The problem with UNRWA

Set up in 1948, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency has a stated goal of helping Palestinian refugees – but many accuse it of perpetuating Palestinian suffering.

By TAL BASHAN
A palestinian child sits in a car after her family received food supplies from the UNRWA headquarters in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, in this photo from November, 2012 (photo credit: REUTERS)
A palestinian child sits in a car after her family received food supplies from the UNRWA headquarters in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, in this photo from November, 2012
(photo credit: REUTERS)
Like other Israelis who spent time overseas this past summer, former MK Einat Wilf was exposed to the harsh images of Gaza portrayed on the TV screen.
“Over and over again, I would watch as the IDF was shown bombing Palestinian UNRWA schools in Gaza. It looked just awful. None of the reporters ever said anything about UNRWA’s connection to Hamas and that it’s barely monitored by the UN, and that its only agenda is to perpetuate the refugee status of the Palestinians.”
Wilf – now a senior fellow with the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, and an adjunct fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy – was shocked when, as an MK, she joined the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee and learned how the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees really functions.
“I began wondering how it was that there was no public discussion about UNRWA’s crucial role in perpetuating the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. This organization has been perpetuating Palestinians’ refugee status for 64 years; every child that has been born in Gaza all these years still has refugee status. This is an organization that has not helped promote Palestinian refugees in any way to better their lives.
“The only subject its education system teaches is the Right of Return, and it is preparing the next generation of shahids [martyrs].
“How does anyone believe there could possibly be peace under these circumstances, and why aren’t we doing anything about it? No one wants to deal with this subject – especially not the Defense Ministry. But I think this is a mistake, because UNRWA is training the next generation of Palestinians to shoot at us.” IN 2010, Wilf decided to take matters into her own hands.
She received a permit from the Defense Ministry (on the condition she refrain from advocating that UNRWA be closed down) and set out on a private publicity campaign in which she held meetings with 25 ambassadors of UNRWA donor countries.
The agency subsists on donations of over $1 billion a year from the US and Europe; the US alone donated $250 million last year and a total of $5b. over the last five years.
“It’s absurd,” Wilf says. “All of these countries talk about the need to reach an agreement with the Palestinians, yet at the same time they are contributing to an organization that ensures there will never be peace. The US and Europe view the settlements as an obstacle to peace, but they don’t realize the UNRWA is just as much of an obstacle to peace.
“Since UNRWA was formed, the number of refugees has mushroomed from 650,000 to five million; that’s sevenfold.
Eighty percent of Gazans have refugee status despite the fact that they, their parents and sometimes their grandparents were born there. They were born and live in Palestinian territory and have Palestinian citizenship, but if you ask them where they’re from, they’ll still tell you ‘Ashkelon’ because the UNRWA schools cultivate this ideology. And yet everywhere else in the world, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) acts to rehabilitate refugees.
“The UNRWA was supposed to be temporary, but instead it perpetuates the idea of returning to Palestine – not to mention its connection to Hamas.”
Wilf has demanded that UNRWA officially change its role to caring for people in need and not according to refugee status; not allow refugee status to pass on to the next generation; and that it merge the organization with the worldwide refugee organization.
“Donor countries politely listened, and to my amazement I discovered the West does not really take the issue of Right of Return seriously. But this is a mistake, because as we know all too well, if you ask a Palestinian who was born in Gaza, Judea or Samaria where he’s from – including the grandson of [Palestinian Authority President] Mahmoud Abbas – he’ll tell you he’s from Safed.
“People around the world don’t get that this is the central issue that’s keeping the crisis going. And they don’t realize that UNRWA plays a key role in perpetuating this phenomenon.”
THIS PAST May, before Operation Protective Edge began, a Jewish jurist organization (UN NGO) held a oneday seminar titled “UNRWA: Providers of Humanitarian Assistance or Perpetuator of the Conflict?” James G.
Lindsay, former legal adviser and general counsel for UNRWA, is the only participant who openly criticized the organization.
Lindsay admitted that UNRWA “has not taken any steps to identify terrorists among the ranks of its staff or service recipients, and no security checks are carried out before hiring employees. Its school system is extremely problematic and is not conducive to peace between peoples in the region.
There is absolutely no justification for the wasting of millions of dollars in monetary aid provided by donor nations, which is given to people who do not need these services – and there are many of them.”
David Bedein, director of the Israel Resource News Agency and the Center for Near East Policy Research, has been actively following UNRWA activity for over 20 years; he has written many articles, books and policy papers about the agency in which he illustrates how it is controlled by Hamas.
Bedein claims that some people are reluctant to embrace his work because he lives in Efrat, which is over the pre-1967 border.
“People on the Right consider me too far Left, and people on the Left consider me too right-wing. But I don’t feel the need to pick a side,” Bedein says with a smile. “I just continue to closely following what is happening with UNRWA. Seventy-five percent of Gazans – that’s 1.2 million people – have refugee status. But Gazans don’t want any connection with Gaza, and they laugh in your face if you try to talk to them about rehabilitation. Why? Because the Right of Return is their only bargaining chip. It’s not a joke, this is really what’s going on.
“When Arabs in Gaza are asked in a Skype conversation why they are shooting at us, their immediate response is always: So that we’ll receive the Right of Return. You should have seen how happy they were when Kibbutz Nahal Oz decided to evacuate its members.
In their minds, this brought them one step closer to achieving the Right of Return.”
Bedein believes the UNRWA educational system – with its 700 schools in which 1.5 million children study – is the body responsible for the current situation.
“Since 2000, UNRWA added Right of Return as the main subject taught in its schools. At these schools, Gazan children learn, day in, day out, for years that the Land of Israel belongs solely to the Palestinians and their descendants, with no time limit.”
Bedein bought copies of the UNRWA textbooks and gave them to Arabic-language experts for examination.
“It turns out that no matter what the subject was – literature, grammar, geography or math – the Right of Return was somehow incorporated.”
Bedein gave a few examples of quotes he found in the UNRWA textbooks: A grammar exercise in a 2011 book titled Our Beautiful Language, used to teach fifth-grade pupils, read, “Fill in the blank with the appropriate noun. ______ (Name of refugee) dreams about returning to his homeland.” A ninth-grade writing workbook printed in 2011 includes the following, “I was visiting the city of Jaffa and while I was wandering around, I saw an Arab-style house that was empty. I imagined what the house would tell me about its history if it could talk.” The student was then requested to write a composition about this subject.
“And it works,” Bedein says. “Every single child knows from a very young age where he is from in Israel – Tel Aviv, Jaffa, Beersheba. In this way, UNRWA, an international organization sponsored by the UN, which is 100% funded by donations, is bringing up generations of people who are filled with a fighting spirit to destroy Israel and take over its land.
“If this isn’t fanning the flames of conflict, I don’t know what is.”
“IN MANY ways, UNRWA is the tragedy of the Palestinian people,” says Yuval Sasson, a former deputy state attorney and currently head of the homeland security, defense and aerospace law department at the firm of Meitar Liquornik Geva Leshem Tal.
“The criticism of UNRWA as a perpetuator of the Palestinians’ refugee status and the conflict for an entire generation is well-founded. UNRWA also perpetuates poverty.
“People have been sitting in refugee camps for decades now, instead of getting up and improving their lives. It’s a tragedy. In my opinion, it also harms the rights of other needy people around the world. In Syria and in Africa regimes are operating freely against their own people, since the spotlight is always on the Palestinians’ distress.”
The real question is: Who is running UNRWA? “There are international headquarters in Tel Aviv and in Europe, but it’s clear the Palestinians are the ones who are really in charge, and the reality is that it is controlled by Hamas. For years, Hamas has been building rocket launchers and tunnels from within UNRWA health clinics and schools, and these were all rigged with explosives. “These aren’t structures that can be constructed in a day or two, and it’s also not possible they were built without the knowledge of local UNRWA and construction officials.”
The subject of the relationship between Hamas and UNRWA, and turning it into a convenient surrogate for terrorist organizations, has become even more relevant since Hamas won the election in Gaza in 2006 by an overwhelming majority (25 out of 27 seats) of the UNRWA workers union, which happens to employ 30,000 people, 10,000 of whom are in Gaza.
For years, Lt.-Col. (res.) Jonathan D. Halevi, formerly of IDF Military Intelligence and currently a researcher at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, has been following the Hamas takeover of UNRWA. Over the years, Halevi has published lists of UNRWA teachers, educators and administrators who are active in Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
The following is the shortlist: Suhail al-Hindi, UNRWA teachers’ union head and Hamas senior operative; Said Siyam, a Hamas interior minister, close associate of movement leader Khaled Mashaal and teacher in UNRWA schools for 23 years, before being killed in 2009; and Awad al-Keek, a teacher in UNRWA schools in Rafah who served as head of the Islamic Jihad arms manufacturing unit in Gaza, before being killed in 2008.
The US administration attempted to demand that UNRWA do a better job of checking whom they hire, and even suggested the organization rely on a list of active Hamas operatives compiled by Israel, but UNRWA (at least according to a 2011 US Congress report) was not willing to rely on an Israeli list and instead agreed to follow an American “blacklist.”
Eyal Ofer, a doctoral student who’s researching the Palestinian economy, says the American list includes many names of people in Pakistan, the Philippines and Saudi Arabia, but none who live in Israel or Gaza.
“That way, they can truthfully say, ‘We checked the entire list and none of these people work for us.’ Hamas controls everything that happens in UNRWA, and the organization doesn’t check what any of its employees do in their spare time,” Ofer says.
“Since Israel is adamant about not letting cash into Gaza, and Gazans need cash to pay smugglers who bring in merchandise – anything from weapons to Viagra – there is always a cash shortage. The only organization that is allowed to bring in dollars is UNRWA, which claims to need $13.5m. of cash each month to ‘pay salaries’ – even though they could easily pay through wire transfers, in shekels or with debit cards. Of course, this cash quickly finds its way to Hamas, which then feeds the smuggling industry and terrorism.
“But the world just ignores this. In this instance, Israel behaves like a battered wife who doesn’t want anyone to know about what happens to her at home.
The cash transfers to Gaza aren’t even mentioned in the monthly IDF reports. The Defense and Foreign ministries are scared to raise the issue explicitly, because that would mean dealing with the core of the conflict.”
Yossi Kuperwasser, director-general of the Strategic Affairs Ministry, weighs in: “UNRWA is integrated into the fabric of life in Gaza. Most of its employees are teachers, some of whom are affiliated with Hamas. The question is, how can anyone maintain independence under such conditions? And we see the results: rockets are shot from within UNRWA facilities, and they preach the Right of Return in their schools.
“Our hands are tied in a Gordian knot, and the Israeli government is at a loss as to how to deal with this issue.”
Translated by Hannah Hochner.