For Palestinians, "Refugee" Is A Term Of Convenience--And Self-Imposed Inconvenience

Sol Stern, a contributing editor to City Journal, writes about the Palestinian ghettos that exist inside the West Bank under PA control and urges: Mr. Abbas, Tear Down This Wall!

A few years ago I briefly visited the Balata refugee camp with its 20,000 residents. The camp is inside the West Bank city of Nablus—that is, within the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority (PA).
It is where many of the Arabs of Jaffa settled when they fled the armed conflict that flared up immediately after the November 1947 UN partition resolution dividing Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states. Most of Balata's current residents are the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of the original refugees. Thus, a new baby born in Balata today is still designated by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) as a refugee dislocated by the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and hence entitled to substantial material benefits for life, or at least until the conflict is settled. That infant will grow up and attend a segregated school run by UNRWA. In UN schools and cultural clubs financed by American tax dollars, Balata's children, like the children in similar camps in Gaza and neighboring Arab countries, are nurtured on the myth that someday soon they will return in triumph to their ancestors' homes by the Mediterranean Sea.

While awaiting redemption, Balata's Palestinian residents are prohibited, by the Palestinian Authority, from building homes outside the camp's official boundaries. They do not vote on municipal issues and receive no PA funding for roads or sanitation. As part of Prime Minister Salam Fayyad's "economic renaissance" and state-building project, a brand new Palestinian city named Rawabi is planned for the West Bank near Bethlehem. But there will be no room at the inn for the Balata refugees. Sixty years after the first Arab-Israeli war, Balata might accurately be defined as a UN-administered, quasi-apartheid, welfare ghetto.[emphasis added]

Read the whole thing.

We are used to hearing about the Palestinian refugee camps that exist due to the indifference of Arab countries--countries that find it to their political advantage to perpetuate a situate unique to the Arabs, while the rest of the worlds refugees are repatriated in a timely matter.

But what is one to make of the Palestinian leaders who perpetuate the same crime against what we are led to believe are their 'fellow Palestinians'?

Technorati Tag: Palestinian Refugees.