UNWRA To Lexicographers: Add Infinite Descendants To Definition Of ‘Refugee’

The UN has an entire other organization for resettling and caring for refugees as such, and almost none of the Palestine Refugees qualify under the standard definition of ‘refugee.’

Geneva, January 14 – An international organization mandated to see to the healthcare, education, housing, and feeding of Palestinians who fled or were expelled from areas that came under Israeli control in two separate wars has asked dictionary-makers to modify an important term to include the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of refugees in the definition of the term “refugee,” among other changes.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), founded in the aftermath of the 1948-49 Israeli War of Independence to care for many displaced Arabs who previously lived in places that the nascent Jewish State claimed during that defensive war, has grown weary of the need to employ the specialized term “Palestine Refugee” in all of its literature and documentation, a spokesman explained, while the term “refugee” itself refers, with few exceptions, only to those who themselves fled, not their eventual families, and even then only to those who now have no citizenship or official country of residence. UNRWA, however, retains the designation of “Palestine Refugee” for its rolls in perpetuity, regardless of where those Palestine Refugees live now, as part of a decades-long effort by Israel’s enemies to wield the growing Palestine Refugee population’s misfortune as a political and diplomatic cudgel against Israel.

“The nomenclature issue is a big one,” acknowledged Chris Gunness, who once served as the organization’s official spokesperson for its operations in the Gaza Strip. “The UN has an entire other organization for resettling and caring for refugees as such, and almost none of the Palestine Refugees qualify under the standard definition of ‘refugee.’ UNRWA does the opposite – it keeps Palestine Refugees in a perpetual state of limbo, with the increasingly impossible promise of restoring them to Palestine. The organization can’t fulfill its mandate of draining international coffers for purposes of sustaining a time bomb of human suffering without a little cooperation from the gods of language, among them dictionary-makers. If those can be shamed into redefining ‘sexual preference’ as an offensive term at the drop of a hat, it shouldn’t be too hard to get them to include Palestinians of all sorts in the definition of ‘refugee,’ regardless of what those Palestinians even want, or how that might adversely affect the UN’s success with refugees from other conflict zones.”

Gunness noted other successful or partially successful redefinition campaigns that he hopes will provide both inspiration and precedent, such as an insistence from certain quarters that racism only qualifies as such if the perpetrator holds some ill-defined “institutional power” over the victim in addition to bias or animus, a rhetorical maneuver that has proved a boon to movements and activists insisting their antisemitism can’t be called racist because Jews control everything.

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