You need an UNRWA history lesson. Dr. Einat Wilf (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQDbqOUgSB0&t=2949), author of The War of Return, gives the best one.after which you can ask why multimillionaire supermodel and US citizen Bella Hadid is still on UNRWA's refugee roster:

"In the 20th century transition from empires to nation states or states, if they're not lucky,

new borders are delineated. In the process of new borders being delineated it's almost always a very bloody violent process.

And you have tens of millions of refugees being created, as people flee across these newly created borders, typically to the side that is more ethnically similar to them. You have this happening across Europe, where the Germans and Poles and Ukrainians and Bulgarians and Italians and of course Turks and Greeks and Hindus and Muslims. And this is happening here too, already in November, December 1947, before the Arab onslaught, before the British leave, the top, the most educated, the wealthiest of the Arabs in the land, leave.

And we see it everywhere. When there's war. The people who have money, the people who have assets, the people who have the ability to flee, they flee. This was devastating for the local Arabs

because essentially the entire leadership, the entire educated class left within the first few weeks

of the civil war situation between the Jews and Arabs. Then with the Jewish offensive that begins in April 1948. As I said, this is the moment that the Jews understand that they either win or there's no state. Then begins the process of also some expulsions and people essentially

also being pushed out. None of them, and that's important to mention, are what you call today ethnic cleansing,

because now there is this story that looks like this. You know, if people you ask them

what happened in 1948, this is their imagination. There was a peaceful state of Palestine, which was Arab and already existed.

And then evil, white imperial Jews came with a massive army

that already in 1948 possessed F-16s and tanks, and they rolled over the peaceful state of Palestine and

you know, ethnically cleansed the peaceful Palestinians

who just lived there. And I don't think I'm caricaturing too much how some people

imagine what happened there. And this is why it's so important. And we included in the book, especially in English descriptions of what

the war was like, brutal, existential door to door,

and with a clear declaration by the Arabs that they have no intention

to allow the Jews to remain sovereign for a single moment if they can help it.

So in April 1948 begins the process that also includes expulsions, but they're always driven by a military idea

because the notion is that Israel can no longer be on the defensive it needs to go out. And because this is essentially

a civil war where the fighters are part of the population, there's no difference in places. Where the Arab population said, you know,

we're good with the Jewish state, we're not fighting, those are places that nobody was hurt. You see it in Abu Ghosh today,

but in places where there was fighting... - So Abu Ghosh is just outside of Jerusalem. -Yes. And it's a it's an Arab town. -Yeah.

And it's a very healthy civil relationship. -Exactly. There was no fighting. So there the Arab community

has very close relations with the Jewish communities that surround it. Yeah, exactly. Ethnic cleansing is essentially when you do it to people who are, it's

not in war, it's not in fighting, you do it because of their ethnicity, not because they're fighting. When people are expelled, it's

because of a fight in war situation. And it's important to remember this

is incredibly normal in the course of war. Certainly this kind of existential door

to door, village to village war, which was the Jewish-Arab war between November 29th, 1947 until the Arab onslaught on May 15th (1948).

From May 15th on, you continue to have refugees, as you know, with people, when war is coming close, they flee.

And it's a combination of people fleeing and some expulsions, and again, completely normal in war. There is nothing unique in the war

here compared to anything happening at this time as empires collapse and nations are established. Okay,

the war ends. There's an armistice agreements reached with Egypt and Syria, and armistice agreements with Egypt.

Hold on. I wrote this down. There was armistice agreements in 1949, reached with Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria at this point,

how many Palestinian Arab refugees are there as a result of this war? On the day the war ends,

according to the U.N.? Okay. So they're still at this point called Arab refugees because the name

Palestine has not yet been hijacked to the Arab cause. They're called Arab refugees. There's about 700,000 of them.

There are estimates ranging from a low of 500,000 to a high of 900,000. The common and accepted estimate is around 700,000.

And there are U.N. papers, i've seen them from around that time that cite around 700,000 - 760,000. Exactly. Okay.

And they are mostly in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan,

Syria and Lebanon, some in Iraq. And here the Arab countries are actually a bit different.

First of all, it's important, like you said, there are armistice agreement. Those are not peace agreements because the Arab countries

are basically saying we're stopping the fighting for now, you know, apropos everyone asking for a cease fire.

We're stopping the fighting for now, but we're not making peace because this Jewish state thing is still unacceptable.

So we're not recognizing the sovereignty of this Jewish state. Certainly not. We're just saying we're

pausing the fighting for now. Precisely. Now, Jordan, because it has a somewhat

different history with the Jewish state, it's somewhat more acceptable of that idea, especially the Hashemites, -They are the family,

the royal family in Transjordan. Exactly. Which is to this day, King Abdullah is the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.

And after World War One, they had some favorable ideas with the idea of a Jewish state, still under

Arab control, but it was mildly favorable. They were actually willing to make peace with the Jewish state at the end of the war.

They annex the West Bank. They naturalize the Arab refugees and they do not demand anything from the Jewish state.

They understand that the way you end war is wherever refugees are,

is where they stay. So Jordan actually is willing to make peace and to naturalize the Arab refugees and make them citizens

or residents of Jordan. Exactly. It makes them citizens or subjects essentially of the kingdom of Jordan.

But the Jordanian King Abdullah is actually murdered by a Palestinian over that issue. So ever since the Jordanians are kind

of, you know, jumpy on this issue. But Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, with Gaza,

they're very clear we are not settling the Arab refugees, and the Arab refugees themselves, they're not some pawns,

they refuse settlements, too, because they say if we're settled, the war is over. And that means that the Jewish state

gets to stay. And that's unacceptable. So an Arab refugee in Syria or in Lebanon or Egypt

- are the same ethnicity. They're Arab Muslims who will not become naturalized in the country where they are not living,

and then as we learn it, same thing applies to their children and grandchildren. -Yes. So can you explain that? -Certainly.

So what happens at this point is the refugee crisis across the world massive.

And this is post-World War two, empires collapse, new states are established, borders are delineated.

Tens of millions of people flee across borders and they're refugees.

A lof of them are handled locally without any assistance. Israel absorbs

the Jewish refugees from the West Bank, from Gaza, from Jerusalem,

from the Jewish quarter. It absorbs the Jewish refugees who are ethnically cleansed from across the Arab world,

partly in revenge for the establishment of the state of Israel. They absorb all the Jewish refugees from Europe, from the displaced persons

camps, and they do it without any international help. That's Israel and the Jewish refugees. Then you have other countries,

Hindus and Muslims in India are ultimately absorbed, but in some places a local agency is established

in order to help refugees be settled. So in order to understand UNWRA,

which is for the Arab refugees, we should talk about on the surface, the United Nations relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees,

which also included the Jews. But again, Israel took care of them. So and about the same time another agency is established called UNKRA

the K is for Korea for the Korean War and the refugees from the Korean War. And why is it a temporary agency like UNWRA?

Because the idea is that you settle the refugees in a few short years and you move on, you close down and it's over.

Refugee crises were meant to be settled quickly and be over. #NAME? if a refugee is made a refugee,

but finds a home somewhere else, then they're no longer a refugee. Of course. -As a legal matter they are...

Yeah. And there is no demand or priority that the only way for a refugee to stop being a refugee

is to go back to where they were. That's not the international standard. So 3.1 million even today by the way, in recent times,

the Syrian civil war, you have something like hundreds of thousands of refugees, close to half a million refugees

that have fled Syria Bashar Assad's brutality,

and they wound up all over the place. And there's no sense that they're just in a temporary place waiting to return to a sovereign Syria.

They are they are if they are given a home or naturalized somewhere else,

that's it. -Yes. The general view and convention on refugees, that applies to everyone in the world says basically

there are three ways that refugees are settled: in the places to which they fled; if they can go home, great;

or in a third place. And all of these are equivalent, they are equally good ways of ending a refugee situation.

The entire refugee convention doesn't care who started what, who's to blame.

It just cares about a person being able to start their new life. End of story. -Somewhere. Somewhere, yeah, exactly.

So the Koreans are settled 3.1, within a few short years, - 3.1 million 3.1 million Koreans

refugees, in a few short years, a third of the budget of UNWRA, and look at South Korea today. And then the commissions disbanded.

And that's it, right? UNKRA is closed. It's temporary, a huge success. Look at South Korea today.

Could have been the Arabs. But no, the Arabs have UNWRA and they refused to settle. They refused to go

the path of the Koreans. And essentially they engage in a tug of war with the Americans and the British,

who are funding UNWRA at this point, because they don't want to be settled.

And what they do is the British and the Americans want to close down UNWRA

by the fifties, the end of the fifties. They're like, they look at UNKRA, UNKRA already settled 3.1 million. They're like this UNWRA is achieving

nothing. It's useless. It hasn't settled one Arab refugee, so we're going to close it down.

So there was no question that UNWRA was a failed project. This is the moment of the Eisenhower doctrine during the Cold War.

So the Arabs come to the Americans in a kind of mob style scene, which we describe in the book. And they say

you don't want to make another mistake. You made one mistake. You allowed a Jewish state to emerge,

you're not going to close down UNWRA. So from the beginning in the Arab mindset,

UNWRA was the antidote to the existence of the Jewish state.

Keeping the Arab refugees from settling was the way to essentially send

the message that the war in which the Jewish state declared independence was a bump in the road, it will be undone in time.

You know, give us a little you know, this is just something that's temporary and it will be over soon enough. And what the Arabs do with UNWRA

is three things that plague us to this day: The first is they make sure

that the agency is called UNWRA, U U.N. It was going to be called REWA or NERWA.

It's not really a U.N. body. It's a temporary instrument established by the General Assembly to solve a specific problem.

It's not a U.N. organ, but they wanted it to be called U.N. because in the Arab

perspective, in imagination, the U.N. created Israel and the U.N. is responsible for the refugees. It's certainly not

the Jews who created Israel. And they have no responsibility for waging war against the Jewish state,

a completely unnecessary war. They could have had their own state, no refugees, no one displaced, living side by side

with the Jewish state of Israel. But their top priority was no Jewish state. So they waged war and they failed to achieve their goal.

So the refugees were created. But in their imagination they bear zero responsibility for that. It's all in the U.N.

So they made sure it was called UNWRA. Then they made sure that when the U.N. created the actual refugee agency, the U.N.

High Commissioner for Refugee, they created a loophole for UNWRA because they understood very clearly that if the Arab refugees from the war

will be treated like all of the refugees in the world, and they looked at what the international standards were,

they understood that within a few years there's going to be no refugees and the Jewish state gets to stay. And no, that's unacceptable.

So they make sure that the UNHCR basically treats all refugees in the world

except those who have an agency, and then they make sure that UNWRA never closes. So that the loophole is always maintained

and the refugee status applies to the descendant’s, multiple generations. Okay. So now that they've created this loophole and this little fiefdom,

the Arabs essentially take over under the beginning of the sixties

and essentially becomes a Palestinian organization. It becomes the welfare, health care education system of the

now increasingly known as Palestinians, waiting to liberate Palestine

from the river to the sea. And in the service of this perpetuation of the refugee status until the moment that the Jewish state

is no more, until that moment, they begin to essentially inflate the number

of refugees in a variety of ways. The first is by creating a really bizarre definition of a refugee. That is not the international definition.

Just about being two years in here and losing livelihood. And that's not, generally speaking, refugees. It's about personal persecution.

Okay. So first they inflate the numbers by having a different definition. Then they inflate the numbers

by creating this hereditary status, which doesn't apply to any other refugee group. In other refugee situations,

the descent of refugees can individually apply

for a dependent status. It's not a refugee status, it's a dependent. They have to be under 18 and the status

personally has to justify it. This kind of automatic generation

after generation, not looking at personal situation, that's only for the Arab refugees. So bizarre definition,

perpetual multigenerational refugee hood. And another way of inflating the numbers

is that they never, ever take anyone off the rosters. So a huge number of the refugees are Jordanian citizens.

As we said everywhere in the world, citizens of other countries are no longer refugees. But UNWRA doesn't have to abide by

what's called the cessation clause, what ends the refugee status. So all the citizens of Jordan are also,

you know, those who are from this background are also registered as refugees from Palestine. My favorite

refugee is the multimillionaire playboy, American citizen, father of supermodels

Gigi and Bella Hadid. He's an American citizen. He's not your vision of what a refugee is, but because he was registered by UNWRA,

he was born in Syria, he remains on the roster forever. UNWRA never goes and checks whether refugees have better lives now.

Are they settled somewhere else? Nope. It keeps them on. Do they have citizenship of the United States?

It doesn't care for UNWRA, because it has been taken over by the Palestinians, There's only one thing that ends the refugee hood.

No Jewish state. Anything else does not end their refugee status. Now, parallel to this,

there's something like 800000 to 1000000 Jewish refugees who are forced

to leave their homes in Arab countries. So talk about them and how their refugee status ended. -Yes. So first of all, it's important

to say the Arab refugees are created in the course of war,

where they are part of the fighting side. That's entirely normal.

The Jews are ethnically cleansed from the Arab world, defenseless Jews.

They're trying to ethnically cleanse the Jews who stand up and have their defense. But defenseless Jews from communities

again that predated Islam in the Arab conquests of the seventh century are ethnically cleansed. Essentially overnight,

in large part in revenge for the establishment of the Jewish state in the name of anti-Zionism. Right.

And as Jews are ethnically cleansed, Arabs declare that they love Jews and they have nothing against Jews. It's only against Zionism.

But the Jews are then blamed for having Zionist sympathies, and in that name

they're essentially ethnically cleansed from across the Arab world. Also, the rise of new states, the end of the colonial era in the Arab

world leads to the ethnic cleansing of Jews, as it did in Europe, and the Jews find a home in some other countries,

but mostly in the state of Israel, which now exists and, unlike the 1930s exists, controls its borders and can open its borders

and its gates to Jewish immigration. Israel absorbs hundreds of thousands

of Jewish refugees from across the Arab world and in parallel, just to understand the scale, in parallel,

it absorbs the Jewish refugees again from the war, from the West Bank and Jerusalem and Gaza and from Europe, and the displaced persons

camps. It absorbs all of them without international assistance, with a lot of Jewish world assistance, but

without official international assistance, no UNWRA. It's a remarkable story

of Israel and doing that essentially within a decade, and they're all absorbed into the state of Israel.

And again, that's normal for a lot of countries to absorb and absorb efugees that had similar ethnic,

national, linguistic, religious makeup. That's very typical.

Nowhere are there countries who receive refugees who belonged

to a group that waged war against them. So a lot of people say, you know what, we don't care how the Arab refugees were created in war,

Israel should have taken them back in saying that Israel is asked to do what no country was asked to do.

At the time, it was clearly understood that if people belong to a national, ethnic, linguistic, religious group that just waged war,

they were absorbed typically by the countries that had a similar ethnic makeup, and that was it,

especially if they were the aggressors, especially if that country was the aggressor in that war. Yeah. And just waged a violent war.

You know, the notion that a country will be forced to receive a group that just waged war on it, I mean, it's nonsensical.

And yet this was demanded of Israel. Okay. Now I want to fast forward to the Six-Day War, 1967. A number of these countries

launch a war against Israel, and in that war, Israel is left

with control of East Jerusalem. Control of the West Bank, control of Gaza, control of the Golan Heights and control of the Sinai.

The U.N. passes resolution, U.N. Security Council Resolution 242

that talks about the process, some some sort of land for recognition, return

of this land in recognition. And so long as Israel return territories, not all territories, the return of territories,

to the Arab countries and what effectively it means, Israel winds up now assuming the occupation of what we'll call

Palestinian Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank in place of other countries that had been occupying them, namely Jordan and Egypt respectively.

And so Israel is in the context of a of a mutually agreed upon accommodation

where these Arab countries recognize Israel's right to exist and provide security guarantees. There is a return of territories

and there's language in there about, quote unquote, “a just resolution†to the refugee problem or the refugee crisis.

So what is that about? What are they referring to there? Okay. So first, this is another great moment

in what I call ‘why the Jews are never allowed to win’. Essentially, as we saw it in the twenties and thirties,

when Arabs are violent towards Jews, the tendency is to cave in to their demands, such as closing the gates to Jewish immigration.

When the Jews begin to win, the response is always cease fire. So this is what you have with the armistice agreements.

After 1948, ‘49, and in ’67 you have the same pattern.

You know, the as we said, the Arab states after 1948-49, said, you know, this is a temporary pause, but the war, the bigger war

against the existence of a Jewish state, that war continues. That war continues on some level all the time.

But it is essentially resumed in a big way in ‘67 under the ideology of pan-Arabism

and the leadership of Nasser, ‘now we will get rid of the Jewish state’.

And this time they fail even more spectacularly than they did in ‘48 - ’49

And again, the call is cease fire, all kind of, you know, stop, stop, you know, don't don't continue.

And there's, again, a refusal to acknowledge generally in diplomacy, when one side wins decisively, the path to peace.

And Dr. Shani Mor wrote about it beautifully. The path to peace involves

recognizing some of the wins of the side that was victorious,

except when it comes to the Jews in Israel. No, you get nothing. And this has to go back.

But, you know, this time you'll get peace. The Arab response is swift.

They declare in Khartoum, no to recognition, no to peace,

no to negotiations. The idea of a just solution to the Arab refugee problem has become a key word

that confuses many in the West. When you hear a just solution, you think, okay, justice would be some form of compensation

for lost livelihood and houses. And if that's the case, we need to discuss compensation for Jewish refugees. We need to discuss compensation

for Jewish refugees across the Arab world, not just in Jerusalem and the West Bank. But people think a just solution to a refugee problem is getting them

citizenship, getting them maybe some compensation if possible. End of story. This is the vision of the Refugee

Convention for everyone else. In the Arab telling, in the Palestinian telling, a just solution is only one.

It's the solution that undoes the injustice which is the existence of the Jewish state.

So every time that we see, in various documents, a just solution to the Arab refugee problem, Westerners

think, it means one thing. And for the Arab refugees it means one thing and one thing only. Their idea of what they call return.

Now a word about return. Yeah, the idea of return

is generally against the idea of ending wars for the tens of millions of refugees after World War Two.

The message was basically tough, tragic, sad move on.

It was understood that return would be a continuation of the war by other means,

which is exactly what the Arab refugees wanted, which is why they insisted on this idea of a right of return.

Now, there's no such right in international law, even Resolution 194, which they quote as if it gives it to them, does not give it,

if only for the simple reason that General Assembly resolutions don't grant rights. A reminder also that the Arabs rejected

that resolution because it was just part of a bigger process of making peace with the Jewish state. But there's actually no right of return

for Arab refugees in to the sovereign state of Israel in international law. It doesn't exist,

but they believe they have. They have made it into a

and a mechanism of continuing the war.

There's no understanding October 7th,

without understanding the entire Palestinian ideology of no Jewish state, of return, of perpetual refugeedom,

It all comes together in Gaza. Gaza. You can't understand Gaza and October 7th

without knowing that the vast majority of Gaza residents, about 75%, are registered

by UNWRA as refugees from Palestine. This is by now a fifth generation

of people who were born in Palestine. Right. Whatever your political views, we can agree that the Gaza Strip

is Palestine, right? It's between the river and the sea. So they have been born in Palestine, they have always lived in Palestine,

and yet they are registered as refugees from Palestine,

which would be nonsensical unless you understand that from their perspective, the only Palestine that matters is from the river to the sea,

where there's no Jewish state. So you have three quarters of Gaza's residents being told day after day, generation

after generation, Gaza is not your home. Don't treat it as your home.

Your real home is where the Jewish state exists

right now. And that's what you need to take back in their mind. So generation,

after generation is raised with the idea that they shouldn't be making their home in Gaza, but that their most noble goal

is to liberate from the river to the sea land, the mythological Palestine home from the evil

white settler European crusader Jews. And they are legitimized

in that by an organization that has the letters UN, right? The Arabs were very far reaching and understanding the importance of

who gets Western money. So that must be just, this is a just cause.

And as a result, when Israel leaves the Gaza Strip, it leaves 80% of it. Under the Oslo Accords in the nineties,

the remaining 20% Israel leaves with the disengagement in 2005.

And this is the first time that the Arabs of the land actually control territory.

Contrary to the all these fake disappearing maps, this is the first time that the Arabs of the land actually controlled territory.

Do they say to themselves, “finally we got rid of the Jews and the settlers and the occupation and we are going to build a pearl,

a Dubai on the Levant, a Singapore of the Mediterranean†. No, what they say “excellent, we now control territory from which

we can take back Palestine from the river to the sea†. And I have by now books, essays, lectures that say the same thing

to all the funders of UNWRA who believe that there, you know, this is some innocent idea. Tell them every dollar, every sack

of cement that you are giving in to Gaza, and I'm saying this for years,

is guaranteed to go into building tunnels, is guaranteed to go into making Gaza into formidable war machine,

because the people of Gaza don't think of Gaza as their home. They think of it literally as a launch pad.

And October 7th needs to be understood as the exercise of Palestinian return.

Return was never an innocent idea. If you look at the Arab texts from the early fifties, return was always a violent,

triumphant idea. We are going to go back and essentially slaughter the Jews. This is how we take back Palestine.

This is how we liberate. October 7th was minute by minute the Palestinian vision of return. This is why there's

so much exhilaration, thrill, because this is what they've been waiting

for, groomed for for decades, and you see it, they could not be happier. Interestingly, during that

time that the Israel had left Gaza in 2005, until,

you know well, up until including through today, refugee, just the whole notion refugee camps kept intact.

The Jabaliya refugee camp, which I visited in the late nineties, they kept refugee camps in a region that they controlled.

It's not like this whole idea that they're still refugees in a place that you're saying they could have actually created

a political sovereignty of formal country. But anyways. -Precisely, because it was never their goal. -Right.

Even more absurd, under the areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority, supposedly the state of Palestine in the making,

a lot of country countries recognize Palestine. So a few years ago, the Pope visits, Prince William, visits on their itinerary.

It says that they're visiting Palestine, Right? It doesn't say like occupied here. It says they're visiting Palestine.

So in their mind, the pope, Prince William, are visiting a state where it's the first state, a place they're being taken to visit.

They're being taken to visit a refugee camp, which, again, they're not refugees. It's not a camp. It's a permanent neighborhood, looks,

in some cases better than a lot of neighborhoods in the Arab world. They are being those guests

visiting Palestine are being taken to visit a refugee camp in Palestine. Have they ever bothered to ask why?

What's going on? But again, once you understand the Arab Palestinian mindset of no Jewish state, you understand that

this is their top priority. Going back to Bevin, then you understand that everything is mobilized for that, which is why

in Gaza they're going to call many of the neighborhoods, refugee camps. The people in those neighborhoods will maintain

the names, the streets, the towns and of their families five generation back. The perpetrators, the planners of the October 7th

massacre are children of those camps of the UNRWA schools and Hamas. But the most recent iteration,

the perpetrators of the massacre of the Israeli Olympics athletes in the Munich Olympics in 1972, their children

of the UNWRA schools of the camps, because they have been groomed to believe

that there is no nobler a cause for their lives then liberating Palestine

from a sovereign Jewish state."