And Other Undesirables
Another twist on an old story; UNRWA, the United Nations special relief and works agency established for the particular purpose of looking after the interests of the Palestinians since 1948, despite having funnelled billions of dollars to the Palestinians over the course of 60 years, has little to show for the effort. In 60 years of supporting Arab Palestinians as refugees, nothing concrete has born fruit to show for the effort. The Palestinians are still considered to be refugees, still dependent on UN and other international sources for support.In all the time that has passed and all the funding that has been handed over to the groups purporting to represent the interests of the Palestinians, no fundamental changes have taken place to ensure a universal civil structure has been formulated and put in place. Instead, the Palestinians live as refugees, despite that their 'refugee camps' have become towns and cities. They live in a state of apprehended nationhood. Declaring their wish to become a state, an autonomous country, yet time after time rejecting the opportunity.
The Palestinians live now as a divided people; one half of whom were Jordanians, now inhabiting the West Bank; the other half of whom were Egyptians, inhabiting the Gaza Strip. They might have been conjoined, but an incendiary rift of bitter animosity between two leaderships, one the secular Fatah born from the old PLO, the other the Islamist Hamas, has solidly separated the two communities. Making it even more difficult to reach a peace agreement with Israel.
Palestinians cleave to the belief that they must never offer validity to the historical fact of the Holocaust through recognizing it as a reality. They believe that the Holocaust and its horrors played a part in encouraging the international community to agree, through the auspices of the United Nations, to fractionate the territory of Palestine, giving one area to the Jews, the rest to the Palestinians. Nor will they agree to recognizing Israel as a Jewish state, for to do so would be tantamount to giving up their aspirations of returnees.
Through UNRWA's school system, the Palestinians were permitted to draw up their own version of history to explain what they describe as the 'disaster' that overtook them with the territorial division of Palestine. Their portrayal of Jews as foreign interlopers whose atrocious claim of territory violently left them adrift as refugees is expressed in their school curricula, teaching children to fear and hate and distrust Israelis.
This has long been pointed out to UNRWA as a source of trouble, in teaching the impressionable young to view their neighbours as life-long enemies, making it highly unlikely that, grown into adulthood, they would be agreeable to living in peace with an established country whose presence was held responsible for their refugee status. UNRWA appears to have attempted to insert historical reference to the Holocaust into Palestinian school curricula to try to counteract this situation.
However, an angrily strenuous condemnation from Hamas has brought this initiative to a standstill, with Hamas stating the Holocaust represents a "lie invented by the Zionists" to reinforce their claims over the Holy Land.
Hamas has condemned a United Nations decision to teach refugee children in Gaza about the Holocaust, saying it is a “lie invented by the Zionists” that would reinforce Israeli control over the Holy Land, demanding that UNRWA withdraw their plans for a new history book for UN schools in Gaza. "We refuse to let our children study a lie invented by the Zionists", Hamas wrote to the head of the Gaza chapter of UNRWA.
Evidently as far as Israel is concerned, it would far prefer that UNRWA create permanent housing for the refugees, remediating their refugee status, whereas it seems that the Palestinian leadership is invested in perpetuating the misery of their people, to ensure that there can be no civil settlement leading to peace between the Palestinians and Israel. By maintaing the status of the Palestinians in a tenuously fragile state, the issue remains front and centre, and the portrayal of the Palestinians as hapless victims suits their political cause.
Heeding the anger and refusal of Hamas, however, to permit a new history text for 13-year-olds to be accepted, The commissioner-general of UNRWA, Karen, Abu Zaid, at a press conference stated: "I can refute allegations that the UN school curriculum includes anything about the Holocaust; we focus on human rights in curriculum ... and the murder of six million Jews and five million other undesirables ... is not a human rights issue."
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| John Ging | Karen Abu Zaid |
So that appears to be that. The "murder of six million Jews and five million other undesirables ... is not a human rights issue." After all, in the opinion of both UNRWA representatives, it would appear that those six million Jews who died during the Holocaust merely represented 'undesirables'.
What more need be said other than to observe that these two UN functionaries are obviously the right people in the right position at the right time.
Labels: Israel, Political Realities, United Nations
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, September 02, 2009
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