The United Nations must treat all refugees in the world in the same way, including "Palestinian refugees" and review the role of UNRWA

In this photo (below) from the 1940s, the little girl standing next to her brother in front of their big house is my mother.

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At that time, they must abandon this building in the Al-Alwiyah district in Baghdad. They, like 120 Jews, fled Iraq to Israel leaving behind an entire life. Their Iraqi citizenship was stripped of them. They arrived in transit camps in Israel where they experienced the fate of refugees.

I gave this photograph last week to Mr. Jason Greenblatt, President Trump's Middle East envoy, as part of a working session of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Security Committee. which was held in the United States. I wanted to talk to him about that part of history that seems to have been forgotten, the part where more than 800 Jews had to flee the Muslim countries in which they lived when Israel was created. But none of them benefited from any refugee status or demanded it. Nor the following generations, like me, my brother, or my four sisters. So I told him that it was time for the UN to define the status of all refugees worldwide equally and to stop giving Palestinians special treatment by guaranteeing them a refugee status that is transmitted from generation to generation. generation. This is conferred on them by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) (under the influence of Hamas, a terrorist organization which controls Gaza), which receives huge funding compared to refugee agencies.

Refugees from generation to generation

In reality, only 1% of Palestinians are "true" refugees, as defined by the Relief Agency: " people whose usual place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948, who lost both their homes and their livelihoods (as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict) ". The other 99% are their descendants. Isn't that absurd? Of the 600 Palestinian refugees counted by UNRWA 000 years ago, the number has grown to more than 70 million, and every day, with every birth, it is only increasing. Without control, this population of pseudo-refugees will never stop growing. And UNRWA is entirely responsible for this situation.

UNRWA has financial and political interests in maintaining this fiction of “Palestinian refugees”: as long as they are considered as such, funds will flow. While the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which focuses on the rehabilitation of refugees and their adaptation to the host country worldwide, has approximately 9700 staff worldwide, UNRWA, exclusively dedicated to Palestinians, employs 30 people, the vast majority of whom are Palestinians working in Gaza and the West Bank.

The UN must take responsibility

In April, a report signed by the monitoring group UN Watch accused UNWRA schools of incitement to terrorism. Document details dozens of instances of instigation, reveals photos of UN agents glorifying kidnapping of Jewish children or firing rockets at Israeli civilians, praising Hamas and from Nazism to the cry of "Allah bless Hitler". The report stresses that UNRWA violates its duty of neutrality and rejection of all forms of racism, by openly supporting Hamas. Even more outrageous, UNRWA would be complicit in war crimes by letting Hamas use its infrastructure in Gaza to launch missiles against Israel or dig tunnels in the context of terrorist operations against Israeli civilians.

While the war in Syria, Iraq and throughout the Middle East has created millions of refugees, there is an urgent need to treat all refugees equally.

Let us ensure that the UN stops letting the Palestinians wallow in the role of welfare and reconsiders the vocation of UNRWA, whose field of action oscillates between the questionable and the criminal.