The United Nations Palestinian refugee industry

Of all the problems that dominate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, only one ensures that the conflict will never end: the growth in the number of Arab-Palestinian refugees. Western governments have enabled this industry.

UNRWA is the UN’s internationally funded welfare agency exclusively for Palestinians, and it has financial and political interest in maintaining a fiction: as long as the Palestinians are refugees, UNRWA is in business. Of the 30,000 people who UNRWA employs, the vast majority are Palestinian. Only a few hundred are not. UNRWA is also the largest single employer of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. By comparison, the UN High Commission for Refugees employs only 5,000 to 6,000 people globally. It focuses clearly on resettlement and rehabilitation of refugees and building new lives, not maintaining services that prop up a six-decade-long status quo.

Since its inception in 1950, UNRWA has worked against resettlement in Arab countries where Palestinians are located. It has done so by shifting its mission from refugee relief to education, devising its own expanded definitions of who is a refugee, and expanding its legal mandates to “protect” and represent refugees. As a result, the Palestinian clients of UNRWA have gradually taken over the organization and have undermined an international relief effort, created in naïve good faith, under the auspices of the UN General Assembly.

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