SPARE US THE LAMENTATIONS FOR UNRWA

ISRAEL BANS THE PALESTINIAN “REFUGEE” AGENCY. IT’S ABOUT TIME.

Hyperbole? Maybe. But here’s an idea: Why don’t we make sure it’s not.

Oh, now the world is suddenly concerned about UNRWA.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) has operated since 1949 to provide humanitarian aid, health, education, and social services to Palestinian refugees. The agency operates in the West Bank and Gaza. But it also operates in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, where it serves as a sort of sub-government for people who those countries have segregated and refused to integrate. (One of several examples in the region that could rightly be compared with apartheid.)

Rather than resolving the Palestinian refugee problem, UNRWA has ensured that it has grown exponentially in 75 years. This is no niggling detail.

Through an unbelievably cynical strategy, the Arab world and its networks of “nonaligned” and other countries at the UN have ensured that Palestinian refugees are treated differently than every other refugee population on earth.

Thus, the UN adopted a definition of “refugee” for Palestinians that differs from every other refugee population in the world, making it a heritable right for (male!) descendants of the actual refugees — even if those “refugees” have citizenship in, say, Canada or Sweden. Thus, a “refugee” problem the agency was ostensibly created to resolve has seen that refugee population grow more than 686%.

Nice job.

In cahoots with the kindly Arab countries that have penned up Palestinian refugees and refused to integrate them into their host societies, UNRWA has used the Palestinian people in one of humanity’s most cynical, cruel plots. The longer the Palestinian problem remains unresolved, and grows, the more the world bays at Israel and declares its very existence an injustice — as proved by these living testaments to displacement.

To whit: Here is a first-person example of the pro-UNRWA perspective. The author, a product of UNRWA’s education system, acknowledges the core purpose of UNRWA’s existence — but misses the point.

“UNRWA’s presence,” she writes, “reminds the world of Israeli occupation, the 1948 genocide [sic, and sick] and other historical atrocities against the Palestinians — an uncomfortable reality for Israel. To remove this reminder, Israel is using the same strategy of dehumanization that justifies violence against Palestinian civilians.”

She doesn’t see that she and everyone she knows is being used as a hostage in a geopolitical conspiracy. No, she buys into the conspiracy and propagates it with her tale of woe.

The point she makes, but unintentionally, is that UNRWA exists not to resolve the problem of Palestinian refugees, but to prolong it. She and millions of others UNRWA claims to help are in fact human weapons in an inhumane PR battle to “prove” the injustice of Israel’s existence.

Aside — and a big one: The “genocide” the author laments has seen the Palestinian refugee population “helped” by UNRWA grow from about 750,000 Palestinian refugees in 1949 to 5.9 million today.

Some genocide.

And, not incidentally: way to solve the refugee problem, UNRWA.

Palestinians are, thanks to UNRWA, among the Arab world’s best educated populations — and yet have some of the region’s highest unemployment rates. More money has been ploughed into Palestine (and into Palestinian “refugee camps” in neighboring countries) than into places with exponentially worse social and economic conditions. And yet, every time Israel responds to Palestinian atrocities and aggressions, we are told the Palestinian people are on the brink of mass starvation at the best of times.

UNRWA’s “education,” meanwhile, inculcates hatred and stokes incitement to genocide alongside the three Rs.

In a society where anti-Israel and antisemitic incitement is endemic in popular culture, religion, politics, news, weather and sports, the education system ensures every generation of Palestinians is as aggrieved and enraged as the last.

And for years the world has concluded that this is nothing to be concerned about. Everyone from the UN’s top official to the millions marching for Palestine worldwide every weekend insists there’s nothing to see here.

Until we can condemn Israel for, say, calling bullshit on this whole operation, as they did Monday in the Knesset.

The latest controversy came to a head as a result of evidence that numerous UNRWA employees were involved in the October 7 atrocities and subsequent terror operations.

“It’s hard to know where Hamas ends and UNRWA begins,” said an Israeli official.

But this is the culmination of decades of unchecked UNRWA corruption, mismanagement and political malfeasance.

For decades, Palestinians have received more humanitarian aid per capita than any other people on the planet — and the not-insignificant PR operations that support them insist that things spiral into ever-worsening peril.

UNRWA has responded to the litany of allegations against it. Here are their “Claims versus facts.” Not surprisingly, their answer to each allegation is (I summarize) Nothing to see here. Where there’s smoke there is not necessarily fire.

On Monday, Israel finally said Enough.

Now, at a moment when Israel is being depicted as the most atrocious entity on earth, banning UNRWA is not a great look.

Still, at a time when braying mobs worldwide depict Israelis as a genocidal, blood-drinking, merciless race of subhumans, I can imagine there is a certain nonchalance at the latest raging hyperbole.

Maybe this isn’t the right time to ban UNRWA. But you know what? It is far past the time — decades past time — that the world has a conversation about UNRWA.

Say what you will about the Israeli government’s decision to ban UNRWA. It’s started a long-overdue conversation.

Meanwhile, most of the effects of the bills passed Monday don’t take effect for 90 days. So the organization has three months to get its shit together.

This may seem like a tight timeline for an agency responsible for almost 6 million people. But an agency with an annual budget of almost $1.5 billion and a tight little staff team of 30,000 surely has the capacity to address the concerns that Israel and anyone with a sense of humanity have been warning about for decades.

No time like the present to get started.