June 25, 2011
Rhonda,
If you visit the Rammalah Palestinian refugee camp which is located in downtown Ramallah, you will see a process of gentrification of what is an urban slum. To preserve the householder’s rights to the original home in the camp, multi-story houses are built above and astride the original walls of what was once a mud brick house.
Spivak wrote that: Dr. Tal Becker, an International Associate of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told me that Israel ‘behind the scenes has tried to encourage [donor] states to channel aid they give to the PA towards the rehabilitation of Palestinian refugees in the West Bank’ [i.e. new homes for them] but Israel’s ‘efforts so far have been unsuccessful.’ "
I do not know how much has changed, but when I was a technical adviser to the Canadian government that was then gavelling the multilateral refugee talks in the early nineties, we explored the proposal to shift aid to the Palestinian refugees directly through the PA rather than through UNRWA since that was to be the de facto government of Palestine and the refugees were to be Palestinian "citizens". We were not so surprised that the PLO then opposed such a shift for two reasons; a) they would be surrendering the political leverage of "refugee return"; b) they calculated that less aid in total would come to the Palestinians than if the aid was going to two different institutions. Thus, though it would mean that the education, health and welfare system would have become more rationalized and coherent, politics and irrational economics of aid stood in the way. However, we were very surprised to learn that "at that time" Israel also opposed diverting UNRWA funds to the PLO because less aid would be coming to the region and some authorities in the Israeli government believed that Israel would in the end have to pick up the slack.
In ethnic and religious conflicts all around the world refugees have not returned unless by force or stealth. However, Elliot Abrams is incorrect to claim that they have been resettled. Though many have been resettled, millions of such refugees have wallowed in protracted refugee situations for decades and have NOT been resettled. The Palestinian refugee case is just the one of longest duration and the largest one.
– Howard Adelman
Howard Adelman is the co-author of the very recently published "No Refugee, No Return" (Columbia University Press) and of many other books and articles on refugees.