On January 3, 2021, HonestReporting, in conjunction with UNRWA: Stop Teaching Hate, launched a “We the People” White House petition with the goal of inducing the Trump Administration to reveal the true number of Palestinian refugees alive today that were displaced during the 1948 war following Israel’s declaration of independence.
Now, with our help, the truth has been exposed by outgoing US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. The revelation came after a concerted campaign by HonestReporting that garnered widespread media attention (see here, here and here, for example).
We also produced a related video that, to date, has garnered some 1 million views and spurred people to action at the grassroots level.
Taxpayers deserve basic truths: most Palestinians under UNRWA’s jurisdiction aren’t refugees, and UNRWA is a hurdle to peace. America supports peace and Palestinian human rights; UNRWA supports neither. It's time to end UNRWA's mandate. pic.twitter.com/zEsEXLaAbk
— Secretary Pompeo (@SecPompeo) January 14, 2021
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Indeed, the United Nations treats Palestinians differently from all other refugees, whose needs are attended to by the body’s High Commissioner for Refugees. But the Palestinians are under the auspices of UNRWA, created uniquely for them and which reinvented the concept of refugee as an inherited characteristic.
Today, therefore, UNRWA counts four generations of Palestinian “refugees” — more than 5 million people — all descendants of the original 750,000-odd Palestinians who fled in 1948.
In this respect, the Palestinian leadership has long insisted that these “refugees” be granted the “Right of Return” to what is now the State of Israel, which would effectively end Jewish self-determination.
Clearly, this distorted, if not malicious, figure serves to diminish the prospects of a peaceful resolution to the conflict.
Accordingly, in 2012, the US Congress prompted the Department of State to conduct a study to determine the exact number of Palestinian refugees but the report was subsequently “classified,” effectively burying it.
But Pompeo has now dispelled a 70-year-old myth, prompting Richard Goldberg, a senior advisor at the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies who has dealt with the issue extensively, to explain:
One of the most important statements on Mideast policy over the past four years. It's more than eight years in the making. USG finally upends the fiction of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). Numbers & policy statements to be cited by scholars for years. Thread. https://t.co/r4fJX4sVf5
— Richard Goldberg (@rich_goldberg) January 14, 2021
The ramifications of this development are liable to reshape the manner in which the international community views the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and thus its approach to peacemaking.
HonestReporting is extremely proud to have played a role in an initiative that stands to positively impact Israel, millions of Palestinians who have not been afforded the opportunity to fulfill their potential, and the broader Middle East.
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Featured Image: Palestinian UN Guard Closes UNRWA School via Shutterstock.
