Sol Stern wrote a great piece highlighting the hypocrisy of the Palestinians when it comes to hurling accusations of “apartheid”. He casts a spotlight onto a fact of Palestinian society that most of the media choose to conveniently ignore: that the Palestinian refugee camps are clearly an unnecessary societal extreme and mostly only exists today because of the manipulation and oppression of the Palestinian Authority themselves, who are forcing the “refugees” to maintain that status for bargaining purposes, and for purposes of embarrassing—and ultimately “de-Judaizng”—Israel.

Despite potential opportunities for some of those “refugees” to raise themselves out of the refugee camps and to succeed in life, the PA maintains a heavy boot on their necks by denying them basic rights, like the right to vote, the right to build homes (how ironic, given their recent whining about Israeli construction), the right to education, etc. Instead, they are literally forced to live in semi-squalor, receive infinite aid from the United Nations (and, consequently, us in the United States) in the form of food, supplies, education, etc. And, amazingly enough, they are then told (and taught in those same UN-run schools from a young age), that it is Israel who is persecuting them.

Sol Stern argues that it’s time to cast the spotlight on this clear isolation within Palestinian society of these “refugees”. He writes:

…it is not the absence of peace that keeps Palestinians “waiting” in refugee camps. Rather, most Arab leaders since 1948, including the current Palestinian leadership itself, insist that the refugees—originally numbering between 500,000 and 750,000 but now swollen through natural increase to over four million—must remain in those camps until allowed to return en masse to Israel. This insistence in turn makes it impossible to achieve any resolution of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, let alone a “new beginning” in the Middle East.

A few years ago I briefly visited the Balata refugee camp with its 20,000 residents. The camp is inside the West Bank city of Nablus—that is, within the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority (PA). It is where many of the Arabs of Jaffa settled when they fled the armed conflict that flared up immediately after the November 1947 UN partition resolution dividing Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states. Most of Balata’s current residents are the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of the original refugees. Thus, a new baby born in Balata today is still designated by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) as a refugee dislocated by the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and hence entitled to substantial material benefits for life, or at least until the conflict is settled. That infant will grow up and attend a segregated school run by UNRWA. In UN schools and cultural clubs financed by American tax dollars, Balata’s children, like the children in similar camps in Gaza and neighboring Arab countries, are nurtured on the myth that someday soon they will return in triumph to their ancestors’ homes by the Mediterranean Sea.

While awaiting redemption, Balata’s Palestinian residents are prohibited, by the Palestinian Authority, from building homes outside the camp’s official boundaries. They do not vote on municipal issues and receive no PA funding for roads or sanitation. As part of Prime Minister Salam Fayyad’s “economic renaissance” and state-building project, a brand new Palestinian city named Rawabi is planned for the West Bank near Bethlehem. But there will be no room at the inn for the Balata refugees. Sixty years after the first Arab-Israeli war, Balata might accurately be defined as a UN-administered, quasi-apartheid, welfare ghetto.

…if Olmert’s offer had ever become the basis of serious negotiations, Abbas would have had to admit to the residents of Balata and the other refugee camps on the West Bank that their leaders had lied to them for 60 years and that they were not returning to Jaffa. Among those leaders was Abbas himself, who in his 2005 campaign for the PA presidency declared repeatedly that he would never bargain away the Palestinian refugees’ right of return.

Today, two years later, face-to-face meetings, brokered by the Obama administration, are again being held between Abbas and an Israeli prime minister. But just like the Abbas-Olmert meetings, the current talks will go nowhere until Washington recognizes that the official Palestinian stance on the refugees presents a far more serious obstacle to Middle East peace than the issue of construction within Jewish West Bank settlements. The latter is no more than a complication, while Palestinian insistence on the right of return is a deal breaker.

Why not, at long last, break up the awful refugee camps and encourage their residents to integrate themselves into West Bank civil society? The rationale for doing so is not merely political expediency. There is an overwhelming human-rights imperative to deal with the issue now. For the past decade, an array of peace and human-rights groups has been protesting Israel’s “brutal” West Bank occupation and the military checkpoints restricting the movement of innocent Palestinians. Now, many of the checkpoints have been closed, and Palestinians are building their economy and policing their own cities. In these circumstances, where are the human-rights advocates demanding that the Palestinian refugees be freed from their crowded camps, allowed to build their own homes anywhere on the West Bank, and permitted to send their children to regular Palestinian schools?  Why aren’t peace demonstrators marshaling outside the Balata refugee camp with signs saying, “Mr. Abbas, tear down this wall”?

Somehow one doubts that the Palestine Human Rights Campaign or other like-minded groups will undertake such protests. But what does that say about their bona fides as advocates of peace? Does it not powerfully suggest that for them, as for Arab leaders throughout the Middle East, the welfare of suffering Palestinians has been of far lesser import than the demonization, if not the weakening and destruction, of the state of Israel?

I just came across a great piece in the Jerusalem Post that Michael Freund wrote a couple of months ago, in which he illustrates how the Arab world is full of self-righteous, self-important babbling statesmen rushing to the cause of their Palestinian brethren… but when it comes to actually helping them financially, they’re nowhere to be found.

Here’s this eye-opening—but hardly surprising—piece (emphasis mine):

For all their talk of standing by the Palestinians, the Arab regimes sure have a strange way of showing it. Despite reaping an oil-driven windfall last year of unprecedented proportions, few Arab states seem willing to dig very deep into their own pockets to back up their concern with cash.

Indeed, the hollowness of their pro-Palestinian pronouncements was unambiguously on display last week in Amman, at a meeting of the Advisory Commission of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, better known by its acronym of UNRWA.

Among the central topics discussed at the gathering was the growing financial crisis confronting the organization, which relies on voluntary contributions from governments to fund its activities on behalf of Palestinian refugees.

In her remarks, Karen Abu Zayd, UNRWA’s commissioner-general, bemoaned the group’s financial state, describing it as “my most worrying preoccupation.”

She told those assembled that the agency is facing a deficit of $84 million this year, and that it projects a budget shortfall of $140m. in 2010. “UNRWA’s weak financial situation,” Abu Zayd said, “hinders our ability to discharge our responsibilities to the standards Palestinian refugees deserve.”

FOR THE past several years, it seems, UNRWA has been in increasingly dire straits. Indeed, on Tuesday of last week, the group’s 16,000 employees in Judea, Samaria and Gaza held a one-day strike to demand better pay.

Why, you might be wondering, have the UN agency’s troubles been mounting of late? After all, fuel prices surged last year, with oil peaking in July 2008 at a high of $150 a barrel, so the coffers of Arab treasuries throughout the region were hardly lacking for funds with which to aid their Palestinian brethren.

I wondered too, so I did some research and discovered a few surprising facts about the colossal gap between Arab rhetoric and Palestinian reality.

Consider the following: In 2008, 19 of the top 20 donors to UNRWA’s general fund were from the West, with the EU contributing over $116m., and the US more than $94m. Others, such as Sweden and the UK, each gave over $35m.

Just one Arab country – Kuwait – appeared among UNRWA’s top 20 benefactors. The Kuwaitis came in last on the list, having coughed up just $2.5m.

Given that Kuwait’s oil revenues last year surged by 44 percent to nearly $78 billion, you would think that if they really, truly cared about the Palestinians, this would have been reflected in the size of their donation to UNRWA.

Nonetheless, when compared to the other five Arab states that comprise the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) – Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – the Kuwaitis come out looking generous.

In 2008, the combined revenues of the GCC states from oil production amounted to a whopping $575b. Yet their joint contribution to UNRWA’s regular budget was a little more than $3.6m., signifying less than one one-thousandth of a percent of their total petroleum income! Bahrain gave a miserly $50,000, Oman forked over just $25,000, while Saudi Arabia coughed up zero.

I’ve been to Hadassah dinners where more money was raised in an hour than the Arab states seem willing to part with in an entire year.

In fact, over the past two decades, Arab regimes have been providing a steadily decreasing percentage of UNRWA’s funding. In the 1980s, their contributions amounted to 8% of the group’s annual budget, whereas now they comprise barely 3%.

As a result, Western states are currently providing more than 95% of the funds behind UNRWA’s ongoing programs.

Now don’t get me wrong – I am not shedding any tears over UNRWA’s difficulties. The organization has long been a vehicle for perpetuating the Palestinian refugee problem as a lever for pressuring Israel, and it has not shied away from working closely with Hamas in Gaza, or serving as a vehicle for anti-Israel and anti-Western indoctrination.

But UNRWA’s woes lay bare the breathtaking hypocrisy of the Arab states. They lambaste Israel at every opportunity over the condition of the Palestinians, even as they themselves do very little to alleviate the problem.

Sure, some Arab countries have kicked in funds to various UNRWA emergency appeals, while others provide aid to Palestinians via other channels.

But the numbers above lead one to wonder: do the Arab states really care about the Palestinians?

If UNRWA’s ledger is any guide, the answer is a clear and resounding “no.”

When it comes to Palestinians there is a monumental double standard in the world, such that Israel gets condemned right and left for their supposed “treatment” of the Palestinians, while Arab countries get a complete free pass for doing the exact same things (and often worse).

Squalid Palestinian refugee camps are not only found in Israel’s disputed territories. They are also found in the neighboring Arab countries, but you’d never know that from most of the mainstream media. And you’d also never know that they are often in even worse conditions there than in Israel, that they contain even more Palestinian refugees than those in Israel, and that they are often treated to persecution even worse than the supposed “persecution” in Israel.

Every once in a long while, a newspaper decides to do the rare report on this, and this time the honor goes to Britain’s The Independent. In a special report by Judith Miller and David Samuels, the Palestinians’ treatment by their brethren is laid bare for all to see. It’s a great article to read in full, but here are some excerpts (emphasis mine):

It is a cynical but time-honoured practice in Middle Eastern politics: the statesmen who decry the political and humanitarian crisis of the approximately 3.9 million Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and in Gaza ignore the plight of an estimated 4.6 million Palestinians who live in Arab countries. For decades, Arab governments have justified their decision to maintain millions of stateless Palestinians as refugees in squalid camps as a means of applying pressure to Israel. The refugee problem will be solved, they say, when Israel agrees to let the Palestinians have their own state.

In other words, these people are used as pawns by their own brethren just to make Israel look bad. The more these Arab countries persecute their Palestinians brethren and keep them in the dirt, the more they could spotlight it and bizarrely blame Israel for their conditions!

Yet in the two decades since the end of the Cold War, after two Gulf wars, and the rise and fall of the Oslo peace process, not a single Palestinian refugee has returned to Israel – and only a handful of ageing political functionaries have returned from neighbouring Arab countries to the West Bank and Gaza. Instead, failed peace plans and shifting political priorities have resulted in a second Palestinian “Nakba”, or catastrophe – this one at hands of the Arab governments. “Marginalised, deprived of basic political and economic rights, trapped in the camps, bereft of realistic prospects, heavily armed and standing atop multiple fault lines,” a report by the International Crisis Group (ICG) in Lebanon recently observed, “the refugee population constitutes a time bomb.”

The fact that the divided Palestinian political leadership is silent about the mistreatment of the refugees by Arab states does not make such behaviour any less reprehensible – or less dangerous.

Just as bizarre, you have the Palestinian leadership themselves, based in Israel, not defending their own across the border and not calling attention to their plight, only because it would detract from the world’s hate that they are too busy directing at Israel. So, you have hundreds of thousands of Palestinians getting kicked around Iraq, Kuwait, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, etc… and the Palestinian leaders apparently care only about the fewer numbers living in Israel. Again, because it’s not the plight of their own people that they primarily are concerned with, but rather the inverse: the vilification of Israel is all they really care about, their brethren be damned.

The report then provides some examples:

Some 250,000 Palestinians were chased out of Kuwait and other Gulf States to punish the Palestinian political leadership for supporting Saddam Hussein. Tens of thousands of Palestinian residents of Iraq were similarly dispossessed after the second Gulf war.

In 2001, Palestinians in Lebanon were stripped of the right to own property, or to pass on the property that they already owned to their children – and banned from working as doctors, lawyers, pharmacists or in 20 other professions. Even the Palestinian refugee community in Jordan, historically the most welcoming Arab state, has reason to feel insecure in the face of official threats to revoke their citizenship. The systematic refusal of Arab governments to grant basic human rights to Palestinians who are born and die in their countries – combined with periodic mass expulsions of entire Palestinian communities – recalls the treatment of Jews in medieval Europe.

The only difference is that Jews were bounced around Europe by the Christians. Here, it’s Palestinians getting bounced around the Middle East by their own Arab brethren.

The report then highlights the ridiculous new definition of a “refugee”, the redefinition coming about especially for the Palestinians:

The only governing authority that Palestinians living in the camps have ever known is UNRWA – the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. Established by the UN on 8 December 1949 to assist 650,000 impoverished Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war, UNRWA has been battling budget cuts and strikes among its employees as it struggles to provide subsidies and services to Palestinian refugees, who are defined as “persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948″.

The inclusion of the descendants of Palestinian refugees as refugees in UNRWA’s mandate has no parallel in international humanitarian law and is responsible for the growth of the official numbers of Palestinian refugees in foreign countries from 711,000 to 4.6 million during decades when the number of ageing refugees from the 1948 Israeli war of independence in was in fact declining. UNRWA’s grant of refugee status to the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the original Palestinian refugees according to the principle of patrilineal descent, with no limit on the generations that can obtain refugee status, has made it easy for host countries to flout their obligations under international law. According to Article 34 of the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, “The Contracting States shall as far as possible facilitate the assimilation and naturalisation of refugees,” and must “make every effort to expedite naturalisation proceedings” – the opposite of what happened to the Palestinians in every Arab country in which they settled, save Jordan.

So, what to do with all of these so-called “refugees” (most of whom actually never personally left any place to seek actual refuge someplace else)?

Daniel Kurtzer agrees no one is likely to make a deal that includes a substantial return of the Palestinian diaspora. “Most Palestinian refugees know it, as do the settlers,” he says. So rather than wait for American mediators or Arab states to impose solutions on them, the Palestinians themselves should begin to tackle the diabolically difficult issues inherent in the resolution of their political and economic future. “What we need is a refugee summit,” he says. “I’m looking for a real conversation that must start internally and soon.”

After 60 years of failed wars, and failed peace, it is time to put politics aside and to insist that the basic rights of the Palestinian refugees in Arab countries be respected – whether or not their children’s children return to Haifa anytime soon. While Saudi Arabia may not wish to host Israeli tourists, it can easily afford to integrate the estimated 240,000 Palestinian refugees who already live in the kingdom – just as Egypt, which has received close to $60bn in US aid, and has a population of 81 million, can grant legal rights to an estimated 70,000 Palestinian refugees and their descendants. One can only imagine the outrage that the world community would rightly visit upon Israel if Israeli Arabs were subject to the vile discriminatory laws applied to Palestinians living in Arab countries. Surely, Palestinian Arabs can keep their own national dream alive in the countries where they were born, while also enjoying the freedom to work, vote and own property?

A practical solution to the crisis of the Palestinian refugees in Arab countries will focus on Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, which together play host to approximately 3 million of the estimated 4.6 million Palestinian refugees living outside the West Bank and Gaza. While each of these countries has chosen different legal and political approaches to the 1948 refugees and their descendants, they share a political desire to sublimate the rights of Palestinian residents, treating them as unwanted guests or as tools to be used in pursuing wider political interests – but rarely as fully-fledged members of society. Lebanon, where Palestinians led by Yasser Arafat are widely blamed for having sparked the 1975 civil war, is the worst offender against international norms. Yet even in Jordan, which is in many ways a model for the humane treatment of a large refugee population, Palestinians today feel markedly less secure than they did two decades ago, or even five years ago.

The report then provides some more examples of their treatment by their Arab brethren:

Outside of Iraq, whose Palestinian population fled en masse after the fall of Saddam, nowhere has the situation of the Palestinian refugees worsened so dramatically as in Lebanon. Since the early Sixties, Palestinians there have been barred from working in medicine, dentistry and the law. In 2001, the Lebanese parliament adopted an amendment to the country’s property laws that prohibited the acquisition of real estate by “any person not a citizen of a recognised state” – meaning the estimated 250,000 to 400,000 Palestinians living in Lebanon. Palestinians who had acquired real estate prior to 2001 were barred from bequeathing property to their children.

Right-wing Christians and Shi’ite radicals alike support discriminatory legislation that further impoverishes Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, with the stated goal of preventing them from beginning the process of naturalisation, known as tawtin. In his inaugural speech in May, 2008, Lebanese President Michel Suleiman, a Christian and former head of the country’s armed forces, reaffirmed “Lebanon’s categorical refusal of naturalisation”, a statement echoed by the former Lebanese ambassador to the US, Nassib Lahoud, who told us recently in Beirut: “The confessional balance does not allow these things to happen … at the moment the Palestinians are citizens of a state that does not exist.” His sentiments were echoed by Hizbollah’s spokesman on the Palestinian question, Hassan Hodroj. “The threat of tawtin is genuine,” Hodroj explained. “It is one of the ways in which Israel, backed by the US, is endangering the region.”

The fact that the living standard of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon has been deemed “catastrophic” by both UNRWA and by the Lebanese government can therefore be understood as a deliberate result of official state policy that is supported by all parties across Lebanon’s divided confessional spectrum. As a member of the Lebanese parliament, Ghassan Moukheiber, explained in an interview with the ICG, “our official policy is to maintain Palestinians in a vulnerable, precarious situation to diminish prospects for their naturalisation or permanent settlement“.

…While Palestinian refugees and their descendants inside Syria are not allowed to vote or hold Syrian passports, they are free from the overt discrimination that has turned Lebanon into a recruiting ground for al-Qa’ida. The legal status of Palestinians inside Syria is defined by a 1956 law that states that grants them “the right to employment, commerce, and national service, while preserving their original nationality”. More than 100,000 of the estimated 450,000 Palestinians in Syria live in or around the Yarmouk refugee camp, which long ago became a neighbourhood of Damascus.

While Palestinians are reasonably well integrated into the Syrian socio-economic structure, according to the scholar Laurie Brand they do not have the right to vote, nor can they stand for parliament or other political offices. Palestinians are barred from buying farmland and prohibited from owning more than one house. The female descendant of a Palestinian refugee can become a Syrian citizen by marrying a Syrian man. The male descendants of Palestinian men and their children are barred from acquiring Syrian citizenship, even if they marry Syrian women.

These are all things you’d never know just from listening to most news reports. The double-standard applied to Israel and the hypocrisy and false piety of the world when it comes the the “plight” of the Palestinians is just sickening, and more people need to be aware of the truth.