Wednesday, December 14, 2016

UNRWA's Appeal Unpacked (And How It Impedes Any Sort of Viable "Solution")

The Hamas-linked UN agency takes care of people free of charge, an offer that many Palestinians--including those living in the overcrowded Shuafat "refugee" camp (where half the residents are not even refuges)--find irresistable:
According to this article at the official Shuafat website, since the mid 1970s, Israeli authorities have tried to get camp residents to move to other, less crowded areas of Jerusalem, especially the Arab neighborhood of Wadi el-Joz. Yet “the residents of the camp have categorically refused the Israeli offer,” claiming that it would somehow impact their “right of return.” 
In reality, it would mean that they’d have to pay rent instead of getting free housing from UNRWA. That’s the real reason they won’t move. 
The same article says that more than half of the residents at the camp are not “refugees.” They are squatters taking advantage of the lawlessness of the area. 
UNRWA should take responsibility for expelling these people — but of course UNRWA hasn’t done that for 60 years. Arabs have been moving into UNRWA camps since the 1950s to take advantage of free services, and UNRWA just lets it happen. 
The bottom line is that Israel has tried to fix the problems of Shuafat for a long time, and UNRWA has let them fester, to follow the Palestinian master plan of keeping “refugee camps” forever as a propaganda weapon against Israel.
In plain words/the appropriate cliché: UNRWA is part of the problem, not part of the solution (because that's the way to perpetuate the problems--along with UNRWA itself).

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