Dhimmis for Dummies.

The UN helped initiate this problem by not listening to the British who had been handed the Mandate in 1920 by its precursor organisation The League of Nations, specifically with the project of establishing a homeland for Jews.

After 27 years the Brits understood what the problem was, and would always be. 

 

On February 18, 1947 Foreign Secretary Bevin explained it to Parliament — the Jews want independence, but for the Arabs the point of principle is not the recognition of any rights of their own, but the denial of sovereignty over any part of the territory to the Jews. 

 

This was because the very idea of a Jewish nation was an affront to natural justice in the Arab worldview. As non-Muslim monotheists the Jews were supposed to reconcile themselves to the socially and politically inferior status of Dhimmis (protected people) and could under no circumstances be permitted anything like equal status within the 'Arab World'. 

 

The British lobbed this matter of irreconcilable perspectives back at the UN, who duly failed to address it. Instead they pressed ahead with a plan for partition, which was immediately and violently rejected by the Arabs after the Security Council vote. 

 

The UN thus oversaw a massive problem of displaced Arabs largely of their own making, which they have since gone about making ever more massive. 

 

They done this by switching from the mishandled, misapprehended compromise to establishing their own organisation (UNRWA) which would duly ‘go native’ and thus perpetuate, seemingly for eternity, the most rigid, relentlessly uncompromising mental model of the situation. 

 

Along the way UNRWA has explicitly helped transition this sense of injustice from its origins in Arab-Muslim chauvinism into something which will more likely gain traction amongst the gullible of the wider world (even Jews) — the geopolitical social injustice of 'settler colonialism'. This is a process I have given an appropriate name in the title of this post.

 

The partition of India created 20m refugees. The Russian invasion of Ukraine created 9.1m refugees. The Syrian Civil War created 6.7m refugees. The Israeli war for Independence initially created 360,000 refugees. 

 

Only the latter group has had its own UN Agency in perpetuity. This is because UNRWA consciously chose to preserve and then enlarge the group as cognitive refugees from the need to recognise Israeli legitimacy.

 

All that ever shifts is the underlying rhetorical justification for that fundamental intransigence, some of which is basically demented and anti-Semitic, but even in the more moderate register the effect is basically the same. 

 

There were in effect two wrong ways to go about this and the UN have tried both with a degree of die-hard obstinacy which has now left pretty much the entire institution looking in need of an overhaul.

 

As for UNRWA, it surely cannot survive in its current form. There unfortunately remains much that nation states are able to get away with, flaunting common decency, but multilateral organisations, especially UN agencies, have to be held to higher standards and frankly any degree of complicity in the rape, murder and abduction of innocent civilians has to be game over, surely?