Televisions around the globe were filled on Tuesday with images of Israeli bulldozers, cheered on by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, destroying “UN facilities for Palestinian refugees in east Jerusalem,” as an AP headline put it.
Without context, the move to demolish UNRWA’s east Jerusalem headquarters in Ma’alot Dafna looks like just another incident of Israeli hard-heartedness – an attack on a UN body that wants only to help Palestinian refugees.
So the Foreign Ministry sought to provide some context.
First, said spokesman Oren Marmorstein in a social media post, Israel owns the land in question. Second, Tuesday’s move does not represent a new policy but rather the implementation of Knesset legislation from October 2024 that bans UNRWA from operating in Israel and severs all government ties with it.
And third, perhaps most saliently, “UNRWA employees participated in the October 7 massacre and the kidnapping of Israelis. Numerous employees within the organization are Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists, and the organization’s infrastructure has been used for tunnel construction, rocket fire, and terrorist activities.”
All that is correct, and it does provide context. Just not enough.
Tuesday’s demolition thrust the issue onto the international news agenda and offered a perfect opportunity to explain why Israel is justified in shutting down UNRWA offices – not only because, as the Foreign Ministry spokesman said, the agency has long ceased to be humanitarian and instead “served as a greenhouse for terrorism,” but also because it is arguably the premier body responsible for perpetuating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since 1948.
As Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf spell out in their 2023 book The War of Return, which traces the historical, political, and institutional evolution of UNRWA, the organization did not merely fail to solve the refugee problem for which it was established. It created the political infrastructure ensuring that it can never be solved, by keeping alive the hope that Israel itself is reversible.
Have you ever wondered why, some 30 years after the Palestinian Authority took control of large parts of the West Bank, there are still refugee camps scattered throughout – in Jenin, near Ramallah, near Bethlehem, and elsewhere?
Surely, three decades after the Palestinians received control over Area A, they could have dismantled these camps and permanently housed their residents. The same is certainly true in Gaza. But that would defeat the purpose, which is to resist resettlement anywhere other than in pre-1967 Israel.
UNRWA perpetuates illusion of Palestinians returning to ancestral homes
UNRWA perpetuates the illusion that someday, somehow, all those living in Palestinian refugee camps – in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon – will return to homes their ancestors left or were driven out of in 1948.
That is not going to happen, because it would spell the death knell of Israel – and Israel is not going to commit suicide. Yet instead of working to resettle the 1948 refugees, UNRWA kept them in camps and educated them to believe it is merely a matter of time before they return.
Responding to Israel’s actions on Tuesday, UNRWA’s commissioner Philippe Lazzarini wrote on Twitter/X that the step comes “in the wake of other steps taken by Israeli authorities to erase the Palestinian refugee identity.”
Lazzarini meant this as a criticism. But moving Palestinian identity beyond refugeehood would be a step forward – one that could help both sides move on. UNRWA, by granting Palestinians a perpetual refugee status not afforded to any other people, prevents that from happening.
As Schwartz and Wilf point out, UNRWA is by no means a neutral humanitarian body, but rather an institution that turned a political demand into something that felt normal, official, and inevitable.
Instead of the “right of return” being something Palestinians argue for and Israelis reject, UNRWA built its entire system around the assumption that it will eventually happen – and that those under its care are merely waiting temporarily until they go back.
In doing so, the organization transformed refugee status from a temporary humanitarian condition – typically resolved through absorption into other countries – into a permanent political identity passed down through generations. That identity, in turn, is rooted in a dream of returning to pre-state Israel, spelling the end of the Jewish state.
Over the years, UNRWA focused not on resettlement or integration, but on keeping this illusion alive.
The destruction of UNRWA’s headquarters in Jerusalem allows Israel to also explain that UNRWA’s education system has, over the years, served to indoctrinate generations of Palestinian youth with the belief that all of Israel is “occupied Palestine”; that return – not coexistence – is the moral goal; and that Jewish sovereignty is illegitimate and temporary at best, and criminal at worst.
Rather than easing Palestinian suffering, UNRWA prolonged it by blocking resettlement in host countries such as Lebanon and Syria, discouraging normalization of life outside refugee status, and – more broadly – managing Palestinian despair rather than helping to resolve it.
In their book, Schwartz and Wilf argue that there will be no Israeli-Palestinian settlement as long as UNRWA exists in its current form, because peace requires acceptance that Israel is an irreversible fact – and that the refugee issue must be addressed through resettlement, compensation, and integration, not the mass exercise of a so-called “right of return.”
Ending UNRWA would force the international community to confront the reality that this conflict cannot be solved by pretending the results of 1948 can – or will – be undone.
That is the broader context Israeli spokespeople should be conveying when explaining the bulldozing of UNRWA offices in Jerusalem.
It is unconscionable that some UNRWA employees were Hamas terrorists involved in the October 7 massacre. It is also indefensible that the organization’s infrastructure was used for terrorist activity. Grave as those facts are, there are deeper-rooted reasons to do away with this organization – and this symbolic moment provides an opportunity to explain precisely what those are.