“I qualify as much as any Palestinian whose great-grandparents left their rental property to make it easier for Arab armies to kill the Jews in 1948.”
Jerusalem, November 16 – A local adolescent hopes to piggyback on a longtime international trend to gain immunity from criticism and scrutiny by assigning himself a status that international humanitarian organizations and journalism outlets by default associate with victimhood, virtue, and credulous acceptance of claims – an assignment of status with equal factual weight to that of those who have Palestine Refugee status already.
Ofir Shahak, 16, proclaimed his bedroom a “Palestine Refugee Camp” this afternoon. He made the move following an intense argument with his mother, followed by a bitter exchange with his sister, which sparked another argument with his mother, during which he showed such disrespect that his father stepped in an grounded him, in addition to revoking allowance for a month and halving Ofir’s allotted time online. The eleventh-grader now expects the international community to rally to his side, given that they do the same for Hamas with even less justification.
“I should be getting uncritical media and United Nations support any minute now,” he predicted. “I’m just as much a ‘Palestine Refugee’ as any of the people who officially carry that title – and UNRWA,” the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees – has to accept me into their rolls now, and all my descendants in perpetuity, as is their practice. Under their definition of ‘refugee’ I qualify as much as any Palestinian whose great-grandparents left their rental property to make it easier for Arab armies to kill the Jews in 1948.”
While the standard definition of “refugee” anywhere else in the world restricts the status, with rare exceptions, to people who themselves flee war or violent persecution, and cease to be refugees once they achieve resettlement in a new country, “Palestine Refugees” can never lose that status, and bequeath it to succeeding generations, precisely to prevent resettlement anywhere else, lest the Arab nations lose the political cudgel that the demographic – perhaps 700,000 in 1948, but ballooned to at least five million today, according to UNRWA figures, which might be unreliable – provides them, as the governments can divert popular anger toward the Jews as long as Palestinian suffering remains visible and acute. It helps that human rights groups and international aid organizations, in addition to European governments, nurture Palestinian grievances and encourage intransigence, having adopted a narrative in which Israel always bears blame and Palestinians, whether “refugees” or not, escape harsh judgment. Shahak hopes to capitalize on that tendency.
“My sister has to give me her room. I was in the house first and when she came along I was dispossessed,” he argued, getting into the spirit.
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