Commentary
When 84-year-old Ditza Heiman was released from Hamas captivity and ready to tell her story, she revealed that she was held in Gaza for 53 days under the watchful eye of a teacher from the United Nations agency in Gaza, UNRWA.
In August, UNRWA director Philippe Lazzarini was confronted by Ayelet Samerano, whose son was killed on Oct. 7: “As you can see in the video that is online, on Oct. 7 an UNRWA employee entered Israel and actively participated in the massacre, brutally murdering and kidnapping my boy’s body, with a United Nations car, into Gaza.”
It gets tiring to rehearse the many such stories—the nine staffers fired by the agency for participating in the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre, the hundreds of agency employees who Israel claims were moonlighting with one of Gaza’s terrorist groups, the discovery that the head of the UNRWA teachers union was also Hamas’s top official in Lebanon, the agency’s sharing of facilities with Hamas command centers, the rockets stored in UNRWA schools and the Hamas tunnels underneath them.
Just reciting that partial list raises a question: Why on earth was UNRWA given free rein in Gaza for so long? Whatever the answer, those days are finally over. The Knesset passed legislation yesterday barring UNRWA from Israel and greatly limiting its work in Gaza and the West Bank (though not banning it from those territories completely).
From the Times of Israel: “Without coordination with Israel, it will be almost impossible for UNRWA to work in Gaza or the West Bank, since Jerusalem would no longer be issuing entrance permits to those territories or allowing coordination with the IDF. Israel also currently controls access to Gaza from Egypt, with Israeli forces deployed along the border between them.”
The proper response from UNRWA would be: Thank you. For an agency funded by hundreds of millions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer money alone, and which does nothing but perpetuate the conflict so it can continue collecting other people’s hard-earned money and spending it on terrorists, any punishment shy of closure and the prosecution of its directors is a gift.
The UN, of course, is furious. But honestly, who cares? For posterity, here’s the crux of the world body’s complaint: “The vote by the Israeli Parliament (Knesset) against UNRWA this evening is unprecedented and sets a dangerous precedent. It opposes the UN Charter and violates the State of Israel’s obligations under international law.”
An unprecedented precedent-setter! The legislation, we’re told, “will deprive over 650,000 girls and boys there from education.” An education from literal Hamas political leaders? Or accused hostage-takers? Anyway, the “education” provided by UNRWA schools teaches children to venerate terrorists and to hate Jews, which is really no education at all.
Finally, UNRWA says, “Putting an end to UNRWA and its services will not strip the Palestinians from their refugee status. That status is protected by another UN General Assembly resolution until a fair and lasting solution is found to the plight of the Palestinians.”
About that “refugee status.” Palestinian refugees, according to the agency’s own definition, are “persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict.”
UNRWA then sneaks in that the descendants of refugees are “eligible” for refugee benefits as well. The common claim that there are millions of Palestinian refugees from 1948 is very obviously false. There were perhaps as many as 750,000 refugees. Palestinians are the only refugee class with their own UN agency. It is no coincidence at all that that agency has inflated the number of refugees even though its own definition of a refugee makes that number impossible.
According to Jonathan Schanzer, COMMENTARY contributing editor and vice president at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, members of Congress have been trying for years to pass legislation that would apply the actual definition of a “refugee” to Palestinians. A 2012 amendment would have required “the secretary of state to report to Congress on how many Palestinians serviced by UNRWA are true refugees from wars past — those who could prove that they were personally displaced. That number is believed to be closer to 30,000 people. This new tally would then become the focus of America’s assistance to UNRWA for refugee issues.”
UNRWA could, that is, service Palestinian refugees. But it isn’t designed to do that. It is designed be a Palestinian agency. Which is why it has been subsumed by Hamas in Gaza (and Lebanon). UNRWA counts nearly 6 million Palestinians among its refugee population—which is higher than the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Actual refugees deserve every bit of help they can get from refugee agencies. But that work isn’t being done by UNRWA, which is why UNRWA should not be doing any work at all.
