Palestinian refugees and the bishop

Whenever I think about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, I always ask myself one simple question: Why is it so agonizing and depressing to talk about the Palestinian refugees? I don’t know how people answer this question but I think it is because their number was less than a million when Israel was founded in 1948 and now it has reached around five million.
They are scattered around Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Gaza Strip and the West Bank and are forced to live under harsh conditions. There is one more puzzling question: Why do Palestinians live in refugee camps in Gaza Strip and the West Bank?
Let us face the reality. The Palestinian refugees’ issue is the biggest obstacle facing a lasting peace and any future one-state or two- state solution. Accommodating five million people is not easy. That’s more than the total population of Norway. And what is more is who is a Palestinian refugee. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) defines Palestinian refugees as “persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period between June 1, 1946 and May 15, 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict." Things have changed since 1946. Out of the 5 million current Palestinian refugees there are only about 30,000 original refugees and the countries hosting those refugees have more refugees and displaced Syrians than the Palestinian refugees themselves. The Palestinian refugees are different. They have been refugees for decades. It is true that many of them were forced to leave their homes but many of them left under the assumption that they would return to their homes few months after the 1948 Arab- Israeli war. Now there is no light at the end of the tunnel. Their agony and suffering should have been resolved when their number was less than a million. Their suffering would have ended if they were taken and absorbed by many Arab countries who instead build refugee camps in the hope that one day they would return home. The bitter truth is they have been not only forgotten by the outside world but their own leaders never discuss ways to end their plight.
The world never or seldom sees active presence of Palestinian officials in the refugee camps. These refugees have no bright future, period.
Let us touch one more point about the desperate and ever-swelling number of Palestinian refugees. For the past decades, the world in general and Palestinians in particular never saw one single Palestinian activist who took on his shoulder the burden of shedding light on the suffering of the Palestinians living in refugee camps. We see many Palestinian activists speaking in major world capitals but we never see them in refugee camps doing volunteer work to help the refugees or at least speak in their behalf.
Many so-called Palestinian activists put their own interests ahead of the refugees and it is ironic to hear or see some Palestinian activists live in the most beautiful and expensive western cities and just give hollow support. What is more ironic is that since the time Palestinians started leaving their homes, it was a non-Arab or non-Muslim charity organization that ended up highlighting the issue of the deprived Palestinian refugees. During the 1960s members of an association called Catholic Near East Welfare Association (CNEWA) saw at firsthand what the needs of the Palestinian refugees are. At a time when the UNRWA was not able to provide the minimum need to feed, house and educate the refugees, it was members of the CNEWA who traveled to the Middle East to provide the much-needed assistance and moral support. Bishop John Nolan who was the head of CNEWA and others who are not Palestinians went as far as establishing Bethlehem University and furnished all needed assistance to give many Palestinians opportunities to be enrolled in higher education. Bishop Nolan’s activities helped the world pay more attention to the needs of the Palestinian refugees. Now what’s next for the Palestinian refugees?
At this stage, the United Nations is struggling with a lack of funds for these refugees and many countries around the world are struggling to feed their own people let alone pay attention to these decades-old Palestinian refugee camps. The Middle East now has more than 5 million Palestinian refugees who are completely forgotten and lost among the other millions of refugees and displaced Syrians, Yemenis, Libyans and Iraqis. So during any future peace negotiations between the Palestinians and Israelis, the issue of the Palestinian refugees must be given the utmost importance. Without ending the agony of those Palestinians, there will be no solid ground for lasting peace. The refugees or their ancestors did not want to become refugees in the first place. Time and money is running out. It is a shame that one single Catholic bishop showed more care for the Palestinian refugees than any Palestinian jet-setter.
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