Why are the Palestinian refugees different from all other refugees? For the other 130 millions of refugees that the United Nations has helped since its founding, the goal has been to resettle them. But for the half million or so Palestinian refugees, the UN had no such goal; the descendants of many of these refugees remain stateless 67 years after the 1948 war in which Arab nations tried unsuccessfully to annihilate the new Jewish state and most Palestinians fled. Many of their descendants live in refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria, where they are denied citizenship (except in Jordan, where they are very much second-class citizens) and denied basic benefits such as public school education or access to any other than the most menial jobs.  Such refugee camps are also found in the Palestinian-administered West Bank and the independent Palestinian Gaza strip.

While all other refugees are handled by the UN High Commissioner of Refugees (UNHCR), the Palestinian refugees have their own agency, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA, which operates according to its own rules.

While all other refugees diminish in numbers with time, the number of Palestinian refugees has increased tenfold since 1948, as a result of the unique definition of refugee status reserved for them:   Whereas the descendants of refugees are not normally considered refugees, the descendants of the Palestinian refugees are.   By that definition, I, my wife, and our daughter are all refugees from World War II Europe and the early twentieth century pogroms in Russia.   Normally people cease to be refugees once they are granted citizenship in another country. Not so the Palestinians in Jordan, or many in the West Bank, who were Jordanians when it was ruled by Jordan from 1948 to 1967.

While the Palestinian refugees have received far more aid from the UN, other agencies and foreign governments than any other refugees in post-war history, they have seen no improvement in their livelihoods as a result.   Since no effort is made to integrate the refugee descendants into Arab societies, this aid constitutes a form of welfare, allowing the recipients to subsist in poverty.  Deprived of the benefits of a fulfilling, economically-stable life for the past 67 years, whole lifetimes have been wasted as a result.   The unique discriminatory treatment of the Palestinian refugees indeed constitutes a human rights abuse of Arabs by Arabs.

There is certainly no justification for the unique treatment of the Palestinian refugees. Millions of other refugees fled their homes under far worse circumstances, such as ethnic cleansing or genocide, including the Biafrans from Nigeria in the 1960s, the Tutsi from Rwanda in the 1990s, the Darfuris from Sudan in the early years of the present century, and the Syrian refugees recently.   They have been assisted by the UNHCR, like the other 130 million refugees, to resettle and rebuild their lives.

The common explanation for preserving the Palestinian refugees in amber for two-third of a century is that they constitute a bargaining chip in negotiations with Israel. Where have we ever heard of a bargaining chip of this kind? Normally, a bargaining chip is something I have that you want. The West Bank is a bargaining chip for Israel, because they Palestinians want it. But Israel does not want the Palestinian refugees—quite the contrary—so how do they constitute a bargaining chip? Again, the Palestinian refugees constitute a bargaining chip in a unique way: Arab leaders claim that the hardship of the refugee (descendants) is the fault of Israel and insist that these Palestinians will remain refugees until they are allowed to be transferred to Israel. This is the so-called “right of return.” But most of the Palestinians have never lived in Israel, and so could not be said to be returning there. Moreover, there has been no such “right” for other refugees who fled under much worse circumstances. The one possible exception was the Dayton Accords at the conclusion of the civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1995.  But the exception proves the rule: the effort to repatriate refugees failed in that instance, but the peace held firm nonetheless. Finally, no Israeli government of the left or right will ever agree to such an influx of Palestinians, since it would eradicate the Jewish character (if not the Jews) of the country.  This position was exemplified by the Labor PM Barack’s refusal to accept this demand by Yassir Arafat in 2000. The Palestinians will hopefully one day have a country in the West Bank and Gaza strip, but they will not turn Israel into a second Palestinian country. And so the descendants of the refugees suffer in vain.

In sum, Arab leaders bear the primary responsibility for the plight of the so-called Palestinian refugees. They caused these people’s forebears to become refugees in the first place by trying to destroy Israel in 1948 and they perpetuate their refugee status in the service of their own political ends.

Despite all of this, much of the world appears to accept–or at least acquiesce to–the Arab claim that Israel is to blame for the plight of the Palestinian refugees in Arab lands.   If they actually care about the Palestinians, the world must come to its senses and start to treat these refugees like all other refugees in the past 70 years by demanding that the Arab countries finally integrate their brethren into their societies, release them from the camps, grant them citizenship and all the rights, benefits and opportunities that go with it.   In short, it’s time to tell the Arab leaders to let their people go.