Asaf Romirowsky describes The Real Palestinian Refugee Crisis in the May 2014 issue of The Tower Magazine. At the center of the crisis, Romirowsky explains, is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which works counter to its stated goals: “UNRWA has no incentive whatsoever to resolve the Palestinian refugee problem, since doing so would render it obsolete,” he writes, adding: “UNRWA has come to depend on the refugee problem itself.” Thus “the agency not only perpetuates the refugee problem, but has, in many ways, exacerbated it,” making “Israeli-Palestinian peace all but impossible.”

At the heart of the problem is the unique standards by which UNRWA determines refugee status for Palestinians. Palestinian refugees are not only those who left their homes in 1948, but their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren too. Thus the number of Palestinian refugees has swollen from some 650,000 to several million. With these inflated numbers come the service and jobs that are created to benefit them.

UNRWA’s role as a jobs machine and a pillar of the Palestinian economy has led to institutional bloat on a huge scale. Its 30,000 employees, for example, dwarf the approximately 5,000 who work for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), whose remit is the rest of the entire world. The UNHCR mandate, moreover, is clearly focused on the resettlement and rehabilitation of refugees, not on providing services that maintain the status quo. The role played by economic incentives in these organizations is very telling. While UNHCR—forbidden by its mandate to work with Palestinians—has worked to decrease the number of refugees in the world, UNRWA has worked to increase the number of Palestinian refugees, prolonging and exacerbating the problem rather than solving it.
The result of this over-60-year-long process is that incentives for the refugees to resettle in Arab countries or elsewhere are minimal, and practically none exist for UNRWA to end its operations. UNRWA states that the Palestinians are an occupied people, and will remain so until the General Assembly declares an end to the conflict; so as long as the Palestinians are refugees, UNRWA is in business. The minute they are not, it disappears.

Usually an organization that fails to accomplish what is nominally its goals would be looking to reform and fix the problems. That’s not the case with UNRWA. Romirowsky tells the story of James Lindsay, a former UNRWA legal advisor, who wrote a critique of the organization and made recommendations to accomplish its goal of solving the Palestinian refugee problem. For his troubles, Lindsay was roundly criticized by UNRWA’s bureaucrats.

UNRWA remains a driver of the Palestinian refugee problem rather than part of its solution, with few prospects for correcting its flaws and actually helping to repatriate Palestinians. Read the full essay here.

[Photo: Wissam Nassar/ Flash90]