It is welcome news that Sweden’s Aid Minister, Benjamin Dousa, has said that Sweden will no longer fund UNRWA, apparently satisfied with Israel’s evidence that it has been a HAMAS front. The Arabs there need not worry, though, because Sweden is going to increase the amount of its aid, only using other agencies.
Lucky for them. However, Israel could help itself by going further and attacking the very idea that the recipients of UNRWA largesse are “Palestinian refugees” entitled to such aid when there are virtually no refugees among them. And in any case, there is nothing Palestinian about them.
History explains why there is nothing “Palestinian” about these people on the UNRWA rolls. In 1948, when the armies of five surrounding Arab states attacked Israel, there were in Israel thousands of foreign, overwhelmingly unskilled, and illiterate migrant workers in the country who had come into Mandatory Palestine looking for work.
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Image: Screengrab from a 1947 newsreel following the UN’s Recognition of the State of Israel. They were not “Palestinians,” and it was not a fight for their “nation.”
These workers did not want to be caught in the middle of the fighting. Because they were migrants who did not own and did not have to worry about immovable property, they ran behind enemy lines in the belief that the Arab armies would murder all the Jews in a few days. Then, they could run back to loot all the Jews’ property and possessions. (As we saw on October 7, 2023, following the Muslim Brotherhood rapists, torturers, and arsonists, masses of unarmed Muslims followed to loot the possessions of the dead Jews.)
Unfortunately for the migrants, things in 1948-49 did not work out as the migrant workers had hoped. The neonate Jewish army stopped the Arab invaders, ceasefire agreements were signed, and the migrant workers were caught behind Arab enemy lines, with none of the Arab states taking responsibility for their welfare.
And why not? Because in the Arab mind, the war was the UN’s fault for allowing the Jews to live free of the Muslim domination that had been in place from the earliest days of Islam. It was the UN’s fault for letting the Jews have their own state. Therefore, held the Arabs, the UN was responsible for the refugees. Ergo, the creation of UNWRA.
And because these migrants were from all over the Middle East—Morocco, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, etc.—the UN referred to them as the “Arab refugees.” So did the whole world, including all the Arab and Muslim states. They all used the generic term “Arab refugees” because they were a mixed bag from all over Araby with absolutely nothing “Palestinian” about them.
And to this day, there is undoubtedly no more than a statistically microscopic percentage of current recipients on the UNWRA rolls who were refugees. After 76 years of UNRWA, there can be only a tiny number of refugees receiving benefits. A 20-year-old refugee in 1948 would today be 96 years old, and how many of them have lived that long?
The only reason these people are on the UNWRA rolls is the PLO’s success in foisting on the UN the notion that the status of “Palestinian refugee” adheres to that person’s children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, etc., until the “Palestinians” are allowed to reclaim their “ancient” homeland. In fact, after Israel’s War of Independence, some 150,000 Arabs became citizens, i.e., those who did have property and did not run away.
Since then, unlike all other refugee populations in history that assimilate into their countries of refuge and die off, the “Palestinian refugee population” is today ten times larger than in 1948-49. UNRWA is arguably the greatest welfare scam in history.
Ergo, the recipients of UNRWA aid are neither refugees nor Palestinians in any recognizable way—none speak any ancient Palestinian language as Jews speak Hebrew. Their principal religion is native to the Arabian Peninsula and not to Palestine. There is not one book on any shelf in any library or bookstore in any language in the world on the history of “Palestinians” in Palestine before the advent of the Zionist movement, and there never will be.
In 1857, American novelist Herman Melville, author of Moby-Dick; or, The White Whale, visited the Holy Land and reported it was a “caked, depopulated Hell.”
Ten years later, his fellow great American writer Mark Twain made his pilgrimage and said the land “sits in sackcloth and ashes.”
Every scrap of evidence about Eretz Yisrael as it was in the 19th century before the movement to return Jews to their Promised Land tells us it was largely a barren, uninhabited wasteland. There were no roads, only animal tracks. It took Mark Twain on horseback a whole day to ride up from Tiberius on the Sea of Galilee to Mount Tabor—today a 15-minute car ride on roads the Zionists built—and he said he never saw a single person on the way.
In sum, the Zionists dispossessed no “Palestinian” nation from its imaginary ancient homeland. It was the Jewish people and only the Jewish people that brought the mournful, desolate country back to life.
When the League of Nations created Mandatory Palestine in 1922, the Grand Mufti in Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, was furious, as he had been even before the Paris Peace Conference opened for business in 1919. It was already known that the British were bent on implementing the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which process would culminate with the signing of the Palestine Mandate text “recognizing the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country,” with no mention of any “Palestinians.”
Haj Amin was murderously adamant that there never was such a country, and in Islamic history, he was right. Muslims never used “Palestine” to refer to the Jews’ Promised Land; only Jews and Christians did.
Before 1919 was out, Haj Amin began publishing a newspaper in Jerusalem to resist the League’s creation of a new jurisdiction called Palestine. He called that paper Southern Syria (Al-Suria al Janubia) This remained the Arab position for the next Biblical generation of forty years.
Not until 1959, in an Arab League meeting in Cairo, did Gamal Abdel Nasser, the reigning Egyptian “pharaoh” and head of the Arab League of States, propose rebranding the generic “Arab refugees” into “Palestinian refugees.” The rest is history: It’s the greatest historical hoax ever, according to which the “Palestinian people is the indigenous people of Palestine whose ancient homeland was stolen by the Zionist Jews.” For this lie, Jews are today being murdered and raped, and their synagogues burnt to the ground.
That is the essence of the “Palestinian cause,” and it is time for official Israel to end the charade and tell the world “Palestinian nationalism” is nothing but an antisemitic fantasy used to justify murdering and raping Jews in an unholy Muslim “holy war” to destroy Jewish freedom.
Sha’i ben-Tekoa’s PHANTOM NATION: Inventing the “Palestinians” as the Obstacle to Peace is available at Amazon.com in hard cover or a Kindle ebook. He podcasts on www.phantom-nation.com.
This article was originally published at www.americanthinker.com
