Ambassador Schifter was interviewed recently by Leon Goldenberg for the popular “Community Matters” radio program, heard weekly in the New York area on WMCA, AM 570. (Link to the program will be posted when available.)
In the News
Why Palestinians can’t sign an end-of-conflict pact by Eric R. Mandel (Jerusalem Post)
July 20, 2020 by
Palestinian Arabs cannot sign an agreement that ends all claims and recognizes the right of a Jewish state to exist and live unmolested on land that was ever Muslim.
According to the usual international peace negotiators, everyone knows the end game to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, exactly what each party must concede for a final treaty. They say all that is needed is for Israel to withdraw to the 1967 lines with minor adjustments, with east Jerusalem as the capital of the new Palestinian state. If only Israel offered that, peace would reign.
But diplomats twist themselves into knots, finding ways to rationalize Palestinian intransigence, trying to explain away the fact that all those concessions were already offered to the Palestinian Authority in 2001 and 2008 and were soundly rejected. In 2008 the Israelis offered 94% of the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) with land swaps to make up for the 6%, east Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state, while Israel even conceded giving up exclusive sovereignty of the Temple Mount, the Mount of Olives, and the City of David, not to mention billions in international investment in a new Palestinian state. The Palestinians only had to give up the right of return, sign “an end-of-conflict and end-of-claims” agreement for perpetuity and be demilitarized.
If the Palestinians’ goal was truly two states for two peoples, and they truly wanted an independent Palestinian state living side by side a Jewish state, as UNGA Resolution 181 called for, why has this conflict not been resolved?
A recent article in The Hill by Dennis Ross and David Makovsky, two veteran peace negotiators and advisers who should know better, referred to a “two-state solution” and a “viable two-state outcome” in their attack on the Trump peace plan. Those terms mean completely different things to the Palestinians than they do to Western negotiators. To Palestinians, two states mean an Arab state in the West Bank and a binational state in Israel that will become Arab-ruled with time, because the Palestinians will never give up the right of return, as well documented in the new book The War of Return by Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf, a former Knesset member from the Center-Left Independence and Labor parties. The Palestinian demand is that all Palestinian refugees and their descendants in perpetuity have the right to move into Israel at any time of their choosing. In other words, this is the demographic destruction of Israel as a Jewish state.
Western negotiators and politicians of both American political parties have never fully understood or let on that they understood what the Palestinians really want, believing the answer to bridge the divide was leaving any documents between the parties ambiguous, so both could claim victory.
The only logical approach to truly ending this conflict is to write the most clear, unambiguous and specific documents, with every possible “i” dotted and “t” crossed, so no party can ever claim it still has outstanding issues in the future. Even contingencies should be included in the agreement, with a mechanism to respond to any violations.
Why?
Because Palestinian Arabs cannot at the present time sign an agreement that ends all claims and sign an end-of-conflict resolution that recognizes the right of a Jewish state to exist and live unmolested on land that was ever Muslim. I brought this up with president Bill Clinton in 2004, a man who truly gave his all to solve the conflict. Surprisingly, despite his sincere personal investment in the conflict, he didn’t seem to appreciate the essential importance of signing an end-of-conflict resolution, but he did tell me that prime ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak insisted upon it, as did Ehud Olmert in 2008. This is the eternal blind spot of Western negotiators and American presidents who seem to just want a deal signed, and inexplicably believe ambiguity will build trust. That was the failure of the Oslo Accords, giving away tangible assets for unfulfilled promises.
Western peacemakers have claimed without a credible basis that acknowledging the Palestinian right to return is just a needed gesture for Palestinian dignity, and say that the Palestinians will never take advantage of it, knowing that only a token number of refugees can be allowed. Just listen to what Palestinian leaders from Yasser Arafat to Mahmoud Abbas say, that vehemently contradicts this.
There is no international right for the return of refugees, certainly not descendants of refugees. In fact every other refugee in the world aided by the UNHCR (UN High Commission for Refugees) is to be rehabilitated in the country where they received refuge. This is especially true for refugees from the 1948 War of Independence, who were active participants in the war to annihilate the Jewish inhabitants, joining five Arabs armies whose goal was the complete annihilation of the Jewish state. The most the pro-Palestinian world can argue is that UNGA Resolution 194 calls for the right of return. However as with all General Assembly resolutions it has absolutely no force of law.
If peacemakers truly want a sustainable peace, they have to acknowledge that Israel has legal rights over the 1949 armistice lines if an eventual deal includes land swaps. Just like with the refugee issue, if it is not completely spelled out, no matter what agreement is signed, Palestinians will always have a pretext to say Israel stole Palestinian land with land swaps, and once again, preach and prepare for a new war.
The pro-Palestinian Middle East Monitor said it the best. “ Palestinians will continue to seek a just peace that will provide future generations with their birthright; their land will be returned, one way or another.” Naïve Westerners hear the words “just peace” and assume it means two states for two peoples. What it actually means is the unlimited right of return for every Palestinian forever to Israel, as no Palestinian government can give up an individual Palestinian descendant’s claim to be a displaced owner of what is now Israel.
The annexation debate has obscured the true paradigm of the conflict. The question is not if Israel annexes 30% of the West Bank, would it end the dream of a Palestinian state. The question to ask is, would the Palestinians accept the West Bank with land swaps that ensure Israel’s security, sign an end-of-conflict resolution and accept a Jewish state? The answer for the foreseeable future is no. This is not a territorial conflict or else this would have ended long ago.
If this hill for a comprehensive agreement is too high to climb at this time, so be it. What is needed is honesty, so a putative peace agreement is not just a recipe for fruitless concessions by Israel.
If all the Palestinians are capable of doing is negotiating a better status quo with more economic development and investment in exchange for nonviolence, then that should be the path for this generation.
The Trump peace plan or any other agreement will never have any staying power if it doesn’t include an end-of-conflict agreement, a recognition of two states for two peoples that clearly states that one of those states is Jewish, and an absolute end of any right for descendants of original Palestinian refugees to return to the State of Israel.
The writer is the director of MEPIN (Middle East Political Information Network). He regularly briefs members of Congress and their foreign policy aides, as well White House advisers. He is the senior security editor for the Jerusalem Report/ Jerusalem Post, and writes for The Hill, JNS, JTA, RealClearWorld and Defense News.
Destructive Western indulgence of the Palestinian dream
June 17, 2020 by
Refugee issue has no legitimate historical precedent or international parallel.
‘The reasons for the flight of the Palestinians are finally irrelevant,” literary critic and political activist Edward Said once declared. “What matters is that they are entitled to return.”
In The War of Return (a bestseller in Israel that has now been translated into English), Einat Wilf (former Labor and Independence Party MK and the author, among other books, of Winning the War of Words; Telling Our Story; and My Israel, Our Generation), and Adi Schwartz (a former staff writer and senior editor for Haaretz), provide an account of Palestinian refugees from 1948 to the present and the evolution of return as a “right.”
Perpetuated for more than 70 years, the refugee issue, which has no legitimate historical precedent or international parallel, the authors argue, has attracted much less attention than it deserves. Return, they maintain, is “not a bargaining chip… It is actually the greater goal itself” (i.e. “the obliteration of the Jewish state”).
Palestinians have “repeatedly bargained away” the establishment of a state of their own in order to keep fighting for the right of more than five million refugees to return to homes they never lived in. Informative, provocative, partisan and, at times, compelling, The War of Return may accomplish the unthinkable: change the minds of some readers about the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Acknowledging that a substantial number of Palestinians were forced to leave their homes, amid “the hell of slaughter” in 1948, Schwartz and Wilf emphasize that given Palestinian rejection of UN-mandated partition, ”the Israelis’ growing intolerance for the local Arab population was understandable.”
The fact that 150,000 Palestinians, one fifth of the Jewish state’s population in 1948, stayed, the authors indicate, proves that Israel is not guilty of “ethnic cleansing.” Most important, people who wage war “cannot legitimately claim that they ‘suffered an exceptional injustice.’”
In the 1950s, Schwartz and Wilf write, the UN General Assembly declared that Palestinians had a “right” to return, opening the door to a “protracted war under the cloak of international legitimacy.” At first, Palestinians and Arab countries refused to cooperate with the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the “temporary” organization set up to rehabilitate the refugees. Insisting that resettlement and compensation (policies used throughout the world by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees) be dropped as goals, Palestinians subordinated humanitarian considerations, better living conditions and even permanent housing in the camps to the wider struggle against Israel: “their blind loyalty to the idea of a violent return to Palestine was absolute.”
Under pressure from Arab states and the US, which sought to protect its oil interests, UNRWA dropped rehabilitation, focusing instead on education and vocational training, and filling teaching and administrative positions with Palestinians. UNRWA became “a very successful organization for the development of a Palestinian identity;” with the exception of camps in Jordan, which granted citizenship to Palestinians, each camp became a state within a state, a breeding ground for terrorists and an outpost for the PLO. Raised on a sense of victimhood, students recited a daily oath: ‘Palestine is our country/Our aim is to return… Another homeland we will never accept.’”
Israel did not appear in geography books. Grammar exercises fostered nostalgia “for the usurped homeland.” After 1969, the General Assembly referred repeatedly to “the inalienable right” to return and to self-determination of Palestinian refugees. “Where, precisely,” the authors ask, “do they intend to return to and how can this demand be reconciled with Israel’s own right to self-determination?”
The authors insist that Palestinian leaders have no interest in a two-state solution. Two years after Yasir Arafat explicitly endorsed the right of Israel “to exist in peace and security,” they point out, he imagined riding into Jerusalem with Saddam Hussein in triumph. Secret Palestinian Authority documents reveal Saeb Erekat’s view that references to the “‘right of two peoples to self-determination in two states’ may have an adverse impact on refugee rights, namely the right of return.” Erekat proposed instead “two states living side by side in peace.”
Unfortunately, the thesis of The War of Return – “the refugee question remained (and remains to this day) the most important litmus test for understanding the true and ultimate Palestinian position” – allows the authors to give Israel a free pass. Indeed, they characterize alternative explanations of the Arab-Israeli conflict as disingenuous or naïve “Westplaining.”
Israel’s “failure to compromise,” they assert, is not the problem. The deals offered to Arafat at Camp David in 2000 and to PA head Mahmoud Abbas in 2008, they write, without elaboration, constituted “a great opportunity.” The authors do not discuss the impact on the peace process of Israeli occupation of disputed land, the expansion of settlements, the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin or heightened concerns about terrorism.
Most refugees, they suggest as well, live in permanent housing (not camps), sell real estate, food and UN ration cards, are better educated than most other Arabs in the Middle East and work in white-collar professions, many of them in Western Europe.
That said, their emphasis on the role of the right of return provides a fresh angle of vision on a seemingly intractable conflict. The authors may well be right to propose replacing “constructive ambiguity” with “constructive specificity” as a diplomatic tool.
It should begin by shutting down UNRWA, the 70-year-old “temporary” agency that continues to confer legitimacy on a right of return, a right not clearly established in international law that has now been extended to a third, fourth and fifth generation of Palestinians; then persuading Western countries to appropriate funds to apolitical providers of schools and healthcare services; and endorsing a policy based on “naturalization and economic integration,” a manifestly preferable alternative to an unwilling war of return.
The writer is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.
The U.N. Agency for Palestinians Is Even Worse Than You Imagine
March 3, 2020 by
Wall Street Journal
A report alleges sexual misconduct, nepotism and retaliation by several Unrwa officials.
(August 6, 2019)
A corruption scandal involving sexual misconduct, nepotism, retaliation against whistleblowers and lots of business-class travel has gripped the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. It represents a new low for Unrwa and an indictment of the idea of an international agency dedicated to a single interest. But it’s also a unique opportunity to see behind the curtain of a billion-dollar U.N. bureaucracy and phase it out.
The allegations come from a leaked Unrwa ethics report completed in December 2018 exposed last week by Al Jazeera and Agence France-Presse. The published account accuses Commissioner-General Pierre Krähenbühl of appointing Maria Mohammedi, with whom he had a relationship “beyond the professional,” to a newly created and fast-tracked role as senior adviser and flying her around the world in business class. The U.N. says it’s still investigating.
According to the report, Ms. Mohammedi’s new job allowed her to join Mr. Krähenbühl onhis busy and expensive travel schedule. Current and former Unrwa officials describe him as perpetually absent from Jerusalem, a submarine who “surfaces for a couple of days” of public meetings then “disappears into the unknown for protracted periods.” Unrwa, which complains it’s strapped for cash, would have footed the bill for all of it.
Palestinian ‘right of return’ is really about ending Israel’s existence
February 4, 2020 by
Washington Examiner, February 4, 2020
by Sean Durns
On Jan. 28, President Trump revealed his administration’s long-awaited Israeli-Palestinian peace plan. As several commentators noted, the proposal explicitly states that there shall be no “right of return” — a key phrase with a very particular meaning that few analysts have carefully parsed out.
The Palestinian Authority, the entity that governs the West Bank, has continually demanded a “right of return” in nearly every negotiation that has occurred since the PA was created a quarter century ago. To understand the origin of this so-called “right,” one must first understand the history.
In 1947, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a partition plan for British-ruled Mandatory Palestine: Resolution 181, which called for the establishment of both a Jewish state and an Arab state. Arab states and Palestinian Arab leaders rejected it out of hand, choosing war over statehood. They violated Resolution 181 by attacking the fledgling Jewish nation. In the combat that followed, hundreds of thousands of Arabs and Jews fled. In some cases, they were forced from their homes in Mandatory Palestine and beyond.
Estimates of the original number of Arab refugees vary. The British Foreign Office suggested the number was between 600,000 and 760,000. A 1950 report by the U.N. Conciliation Commission for Palestine endorsed an estimate of 711,000 refugees by an “expert of the Statistical Office of the United Nations.”
Many of these initial Arab refugees were set up in camps in Arab nations that typically refused to grant them citizenship or give them equal rights. Rather, they were treated as political pawns and overseen by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency.
In retaliation, some Arab nations punished their native Jewish populations by seizing their property and expelling them or forcing them to flee under threat of death or torture. Of the more than 800,000 Jewish refugees, nearly 600,000 settled in Israel.
In the years since, Palestinian leadership has promoted the idea of a “right to return.” Not, of course, for the Jewish refugees — for whom no recognition or compensation has been offered. Nor is this “right” just for the original Arab refugees, the people who actually left Israel as the Arab states made war against it. Rather, the term “refugee,” as UNRWA and Palestinian leadership define it, includes people who are several generations removed from the conflict, people who are citizens of new states, and people who reside in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip — places that the Palestinians themselves claim as part of a future Palestinian state.
According to UNRWA, any Palestinian Arab descendants from the 1948 conflict are considered “refugees” until they “return” to Israel.
Thanks to this dubious definition, UNRWA considers there to be more than 5.3 million “Palestinian refugees” who have a “right to return.” In an Oct. 28, 2018, speech, PA President Mahmoud Abbas even claimed that there were 6 million. The actual number of surviving refugees from the 1948 war is closer to 30,000, according to an unreleased State Department report.
Demanding that 6 million Palestinian “refugees” have a “right” to “return” to a place where most of them never lived runs counter to Palestinian claims that they want to have their own independent state. As the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis noted in the Washington Post, this demand negates the idea of Palestinian statehood — unless that state means, by its definition, the demographic end of the Jewish nation of Israel. As the American Jewish International Relations Institute observed, such a move would “end the existence of the majority-Jewish state” in Israel.
In their unguarded moments, Palestinian leaders and their state-controlled media have said as much. Palestinian Media Watch, which monitors Arab media in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, has highlighted that official PA television promotes the “right of return” by showing a map of “Palestine” that simply erases Israel. PA-approved textbooks also hail that demand.
Defenders of the “right of return” often cite U.N. General Assembly Resolutions 194 and 394 and Security Council Resolution 224 to buttress their claims. But the Arab states voted against 194 in part because it did not establish a “right to return.” Indeed, it only “recommended” that original refugees from the conflict, not descendants, be permitted to return, and only after they agree to live “at peace with their neighbors.” (It should also be noted, as the late historian Martin Gilbert has documented, that these resolutions can be applied to the Jewish refugees as well.)
For decades, Palestinian leaders have rejected offers for statehood and peace while citing a “right” that doesn’t exist. Both the press and policymakers should speak honestly and openly about what it would truly mean and perhaps reflect on why Palestinian leaders continue to demand it.
Sean Durns is a senior research analyst for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.
The Real Problem With UNRWA
January 8, 2020 by
photo:Shareef Sarhan
International Policy Digest
In these camps, children are taught that they have been dispossessed and that they will one day “return” to their homes in what is now Israel. This imagined “right of return” has no basis in international law and does not exist for any other refugees in the entire world. If implemented, this scheme would overwhelm the state of Israel, ending its character as a majority-Jewish state, and effectively ending the very existence of Israel.
Ambassador Schifter Letter to the Editor, Washington Jewish Week
August 23, 2019 by
Washington Jewish Week
Letters | Aug. 22, 2019
In “UNWRA’s corruption runs deep” (Editorials, Aug. 15), you have correctly pointed to the problem of UNRWA corruption and noted that it is not likely that this problem will be solved soon, given present conditions in the UN system.
A point needs to be added concerning the very reason for UNRWA’s continued existence. With strong support from the U.S., the UN created the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in 1949. As its name implies, UNRWA’s purpose was to provide relief and “works” for the Palestinian refugees. “Works” were construction projects that would help integrate the refugees into their new surroundings. Given the fact that they were in Arab territory in which the population was of the same ethnicity, spoke the same language, and adhered to the same religion, that should not have been difficult.
But integration, the process initiated by the UN for millions of other refugees, was not what the Palestinian refugees or their hosts wanted. They rejected the works programs that would lead to integration. UNRWA tried to make progress with resettlement programs, but failed.
By 1960 the UN officials in charge of UNRWA had given up on the goal of integration. UNRWA’s leading officials then made a fundamental change in the initial UNWRA goal. They moved to a deliberate program of keeping Palestinian refugees segregated, providing them with social and health services, and above all educational services. All these segregated services, but particularly the educational services, were designed to have the original refugees and their descendants to continue to consider themselves as Palestinians and claim what they call their “right of return”, their mass migration to Israel. The goal of that migration is to reduce the Jewish population of Israel to a minority and end the existence of the State of Israel. This claim of a “right of return”, supported by UNRWA, has been and remains the major obstacle to an Israeli/Palestinian peace. UNRWA engages in a continuing effort to use its school system to instill hatred of Israel in its students.
It is worth noting that the proposal submitted to the recent Bahrain Conference would call for a program of economic development in the Arab territory adjacent to Israel that would foster the integration, at long last, of the Palestinian “refugees”, 99% of whom are the descendants, including the great-grandchildren, of the original refugees. The Palestinian leadership has rejected that proposal.
Richard Schifter
From the Jewish Policy Center: The UN General Assembly as an Obstacle to Peace
August 14, 2019 by
At the Bahrain Conference of last June, the United States recommended approval of a program that would invest $ 50 billion in the improvement of the economies of the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon. The major beneficiaries of this program would be the more than 5 million people living in the area whom the UN lists as “Palestinian refugees” and the more than 2 million Palestinian Arabs living in these five territories and states who are not on the refugee list. A large proportion of these more than 7 million people is in desperate need of economic assistance. Yet the Palestinian leadership rejected the U.S. proposal. Why?
The answer is obvious. Since the end of Israel’s war of independence in 1949, Palestinian leaders have emphasized a single goal: the end of the existence of the State of Israel and the creation of a Palestinian state “from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea.” They believe that this result, the one-state solution, can be reached through the mass migration of about 5.5 million “Palestinian refugees” to Israel, which would result in the Jewish population being in a minority, and would then lead to the dissolution of the State of Israel.
What needs to be fully understood is that a better standard of living for their own people is not the foremost goal of the Palestinian leadership. They are committed to an ideology which puts the extinction of the State of Israel at the top of their agenda. If their own people have to suffer as a result, that is the price that they have to pay to attain the result desired by their leaders. The Bahrain proposal was rejected because it provides help for people of Palestinian descent in the places where they now live. It does not contemplate their mass migration to Israel.
Who are the Palestinian Refugees?
To answer this question, we need to go back to 1947, when the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) adopted Resolution 181(II), which proposed the partitioning of the UN Mandate of Palestine, administered by Great Britain, to create a Jewish state, an Arab state, and a corpus separatum, consisting of Jerusalem and environs. The effort to persuade the Arab leaders to negotiate a partitioning failed. They had been heavily influenced by the anti-Jewish ideology of the Grand Mufti al-Husseini and were not prepared to accept the existence of a Jewish state in the Near East.
It was in light of that fact that the British decided to end their administration of the Mandate of Palestine. On May 15, 1948, as the British were getting ready to leave, the Jewish community in the Mandate created the State of Israel. Israel was promptly attacked both by Arabs in the Mandate and by the neighboring Arab states. At the very outset of the war, the message was sent by the Arab states to Arabs living in the areas of intense combat to move quickly to Arab territory. Many followed that advice. To be sure, there were also those who were expelled or forced to flee as a result of Israeli military operations.
By 1949, when the military conflict ended and armistice agreements were signed, an estimated 700,000 Arabs who had been residents of what had become the State of Israel found themselves in Arab territory. Under the armistice agreements, the West Bank was administered by Jordan and Gaza by Egypt. For many of the Arabs who fled from their homes in the new State of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza were their places of refuge, but others had fled to Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon as well.
Most of the Arabs that fled from Israel in 1948 found places of refuge in countries in which the long-time residents were of the same ethnicity as the refugees, spoke the same language, and were of the same religion. As a matter of fact, in many instances they were back in the country in which they or their ancestors had lived.
There were also Jewish refugees. To start with, there were 17,000 from East Jerusalem and the West Bank, who had been expelled by Jordan. They were quickly resettled in Israel. But there were many more. Beginning with the outbreak of the conflict with Israel, the Arab states compelled Jews to leave. As distinct from the Arabs in the Palestinian Mandate, many of whom had been recent arrivals at the Palestinian Mandate from neighboring areas, the Jews in the Arab states descended from families that had been residents of these states for centuries. The number of those expelled was about 800,000. They soon found new homes, about 600,000 of them in Israel. Many from Northwest Africa settled in France. Others settled in the United States.
General Help for Refugees
The number of people displaced in the Middle East as a result of the Arab-Israeli conflict did pose a humanitarian problem, but it was much smaller than the problem posed in Europe by the millions of Germans, Poles, and Ukrainians who were expelled from the areas in which they had made their homes for generations. Germans were expelled from areas which had been predominantly German for many centuries. Poles were expelled from East Galicia, Ukrainians from West Galicia. All of these refugees were resettled among people of the same ethnicity. There were also Jewish refugees who had survived the Holocaust and did not want to go back to the countries that they had come from. They were resettled as well.
The United States had been in the lead at the United Nations in the post-World War II period to deal with the refugee problem. Organizations with broad mandates were created. It led to the establishment of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, created in 1950. Before establishing the High Commissioner’s Office, the UNGA, acting in December 1949, adopted Res. 302(IV), which established the United Nations Relief and Work Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). (It is today the largest organization within the UN system, with about 30,000 employees, 99% of whom are Palestinian.)
The initial assumption on the part of the major financial contributors to UNRWA, particularly the United States, was that the Agency would lay the economic foundation for the integration of the refugees into the countries in which they were living. That is what was being done with the great majority of other refugees. UNRWA, as its name indicates, was to provide not only relief, but “works,” namely economic opportunities in the places in which the refugees lived. It would help them get resettled.
From 1951 to 1963 UNRWA was under the leadership of three Directors, all of them U.S. citizens. Two of them had had experience working on the Marshall Plan. The third had been an Assistant Secretary of Agriculture. They tried their best to use their experience to encourage economic development for the benefit of the refugees. But as the years passed, it became clear that UNRWA would not be able to discharge its economic development mission. The 1960 UNRWA Annual Report contains the following observation: “Ten years of UNRWA history bear out the fact that major development projects designed with the specific purpose of resettling refugees are unacceptable to refugees and host governments alike. It is the Director’s opinion that major development projects in the Middle East should proceed independently of UNRWA and without direct reference to the resettlement of refugees.” (Emphasis supplied.)
The Role of the UN in Preventing an Israeli/Palestinian Peace Agreement
It was thus in 1960 that UNRWA, which had been created to make a major contribution to peace, gave up on that goal. By 1960 it had become clear that Palestinian refugees could not be resettled in the countries in which most of them lived. They were a unique exception from the generally successful resettlement effort that had been undertaken for the millions of refugees of the late 1940’s. Given that realization, UNRWA gave up the goal of providing economic assistance and committed itself to the creation of a system of segregated governmental services for the Palestinian refugees. These services were to be provided in the fields of education, health, relief and social services and were to be completely separated from the services provided to the fellow-Arab population among whom they lived. That program of segregated services was the program to which the United States was the major contributor until 2018.
Special attention needs to be paid to UNRWA’s educational services. They were designed to instill in “refugee” children early in life the basic concept that the State of Israel does not have a right to exist, that they had a “right of return” and needed to be ready to migrate to Israel and help end the State’s existence.
As the years passed, the people exercising influence over UNRWA became concerned that as the refugee population got older, it would start shrinking and thus become less of a demographic threat to Israel. It was to deal with that issue that the term “Palestinian refugee” was re-defined in 1965 to include not only the children of refugees but the grandchildren along the paternal line as well. In 1982, the demographic issue was considered once again, and the decision was made that Palestinian refugee status would be inherited along the paternal line in perpetuity. That is how we got to the present 5.5 million. (Mahmoud Abbas claims it is 6 million.)
The UN General Assembly Endorsement of the Claim of a “Right of Return”
Though the UNRWA leadership had by 1960 reached the position that its activities would be based on the proposition that Palestinian refugees should be helped to exercise a “right of return” to Israel, this had not been the UN system’s formal policy until 1974. An entirely new developments at the UN took place in 1974 as the result of an informal and carefully hidden understanding reached between Fidel Castro of Cuba and Muammar Qaddafi of Libya, under which they would work together to use the Non-Aligned Movement to create a majority coalition at the UNGA, a coalition that would pursue the goals of weakening the international position of the United States (Castro’s objective) and ending the existence of Israel (Qaddafi’s objective).
It was in keeping with that new approach that the UNGA, at its 1974 session, granted the Palestine Liberation Organization observer status, and then invited the PLO leader, Yasser Arafat, to address the Assembly, which he did, at great length, on November 13, 1974. In his speech he declared that “Zionism is an ideology that is imperialist, colonialist, racist.” He also made it clear that he was committed to the one-state solution, the end of the State of Israel. Nine days later the UNGA adopted Res. 3236 (XXIX), which declared it to be “the inalienable right of the Palestinians to return to their homes and property from which they had been displaced and uprooted” and called for their return. The reality is that the UNGA does not have the legal authority to establish a “right.” The UN Charter provides in Article 10 that the UNGA may only “make recommendations.” Thus Res. 3236 just pretends to establish a legal right.
In 1975 the UNGA, under its new de facto leadership, adopted the “Zionism is Racism” resolution, Res. 3379 (XXX), which attained a great deal of attention. But it also adopted Res. 3375 (XXX), the resolution which established the Committee on the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, which did not receive the attention it deserved. It was Res. 3375 which institutionalized within the UN system the commitment to end the existence of the State of Israel through the mass migration to Israel of all Palestinian refugees living in adjacent territory. Although not legally binding, it has since 1974 served as a recommendation to the UN Security Council to accomplish that result.
To make sure that the Committee would be able to get its message out internationally, the UNGA established in 1977 the Special Unit on Palestinian Rights in the UN Secretariat, which was enlarged in 1979 to become the Division for Palestinian Rights in the UN Secretariat. The Division, consisting of close to twenty UN employees, has the function to get the pro-Palestinian message out to the international community in the name of the United Nations.
The Information Note on the UN website articulates explicitly the position CEIRPP and thus of DPR states with regard to the engagement of CEIRPP and thus of DPR: “The Committee considers that a durable solution to the Palestine refugee problem can only be achieved in the context of the inalienable right of return to the homes and property from which the Palestinians have been displaced over the past decades.”
The establishment of CEIRPP and DPR in 1975 made it clear that the UNGA was not committed to an effort to help Palestinian refugees but was committed to ending the existence of the State of Israel. To make sure that this commitment would not be affected by a shrinking of the Palestinian refugee population through the death of the original refugees but would in effect be expanded, the original definition of Palestinian refugees, which included their children, was initially changed to include grandchildren, but was in 1982 expanded to cover descendants along the paternal line in perpetuity. That is how we get to 5.5 million in 2019.
Most observers of international affairs are well aware of the fact that the United Nations system has for many years engaged in programs to defame and delegitimize one of its member states, the State of Israel. But very few of them are aware that the UNGA has gone beyond that. It has created and has maintained an apparatus that contravenes the efforts to attain an Israeli/Palestinian peace agreement. In violation of the basic principles of the UN Charter, the UNGA has endorsed the one-state solution. That goal is to be achieved through the exercise of the so-called “right of return”, compelling Israel to accept the mass immigration of more than 5,500,000 Arabs of Palestinian ancestry, people now living in states and territories adjacent to Israel. Their arrival in Israel would reduce the Jewish population to a minority and thus end the existence of the State.
How can the “Right of Return” Obstacle to Peace be Overcome?
The fact that the UNGA has created and continues to renew annually the mandates of the apparatus that seeks the end of a Jewish-majority state is not generally known, even by some of the officials responsible for votes cast by their countries in the UNGA. But it is certainly well known to the Palestinian leadership. How can these leaders be expected to engage in serious peace negotiations with Israel, when they are well aware of the fact that the UNGA has endorsed and continues to endorse annually the claim of a “right of return,” a claim to end Israel’s existence?
There is no doubt that there are member states of the UN that want to see an end to the existence of the State of Israel. There are others that vote for CEIRPP and DPR, motivated by a desire to oppose the US position. But there are many states whose heads of government would be surprised or even shocked if they were made aware of the fact that their country has voted Yes or has voted Abstain on resolutions that commit the UN to ending the existence of Israel through the mass migration to Israel of 5.5 million residents of the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon.
Adoption of CEIRPP and DPR resolutions require a two-thirds vote because the resolutions have budgetary consequences. The two-thirds majority would not be there if heads of government that have no animus against Israel or the United States were fully aware of the fact that they are failing to oppose UN resolutions that seek to end the existence of Israel. There may not even be a simple majority. That is why it is so critically important to get the message to these high-level decision-makers, state by state, that they are allowing the UN to place a major obstacle on the road to an Israeli/Palestinian peace and thus cause the UN to violate the very principles on which the UN was founded. Given their friendly outlook toward Israel and the United States they need to give instructions for a change in their countries’ votes.
Amb. Richard Schifter chairs the American Jewish International Relations Institute and is a former U.S. assistant secretary of state for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs and special assistant on the National Security Council.
(Reprinted from the Jewish Policy Center Website)
Link: https://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/2019/08/13/the-un-general-assembly-as-an-obstacle-to-peace/
Ambassador Schifter in the Times of Israel: The Bahrain Conference and the “Right of Return”
July 3, 2019 by
Times of Israel
July 3, 2019
The Bahrain conference: What many have overlooked
The PA has no interest in the $50 billion of aid to Palestinians if it means giving up their claim of ‘right of return’
White House senior adviser Jared Kushner talks to the audience during the opening session of the “Peace to Prosperity” workshop in Manama, Bahrain, on June 25, 2019. (Bahrain News Agency via AP)
Discussions of last week’s Bahrain conference have stressed the point that the conference was designed to deal only with economic issues. It was to be followed by a conference that would be attended by representatives of Israel and the Palestinian Authority at which the political issues would be discussed and, hopefully, a peace agreement would be reached.
What appears to have been overlooked is that the Bahrain conference directly addressed the most important political issue in the Israeli/Palestinian dispute, an issue that must be resolved if peace is to be attained: the Palestinian claim of a “right of return.” That is the claim that calls for the mass migration to Israel from the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria of about 40,000 surviving Palestinian refugees from the 1948 and 1967 Arab wars against Israel plus about 5,500,000 children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of Palestinian refugees. All of them are now served by the UN Relief and Works Agency, which keeps them classified as Palestinian refugees, who are deliberately segregated from other members of the Arab communities among which they live. Their mass migration to Israel would end Israel as a majority-Jewish state and thus end the existence of the State of Israel. The claim of a “right of return” is thus designed to attain the long-term objective of the anti-Zionists: the end of a Jewish state in the Middle East.
The goal of the Bahrain conference was to make a major initial contribution to the cause of peace. That would be done by providing significant help for the economic development of the above-mentioned five political entities, West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. New job opportunities would be created through investments, totaling $50 billion, that would help all their residents, including the “Palestinian refugees,” who would become fully integrated into the communities in which they have lived for all or most of their lives.
Mahmoud Abbas and his colleagues in the Palestinian Authority leadership have rejected the proposed assistance program. They have made it clear that they are not interested in a program designed to provide a better life for the millions of Palestinians who are classified as “refugees” if it means giving up their plan to end the existence of the majority-Jewish state through mass immigration.
On the other hand, it appears that the leadership of some Arab states and also some Palestinian businessmen are sympathetic to the Bahrain conference proposals and are indeed prepared to accept the existence of the State of Israel in the Middle East. The question that is open now is whether these supporters of economic progress will be prepared to assert themselves in the period ahead, help keep the basic concept of a two-state solution alive and ultimately lead to its implementation. We’ll have to wait a while and see whether the Bahrain conference does have such positive results.
What is clear, however, is that there is no point to entering into a discussion now of borders, the status of East Jerusalem, and other political issues, if the Palestinian Authority continues to insist on its claim of a “right of return.” It should be quite obvious that no government of Israel will sign a peace agreement that embodies a program to end Israel’s existence as a State.
It so happens that in the Camp David negotiations of 2000, in which Prime Minister Barak and PLO leader Arafat represented the two sides, President Clinton, in his “Clinton Parameters,” came up with a similar proposal for the “right of return” issue, a proposal which also called for a program of substantial financial assistance to the “Palestinian refugees.” The Parameters made it clear that the proposed peace agreement would not compel Israel to accept Palestinian immigrants based on the “right of return,” but that President Clinton would help get the cooperation of a number of countries throughout the world that would accept Palestinian refugees as immigrants and that he would seek to raise the billions needed to resettle the migrants. As we know, Arafat did not accept the Clinton proposal, which would indeed have provided the two-state solution.
In analyzing the problem that we continue to face in any effort to attain an Israeli/Palestinian peace, we need to note that it was close to a hundred years ago that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini developed the ideology of most emphatic rejection of Jewish migration to the Palestinian Mandate. The State of Israel has now been in existence for 71 years, but the Palestinian leadership continues to adhere to al-Husseini’s ideology: no Jewish-majority state. As we in AJIRI have noted, this outlook, which rejects peace, is supported by the UN General Assembly through its annual enactment of the resolutions that extend the mandates of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (CEIRPP) and the Division for Palestinian Rights (DPR). CEIRPP and DPR are committed to advancing the Palestinian claim of a “right of return.” How, indeed, can we expect the Palestinian leadership to give up a claim that the UNGA endorses year after year?
What the outcome of last week’s Bahrain conference demonstrates is that it is critically important for all relevant decision makers on the international scene to understand that to attain an Israeli/Palestinian peace we need a Palestinian leadership that accepts the existence of the State of Israel and gives up the idea of ending Israel’s existence through a large-scale population transfer. Votes against the CEIRPP and DPR would play an important role in achieving that result. That would be an important step forward in realizing the promise of the Bahrain conference.
AJIRI #63: More Information About UNRWA’s Role As An Obstacle to Peace
June 7, 2019 by
February 2019
After having provided funding for UNRWA ever since it was founded, thus for close to 70 years, the United States has recently ended its financial support of this UN agency. It has for many years been crystal-clear that the work of UNRWA undermines efforts to conclude an Israeli/Palestinian peace agreement. Here, in a State Department report that has just been released, is more evidence of that reality.
“AJIRI deserves support as the only Jewish organization working directly with Congress to redress the UN’s anti-Israel bias.”