The Great Palestinian Refugee Racket

Since its inception, as many have pointed out, the UN Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) has considered “refugees” not just Arabs who fled Israel during its War of Independence but also their descendants, thus deviating from the standard definition of the term used by the UN itself and international law more generally. UNRWA, which tends exclusively to Palestinian refugees while those of all other nationalities are the responsibility of the UN High Commissioner’s Office of Refugees (UNHCR), also insists on keeping its charges in a permanent state of refugeedom, often in “camps,” rather than integrating them into the countries where they have settled as is normal international practice. And these, writes Efraim Karsh, are only some of the special liberties taken when determining who is a Palestinian refugee: