Palestine Refugees are our Problem     April 2009 Click square for index   Israel sent military force into the West Bank area of the former Palestine in January 2009. Such military attacks are seen as a conflict between two factions whose supporters have strong feelings. Yet Palestine is “our problem” - a shared problem born with the United Nations which the UN has helped to shape. Of course, no conflict between just two parties drags on. Protracted conflict requires a lot of other actors and supporters. The important actors are States. States have their own interests. A major push towards peace in 2000 failed to bring agreement on forming two nation states out of the former Palestine. Some actors didn’t want that solution. Some actors don’t seem to want any solution. The peoples living in this corner of the world have fallen under several ruling empires and dominant religions over the centuries. There were various tribes in this area. There was an ancient Israel and then an ancient Judea which fell under a Persian empire. This was followed by a period of Greek rule which arrived with Alexander around 300 BCE. The Roman empire followed about 200 years later. Around 300 CE the Roman empire became Christian. A series of Muslim empires took over beginning around 800 CE immediately after the emergence of Islam. The last of these was the Ottoman Turkish empire. At the end of World War I in 1918, the Treaty of Versailles formalised the ending of four great empires: Hapsburg; Hohenzollern; Romanov; and Ottoman.[1] [2] Under the League of Nations at the end of WWI, Britain was given a “mandate” to administer the territory of Palestine as a “protectorate”.[3] This changed with the end of World War II when Britain relinquished the mandate and the UN, successor to the League of Nations, inherited the British mandate. Views on subsequent events remain controversial. Late in 1947, the General Assembly of the UN approved dividing of Palestine into Jewish and Palestinian States. In spring 1948, the British withdrew. The Palestinians rejected the UN plan which gave a smaller Jewish population more than half the land. Armed conflict followed. With the help of arms from Czechoslovakia in the then Soviet Union, the Jews and their army survived, took territory and in May 1948 proclaimed an Israeli State.[4] In late 1949, the UN created its Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, UNRWA. A condition for the acceptance of UNRWA was that the Palestinians would be allowed to return to their homeland as set out in General Assembly resolution 194 III of 11 December 1948.[5]  Over the years since 1948, the UN has been able to define, for practical international political purposes, who are refugees. UNRWA's operational definition recognizes Palestine refugees as persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948, who lost both their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict. UNRWA's definition of a refugee also covers the descendants of persons who became refugees in 1948. [6] UNRWA's services are available to all those living in its area of operations who meet this definition, who are registered with the Agency and who need assistance. According to the definition, the Palestinian refugee population is the largest and longest lasting refugee population. Part of that population lives in the territory invaded by Israel in January 2009. Following an Arab Israeli six days war of 1967, the General Assembly allowed UNRWA to extend essential services to a new wave of refugees, but the formal mandate was not changed. During the 1987 uprising or intifada of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, the UN General Assembly authorised a modest “passive protection” component to UNRWA’s work that led to a legal aid arrangement and human rights monitors. Following the 1993 Declaration of Principles on Palestinian Self Rule in the Occupied Territories, UNRWA began a “peace implementation program” with projects to improve education and health facilities, to construct emergency housing, and other infrastructure, and to provide small business loans. The 2000 collapse of the peace process and subsequent cycle of terrorist attacks and harsh military responses make protection of refugees impossible. The invasion by Israel in January 2009 and the ongoing forms of conflict in the former Palestine are UN problems and so problems for all of us to resolve. If there is one message from the January conflict around which progressives might agree, it is a call to pressure our several governments to renew their efforts to solve the Palestine refugee situation in the new era of US President Obama. [1] Marrus, Op. Cit. 1990, 53. [2] Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919, New York: Random House, 2003. [3] UNHCR,  The State of the World’s Refugees: Fifty Years of Humanitarian Action, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, 20. [4] Ibid, 20. [5] Ibid, 20. [6] UNRWA web site, April 2008. TOP   Click:

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