What Is This Idea Of ‘Asylum’ For Refugees Of Which You Speak?

By The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA)

We’ve been hearing quite a bit about some expectation that refugees be resettled in places other than the ones they left and thus be given the opportunity to start over, which prompts us to wonder: how would such so-called “asylum” allow the refugees to nurture increasingly fantastical notions of returning to their ancestors’ homes and to be used as political pawns for generations? That’s what refugee status is for.

It is this organization’s position that refugees may not be permitted to start over. They must be held hostage to the political ambitions of self-appointed leaders and foreign states, not invited to build lives and homes in more welcoming circumstances. It’s a crazy idea, this “asylum” of which you speak, which of course is appropriate, given that the term also refers to a loony bin.

Essentially, refugees – especially Palestinian refugees – are not people. They are tools. Useful tools, with utility far beyond the mere provision of excuses to the kleptocratic Palestinian leadership not to settle for anything less than the destruction of Israel, demographically or otherwise, to keep rejecting peace proposals. Their utility is evident in the way they are exploited by the leaders of neighboring countries, where their presence, the reminder of a great historical injustice, serves as a convenient distraction from domestic problems and a channeling of popular dissatisfaction in the direction of an external foe.

But they also provide the basis for a vast bureaucracy funded by international donations, and cushy jobs for antisemites with plausible deniablity. That alone demonstrates the folly of thinking refugees of any sort should be able to escape their status as such. If the refugees are absorbed into other societies and create new lives for themselves and their families, who will employ all of our staff? They have no other marketable skills. The entire notion of asylum for refugees, principally Palestinian refugees, is predicated on ignoring the needs of these bureaucrats for a decent living and an opportunity to rub shoulders with international bigwigs. Did you even think before you suggested it?

Now, we hear rumors that there is another UN agency tasked with handling refugees, the kind that are not Palestinian, and that said agency resettles one hundred percent of those refugees. If that’s true – and we are not certain that it is, given our aversion to facts that make us look bad – then that agency must be shut down at once.

Primarily because it probably competes with us for funding.