Hurting, Not Helping
BY BENNY AVNI
June 27, 2005

One U.N. agency handles all the world's refugees. Another is charged exclusively with managing the concerns of Palestinian Arabs. An American national, Karen Abu Zayd, will later this week be named as head of the latter - but during her career, she has served both Palestinian Arabs and international refugees. Let's hope she will be sensible enough to recommend ending the preferential treatment that has doomed millions of Arabs to life of misery since 1948.
In Bosnia and Herzegovina, where Ms. Abu Zayd served as an official with the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees during the 1990s, her successors now address issues such as workplace ethnic discrimination against returnees and the use of religious symbols in town squares. Ten years after the war, in other words, there are still problems, but those who were once refugees are on their way to becoming part of a new country.
The United Nations also sponsors the Relief and Works Agency - established in 1949 to aid Arabs who had been displaced by the war in Palestine: The number of registered Palestine refugees has subsequently grown from 914,000 in 1950 to more than four million in 2002, and continues to rise due to natural population growth, according to UNRWA's Web site.
What began as a noble attempt by the United Nations to help one group of refugees has turned millions into permanent charity cases. Right from the start, Arab states saw the camp residents as a propaganda asset at home and abroad and therefore had no interest in any solution that would end their refugee status. The aspirations of those born in UNRWA camps scattered in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and the territories designed for a future Palestinian Arab state, have grown more unrealistic with time.
Now in their fourth generation, the only camp residents who have achieved worldwide recognition are in the terrorism business - such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who is currently the most wanted terrorist in Iraq and is named after his UNRWA-run hometown of Zarqa, Jordan.
Israel is ambivalent. On one hand, as its U.N. Ambassador, Dan Gillerman said, UNRWA refugee camps and their residents have turned into a bargaining chip for enemies of the Jewish state. On the other, as long as there is no solution, UNRWA's job is necessary, and it fulfills an important role that Israel cannot handle on its own.
Meanwhile, past commissioners of the agency have become a thorn in Israel's side. Living and working with resentful refugees, they went native. When the previous commissioner, Peter Hansen, said in a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation interview that he saw nothing wrong with employing Hamas members, he had no inkling that his viewers - Canadians who are responsible for a huge chunk of UNRWA's budget and also define Hamas as a terrorist organization - would cringe.
Early this year, even Secretary-General Annan realized that Mr. Hansen has resided too long at the agency's Gamal Abdul Nasser Street headquarters in Gaza City - named for the previous occupier of Gaza, the Egyptian dictator who unified the Arab world under an anti-Israeli, pro-Soviet banner, and was perhaps more responsible than anyone else for fate of the millions who deem themselves victims of Jewish aggression, and who are doomed to ongoing status as UNRWA clients.
In April Mr. Annan named Ms. Abu Zayd, nee Koning (she is married to a Sudanese national), to temporarily run the agency. Later this week she is expected to be appointed UNRWA's permanent commissioner. Israelis say that as Mr. Hansen's deputy, Ms. Abu Zayd has worked well with them. After the politicization in the organization under Mr. Hansen, they see any change as improvement.
But according to Mr. Gillerman, this might also be the time to go beyond the personal, and perhaps think of a major structural change.
One idea, not yet supported by Israel: rather than attempting to fix it, Mr. Annan should scrap UNRWA and incorporate its cases into UNHCR. And while he's at it, he should also do away with other U.N. agencies that were created to help exclusively Palestinian Arabs, but instead serve to make their lives miserable, and deepen the Arab-Israeli dispute to boot.
Regrettably, Mr. Annan is once again undertaking an ambitious reform plan. He assumes this is no time to alienate Arab states, needed as allies for reform, by taking on such agencies as UNRWA.