Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Il mito dei campi profughi palestinesi

The Myth of the Palestinian 'Refugee Camps'
By Peter Wilson
Controlling the vocabulary is a crucial part of any political debate,
and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, specifically the 1948 exodus --
or one should really say, the 1948 departure -- of Palestinians from
Israel, is no exception.  A typical formulation, chock-full of code
words, appeared in a recent letter to the Boston Globe: "Generations
of families living in squalor in refugee camps still await their right
to return under international law to their homeland Palestine."
Many, including Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu in his meeting with
Obama, have pointed out how the "right to return" would impose an
untenable situation for the Israeli democracy.  The 860,000 or so who
left in 1948 have grown to 4.8 million "registered refugees" living in
Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip.  Of this
number, 1.4 million are "RRCs" -- registered refugees in camps.  An
influx of this magnitude, added to the 1.2 million Israeli Muslims,
would create a Muslim population of 6 million, outnumbering Israel's
5.6 million Jews, potentially turning Israel into a sharia state.  In
other words, whatever "right to return under international law" may be
asserted, as Netanyahu said, "it's never going to happen."
Describing Palestinians as "refugees" living in "refugee camps" is a
further example of politicized word choice.  The original group of
Palestinians in 1948 left their homes in the face of an impending
aggression by Arab countries and moved into canvas tents with
primitive sanitation.  Regardless of arguments about whether Israeli
Palestinians "fled" or, as Noam Chomsky would have it, were pushed out
by a campaign of ethnic cleansing, this original group can rightly be
called refugees.  However, to continue to call their descendants
refugees sixty-three years later, as Obama did in his Middle East/
North Africa speech, distorts the truth of their situation.
Sixty-three years is time enough for three, perhaps four,
generations.  Imagine the grandchildren or great-grandchildren of
Jewish refugees who came to Brooklyn or Brookline after the Holocaust
referring to themselves as refugees.  My own family includes a number
of refugees from the Cambodian killing fields, and my nieces and
nephews would never think of claiming refugee status and a right to
return to Cambodia.
Granted, refugees arriving in America are welcomed as Americans, while
Palestinians are not welcome in the Arab countries where they reside.
This makes them political prisoners, bargaining chips, whatever.  But
at a certain point, given that the right to return is not an option,
you have to move beyond your grandfather's mistakes and accept the lot
you were given.
Keep in mind also that the tent cities in the desert from 1948 are
long gone.  Over the past sixty-three years the United Nations and the
United States have poured billions into the camps to upgrade living
conditions.  What Palestinian advocates like to call "camp shelters"
or "CS's" are typically 4-5 story concrete apartment buildings with
electricity, kitchens, satellite television tuned to al-Jazeera, and
municipal garbage collection.  According to the UN, 99.8% of camp
shelters are "connected to water networks" and 87% are "connected to
sewerage networks."  In other words, Palestinian camps are modern
cities.  Yes, they are overcrowded, with high unemployment, and I
wouldn't want to live there.  The infrastructure in these so-called
refugee camps is however far superior to the shantytowns in Dhaka,
Calcutta, Soweto, Kinshasa, Rio de Janeiro, Lagos, Jakarta, and many
other cities where hundreds of millions live without running water, in
shacks cobbled together from scraps of tin and cardboard, with open
sewers running through the streets.
The conduit for most of the money pouring into the Palestinian camps
is the UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for
Palestinian Refugees in the Near East, which was set up as a temporary
agency in 1949.  Its current budget is $1.2 billion, which compares to
the total "regular" U.N budget of $4.9 billion.  Including all
"extrabudgetary" programs (which includes UNRWA), the total 2010-11 UN
budget is $13.9 billion.  Thus the UN spends an amount equal to 25% of
its regular budget, or 8.6% of its total budget on 0.08% of the
world's population.
UNRWA is, for obvious reasons, pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel.  A
press release on May 16th following the "Nakba Day" assault on Israeli
borders from the UNRWA Commissioner-General (their website offers his
photo but not his name) gives an idea of where their sympathies lie:
    I deplore the deaths of Palestine refugees in Lebanon, the
occupied Golan Heights and the occupied Palestinian territory
["occupied" is another code word for the illegitimacy of Israel--
repeated not once but twice]. These sad events demonstrate once more
the vulnerability of the Palestine refugees we serve...They underline
the need for a just and durable solution, based on UN resolutions, to
resolve the plight of those who have endured statelessness, exile and
dispossession for 63 years.
Another UNRWA press release last Friday is titled, "Palestine refugee
health as much at risk today as in 1950, says new report."  The
motivation is obvious, to prove that despite 63 years of activity, the
temporary agency UNRWA is still vitally needed.  The text of the press
release however reports that a) "the reduction of child mortality
(Millennium Development Goal Four) is on track" and b) "UNRWA
continues to achieve a near 100 per cent rate of immunization
coverage."  The desperate health risks noted include:
    A rise in non-communicable diseases such as diabetes [that] have
led to acute health challenges
    New-born screening for hearing impairment in Gaza
    Integrating mental health and family protection in the West Bank
    Improving rational use of drugs in Syria
    Translating health reform into action, with focus on primary
health care in Lebanon
    Screening for phenylketonria (PKU) and hypothyroidism in Jordan
None of these health concerns should be scoffed at, but how ludicrous
to compare the risk of diabetes or hearing impairment to life-
threatening diseases like dysentery and diarrhea in the 1950 camps and
in so much of the world today.
Calling Palestinians "refugees" and continuing to treat them like
helpless victims does them no favors, especially when $1.2 billion
could be spent more effectively elsewhere.
 
http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/05/the_myth_of_the_palestinian_re.html
at May 25, 2011 - 03:44:04 PM CDT

 The Myth of the Palestinian 'Refugee Camps'
puah, quanto pus fa uscire il DSP dai cervelli sionisti