UNRWA

The story of the UNRWA picks up where a few paragraphs of my post on Palestine and Palestinians leave off, so I'm copying these paragraphs below in case you have not yet memorized the details (kidding):

The [day after Israel declared its independence], on May 15 1948, every one of Israel’s Arab neighbors (Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and Iraq, with help from Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Lebanon) joined forces with the Arabs of Palestine (bolstered directly by the Muslim Brotherhood out of Egypt) in an attack on the newly founded state of Israel. Certain of an Arab victory and a quick end to the Jewish state, they called for all Arab residents of Israel to vacate their towns and villages until every Jew was dead. It took 10 months, but in July 1949 the Arab nations had retreated and signed temporary truces with Israel. The armistice lines, known as the Green Line to this day, established the first borders of the state of Israel. And they were larger than the area that the UN had originally granted. Egypt took over the Gaza Strip, and Jordan took over the area west of the Jordan river, which came to be known as the West Bank (and note: the original UN Partition Plan had allocated these territories to the local Arabs for a state of their own).

And what of the former Arab residents of Israel who had fled when the neighboring states told them to, or due to the brutalities of war? Of those who left, 700-750,000 Arabs came to be permanently displaced. The term “ethnic cleansing” gets tossed around a lot and continues to be applied to the situation today, but this is not what happened. If what Israel has ever done in defense of their legally-granted and internationally recognized sovereignty (and to prevent the boldly advertised end-goal of the mass murder of its citizens) can be properly called “ethnic cleansing,” then (a) every country that has ever been forced into war would be equally guilty, and (b) there would be no Arab-Israeli citizens here (reminder that they constitute just over 1/5 of the population of Israel, with the same rights and freedoms guaranteed by the same law as applies to every other citizen of Israel).

These 700-750,000 displaced Arabs lost their homes and their lands. They went for help to the neighboring Arab countries that had urged them to flee, and in response were placed into refugee camps in Egyptian Gaza and the Jordanian West Bank. They were denied citizenship in places like Lebanon and were banned from working in various industries (this is still the case in Lebanon). These refugee camps have now lasted for four generations, as these people have become pawns in the regional chess game designed to continue to undermine the legitimacy of Israel’s existence. (In the meantime, the Jews in these Arab lands were expelled – about 850,000 of them forcibly kicked out of Morocco, Yemen, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Iraq, and Egypt.)

And this is where UNRWA comes in.

These displaced Arabs had nowhere to turn. None of the countries that had ordered them to leave would even give them assistance, let alone citizenship. So in 1949 the UN General Assembly passed a Resolution to create the United Nations Relief and Works Agency For Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). The only other time that a special relief agency was created for the exclusive care of a specific group of refugees was when UNKRA came into being to aid refugees from the Korean war. (It operated from 1950-1953, and then was shut down, having completed its mission.) In the aftermath of the second world war, there were another 10.3 million other (non-Palestinian) refugees all over the world; they were the responsibility of UNHCR, the UN's High Commissioner for Refugees, an agency created in 1951. UNCHR's mandate is permanent, as there are always stateless people in a world in turmoil. But the description of UNRWA at its founding made it clear that this was a temporary organization established to handle the problem of resettling specifically Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war. This temporary mandate is now 74 years old, and UNRWA has a permanent staff of about 30,000 people and an annual operating budget of $1.2 billion. And instead of the original 700-750,000 Palestinian refugees, UNRWA now counts 5.6 million Palestinians around the world as "refugees." How is that possible? By changing the definition of who is a refugee, which UNRWA did. Unlike any other group in the world, Palestinians inherit their refugee status, regardless of whether they actually hold, say, Jordanian citizenship (as many of them do). So if you start with 700-750,000 people, and they pass their status onto the third or fourth generation, then it appears you end up with 5.6 million refugees in an exponential rate of increase. But, you may ask, what about those who have managed to move beyond the refugee camps -- like Bella & Gigi Hadid's father, who became a very wealthy real estate developer in the United States, where his daughters were born? UNRWA doesn't actually track the whereabouts of any of those registered as refugees on its list, and never removes anyone from that list.

The problem was recognized early on by David Fritzlan, the US Chargé D’Affaires in Jordan, who noted in 1952 that neighboring Arab states like Jordan, Egypt, and Lebanon, seemed perfectly content to allow the rest of the world to keep sending money for the basic maintenance of the refugee camps without pursuing any more permanent solutions. He concluded that in fact the basic policy of the Arab League was “simply to keep the Palestine problem alive in the hope of bringing about the downfall of Israel.” (For references and more information, see this interesting book.)

By 1958, the US and the UK were working to dismantle UNRWA altogether because of its failed mandate, and in order to counter the illusion maintained by its continued temporary status and failure to re-settle the refugees anywhere else, that these refugees would in fact be able to move the Jews out of the state of Israel and return to their homes. But under explicit threat from the Arab League, delivered by the Saudi ambassador Abdullah al-Khayyal in Washington, that if the US and the UK wanted to continue to receive oil, or allegiances, or strategic military intelligence, they had better leave UNRWA alone, the US and the UK decided to leave UNRWA in place.

And so, the world continues to pay protection money to sustain the refugees in camps, with no intention of moving them elsewhere; it has been clear for 74 years now that the basic idea is to maintain these people as refugees until they can be moved back to the homes they left behind before the state of Israel was formed (homes, of course, which are long gone). And the UNRWA continues to unabashedly threaten the world if they refuse to pay, with such statements as “At a time when extremist groups are in recruitment mode, it’s surely not in anyone’s interest to have half a million children not in UN schools but on the streets. We feed 1.7 million food-insecure refugees, a million of those in Gaza. Is it really in anyone’s interest to have one million hungry, angry people in Gaza?”

So the UNRWA’s policy, in line with the Arab states around us, has basically been to keep the problem of the Palestinian refugees alive; but they do much more than that. They not only cooperate with anti-Israel activities in Gaza and the West Bank, but they also actively foment antisemitism and promote anti-Zionist ideologies – as the larger UN governing body is well aware. As has been revealed time and again, the UN hospitals and schools have long been frequent refuges for terrorists and weapons caches. And, as has been thoroughly examined and concluded by UN oversight committees, the UNRWA-created textbooks and curricula implemented in the UN schools are horribly antisemitic and encourage children to grow up to become martyrs who die in the just cause of overthrowing the Zionist occupiers. If you think I’m making this up or exaggerating, see for yourselves. (For an interesting comparison with textbooks and curricula within the larger region of the Middle East, see here.) And if you're still not convinced that the UNRWA has effectively become a tool of Hamas, you don't have to look further than this past week when they first accused Hamas of stealing humanitarian aid in the form of fuel and medical supplies in a tweet, then deleted the tweet and refuted the claim.

(Note: in case it's not obvious, we actually pay for these textbooks etc. – despite leaked UN reports demonstrating just how ethically corrupt UNRWA’s leadership was, Canada has drawn $90 million from our taxes to contribute to UNRWA since 2019 (proudly in the top 10 donor circle), as the US has contributed $618 million from American taxes since 2021 for the same purpose even though the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations has repeatedly urged the government to end its support; and, sadly, we pay these taxes in parallel with Israeli and EU taxpayers whose taxes pay for the maintenance of Gaza and the West Bank, including for the installation of water pipes into Gaza that Hamas systematically removes to turn into weapons).

The UNRWA is currently pleading with the world to send more humanitarian aid their way so that they can help the people of Gaza, and there is no question that they need it, badly. But Biden’s insistence that Hamas not get their hands on it is futile, because the UNRWA has always allowed Hamas to have first dibs, and in fact to distribute and regulate (and mark up by 20%), all of the aid it receives. This report is 5 years old already, but should give you a good sense of what actually goes on under UNRWA “supervision.”

The UNRWA mandate to “provide assistance and protection to Palestine refugees pending a just and lasting solution to their plight” is obviously laudable and continues to be necessary. But the past 74 years has shown that has not been met, and never will be. Not (only) because its leadership is corrupt, not (only) because it (and the larger UN body that it represents) has effectively been coopted by Hamas’ terrorist agenda, but (primarily) because its understanding – true from Fritzlan’s observations 70 years ago to today – of its mandate is to keep the problem of Palestinian refugees alive, continue to perpetuate it, continue to have the international community fund it, and continue to – along with the UN itself – delegitimize and outright deny the right of Israel to exist. It is because, for the UNRWA and the UN, what constitutes “a just and lasting solution” is an end to the existence of Israel as a Jewish state, and a return of 4 generations of displaced Palestinians to their pre-1948 homes.

The fact that 5.6 million people are stateless after 75 years is, and should be, a horrible stain on the conscience of the modern world. But if you blame Israel for it, and only Israel, then (a) you are suggesting that Israel absorb 5.6 million people who have been taught for four generations that Jews are the spawn of Satan and deserve only torture and death; (b) you’re not paying attention to the role of the UN in keeping them stateless as they continue to delegitimize Israel's right to exist; (c) you’re ignoring the role – as most of the world has – of Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon in continuously refusing to help these refugees. Remember that between 1948 and 1967, Gaza was ruled by Egypt and the West Bank by Jordan, both of which opted to maintain the refugee camps and neither absorb them nor even allow citizenship rights to those who lived there; and that half a million of these 5.6 million Palestinians still live in refugee camps under Lebanese rule, without rights of citizenship even though they were born in Lebanon. Why not absorb the refugees? Because that would put an end to the largest, most effective, and most heart-wrenching pawn that all of these nations hold in their continued denial of legitimacy for Jewish statehood and self-determination in their ancestral homeland. Because the way they have positioned things, and the way that UNRWA has perpetuated and facilitated this positioning, means that ultimately, if you blame ONLY Israel for the Palestinian refugee crisis (d) you are effectively agreeing with the notion that Israel has no right to exist - "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" = judenrein.