Supermodels Gigi and Bella Hadid are, according to @UNRWA, "Palestine refugees"

Gigi and Bella Hadid are two of the highest paid supermodels in the world. Each of them make millions of dollars a year.

They are both American citizens, raised in Los Angeles.

And, according to UNRWA rules, they are both "Palestine refugees," eligible for aid if they move to Lebanon or Jordan.

You see, UNRWA has no means to take someone out of the category of refugee. UNHCR requires that refugees prove that they are still refugees periodically or else they lose that designation;  UNRWA designates them and their descendants refugees forever.

Even if they are born in the US. Even if they become millionaire supermodels.

The Hadids' father is Mohamed Hadid, a very successful real estate developer who was born in Nazareth in 1948. His family now tells an antisemitic story about how they were supposedly forced to leave their home:

...Mohamed Hadid added to his family’s historical narrative, explaining they sheltered a Jewish refugee family from Poland at their home in Safed (today Tzfat in northern Israel) who later “kicked us out of our own home.”

“Thats [sic] how we became refugees to Syria and we lost our home in Safad to a Jewish family that we sheltered when they were refugees from Poland on the ship that was sailing from country to country and no one would take them… they were our guest for 2 years till they made us refugees and they kicked us out of our own home. That my history.. Strange thing. That I and my family would do it again.”

But the Washington Post in a 1989 profile of the mogul wrote a very different, and far more believable, story:

Hadid was an infant when his family left Palestine. His father, Anwar Hadid, said he did not want the family "to live under the Israeli occupation." The parents walked for two nights to reach the Lebanese border -- with Hadid's mother carrying her oldest son. The family finally settled in Damascus, where Anwar Hadid went to work as a translator for Voice of America and traveled widely. The family eventually made its way to Washington, and Mohamed Hadid became an American citizen.

That's how many of the Arabs of Palestine became "refugees" both in 1948 and 1967: They simply did not want to live under Jewish rule. In the case of Mahmoud Abbas' family who lived in Safed, they were convinced the Jews would slaughter them the way Arabs slaughtered Jews there only 19 years earlier, so they left on their own.

By the current definition of refugee, Mohamed Hadid was never a refugee - his family left on their own but could have stayed safely. His daughters were certainly never refugees. Hadid himself has both Jordanian and American citizenship.

But by UNRWA's twisted standards, all the Hadids (besides the model's Dutch mother) are "Palestine refugees" and get counted in the ever increasing numbers of "refugees" that get published year after year.

(h/t Teresa)

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