Aid To The Palestinians

The international community rallies yet again to the humanitarian crisis unfolding yet again in the Gaza Strip. How else could such institutions react but to extend their resources in assistance to a population of a million and a half people who have existed on international aid for the entirety of their modern history as a refugee population?

Palestinians represent the longest-existing refugee population in the world, entirely funded by the United Nations.

What are referred to as refugee camps are in actual fact, large settlements, cities and towns of tall buildings, some of them municipal, others apartment blocks, hospitals and schools, all of which have been funded by the international community. Their designation as refugee camps rings peculiarly.

The population of the West Bank, however, unlike that of Gaza, has the distinction of extending themselves toward economic resiliency through functioning entrepreneurship.

In the Gaza Strip there has been no governing authority to devote itself to introducing an element of civic normalcy with a functioning civic bureaucracy answering to the practical needs of a growing population. Instead, political factions and clan leaders have led Gaza into chaos, disruption and lawlessness.

Enter Islamist Hamas, to bring good governance out of the chaos. Hamas, or what is fondly considered the political-social arm of Hamas, instituted order on the one hand, through its stern oversight of the population, while doing nothing whatever to lead the population toward self-assertive independence from international aid.

Funding meant to contribute to the well-being of Palestinians was side-tracked, not to lead Gazans away from dependency and toward self-respect through the establishment of industries and employment opportunities, but to consolidate Hamas's store of weapons. In the interests of accomplishing its stated goal, the destruction of Israel.

In a sense, the UN Relief and Works Agency has assisted Hamas in its game-plan. UNRWA's original response to the Palestinian refugee conundrum was to set up a temporary care agency to help house, feed and re-settle the original 600,000 to 700,000 Palestinians who fled the area that is now Israel.

The temporary response to an original situation of indigenous Arabs flooding out of a geography they were unwilling to share with the nascent Jewish state, somehow grew into a permanent care structure, once it became clear that re-settlement into other Arab states would not become a reality, and that Palestinians were left in an existential quandary.

They might have learned to live within the geography even though they shunned the original United Nations' proposal to split Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state side by side. To resourcefully replicate what their Jewish counterparts were doing in the new State of Israel; building an economy through hard work and dedication. Instead they cleaved to their sense of aggrieved injustice and took no interest in taking charge of their futures.

Instead, it seemed easier to continue to rely on the goodwill and compassion extended to displaced Palestinians through the work of UNRWA. Which itself offered no time-line and seemed happy enough to grow a bureaucracy of a permanent nature as a welfare organization dedicated to the ongoing support of the growing population, inclusive of the millions of descendants of the original refugees s.

There is a settled staff and budget immensely more generous than the combined United Nations responsibilities for all other refugees on the face of the Earth. Such disproportionate representation for an original relatively small group of displaced people is quite amazing. Certainly Jewish refugees numbering some 800,000 cast out of Arab countries at the same time as their Arab counterparts realized no such international recognition, concern and generosity.

The UN-sponsored refugee camps are also dispersed within Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, where the governments in each of those countries steadfastly refuse to accept the Palestinians as citizens, despite their long residence there - with the exception of Jordan. Palestinians living elsewhere, in Egypt and other countries of the geography are also not permitted naturalization despite their long tenure, despite generations born there.

This was originally organized around the principle that homeless Palestinians would present to the world as a festering wound of injustice, one that would only be solved by the dissolution of Israel through violent external displacement, or by insisting on the right of return. That very insistent that now remains a severe impediment to a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

UNRWA remains responsible, through its dedication to the ongoing support of the Palestinians, to the fact that the Palestinians themselves have never sought to restore themselves to the practicality of self-support. They have remained dependent financially upon the hand-outs of the international community, rather than support themselves and gain self-respect.

In the absence of independence, their honour and self-regard remain impaired, but instead of recognizing that they've wounded themselves by representing as the world's largest population of beggars, Israel is blamed as the 'occupier' of Palestinian lands - which the former occupiers, Jordan and Egypt, never offered their Arab brethren as autonomous Palestine.

But of course, UNRWA, aside from providing the ongoing wherewithal to build civic structures and homes, and provide food and medicines, relied upon the Palestinians themselves to build a reliable working government that could bring the people to statehood. Even this advance toward independence, in a culture that became so willing to remain dependents of international goodwill, never materialized.

The absence of a commitment to advance the interests of Palestinians into statehood and guide the country toward economic stability, resulted from the leaders of the Palestinians behaving in a corrupt, self-availing manner. Their charges became tired of the charade of responsibility succumbing to corruption, and were ripe for the introduction of Islamist intervention.

The failure of the Palestinian leaders to act in good faith in support of the population whose interests they purported to represent, is the failure of the United Nations to understand that their agencies promoted a self-sustaining dependency beyond which the population could not envision an independent future for themselves.

UNRWA is responsible for emasculating the Palestinian population of pride and honour.
And ultimately creating just the right atmosphere for Hamas and Hezbollah to thrive within.