The United Nations Relief and Works Administration (UNRWA) has kept the
displaced persons of the failed Arab assault on new born Israel in
servitude for six decades. It is the servitude of refugee
status.
Now, people who have been moved a few miles from their original homes are
simply not refugees. And that is precisely where most of the
Palestinians hovered together after 1948, moving at most ten miles east,
some much less, a few a bit more. That is, to the
Jordanian-occupied West Bank which became their place of residence, and
they lived among hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians in what was,
after all, also part of historic Palestine. As was Jordan proper on
the east bank of the river. Some went south to Gaza which was also
part of Palestine (but ruled by Egypt since 1949), along with native
Palestinians already living there for many generations. But almost
no one thought of himself as a Palestinian. (No one, although
Edward Said's over-privileged Christian family moved from Jerusalem to
Cairo before the war and there discovered Palestine and Palestinianism,
surely as a protection against the Muslim essence of the Arab resistance
to a Jewish polity in the region that would, as it has turned out,
include the people of the Cross as their enemies.)
And, by the way, almost no one thought himself Jordanian or Lebanese or
Syrian either. The cartography of the area was Ottoman as in
Ottoman Empire, variously divided into sanjaks, according to the
convenience of the sultan. The maps with the new nomenclature of
three independent states emerged only long after he had fallen and deep
into the years of the disintegrating League of Nations. In
Palestine, the only people who thought themselves in some way
Palestinians were the Jews who were already a historic people. Which, alas, is not yet the case for the Arabs of Palestine. In her
famous and oft-maligned June 1969 statement denying the existence of a
Palestinian nation, Golda Meir was actually correct, as we are seeing
right now in, O.K., I'll call it Palestine. I, too, want a
Palestinian state for the Palestinians in Palestine. If only they'd
done something about it when they had more territory, assigned to them by
the United Nations General Assembly in 1947, than will ever be allotted
to them now and half of Jerusalem, besides. Of course, it wasn't
quite their territory for long. The West Bank was annexed, as I
wrote above, an ignored but intrinsic part of Jordan. Gaza was an
Egyptian prison.
The surrounding Arab states and UNRHA cooperated for decades and under
twelve commissioners-general in assuring that the displaced Palestinians
fester to become a permanent force aimed at reversing history and
eliminating Israel. Maybe some idealists around UNRWA (and I knew
one of its heads very well and he was both idealistic and inventive)
imagined that this endless support would somehow transform the so-called
refugees into productive citizens of what was supposed to be Arab
Palestine. But this was not to be.
Along the desolating way, UNRWA became complicit with nearly each and
every Palestinian terrorist organization. Its staffs were
honeycombed with liberation fronters of one sort or another, comrades of
the terrorists in the Arafat command and, of late, with the religious
fanatics of Hamas.
Then, last week, suddenly UNRWA discovered its own virtue. Hamas,
it said altogether believably, had hijacked UNRWA relief supplies away
from the distressed of Gaza and took these as its own. One of these
operations involved 200 tons of blankets and food. The
organization announced that it would cease further deliveries which, of
course, is a confession of its incapacity to deal with Palestinian
thugs. You can read about this in two tiny, really tiny, stories,
one by Ethan Bronner in Saturday's Times and another in an A.P.
dispatch in the same day's Boston Globe.
But this should be a big and important story because it comports with
other revelations by Israeli authorities about heists of material by
terrorist groups from other relief sources, usually discounted.