Discussion
Here's a summary from the Foreign Policy magazine (non-paywalled link).
r/IsraelPalestine
UNRWA was founded in 1949 through U.N. General Assembly Resolution 302 at the conclusion of the Arab-Israeli conflict of 1948
The agency defines Palestinian refugees as persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict.
In 1965, UNRWA changed the eligibility requirements to be a Palestinian refugee to include third-generation descendants, and in 1982, it extended it again, to include all descendants of Palestine refugee males, including legally adopted children, regardless of whether they had been granted citizenship elsewhere. This classification process is inconsistent with how all other refugees in the world are classified, including the definition used by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the laws concerning refugees in the United States.
The only refugees who do not fall under the UNHCR and instead have their own agency are the Palestinians. While the UNHCR has resettled millions of refugees, since the time it was created, UNRWA has not managed to solve or even diminish the problem at all. Instead, using its own metrics, the number of refugees has grown exponentially, while UNRWA has become one of the larger U.N. agencies, with 30,000 personnel and a $1.2 billion budget. This is despite the fact that many of the UNRWA refugees are not actually refugees at all under the standard international definition of that term. For example, of the 2 million Palestinian refugees in Jordan, most have been granted Jordanian citizenship.
By contrast, all of 850K Mizrahi Jewish refugees, expelled from the Arab states, have since been integrated in Israel or elsewhere. Overall, over 50M people got displaced during the formation of modern states in the last 75 years. This includes 20M people moved between Pakistan/India in 1947, or 15M Sudeten Germans, or the 1.5M people displaced during the Armenian-Azeri wars. They have all largely settled in their new countries of residence, and none of them have the right of return.
Here's what Alexander Galloway, then the director of UNRWA in Jordan, had to say about Palestinian refugees in 1952:
"It is perfectly clear that Arab nations do not want to solve the Arab refugee problem. They want to keep it as an open sore, as an affront against the United Nations and as a weapon against Israel. Arab leaders don't give a damn whether the refugees live or die."
And it seems to be indeed the case. For instance, the Arab League passed the Resolution 1547 in 1959, explicitly instructing its members not to give Palestinians citizenship, in order to avoid dissolution of their identity and protect their rights to return to their homeland. So although many Palestinians have lived there for centuries, they are denied integration in order to put additional pressure on Israel. The only country that has naturalised a significant number of Palestinians is Jordan, the majority of whose population is currently Palestinian. However, even Jordan revoked its citizenship from all Palestinians residing in the West Bank in 1990-2010.
If UNRWA understood the cause as early as 1952, why hasn't it done anything to actually solve the problem, instead of indefinitely perpetuating it, at a bloating expense to U.N. funders, such as the USA?