LATE Friday, Foreign Minister Penny Wong announced a doubling of Australian aid to $20 million annually for the UN agency serving the Palestinian Arabs. Timed right before the weekend and the Jewish New Year, Wong was hoping to avoid an outcry. But why is this such a controversial move?
The reason is due to the entity that Wong is sending your tax money to. United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) is a long acronym for a highly controversial organisation that has been much criticised.
UNRWA was established 73 years ago with a mandate to solve the Palestinian Arab refugee issue. During that time the number of Palestinian Arab ‘refugees’ has ballooned from 700,000 to almost six million. How is that possible?
The problem is UNRWA’s unique definition of refugee.
Simply being a grandchild or greatgrandchild of an Arab who once lived in Israel automatically confers ‘refugee’ status on someone, no matter how comfortable their current existence is. Today, only a tiny fraction of ‘refugees’ UNRWA serves has ever set foot in the land they are supposedly refugees from.
A Palestinian Arab can even adopt a child and thus confer refugee status on that child. This bizarre definition of inherited ‘refugeeness’ is not applied to any other group.
Read the article by Robery Gregory in The Chronicle.