comment: >
context: Unlike UNRWA, UNHCR has a specific mandate to assist refugees in eliminating their refugee status by local integration in the current country, resettlement in a third country or repatriation when possible.
  Palestinian refugees are unique in that they're defined by UNRWA as "persons whose regular place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict."  They later added descendants because they have records from the red cross and others from 1948 (and later the 6 day war) to show residency.  
  UNWRA - no Statute.  Technically it's a temporary program whose mandate and charter gets rewritten every three years.
  UNCHR - has Statute. Charter doesn't change. >
  
  I think because the UNWRA was established before the UNCHR so it basically is a legacy organization and if you ask me it should be abolished and it's mission absorbed into the UNCHR.
  From what I can tell, the inheritance of refugee status is unique to Palestinians and it's partly because Arab states like Jordan don't want to have to give ethnic Palestinians citizenship when any other refugee group's children would be. In some ways its responsible for the ongoing crisis. I mean the Jews that were expelled from the Arab states and fled to Israel didn't keep their Iraqi, Jordanian, Iranian/etc., citizenship, they became Israeli.
  I know the situation is complicated and there are a lot of passions on both sides, but yeah it just seems like its a fluke of the UN having been so new and Arab states not wanting the Palestinians to be citizens of their states as a way to force a settlement they think will be better for them. >
  
  Video isn’t available in my country :( I think Kan 11 only makes their stuff available in Israel >
  
  
  Why does UNWRA exist
  
  UNRWA was initially created to help refugees, both Arab and Jewish, in Palestine after the 1948 war. In 1952 Israel took responsibility for the Jewish refugees, and UNRWA continued supporting the Palestinian Arab refugees. 
  UNCHR was created a few years after UNRWA and has a different mandate, mainly helping refugees resulting from WW2, and primarily focused on European refugees.
  Why wasn't UNCHR folded into UNRWA? I imagine it's because UNCHR was created with a different mandate, and UNRWA and UNCHR both facilitated different areas of need. 
  
  why do Palestinian inherit their refuge status?
  
  UNRWA has no mandate to re-settle Palestinian refugees, so unless UNCHR takes over(which does have a mandate to re-settle refugees) then the descendants of those 1946-48 refugees will be refugees themselves.
  Do you think multi-generational Rohingya in the Kutupalong refugee camps shouldn't be considered refugees? 
  I would say UNCHR not recognizing this(if that is indeed true) is a bigger problem than UNRWA recognizing the descendants of 1946-48 refugees as refugees themselves. 
  UNCHR does not have 103 million refugees, UNCHR estimates that 103 million people are forcibly displaced, worldwide. UNCHR's current mandate covers only 21.3 million refugees. 
  UNRWA's budget is 806 million(2020) while UNCHR's budget is 8.6 billion(2021)
  The Palestinian situation is unique, most refugees don't want to return to their homeland, because the situation is either too dire or they have better outcomes in other countries. 
  Palestinians do want to return to their homeland.
  I also imagine a big part of the continued support of UNRWA is the fact that the U.N. played a huge role in the 1948 war, and the resulting ethnic cleansing of 700,000 Palestinian Arabs. They tried to right a wrong by creating UNRWA, foolishly believing that the situation could be resolved in the somewhat near future. >
  
  
  is the fact that the U.N. played a huge role in the 1948 war
  
  did they do something other than send letters? >
  
  Just legitimized a settler-colonial state. >
  
  Oh, so their HUGE ROLE in a war was just sending letters. not like, soldiers or guns or anything >
  
  300k Palestinians were expelled after the U.N. agreed to the partition plan, this directly lead to the Arab League entering the civil war to protect Arab civilians, which lead to Jewish militias expelling a further 400k Palestinian civilians during the 1948 Arab-Israel war. >
  
  It probably has something to do with the fact that they weren’t just refugees fleeing a war, they were forcibly expelled from their homes so that someone else could build an ethnostate on their land, a project that continues to this day >
  
  Full disclosure: I’m an Israeli. You do know what the precursor to Israel’s establishment was, don’t you? And even if you ignore the continual and continuous persecution of Jews, by 1948 there was a thriving Jewish community in mandatory Palestine. In fact, they made up a third of the population. The original partition plan, which was overwhelmingly embraced by the Jewish leadership and people and just as overwhelmingly rejected by the Arabs, was not about banishing anyone. The tentative borders were based on the demography in the region. But given the situation that unfolded, what did you expect the Israeli leadership and army to do? Be naively dovish as they would watch their very existence crumble? Allow a hostile population to aide a few sovereign states in running over Israeli territory and the Israeli people? I’m not saying every act was justified, and we should definitely strive to acknowledge misdeeds. But don’t (probably disingenuously) confuse this with telling apart good and evil, right and wrong. As a side note, this has got nothing to do with the 1967 occupation, which I wholeheartedly oppose. >
  
  
  You do know what the precursor to Israel’s establishment was, don’t you?
  
  The establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine was already under way prior to the Holocaust, which I assume is what you're referencing. 
  No doubt the Holocaust sped things up, but there was always going to be a conflict because Jews were streaming into Palestine with the intention of setting up a Jewish homeland, for Jews. 
  Jabotinsky and other zionists explicitly stated what this was, that it was colonization, with the intent to create a Jewish state in Palestine, without a care for the native Palestinian Arabs wishes, modeled on western colonialism. 
  
  was not about banishing anyone.
  
  Come on now, if 700k Palestinian Arabs were not expelled, Jews would have had a very slim majority in Israel, the alternative was either civil rights for only Jews, or that Palestinian Arabs were always going to be expelled. 
  The Peel Commission even suggested that 225,000 Arabs be forcibly expelled, if needed, from the area of the proposed Jewish state. 
  
  good and evil, right and wrong
  
  Good and evil, right and wrong is subjective, of course. Targeting civilians is wrong, whether they are Arab or Jewish. >
  
  It's political. The rest of the middle east didn't like Israel. Keeping a bunch of refugees around was a great weapon against Israel.
  Normally refugees are integrated into the countries they flee to. Palestinians were excluded and sequestered into refugee camps that their descendants still live in today. If their descendants didn't inherit the refugee status then, after one generation, the countries would have to answer why they have a minority group that is forced to live in camps and excluded from the rest of their country. By calling then refugees they turn that negative PR against their enemy. The worse the Palestinians are treated by their country, the more political damage it does to their enemy. >
  
  It’s also just a matter of legitimacy. If the refugees claim citizenship in the surrounding countries, Israel can make further claims that they are no longer entitled to citizenship in Israel or the return of their stolen land >
  
  I mean, anyone with a bit of honesty would see how ridiculous that claim is. Israel allows converts with no tie whatsoever to immigrate to Israel, under their ridiculous law of '"return", yet a Palestinian having citizenship in another country would somehow mean they have no right to their homeland?