Point of No Return — 2024

Jewish refugees arriving in Israel we're sent to maabarot, or transit camps.

According to Don Peretz (Who is a Refugee?) initially UNRWA defined a refugee

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 Palestine taken over by Arab forces during the 1948 war and about 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 leaving only Palestine Arabs and a few hundred non-Arab Christian Palestinians outside Israel in UNRWA's refugee category.

At the time there was no internationally recognised definition of what constituted a refugee. In 1951, the UN Refugee Convention agreed 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 fleeing persecution in Arab countries, synagogue burnings, arrests and riots. Returning to these countries would have put and still does -their lives at risk.

The burden of rehabilitating and resettling the 650,000  Jewish refugees who arrived in Israel from Arab countries was shouldered by the Jewish Agency and US Jewish relief organisations, such as the Joint Distribution Committee. They we're shunted into transit camps or maabarot. The conditions were appalling.

The American aid earmarked to solve the issue of Middle East refugees was supposed to have been split evenly between Israel and the Arab states, with each side receiving $50 million to build infrastructure to absorb refugees. The money to take in the Arab refugees was handed over to the U.N. agency founded to address the issue of Palestinian refugees, and the Americans gave Arab countries another $53 million for technical cooperation. In effect, the Arab side received double the money given to Israel, even though Israel took in more refugees, including ones from Arab nations Jews who had been displaced by the regional upheavals. The bills presented to Congress in 1951 included a bill to send Israel aid to take in refugees. It was the first and last time that any mechanism was established for the Jewish refugees. The amount Congress allocated to provide for Middle East refugees Jewish and Arab at the request of then-President Harry Truman was equal to $1.5 billion today.

From an early stage in the conflict, the UN was co-opted by the powerful Arab-Muslim voting block to skew its mandate and defend the rights of only one refugee population the Palestinians. UNRWA is dedicated to the exclusive care of Palestinian refugees. There are ten UN agencies solely concerned with Palestinian refugees. These even define refugee status for the Palestinians explicitly: one that stipulates that status depends on two years residence in Palestine.  The definition makes no mention of fear of persecution nor of resettlement. Palestinian refugees are the only refugee population in the world, out of 65 million recognised refugees, permitted to pass on their refugee status to succeeding generations, even if they enjoy citizenship in their adoptive countries. It is estimated that the current population of Palestinian refugees is 5.493 million. Instead of resettlement, they demand repatriation, an Israeli red line.

In contrast to the $17.7 billion allocated to the Palestinian refugees, no international aid was earmarked for Jewish refugees. The exception was a $30,000 grant in 1957 which the UN, fearing protests from its Muslim members, did not want publicised. The grant was eventually converted into a loan and paid back by the American Joint Distribution Committee, the main agency caring for Jews in distress.

Yet on two occasions the UN did determine that Jews fleeing Egypt and North Africa we're bona fide refugees. In 1957, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, August Lindt, declared that the Jews of Egypt who we're unable or unwilling to avail themselves of the protection of the government of their nationality fell within his remit. In July 1967, the UNHCR recognised Jews fleeing Libya as refugees under the UNHCR mandate.

Needless to say, no Jew still defines himself as a refugee. Despite the initial hardships, they are now all full citizens of Israel and the West.