After nineteen futile years, there is at last a chance for three quarters of the Palestinian refugees to escape imprisonment in the Palestine Refugee Problem. They are now beyond the effective reach of Arab politics, in West Jordan and the Gaza Strip. With moral and financial support from the West, Israel could work out their permanent self-sufficient settlement in both areas, which are in fact their native soil. But no solution is possible without the co-operation of the refugees and of UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency), their long-time official guardian.



What about UNRWA? UNWRA is the governing power for twenty refugee camps in West Jordan and eight camps in the Gaza Strip. Its actions and attitudes, filtering down from the top through all its staff, influence refugee actions and attitudes.



Israeli co-operation with UNRWA was immediate and obliging. One does not feel that the cordiality is reciprocated. Since 1 was in the Gaza Strip, the UNRWA high command there has changed and no doubt improved. In West Jordan, it seems to me UNRWA is making heavy weather of the Arab defeat, without justification.



Their twenty refugee camps are happily intact, untouched by war. Supplies have not run out and new shipments will arrive on schedule through an Israeli port. Their Jerusalem office building was fought over and war-damaged but they have adequate temporary office space in the elegant UNRWA technical school farther out of the city. Their published and private statements suggest obstacles and hardships that cannot be located on the ground. The peace is really as surprising as the war.



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UNRWA has always been treated like a sacred cow. No one has ever made a careful neutral study of the organization, totting up its successes and failures and examining its methods, its finances and its political fall-out. (I expect to be accused of blasphemy as I write.) UNRWA is a bureaucracy composed of 11,419 Palestinian refugees and 118 Americans and West Europeans who are understandably and necessarily devoted to Arabs, converts to a cause. Of course this bureaucracy, itself preponderantly Arab, would have welcomed an Arab victory and is far from joyful over the reverse. Of course UNRWA's foreign administrators could not have operated in Arab countries for seventeen years unless they accepted and supported the Arab governments' political position on Palestinian refugees.



But has this bias, however understandable, been the best way to help the refugees themselves? Ritually, annually, succeeding UNRWA Commissioner-Generals deplore the fact that Israel does not commit suicide by repatriating all Palestinian refugees. That is official Arab doctrine; return to Palestine or nothing. Yearly, the refugee population grew, and fortunately thrived, with UNRWA's care and because the refugees fend for themselves. Neither official Arab doctrine nor UNRWA's acceptance of it changed.



For 2,300,000 Israeli Jews, 1,300,000 hate-indoctrinated Arabs (taught hate steadily in UNRWA schools as well) make a pretty big Trojan horse. Clearly Israel was not going to commit suicide. lf UNRWA could not devise, if the Arab governments would not agree to any program except repatriation, UNRWA had to accept tacitly the official Arab alternative: war to recover the Palestine homeland. Was UNRWA totally opposed to that unique solution for a refugee problem?



UNRWA's reports and handsome publicity brochures are the basis for soliciting governmental and private contributions to UNRWA. They paint a heart-rending picture. As a side effect, UNRWA thus confirms Arab propaganda. The refugees must be kept desperate, in fact or on paper, or the Palestine Refugee Problem disappears. Without the Palestine Refugee Problem, there is no proper Arab excuse for war with Israel, since Israel impinges on no vital Arab interest.



Year after year, UNRWA states that forty to fifty per cent of the refugees are destitute or near destitute ('without resources' in my dictionary); thirty to forty per cent are partially self-supporting; and some ten to twenty per cent are all right. Yet UNRWA does not give money to refugees. Its direct aid is a monthly ration of flour, pulses, sugar, rice, oil amounting to 1,500 unbalanced calories a day. lf the destitute, without resources, had nothing else to live on they would long since be dead, instead of having a higher birth rate than other Arab peasants, and healthier children.



Over half the refugees live outside the camps, in private dwellings; they must be more than partially self-supporting to pay for rent, clothing and food (aside from UNRWA rations). Someone in each family has to work for money, and they do, and their work has benefited the 'host' countries. Poverty is endemic in the Middle East (while Arab governments waste vast wealth on arms); Palestinian refugees, like non-refugees, have to combat the general affliction and the special restraints put on them by Arab politics. But UNRWA's picture of them does not stand up to common sense or the refugees themselves in the flesh.



During the past nineteen years, sixty-seven governments, including Israel (but never once the Soviet Union, the Arabs' friend) and innumerable private charities have contributed an average of some thirty-five million dollars annually to UNRWA for the support of the Palestinian refugees. This money is spent on goods and services and amounts to Big Business, however you look at it. The Palestinian refugees have been a vested interest as well as a propaganda weapon.



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Three fourths of the refugees can now be given a new deal. UNRWA, in West Jordan and the Gaza strip, needs a fresh inter- national staff, people who are favorable neither to Arabs nor Israelis but strictly concerned with the refugees as human beings. The dispassionate newcomers should then screen UNRWA's enormous Palestinian refugee staff.



And finally, there must be an accurate census of the Palestinian refugees, forbidden by the Arab governments all these years, so that instead of a propaganda numbers game, true need is defined and adequate help given. It really is the limit that a man, living on his native soil, among his own people, speaking his own language, the owner of a large Jerusalem hotel, a travel agency and a house in the suburbs, is classed as a Palestinian refugee.



For nineteen years, Arab politics have demanded a Palestinian Problem. Two generations of Palestinian children have had to learn from refugee teachers in UNRWA schools how and why they were a Problem. Being a Problem doesn't come naturally. During the same years, unaided by UNRWA but unhindered by politics, some thirty-five million refugees an over the world have bravely and quietly solved their problem and made new independent lives.