@Akshay @40Years There is no other conflict in the world where a “refugee organization” maintains a population in permanent settlements described ad “refugee camps” rather than seeking to find third-countries to resettle them. 1/

@Akshay @40Years Yes, the conflict always was going to require a political settlement, but UNRWA was designed to maintain pressure + create demographic realities in order to sustain and enhance “facts on the ground” that might shape a potential settlement that could only be resisted at increasingly brutal cost. Most wars that displace populations do resolve, with political settlements that are easier to reach, when in the usual case, most of the displaced do not return. 2/

@Akshay @40Years There are bitter ironies in all this. In recent decades, Israel adopted the same “facts on the ground” approach to the conflict that Arab states pioneered in shaping UNRWA. And the governments of several states that did shape UNRWA, now threatened by Iran, now wish their predecessors had not locked in “facts on the ground” that would make alliance with Israel very difficult. 3/

@Akshay @40Years But the basic brutal fact is that wars displace people, and usually permanent settlements involve many of the displaced finding new lives elsewhere. It is ethnic cleansing, but that is a fact that attends most wars. To prevent ethnic cleansing, you have to build a peaceful coexistence. 4/

@Akshay @40Years After a war to demand return, or to create conditions that presuppose it, when hostile nationalisms are more provoked than before the conflict, is simply to preserve the conflict rather than to find means for the parties to move on. And that has been UNRWA’s role. /fin