About time:
Nearly everyone agrees that around 650,000 Palestinians fled or were forced from their homes between June 1946 and May 1948. But when it comes to counting the number of Palestinian refugees alive today, the math gets fuzzy.
According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) – the main body tasked with providing assistance to Palestinian refugees – there are more than 5 million refugees at present. However, the number of Palestinians alive who were personally displaced during Israel’s War of Independence is estimated to be around 30,000.
This enormous disparity is explained by UNRWA decisions in 1965 and 1982 that extended the definition of “refugees” to include the children and grandchildren of displaced Palestinians. Today, UNRWA’s annual budget stands at approximately $600 million, of which $250 million is contributed by the United States. Overall, America has contributed $4.4 billion to the UN agency since its establishment in 1949.
If the US Senate Appropriations Committee has its way, this may significantly change. On Thursday, the committee approved language that would distinguish between Palestinian refugees alive in 1948 and their descendants. An amendment to the foreign operations appropriations bill, introduced by Illinois Sen. Mark Kirk (R), requires the US State Department to report within a year how many people receive aid from UNRWA who were themselves displaced and how many of them are descendants of those people. The former number, estimated at around 30,000, would be used as the basis for formulating US policy on Palestinian refugee issues.
By the way, using the same logic, there are not 900,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries, but anywhere from 5.2 – 5.9 million. But you don’t hear many people talking about them, nor is there a UN agency dedicated to their plight.
Probably because we don’t have a record of leaving them for dead, like the Arabs can boast regarding the treatment of their palestinian brethren.
