As if there were not enough twists and turns in the Israel-Hamas War, this development has to do with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). UNRWA was founded in 1949 to provide humanitarian relief to Arab refugees as a result of the Arab-Israeli War of 1948. Remember this is the same war that the Arab nations started after the United Nations proposed a plan (UN Resolution 181) that would have allowed for an Israeli state and Palestinian state to live side-by-side.
The latest UNRWA controversy has to do with the October 7 attack, which was the single largest attack and murder of Jews since the Holocaust. Forget the report from UN Watch that shows a Telegram group of 3,000 UNRWA teachers celebrating the October 7 attack. According to Israeli intelligence, 12 UNRWA employees were involved in the October 7 attack (WSJ). Not only that, but 190 UNRWA employees are also Islamic jihadists. If that were not enough, 10 percent of the UNRWA employees in Gaza have ties to Islamic terrorist groups. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken found the sources to be "highly, highly credible." Apparently, it has been credible enough where several major donor countries, including the United States, Germany, Canada, Sweden, and France, have temporarily suspended funding to UNRWA.
UNRWA replied by stating that if its funding does not resume, it could be forced to close down its doors by the end of February. The pro-Palestine side laments this, to be sure. From this vantage point, UNRWA is an "omnipresent municipal service provider." For UNRWA proponents, the humanitarian work of UNRWA should not be eclipsed by a few bad apples in the organization, even if those bad apples are alleged pogromists that participated in the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.
Funny how the woke crowd thinks that we should give UNRWA more funding, but is the same Far Left that called for "defund the police" after a few bad apples and that we should eradicate racism (which apparently does not include Jew-hatred), but I digress on their intellectual inconsistency. I would contend that the rot in UNRWA goes beyond a few bad apples, especially since the pro-Palestine Al Jazeera reported on the abuse of power of UNRWA leaders. This includes Pierre Krähenbühl, the ex-UNRWA leader who was accused of nepotism, sexual misconduct, abuse of power, and bullying.
Aside from corrupt leadership, UNRWA has supported terrorism and anti-Semitism for many years. This rot predates the numerous UNRWA employees who reacted positively to the October 7 attack. The European Parliament recognizes that Palestinian textbooks teach Jew-hatred, which is illustrated by the Georg Eckert Institute's report on Palestinian textbooks. This trend is confirmed by a November 2023 report from the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (Impact-SE), as well as a report from UN Watch in March 2023 illustrating how UNRWA teachers incite Jew-hatred. These Palestinian textbooks have been so riddled with anti-Semitism that the United Nations admitted in 2019 that the anti-Semitism in these textbooks exists to "fuel hatred and may incite violence."
If the systemic anti-Semitism at UNRWA is not enough to convince you about how UNRWA contributes to the perpetuation of conflict in the Middle East, let us examine the nature of the organization itself. But first, some information on the role of the United Nations and helping refugees. The United Nations operates two organizations to the cause. The first is the United Nations Human Rights Commission (UNHCR), which is dedicated to the plight of refugees globally. The second is UNRWA, which is focused on Palestinian refugees. Here are some figures about UNHCR in comparison to UNRWA:
- UNHCR has 18,879 staff (as of 12-31-2022) to help 29.4 million refugees under UNHCR's mandate. UNRWA, on the other hand, has 30,000 staff that cover 5.9 million individuals under its mandate. This means that UNRWA has over 11,000 more staff to help out over 23 million fewer people than UNHCR.
- This, of course, does not include the 70-plus million refugees and asylum seekers not covered under either organization.
- In terms of funding, that is for $10.80 billion for UNHCR and $1.47 billion for UNRWA in the year 2023.
- That would make the funding-per-refugee ratio $367 for UNHCR and $249 for UNRWA.
As fun as it is to look through these data points, they beg the question as to why the Palestinians have their own separate refugee agency. Are their lives more important than the 2.5 million Sudanese that were displaced last year? That segues into how UNRWA treats refugees. With UNHCR, resettlement of refugees is one of the main goals of its mandate. For UNRWA, not so much. In UNRWA's own words, "UNRWA does not have a mandate to seek durable solutions for Palestinian refugees."
The reason why UNRWA does not want to resettle Palestinians has to do with how UNRWA defines refugees. By UNHRC's definition, a refugee is "someone who has been forced to flee his or her country because of persecution, war, or violence." This lines up with how refugee was defined for Arabs displaced as a result of the Arab-Israeli War of 1948. However, that definition changed over time and has since applied to more people than the original 700,000 who were directly affected by displacement in 1948. In 1965, UNRWA's eligibility requirements extended to third-generation descendants of refugees. In 1982, that applied was expanded further to any descendant, regardless of whether they had been granted citizenship elsewhere.
Under the 1951 U.N. Convention, specifically Article I(c)(3), a person is no longer a refugee if he or she "has acquired a new nationality, and enjoys the protection of the country of his new nationality." Not so with UNRWA. If the standard definition under international law were used, the vast majority of the 5.9 million that are covered under UNRWA's mandate would not be defined as refugees because they are not among those who left the modern state of Israel in 1948. Under UNRWA's definition, refugee status can be inherited over generations, regardless of where one lives or has citizenship. This helps ensure that its refugee rolls expand every year, which also provides a perverse financial incentive to ask for more funding instead of helping resettle Palestinians.
This begs another question: How did other groups of refugees throughout history respond to displacement? During the Kashmir dispute, Pakistanis and Indians alike resettled. Germans after World War II resettled. Even Ukrainians who have been displaced in its current war with Russia are in the process of resettling.
In response to Israel becoming a nation-state, the Arab nations ejected about 850,000 Jews from their lands. Talking about ethnic cleansing! Instead of claiming permanent refugee status, Israel and other Western nations absorbed those refugees. Israel also absorbed Arab refugees, which explains the Arab Israeli population of 1.7 million. Israel did so in spite of the series of wars that the Arab nations started in the hopes to wipe out the Jews.
Every other refugee in history who has to leave their home for one reason or another finds a new home and resettles. Only the Palestinian "refugee" crisis has been perpetuated over the decades. UNRWA has been in existence for 75 years. You want to know how I know that UNRWA has failed in its mission? Because no other group of refugees has taken three-quarters of a century to get settled elsewhere.
Even pro-Palestinian activist and blogger Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib acknowledged that UNRWA's presence [inadvertently] meant enabling Hamas to be reliant on UNRWA for governance. This, of course, means avoiding the inconvenient truths that Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005 and has been run by Hamas since 2007.
If UNRWA were successful at helping refugees, UNRWA would have been dissolved years ago. The fact that it is still around only confirms that UNRWA exists to bolster Palestinian victimhood into perpetuity while being encouraged to blame Israel. By perpetuating and enlarging the "refugee" crisis, what UNRWA has done is keep the peace process more elusive while preventing Palestinians from living normal lives. As such, UNRWA should be abolished. If you want an organization to help the Palestinians, UNHCR or the World Food Programme (WFP) have a better track record than UNRWA. I will end with a quote from Spiked since they summarize the malaise so well:
"In truth, UNRWA has helped to institutionalize a Palestinian politics of grievance, increase both local and global hatred for Israel, and provide spaces in which Gazan Islamists have been able to indoctrinate a new generation with the Jew hate that masquerades as 'Palestinian liberation.' Liberating Gaza from UNRWA ought to be at least a medium-term goal of everyone who cares about Israelis and Palestinians."
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