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Refugees Who Insist on the Impossible
(Commentary) Jonathan S. Tobin - The UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) has a budget problem, and as a result its workers are on strike in the West Bank. While the refugees demand that the corrupt Palestinian government take care of them while UNRWA is on strike, they are resolutely against being governed by it. Doing so would mean giving up their special status and taking up the more prosaic identity of Palestinian Arabs living on the territory of the putative Palestinian state. Leaving the camps would mean a better life. But it would also entail giving up their precious fiction that the descendants of the Arabs who fled the land of what is now Israel will someday return to it and thus erase the Jewish state. Since 1945, wars have created tens of millions of refugees around the world. Almost all have been resettled in new homes. But only the Palestinians, for whom UNRWA was specifically created, were not given the aid they needed to develop skills and get on with their lives. The answer is not more money for UNRWA and its employees nor for a Palestinian Authority that has no interest in helping them. The only answer is the abolition of UNRWA and its replacement by an agency dedicated to giving Palestinians the same resettlement help other refugees have received. Until that happens, the refugees - still the driving force of Palestinian politics - will ensure peace with Israel can never be achieved.