to do with demograhics, as Sheier and Sucharov claim.

The Arab refugees would be viewed as an invading violent force, who have waited 68 years to reverse the results of the 1948 war.

David Bedein
Director
Israel Resource News Agency
Center for Near East Policy Research

http://forward.com/opinion/letters/352306/why-israelis-are-right-to-oppose-the-palestinian-right-of-return/?attribution=articles-article-listing-1-headline

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David Bedein
David Bedein is an MSW community organizer and an investigative journalist.   In 1987, Bedein established the Israel Resource News Agency at Beit Agron to accompany foreign journalists in their coverage of Israel, to balance the media lobbies established by the PLO and their allies.   Mr. Bedein has reported for news outlets such as CNN Radio, Makor Rishon, Philadelphia Inquirer, Los Angeles Times, BBC and The Jerusalem Post, For four years, Mr. Bedein acted as the Middle East correspondent for The Philadelphia Bulletin, writing 1,062 articles until the newspaper ceased operation in 2010. Bedein has covered breaking Middle East negotiations in Oslo, Ottawa, Shepherdstown, The Wye Plantation, Annapolis, Geneva, Nicosia, Washington, D.C., London, Bonn, and Vienna. Bedein has overseen investigative studies of the Palestinian Authority, the Expulsion Process from Gush Katif and Samaria, The Peres Center for Peace, Peace Now, The International Center for Economic Cooperation of Yossi Beilin, the ISM, Adalah, and the New Israel Fund.   Since 2005, Bedein has also served as Director of the Center for Near East Policy Research.   A focus of the center's investigations is The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). In that context, Bedein authored Roadblock to Peace: How the UN Perpetuates the Arab-Israeli Conflict - UNRWA Policies Reconsidered, which caps Bedein's 28 years of investigations of UNRWA. The Center for Near East Policy Research has been instrumental in reaching elected officials, decision makers and journalists, commissioning studies, reports, news stories and films. In 2009, the center began decided to produce short movies, in addition to monographs, to film every aspect of UNRWA education in a clear and cogent fashion.   The center has so far produced seven short documentary pieces n UNRWA which have received international acclaim and recognition, showing how which UNRWA promotes anti-Semitism and incitement to violence in their education'   In sum, Bedein has pioneered The UNRWA Reform Initiative, a strategy which calls for donor nations to insist on reasonable reforms of UNRWA. Bedein and his team of experts provide timely briefings to members to legislative bodies world wide, bringing the results of his investigations to donor nations, while demanding reforms based on transparency, refugee resettlement and the demand that terrorists be removed from the UNRWA schools and UNRWA payroll.   Bedein's work can be found at: www.IsraelBehindTheNews.com and www.cfnepr.com. A new site,unrwa-monitor.com, will be launched very soon.