Must-see: the most privileged refugees on the planet

Oren of TravelingIsrael posted this priceless video.

I was aware of most of the facts discussed in the video — except the UNRWA employment statistics — but it was a good recap — and it’s essential viewing if you’re not already well-versed in the topic.

Let me unpack the main points below:

• there are two United Nations refugee agencies: the UNRWA (UN Relief Works Agency) exclusively for “Palestinian refugees”, and the UNHCR (UN High Commission for Refugees) which deals with all all other refugees everywhere else on the planet
• incredibly, UNRWA actually employs more people than UNHCR
• the two agencies employ different definitions of what is a refugee
  • uniquely in the world, UNRWA grants hereditary refugee status — which explains why there are now about 8 times as many “Palestinian refugees” worldwide as they started out with
  • that status is even maintained after one acquires citizenship of another country (e.g. Jordan has many 2nd, 3rd, and 4th-generation “Palestinian refugee” citizens)
  • neither is true of any refugees anywhere else. (My comment: Imagine tens of millions of German citizens with “Heimatvertriebenen” status, whose ancestors fled or were expelled from what are now Polish, Czech, and even Russian lands, drawing benefits from a UN agency created especially for them.)
• the UNRWA educational system actively foments resentment and hatred
• in fact, about 10% of UNRWA employees are affiliated with HamaSS or Islamist Jewhate.
• Needless to say, the 800,000 Mizrachi Jews who fled, were expelled, or were harassed away from Arab countries have no special UN agency. Instead, the newly created State of Israel absorbed them as best as it could, with the result that roughly half of Israeli Jews have some Mizrachi ancestry. (Note that 800,000 is about the same as the initial population of “Palestinian refugees”
• Even the criteria for initial “Palestinian refugee” status were artificially created to ensure a lot of recent migrants from present-day Jordan and Egypt — who during WW II had been attracted by British army bases in need of menial workers — qualified as “refugees”.

THe title “the most privileged refugees on the planet” is of course deliberately polemical. But let’s face it: even from a cold behavioral economics POV, UNRWA provides ten of thousands of jobs whose continued existence depends on perpetuating the problem. (UNHCR does not have this distorting incentive, since there will, sadly, always be a need for refugee relief somewhere on the planet.)

As I have argued before: dismantle UNRWA and transfer the parts that actually do useful work to the aegis of the main UNHCR. In addition, bring the “Palestinian refugee” definition in line with the UNHCR definition.