(Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs) Dore Gold - What has happened with the question of Palestinian refugees is alarming, and it is probably one of the main causes for making it so difficult to reach a permanent peace agreement. After the first Arab-Israeli war in 1949, the United Nations estimated the number of Palestinian refugees to be 750,000. (There were more Jewish refugees from Arab countries, but they were resettled inside of Israel.) By the time you get to 2016, those 750,000 refugees became 5 million because the UN had this numbering system which allowed the Palestinians to include the descendants of the original refugees as refugees. That wasn't done by other refugee organizations in the UN system - only in the case of the Palestinians. What this did is it made the refugee problem a problem in perpetuity - that can never be resolved - and that became more difficult every year. The writer, president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, is a former Israeli UN ambassador and director-general of the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
2017-02-10 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive