The French Have It

A new book, Réfugiés palestiniens. Otages de la diplomatie is out.

The main contention is that the Palestinian refugees possess a unique status, which is defined by the UN since 1948 and as embodied by UNWRA, and it actually violates international law. In addition, it also contravenes the basic human rights of the Palestinian population. They call for an alignment with normative international practice as regards all refugees and a gradual but complete and effective dismantling of UNRWA.

The authors ask How is it that the High Commissioner for Refugees UN, which seeks to eliminate all refugee populations through their integration in host countries, could allow the situation degenerate in this way?  They point to a breach of the UN, which, by a legal anomaly and discriminatory, created an agency  specifically to address the problem: UNRWA, whose sole mission is to provide assistance to Palestinian refugees in the areas of health, education and social services. However, it is clear that the agency - which gives a status to the Palestinian refugees different from all other refugees in the world - is one of the leading causes of deprivation of basic rights for the Palestinians: the right to work, nationality, property and education. To its detriment, the Palestinian people is found and handled, and as hostages of international diplomacy.

Here is another appreciaiton via Google translation plus my editing:

The book traces the history of the conflict and, noting the various international attempts to solve it, shows that there is, throughout its history, a question that seems resolutely omitted: that of Palestinian refugees. Country by country, the authors report their intolerable living conditions intolerable for the past 62 years and protest the policy of the UN which, by creating a specific agency to help them, UNRWA, paradoxically maintains an unacceptable situation of moral and material misery instead of promoting their integration and improve living conditions in their respective host country.

Palestinian refugees have been victims of an institutionalization, in a sense, of their vulnerability which reinforces the violence of the conflict. It is time, in their opinion, to help these generations of Palestinians escape this status and to adopt at the international level, a new way of thinking the issue.

When will it be translated into English?

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