Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . The number of people forcibly displaced by war and violence has not only increased in the last three years, but the time taken for resettlement in a safe "third" country has also grown longer. In fact, the number of refugees who have spent more than 5 years in exile has jumped from 7 million to 11.9 million. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), out of the 20.4 million refugees of concern in 2019, less than 1% are resettled every year. This is just one of the many revelations in an op-ed written for SP Blog by Beth from Advocates for Refugees-Singapore (AFR-SG) as part of Refugee Awareness Week (RAW) 2021, an annual campaign held in conjunction with World Refugee Day commemorated globally every June 20. Beth also reveals Singapore's more humane past when the country hosted Vietnamese refugees from 1977 to 1996 in Hawkins Road Refugee Camp, a former Br...

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Every Friday I receive in my email inbox a Shabbat reading list from Jewish Currents , "a magazine committed to the rich tradition of thought, activism, and culture of the Jewish left." Last Friday, the reading list consisted of articles and links about the crisis unfolding in Palestine/Israel. I found one recommended online event organized by The Middle East Institute and Project48 to be particularly informative. For an instance, I had the misconception that the expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland was a result of the wars between Israel and the Arab states. In the video, the historian Rashid Khalidi corrected that error. 300,000 Palestinains were expelled before the wars, and were followed by another 450,000 Palestinians after the wars began. The 9.1 million Palestinian refugees and internally displaced persons is the largest in the world, and the displacement is still going o...