Only a minority of Palestinian refugees who are not under UNRWA's care, are awarded real rehabilitation
Benny Elon

This fascinating story begins on the slopes of the Carmel mountains. During the War of Independence, Arab villages in the area were abandoned, as in all the areas where the Jews enjoyed strategic superiority and their inhabitants became refugees. Today we call those refugees Palestinians. Farming communities and kibbutzim were established on the ruins of Arab villages that became home to Jewish refugees--refugees who streamed here from Europe after the Holocaust and from the Arab world that expelled the Jews from their midst.

What has happened since to both sets of refugees?

The Jewish refugees have long forgotten their refugee status. The country that absorbed them, the Jewish state, has turned them into its own flesh and blood The transit camps have become cities, villages and farming communities, and within a decade not one single refugee remained in this country.

The Arab refugees, however, have maintained their refugee status. The countries they fled to, Arab countries, have chosen not to grant them citizenship, not to grant them rights and a future, and to leave them as refugees serving as a live propaganda and political weapon against the legitimacy of the Jewish state. The refugee camps have become the biggest hothouse for creating terror, a never-ending ground of hatred and incitement towards Israel, towards America, and towards anyone who is not an Arab Muslim.

UNRWA is the agency whose sole mandate is to take care of Arab refugees. As opposed to the UN Commission for Refugees, the body that takes care of all the other refugees in the world, UNRWA isn't authorized and doesn't attempt to rehabilitate the refugees, to naturalize them in the countries they are residing in or in a third country, or to give them the opportunity for a life other than of refugee status. Instead of solving the problem, UNRWA reinforces it. This is also the reason why only the Palestinian refugees who are registered with UNRWA preserve their refugee status from generation to generation. If your father was a refugee you are also defined as a refugee and so is your son. This is a unique and unacceptable definition. According to the UN Commission for Refugees, a refugee is only one who was expelled himself from his country due to a war. His sons will already be raised in another place after a period of rehabilitation. Tens of millions of refugees from all over the world have been rehabilitated in this way since World War Two – with the exception of one national-ethnic group: Israeli Arabs, the Palestinian refugees.

And here, on Tuesday, the UN Commission for Refugees announced that it is sending 200 hundred Palestinian refugees to be rehabilitated in Scandinavia. They will be absorbed by the governments of Sweden and Iceland and will construct new lives for themselves. Why were these 200 people awarded this privilege? In what way are they different from the hundreds of thousands crammed into Gaza, one big refugee camp?

The answer is simple: These refugees were never under UNRWA's umbrella. Because they were enlisted – while still on the Carmel –into the Iraqi army that participated in the War of Independence. Together with their families, they withdrew with it to Iraq. They weren't granted civilian status there, but they also didn't encounter UNRWA. Today, when they became refugees for the second time following the war in Iraq, they were put on the UNHCR's refugee list, which is after all the UN Commission for Refugees. That is, for 'normal' refugees, those who are rehabilitated, as opposed to the refugees under the auspices of UNRWA, whose refugee status is destined to be perpetuated.

The residents of Kerem Maharal and Gaba-Carmel can relax. The Arabs who lived there several years before them won't return there, and they are not even waiting for them in Jabalya or in Nahar El-Bared. They boarded the plane to Scandinavia, and instead of the energies their brothers invest in cultivating suicide bombers, they will likely invest in establishing themselves financially and in building new lives, sixty years too late.

Click here to read an article on the rehabilitation of palestinian refugees in Iceland:
Sweden, Iceland absorbing Palestinian refugees - CNN.com