Perhaps Israel Should Allow the Return of Palestinian Refugees—If UNRWA Doesn’t Object

Since 1948, the plight of those Arabs who fled during Israel’s War of Independence has been used as a diplomatic tool against the Jewish state. To make sure the problem does not go away, the UN—in contrast to its policy regarding every other refugee group—holds refugee status for this particular group to be heritable. Jerold Auerbach argues that it is time to end what has always been a “charade”:

The number of Arabs who abandoned Palestine has long been disputed and—the better to blame Israel—vastly inflated. The New York Times, for example, repeatedly revised the fictitious refugee number upward: 870,000 (1953), “nearly 906,000” (1955), 925,000 (1957), “nearly a million” (1967). But according to [the historian] Efraim Karsh’s meticulously documented research, the total number of Palestinian refugees in 1947–48 was between 583,121 and 609,071. A terrible tragedy to be sure, and one for which the Arab nations that waged war to annihilate the fledgling Jewish state must bear responsibility. But it was, as Karsh pointedly writes, “a self-inflicted tragedy.”

In 1949 the United Nations Relief and Works Administration (UNRWA) was established to support Arabs “whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period of June 1, 1946 to May 15, 1948.” A laudable endeavor at its inception, over time it has become a farce. As though refugees never die, thereby inevitably reducing the number of beneficiaries, UNRWA (by its own calculation) now provides assistance to more than 1.5 million “refugees” and their descendants. Last August the Trump administration had the good sense to halt UNRWA funding. By then there were as many UNRWA employees as living Palestinian refugees.

Israel certainly can—and arguably should—invite the return of some 30,000 genuine Palestinian refugees, a number guaranteed to decline over time. The only objections, ironically, are likely to come from UNRWA and its Arab minions. They desperately need Palestinian “refugees” to sustain their unyielding public-relations war against Israel and, perhaps more important, to protect UNRWA bank accounts that assure their own salaries. But it is long past time to close this fraudulent charade that lacerates Israel for crimes that it did not commit.

Read more at Algemeiner

More about: New York Times, Palestinian refugees, UNRWA

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society