Two sets of refugees exchanged places in the Middle East Arab and Jewish, but only the Arabs have not been resettled. As long as UNRWA, the agency which registers the Palestinians as refugees, insists on their return to Israel, there will not be peace. Lyn Julius writes on Substack:
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Jewish refugees in an Israeli mabara or transit camp, 1950s
Mo Ghaoui is a Palestinian Arab who until recently lived in Lebanon. Now he is a naturalised US citizen. He walked into an UNRWA office requesting to be taken off the registry for Palestinian refugees: the answer was no. Once a Palestinian refugee, always a refugee. Even a fifth-generation Palestinian like Ghaoui cannot relinquish refugee status. He was told that registration is voluntary, but this is untrue. Deaths as we'll as emigration remain unreported, and abuse is so rife that a Palestinian refugee registered in Syria who moves to Lebanon can re-register there.
That's why the global total of Palestinian refugees is put by UNRWA at around six million and will keep growing in perpetuity as long as UNRWA, an agency exclusive to Palestinian refugees, continues to exist. The worlds 65 million non-Palestinian refugees are not so lucky. Their status is determined by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). For them, refugee status is lost as soon as the individual becomes a citizen of the country where he has resettled.
While Palestinian refugees are given special treatment, another set of Middle Eastern refugees are routinely ignored. Some 870,000 Jews were forced from the West Bank, Jerusalem and Arab countries. There was a movement of roughly equal numbers of Middle Eastern refugees in either direction. But the Palestinian refugees insist on repatriation to Israel, not resettlement.
It is not generally known that UNRWA was actually established to help refugees on both sides of the 1948 conflictboth Arab and Jewish. Initially, UNRWA defined those for whom it was responsible as a needy person who, as a result of the war in Palestine, has lost his home and his means of livelihood.
This definition included some 17,000 Jews who had lived in areas of then-Palestine conquered by Arab forces during the 1948 war and around 50,000 Arabs living within Israel's armistice frontiers. Israel took responsibility for these individuals and by 1950 they we're removed from the UNRWA rolls. This left some 550,000 Palestinian Arabsaccording to a New York Times estimate in December 1948under UNRWA's authority.
At the time, there was no internationally recognized definition of what constituted a refugee. In 1951, the U.N. Refugee Convention agreed on the following definition:
A person who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.
This definition certainly applies to the 850,000 Jewish refugees who fled persecution in Arab countries after 1948 and mostly made their way to Israel. Unlike the Palestinian refugees who fled a war zone (not all did: 160,000 stayed in Israel) the Jews we're non-combatants singled out as suspected spies for Israel and subject to discriminatory laws and mob violence. Returning to Arab countries would have and still does put their lives at risk. Yet the Palestinian refugees demand to return en masse to Israel, a country most have never seen.
The burden of rehabilitating and resettling the 650,000 Jewish refugees, who arrived mostly destitute in Israel, was shouldered by the Jewish Agency and American Jewish relief organizations. Together with Holocaust survivors from Eastern Europe, they we're shunted into transit camps called maabarot and endured appalling conditions. None consider themselves refugees today, although they do demand recognition and redress.
At the time, the American aid earmarked for Middle East refugees was supposed to have been split evenly between Israel and the Arab states, with each side receiving $50 million. The money to take in the Arab refugees was handed over to UNRWA, while the United States gave another $53 million for technical cooperation to the Arab countries. Thus, in effect, the Arab nations received double the money given to Israel even though Israel took in more refugees from Arab countries.
In 1951, a bill presented to Congress marked the first and last time that any mechanism was established to provide for these Jewish refugees. The total amount Congress allocated to Jewish and Arab Middle East refugees was equal to $1.5 billion today.
Palestinians perpetual refugee status does not make Mo Ghaoui happy. He wishes for a humanitarian solution which will permanently resettle Palestinians in their host countries. Thus, the resettlement of the Jewish refugees in Israel or the West would be a model to aspire to.
Politicians and commentators are intoning the two-state solution mantra and President Macron has now said he will be recognising a Palestinian state as part of the two-state solution : a Jewish state alongside an Arab state. When Palestinians demand a two-state solution, they do not mean two states for two peoples: they demand an Arab state in the Palestinian territories, and a Jewish state overrun by millions of Palestinian refugees exercising their right of return. In other words a two-Arab-state solution.
Thus, as Einat Wilf and Adi Schwartz write in their book The War of Return, UNRWA remains the primary obstacle to a solution. Exchanges of refugee populations happened between Greece and Turkey, and India and Pakistan. Two-state advocates need to recognise that the exchange of populations between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East is irrevocable. Neither is going back to their place of origin. The sooner people realise this, the better the prospects for peace.
POINT OF NO RETURNLyn JuliusJul 25, 2025