Israel and her friends are celebrating the 70th anniversary of the country’s founding on Monday. Since 1948, the Israeli people have established a prosperous and democratic state in their ancestral homeland. Israel’s thriving existence is a fact, not something to be negotiated.
However, from the time of the Balfour Declaration in 1917, groups have rejected the legitimacy of the Jewish state. To their detriment, the Palestinians continue to embody this rejectionist attitude. The world must stand up to those that espouse this policy and strongly support the existence of Israel as a nation.
For the past month, Hamas has been leading confrontational efforts in Gaza to protest Israel’s security measures under the guise of a peaceful march for freedom. However, the goal of their so-called “March of Return” is to break through the border wall between Israel and Gaza, allow tens of thousands of Palestinians to flood Israel, and take land that has been occupied since 1948 and 1967. In other words, the March of Return represents a “return” to a time when there was no state of Israel.
The prolonged Palestinian refugee issue and the unfulfilled “right of return” serve as fuel for the flames of protest in Gaza. They also serve as a major obstacle to Palestinian acceptance of Israel and a lasting and stable peace. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, originally a temporary organization created in 1949 ostensibly “to further conditions of peace and stability,” serves to perpetuate this problem.
Unlike other refugee agencies, the UNRWA’s expanded mandate extends refugee status to cover all future generations of Palestinians, greatly expanding the number specifically to “descendants of persons who became refugees in 1948.” According to UNRWA, refugee status now extends to the fourth generation of Palestinians, exploding the number of registered refugees from an estimated 700,000 back in 1949, per UNRWA’s claims, to more than 5 million today. Rather than narrowing the problem, this definition has compounded it.
The UNRWA’s mandate goes far beyond the accepted international standards for refugees, including U.S. standards. Those standards are reflected in the much more successful model for international refugee relief that the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees follows. The UNHCR, formed in 1950, seeks to resettle refugees and find durable solutions for them, not perpetuate their circumstances. Unfortunately, even today, many descendants of Palestinian refugees still live as unsettled and marginalized people in many Arab countries. The UNRWA bears some responsibility for this.
It is clear that the “refugee” issue has become not only an obstacle to peace, but a primary weapon for inciting potential violence. This is why on April 17 I sent a letter, along with 50 of my colleagues, to President Trump requesting that he direct the State Department to declassify a mandated report to Congress identifying the true number of original refugees remaining from the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. The report is said to have been marked classified to prevent public disclosure of the fact that the number of Palestinian refugees is far smaller than what the UNRWA claims.
Of course, the careerists at the State Department oppose the report’s release to the public. That would destroy the so-called “right of return” myth that allows Hamas and others to demand the “return” of millions of nonrefugees to Israel. There is no national security threat or known historical precedent for classifying such a report. The public deserve to know whether their taxpayer dollars are going toward conflict perpetuation or conflict resolution.
When the State Department report is finally made public, it will demonstrate that according to U.S. and international legal definitions and criteria, there are no more than a few tens of thousands of actual Palestinian refugees. This revelation will finally remove one of the most significant obstacles to peace, as well as a chief weapon that the terrorists, extremists, and rejectionists use to continue a state of war with Israel.
It is time to for all to recognize the fact that Israel exists. We must also recognize that we are not advancing towards peace, or even towards an improvement in the situation of the Palestinians, until the world faces the reality of the refugee issue. The UNRWA and its approach to Palestinian refugees perpetuates the conflict and is an obstacle to peace. It is time for this to change.
Rep. Keith Rothfus, a Republican, represents Pennsylvania’s 12th Congressional District. He is a member of the Congressional Israel Victory Caucus.
