UNWRA: The Real Story

The subject of US Government funding for UNRWA has recently been addressed  in the news media following Senator Mark Kirk (R-IL) attempt to have an amendment attached to the funding bill for the State Department, for fiscal year 2013, that would require the State Department to provide to Congress:

1) the number of Palestinians physically displaced from their homes in what became Israel in 1948, and

2) the number of their descendants administered by UNRWA (that is, on UNRWA's rolls today as refugees).

UNRWA is the only international refugee agency in the world dedicated to one group of refugees, the Arab "refugees" of the League of Nations Mandated Territory of “Palestine”.  UNRWA was created by General Assembly resolution 302 (IV) on December 8, 1949, with the initial mandate to provide “direct relief and works programs” to Palestine refugees, in order to “prevent conditions of starvation and distress… and to further conditions of peace and stability”.

As stated on their web site:

• UNRWA is the main provider of basic services – education, health, relief and social services – to 5 million registered Palestine refugees in the Middle East.
• When the Agency started working in 1950, it was responding to the needs of about 750,000 Palestine refugees.
• One-third of the registered Palestine refugees, more than 1.4 million, live in 58 recognized refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, the Syrian Arab Republic, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

All other refugees of the entire world are cared for by the UNHCR -UN High Commission for Refugees under which, in total deference to UNWRA, works to get refugees resettled as quickly as possible so that they might get on with their lives.

UNHCR will assist these refugees in their resettlement even if the only alternative is settling them permanently in the place to which they had fled or to a third place.

UNRWA functions from an orientation that is not only highly politicized but extremely anti-Israel. It says that "its" refugees continue to be refugees even if they get citizenship elsewhere, that their status as refugees will end ONLY by "returning" to the area within Israel. UNRWA says that even the descendants of refugees are also refugees, indefinitely via the patrilineal line. Which means UNRWA promotes "return" to Israel of people who have never been here, and whose parents or even grandparents have never been here either.

So how did all this begin?

On December 11, 1948 the UN resolution (UNR194) which later created UNWRA, the United Nations Relief Agency, called for the return of ALL refugees to their homes and defined the role of the U.N. United Nations Conciliation Commission as an organization to facilitate peace in the region. UNR194 was adopted by a majority of 35 countries from among the 58 members of the United Nations on December 11, 1948; however all of the six Arab countries, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Yemen who invaded the Mandated Area and participated militarily and lost were then represented at the UN and voted against it.

At the time of the vote Israel had yet to have been admitted to the UN. 

Only with United Nations General Assembly Resolution 273 was Israel admitted to the United Nations on May 11, 1949 after Israel consented to implement other UN resolutions including resolutions 194 and 181.

It is important to note that UN resolution (UNR194) was passed before the official hostilities of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War was ended in the 1949 Rhodes Armistice agreement.

Furthermore, the 1949 Rhodes Armistice agreement was a “Ceasefire” agreement that established Demarcation Lines between Israeli forces and the Arab forces most notably by that of the Transjordan Legion which occupied the West Bank, also known as the “Green Line”.  It was hoped that at this time that separate peace treaties would be negotiated within a short time.

This implies that there is in fact only a temporary ceasefire agreement still in place. That an actual state of war still continues to exist between Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Yemen, the countries that invaded the Area of the Mandated Territory from 1948,

ONLY two Arab nations that invaded the League of Nations Mandatory Area in May of 1948 have signed negotiated and finalized peace agreements with the State Of Israel; Egypt March 26^th 1979 and The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan October 26^th, 1994.

Resolution 194 deals with the situation in the region after the majority of the Palestinian population who fled in mass, at the encouragement of the invading Arab “Liberators” and by mass hysteria spread by Arab propagandists of falsified atrocities, from areas of the Mandated Territory that came under Israeli control.

Hazem Nusseibeh, an editor of the Palestine Broadcasting Service's, admitted that on the instructions of Palestinian notable Dr. Hussein Khalidi,  he fabricated a false press release stating that at Deir Yassin atrocities were committed including murder of children and rapes of pregnant women.  Another interviewee, Abu Mahmud, emphatically denied the atrocity and rape stories.

Nusseibeh, told the BBC that the fabricated atrocity stories about Deir Yassin were "our biggest mistake," because "Palestinians fled in terror" and left the country in huge numbers after hearing the atrocity claims.

As the signatories seem to be under the impression that all Israeli attacks on Arab villages were unprovoked, I strongly recommend that they visit Arab villages, which remained neutral in 1948 such as the flourishing village of Abu Ghosh. Mohammed Abu Ghosh has been quoted as saying;

"What we did, we did for Abu Ghosh, for nobody else. Others who lost their land, hated us then, but now all over the Arab world, many people see we were right. If everyone did what we did, there'd be no refugee problem . . . And if we were traitors? Look where we are, look where they are."

Little if any heed is taken of the Jewish population that had been similarly expelled by the Arab Legion from their homes in Jerusalem's Old City and in the West Bank. Nor of the Jewish refugees of the 22 Arab nations.

Some 900,000 Jews fled, or were forced to flee, their homelands following the creation of the State of Israel. As a result, the Jewish population of the Middle East (excluding Israel) and North Africa shrank from 856,000 to just 4,400 today. These Jews of Arab lands who were ethnically cleansed from their homes and properties did not wallow in victimization or becoming consumed by hatred and revenge, they resettled elsewhere with little fanfare and no attention whatsoever from the UN grateful to their adopted lands for making it possible.

Since the inception of UNR 194, not once have the "Arab refugees" of the Mandated Area of “Palestine”, through their leaders or those leaders of the Arab nations that invaded the area in 1948, have accepted any resettlement resolution.

The resolution called for the return of ALL refugees to their homes and defined the role of the U.N. United Nations Conciliation Commission as an organization to facilitate peace in the region.

The resolution consists of 15 articles, the most quoted of which are:

• Article 7: protection and free access to the Holy Places
• Article 8: demilitarization and UN control over Jerusalem
• Article 9: free access to Jerusalem
• Article 11: calls for the return of refugees

Many of the resolution's articles were not fulfilled, since they were rejected out right by the Arab states or were opposed by Israel for being too biased and untrue, or were overshadowed by war as the 1948 conflict continued until Armistice in 1949 between Israel and Transjordan.

Israel continues to reject the biased resolutions which call only on it to make concessions and to allow only “Palestinians” the right to return. Israel continues to point out that Arab countries expelled and have denied more than 900,000 Jewish refugees of their confiscated their property. 

Since General Assembly resolutions are not binding, and only serve as advisory statements, there can be no obligation or enforcement of Resolution 194

Now let us review some historical facts of how the conflict began.

In the aftermath of World War I the “Great Powers”, England and France, or as they are referred to in the League of Nations as the “Principal Allied Powers” divided the defeated Ottoman Turkish between them.

In this division of the Middle East new countries arose overnight where none had existed beforehand as stated in the Mandate Resolution:

"Certain communities formerly belonging to the Turkish Empire have reached a stage of development where their existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognized subject to the rendering of administrative advice and assistance by a Mandatory until such time as they are able to stand-alone. The wishes of these communities must be a principal consideration in the selection of the Mandatory."

The “Great Powers”, England and France, realized that they needed to appease the Arab leadership for there participation in World War I and to win concessions in the production of oil. They therefore conceded to the Pan-Arab Nationalistic movement and grudgingly allowed the creation of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and later Trans-Jordan.

Article 2 of the League of Nations Mandate For Palestine states that: “The Mandatory shall be responsible for placing the country under such political, administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home, as laid down in the preamble...”

Under Article 22 of the League Of Nations, The United Kingdom – the Mandatory power -was appointed as the administration of the territory of Palestine as a “sacred trust”.

• Whereas recognition has thereby been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country;

• Whereas the Principal Allied Powers have also agreed that the Mandatory should be responsible for putting into effect the declaration originally made on November 2nd, 1917, by the Government of His Britannic Majesty, and adopted by the said Powers, in favor of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,

The Europeans nations knowing full well their obligation towards the “Native Inhabitants” included:

it being clearly understood that nothing should be done which might prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

So who are the antagonists of this conflict?

The Jewish people, who with the establishment of the State of Israel in May of 1948 became “the Israelis”, and the Arabs or “non-Jewish” inhabitants of the Mandatory Area who since 1948 have come to identify themselves as the “Palestinian”.

For over one hundred years animosity primarily among the Moslem “Arab” inhabitants towards the native Jewish population began to grow. The slow but steady influx of religious Jewish immigrants prior to 1900, who yearned to return to a homeland lost known in biblical terms as Zion, had at times felt the hatred in acts of humiliation, violence and banditry.

The waves of a more Secular Jewish immigration envisioned in the birth of the Zionistic Movement in the post 1900 period began to settle outside of the five major religious centers in agricultural areas. These Jews with the help of philanthropists such as Baron Rothschild and the Jewish National Fund began to acquire land in areas though to be useless by absentee Arab landlords. With the successful conversion of these previously unmanageable swampy lands into fruitful areas the Arab neighbor’s animosity and anger grew.

During this same period the growth of the Pan Arabism nationalistic movement began to spread among the Arab peoples of the Ottoman Empire and with it the growth of hatred towards the Jews.

The influx of Jewish refugees from Europe during and after the Holocaust era and most particularly with that of the 900,000 displaced Jews of Arab lands, the fires of hatred in the Arab world grew proportionally.

“So then what of the rights of the “minority” Jewish population which had been "ethically cleansed and expelled by the Arab Legion from their homes in Jerusalem's Old City and in the West Bank”

Article 11 UNR194:

Resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.

Instructs the Conciliation Commission to facilitate the repatriation, resettlement and economic and social rehabilitation of the refugees and the payment of compensation,

So what exactly is the purpose of UNWRA?

Is it to perpetuate hatred and hostility by the "embarrassed" Arab countries who lost in their initial effort to eradicate Israel in the "Nakba" disaster of 1948?

Only in UNRWA's mandate is refugee status accepted as "hereditary."It's "Mandate" encompasses Palestinians displaced by the 1948 War in the Mandated Area of Palestine, as well as their descendants, including legally adopted children.

THEN

“If the UN recognizes Gaza and the area of the Palestinian Authority as a country called “Palestine” does this not terminate UNWRA?”

AND

"If so will not the Arab countries need to absorb those “Palestinian Refugees” born in Lebanon, Egypt, Gaza,Jordan and Syria?

“Where in resolution 194 is there a provisional allowing for the assisting of descendants of refugees of 1948 and the granting of them refugee status?”

Than if there is no provision than is UNWRA in violation of UNR194?

Who was Ernie Pyle?

Ernest Taylor Pyle was born on a tenant farm near Dana, Indiana on August 3, 1900 and he was “KIA"- killed in action on Ie Shima, an island off Okinawa, after being hit by Japanese machine-gun fire on April 18, 1945.  As a 1944 Pulitzer Prize winning American journalist, Ernie Pyle wrote as a roving correspondent for the Scripps Howard newspaper chain from 1935 until his death in combat during World War II. All of his articles were written in a folksy style, much like a personal letter to a friend. His stories were about the out-of-the-way places he visited and the ordinary people who lived there. His various articles were printed in columns in some 300 newspapers.

Pyle became a war correspondent following the entry of the U.S. into World War II, he reported stories from the United States, Europe, Africa, and the Pacific. As a war correspondent Pyle applied his intimate “folksy” style to relate his stories from the “Front”. Pyle strove to write “tales” from the perspective of the common soldier, instead of stories from “behind-the-lines” of movements of armies or the activities of “The Brass”. His literary approach of telling the story from the point of view and in the language of the “common man/soldier GI Joe” won him not only further popularity but also the Pulitzer Prize.  His stories of the GI’s won him their love and affection.

From his time spent in the front lines and in fox holes of the combat soldier, he wrote a column in 1944 urging that soldiers in combat get "fight pay" just as airmen were paid "flight pay." The members of Congress were so pressed by their constituents that they passed legislation, known as "The Ernie Pyle bill" authorizing $10 a month in extra pay for combat infantrymen.

Many now attribute the actual first publicized case of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome to that which Pyle publicly apologized to with his readers in a column on September 5, 1944, for being hospitalized with a “war neurosis”. He stated that he had "lost track of the point of the war" and that he hoped that a rest in his home in New Mexico would restore his vigor to go "war horsing around the Pacific”.

Among his most widely read and reprinted columns is "The Death of Captain Waskow." His wartime writings are preserved in four books: Ernie Pyle In England, Here Is Your War, Brave Men, and Last Chapter.

When Pyle decided to cover events in the Pacific, he admitted that his heart was with the infantrymen in Europe. Pyle’s comments, of the “soft life”, of the sailors of US Navy in comparison to the infantry in Europe, was openly criticized by fellow War correspondents in newspaper editorials, and even by his beloved GI’s for giving apparent short shrift to the difficulties of the war in the Pacific.

On April 18, 1945 Pyle was traveling in a jeep with Lieutenant Colonel Joseph B. Coolidge (commanding officer of the 305th Infantry Regiment, 77th Infantry Division) and three other men. The road they were on ran parallel to the beach two or three hundred yards inland.  As the vehicle reached a road junction, an enemy machine gun located on a coral ridge about a third of a mile away began firing at them. The men stopped their vehicle and jumped into a ditch. Pyle and Coolidge raised their heads to look around for the others; when they spotted them, Pyle smiled and asked Coolidge "Are you all right?" Those were his last words as Pyle was struck in the left temple and was killed instantly.

Pyle was noted for having premonitions of his own death and predicted before landing that he would not be alive a year hence. Though a war correspondent Pyle was among the few American civilians killed during the war to be awarded the Purple Heart.

He was buried with his helmet on, laid to rest in a long row of graves among other soldiers on Ie Shima, with an infantry private on one side and a combat engineer on the other. The remains of Pyle and the other fallen Americans was later reburied at the Army cemetery on Okinawa and then moved to Honolulu in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific. After the war, when Okinawa was returned to Japanese control the Ernie Pyle monument was one of only three American memorials allowed to remain in place.

The Death of Captain Waskow

AT THE FRONT LINES IN ITALY, January 10, 1944 – In this war I have known a lot of officers who were loved and respected by the soldiers under them. But never have I crossed the trail of any man as beloved as Capt. Henry T. Waskow of Belton, Texas.

Capt. Waskow was a company commander in the 36th Division. He had led his company since long before it left the States. He was very young, only in his middle twenties, but he carried in him a sincerity and gentleness that made people want to be guided by him.

"After my own father, he came next," a sergeant told me.

"He always looked after us," a soldier said. "He’d go to bat for us every time."

"I’ve never knowed him to do anything unfair," another one said.

I was at the foot of the mule trail the night they brought Capt. Waskow’s body down. The moon was nearly full at the time, and you could see far up the trail, and even part way across the valley below. Soldiers made shadows in the moonlight as they walked.

Dead men had been coming down the mountain all evening, lashed onto the backs of mules. They came lying belly-down across the wooden pack-saddles, their heads hanging down on the left side of the mule, their stiffened legs sticking out awkwardly from the other side, bobbing up and down as the mule walked.

The Italian mule-skinners were afraid to walk beside dead men, so Americans had to lead the mules down that night. Even the Americans were reluctant to unlash and lift off the bodies at the bottom, so an officer had to do it himself, and ask others to help.

The first one came early in the morning. They slid him down from the mule and stood him on his feet for a moment, while they got a new grip. In the half light he might have been merely a sick man standing there, leaning on the others. Then they laid him on the ground in the shadow of the low stone wall alongside the road.

I don’t know who that first one was. You feel small in the presence of dead men, and ashamed at being alive, and you don’t ask silly questions.

We left him there beside the road, that first one, and we all went back into the cowshed and sat on water cans or lay on the straw, waiting for the next batch of mules.

Somebody said the dead soldier had been dead for four days, and then nobody said anything more about it. We talked soldier talk for an hour or more. The dead man lay all alone outside in the shadow of the low stone wall.

Then a soldier came into the cowshed and said there were some more bodies outside. We went out into the road. Four mules stood there, in the moonlight, in the road where the trail came down off the mountain. The soldiers who led them stood there waiting. "This one is Captain Waskow," one of them said quietly.

Two men unlashed his body from the mule and lifted it off and laid it in the shadow beside the low stone wall. Other men took the other bodies off. Finally there were five lying end to end in a long row, alongside the road. You don’t cover up dead men in the combat zone. They just lie there in the shadows until somebody else comes after them.

The unburdened mules moved off to their olive orchard. The men in the road seemed reluctant to leave. They stood around, and gradually one by one I could sense them moving close to Capt. Waskow’s body. Not so much to look, I think, as to say something in finality to him, and to themselves. I stood close by and I could hear.

One soldier came and looked down, and he said out loud, "God damn it." That’s all he said, and then he walked away. Another one came. He said, "God damn it to hell anyway." He looked down for a few last moments, and then he turned and left.

Another man came; I think he was an officer. It was hard to tell officers from men in the half light, for all were bearded and grimy dirty. The man looked down into the dead captain’s face, and then he spoke directly to him, as though he were alive. He said: "I’m sorry, old man."

Then a soldier came and stood beside the officer, and bent over, and he too spoke to his dead captain, not in a whisper but awfully tenderly, and he said:

"I sure am sorry, sir."

Then the first man squatted down, and he reached down and took the dead hand, and he sat there for a full five minutes, holding the dead hand in his own and looking intently into the dead face, and he never uttered a sound all the time he sat there.

And finally he put the hand down, and then reached up and gently straightened the points of the captain’s shirt collar, and then he sort of rearranged the tattered edges of his uniform around the wound. And then he got up and walked away down the road in the moonlight, all alone.

After that the rest of us went back into the cowshed, leaving the five dead men lying in a line, end to end, in the shadow of the low stone wall. We lay down on the straw in the cowshed, and pretty soon we were all asleep.

Epilogue: In his last will and testament, Waskow wrote:

“ God alone knows how I worked and slaved to make myself a worthy leader of these magnificent men, and I feel assured that my work has paid dividends—in personal satisfaction, if nothing else.... I felt so unworthy, at times, of the great trust my country had put in me, that I simply had to keep plugging to satisfy my own self that I was worthy of that trust. I have not, at the time of writing this, done that, and I suppose I never will."

The GI’s Cartoonist of WWII Bill Mauldin by Ernie Pyle

As a cartoonist foe the Stars And Stripes Bill Mauldin may have felt guilty that he was able to get out of combat. So when he drew his cartoons for the front line soldiers who did the actual fighting and dying. Along with the humor he was able to capture the grim and cynical side of the everyday routine of a soldier He incorporated some of the inside jokes of the “you had to be there nature” from their comments from his time spent among them. From his experiences and conclusions from his talks with the average “GI JOE” his cartoons showed an anti-war, anti authoritarian or pessimistic point of view. Though they were drawn for an army newspaper these cartoons were an honest and sympathetic view of the real combat soldier. Mauldin later wrote a book, Up Front, from these encounters were he attempted to explain what the average soldiers on the front line were like and what they were going through.

Ernie Pyle wrote this about Bill Mauldin:

IN ITALY, January 15, 1944 – Sgt. Bill Mauldin appears to us over here to be the finest cartoonist the war has produced. And that’s not merely because his cartoons are funny, but because they are also terribly grim and real.

Mauldin’s cartoons aren’t about training-camp life, which you at home are best acquainted with. They are about the men in the line – the tiny percentage of our vast army who are actually up there in that other world doing the dying. His cartoons are about the war.

Mauldin’s central cartoon character is a soldier, unshaven, unwashed, unsmiling. He looks more like a hobo than like your son. He looks, in fact, exactly like a doughfoot who has been in the lines for two months. And that isn’t pretty.

Mauldin’s cartoons in a way are bitter. His work is so mature that I had pictured him as a man approaching middle age. Yet he is only twenty-two, and he looks even younger. He himself could never have raised the heavy black beard of his cartoon dogface. His whiskers are soft and scant, his nose is upturned good-naturedly, and his eyes have a twinkle.

His maturity comes simply from a native understanding of things, and from being a soldier himself for a long time. He has been in the Army three and a half years.

Bill Mauldin was born in Mountain Park, New Mexico. He now calls Phoenix home base, but we of New Mexico could claim him without much resistance on his part. Bill has drawn ever since he was a child. He always drew pictures of the things he wanted to grow up to be, such as cowboys and soldiers, not realizing that what he really wanted to become was a man who draws pictures. He graduated from high school in Phoenix at seventeen, took a year at the Academy of Fine Arts in Chicago, and at eighteen was in the Army. He did sixty-four days on KP duty in his first four months. That fairly cured him of a lifelong worship of uniforms.

Mauldin belongs to the 45th Division. Their record has been a fine one, and their losses have been heavy. Mauldin’s typical grim cartoon soldier is really a 45th Division infantryman, and he is one who has truly been through the mill.

Mauldin was detached from straight soldier duty after a year in the infantry, and put to work on the division’s weekly paper. His true war cartoons started in Sicily and have continued on through Italy, gradually gaining recognition. Capt. Bob Neville, Stars and Stripes editor, shakes his head with a veteran’s admiration and says of Mauldin: "He’s got it. Already he’s the outstanding cartoonist of the war."

Mauldin works in a cold, dark little studio in the back of Stars and Stripes’ Naples office. He wears silver-rimmed glasses when he works. His eyes used to be good, but he damaged them in his early Army days by drawing for too many hours at night with poor light.

He averages about three days out of ten at the front, then comes back and draws up a large batch of cartoons. If the weather is good he sketches a few details at the front. But the weather is usually lousy.

"You don’t need to sketch details anyhow," he says. "You come back with a picture of misery and cold and danger in your mind and you don’t need any more details than that."

His cartoon in Stars and Stripes is headed "Up Front . . . By Mauldin." The other day some soldier wrote in a nasty letter asking what the hell did Mauldin know about the front.

Stars and Stripes printed the letter. Beneath it in italics they printed a short editor’s note: "Sgt. Bill Mauldin received the Purple Heart for wounds received while serving in Italy with Pvt. Blank’s own regiment."

That’s known as telling ‘em.

Bill Mauldin is a rather quiet fellow, a little above medium size. He smokes and swears a little and talks frankly and pleasantly. He is not eccentric in any way.

Even though he’s just a kid he’s a husband and father. He married in 1942 while in camp in Texas, and his son was born last August 20 while Bill was in Sicily. His wife and child are living in Phoenix now. Bill carries pictures of them in his pocketbook.

Unfortunately for you and Mauldin both, the American public has no opportunity to see his daily drawings. But that isn’t worrying him. He realizes this is his big chance.

After the war he wants to settle again in the Southwest, which he and I love. He wants to go on doing cartoons of these same guys who are now fighting in the Italian hills, except that by then they’ll be in civilian clothes and living as they should be.