Abolish the U.N.’s Palestinian Refugee Agency (UNRWA)
31 January 2024
Here are some highlights from an important essay written by Bret Stephens of the New York Times.
Last Friday, Israeli officials presented the U.S. government with an intelligence dossier detailing the involvement of 12 UNRWA employees, seven of them schoolteachers, in the massacre of Oct. 7. As reported by The Times’s Ronen Bergman and Patrick Kingsley, the charges range from kidnapping an Israeli woman to storing rocket-propelled grenades to murdering civilians in a kibbutz.
“Intelligence estimates shared with the U.S. conclude that around 1,200 of UNRWA’s roughly 12,000 employees in Gaza have links to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and about half have close relatives who belong to the Islamist militant groups,” The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.
But the fundamental problem with the agency isn’t that it appears to be infested with terrorists and their sympathizers, or that their salaries are paid by naïve foreign donors. It’s that UNRWA may be the only agency in the U.N. system whose central purpose is to perpetuate grievance and conflict. It should be abolished.
They [Palestinians] have been kept as perpetual refugees as a means of both delegitimizing Israel and preserving the irredentist fantasy that someday their descendants will exercise what they believe is their “right of return,” effectively through the elimination of the Jewish state.
It’s upon that alleged right that efforts at a comprehensive Israeli-Palestinian peace deal have foundered. It’s also the right that UNRWA’s very existence keeps alive. Palestinians should be citizens of the countries in which they live — just as some two million Arabs are in Israel. They should not be cudgels in a never-ending struggle, subsidized from one aggrieved generation to the next by international largess. New York Times.
For 75 years, UNRWA has maintained the status quo and preserved the status of Palestinians as “refugees in eternity”.
UNRWA also collaborates with Hamas:
As Bassem Eid of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group noted over a decade ago, “In order for UNRWA to survive, they accept [Hamas’s] conditions because they want to continue their activities.”
UNRWA finances terrorist training camps for an estimated 100,000 Palestinian youth each year, run by Hamas and other terrorist organizations.
UNRWA funds schools that brainwash Palestinian children and promote terrorism.
UNRWA also supported Hamas’s transformation of all of Gaza into a large military base, encompassing its schools, mosques and hospitals, forcing Palestinians to build tunnels and weapons and to serve as human shields. This is intended to protect Hamas from retaliation after it launches its attacks on Israel, or to turn world opinion against Israel when it responds to these attacks.
For the Palestinians to have a viable State, they must rid Gaza and the West Bank of Hamas and other terrorists. Palestinians also need to establish strong institutions that will promote the rule of law and fight terrorism.
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