Palestinian refugees will not just fade away

Any just final deal in Middle East peace process must importantly include status of refugees

Even for the Palestinians, long used to the double standards and pro-Israel bias of successive US administrations, the content of Jared Kushner’s internal emails came as a shock. Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and adviser on the Middle East, wants Jordan to strip its more than two million registered Palestinians of their refugee status so that UNRWA – the UN agency that provides relief, educational and health services to several million Palestinian refugees and their descendants – would no longer need to operate there. Foreign Policy magazine reported that in an email earlier this year Kushner called for a “sincere effort to disrupt” the agency. Kushner, who has no experience in diplomacy but has still been given the tremendous task of “bringing peace to the Middle East”, said in one of his emails to US Middle East peace envoy, Jason Greenblatt: “It is important to have an honest and sincere effort to disrupt UNRWA. This [agency] perpetuates a status quo, is corrupt, inefficient and doesn’t help peace.”

Clearly, he seems to think that the way forward on the ‘peace process’ is to realise all of the Israeli regime’s demands, and impose facts on the ground. Since the start of US-led peace negotiations following the Oslo Accords, it was understood that the fate of Palestinian refugees and occupied Jerusalem would be settled in a final peace deal. However, Palestinian officials cannot be blamed for believing that Washington is moving unilaterally to settle these issues in the Israeli regime’s favour, especially given the fact that the US unilaterally recognised occupied Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in December last year, and moved its embassy from Tel Aviv to the occupied city in May.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ office released a statement that it would “foil conspiracies to end the Palestinian cause”. However, when the global superpower has decided to so blatantly take sides with the world’s last colonial power, it places the Palestinians in a very dire situation, and makes their already terrible living conditions even worse.

But, Palestinian people are nothing if not tenacious. They know their cause is just, and have refused to take the Israeli occupation lying down. People in the Occupied Territories, in the diaspora and in the refugee camps have kept the flame of statehood alive. Any just solution to the Palestinian question must also include the status of refugees. They are not a commodity that can be wished away.