The mounting revelations over the last month of the intimate ties between the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and Hamas should not have come as any surprise.
At the time of the first Arab-Israeli War, which ended in 1949, well before the founding of Hamas in 1987, the Palestinian refugees acknowledged the role of the Arab states in the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem.
The head of Britain’s Middle East Office in Cairo, Sir John Troutbeck, reported to the Foreign Office that the Palestinian refugees declared to him that their Arab brothers “were the ones who persuaded them unnecessarily to leave their homes.”
It was the Palestinians’ own testimony that the Arab states who attacked Israel were the principal authors and promoters of the Palestinian refugee problem from the very beginning.
That helps explain why Hamas – and earlier the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) of Yasser Arafat – sought to build positions of strength in various centers in the Arab world – from Morocco to Kuwait.
Hamas’s broad regional view is also a result of its being the direct descendant of the Muslim Brotherhood, a terrorist organization that has been banned in several Arab countries, but which is welcome in Qatar. It also has found a new footing in Turkey and Iran.
Like the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas has an agenda of hatred against Christians and Jews and especially against moderate Muslims whom it believes have grown too comfortable with Western ways such as democracy. And like the Brotherhood, Hamas sees itself as a universal organization with operating areas including the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and regional capitals across the Middle East.
It is not surprising that Hamas would open offices in Europe as well. Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, left behind in his writings where its off-shoots should be active.
Years later, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the successor of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, went to the trouble of having the main ideological texts of the Brotherhood translated from Arabic into Persian by Sayyid Qutb. Muslim Brotherhood ideologue Qutb visited the United States in the 1950s and despised its political, personal, and economic freedoms.
Hamas hates all democracies, not just Israel
Hamas has the same attitude toward all other Western democracies – not only Israel. It despises economic freedom, political freedom, and also personal freedom, especially for women. As for minorities, they really have no place in a Hamas-run society.
That also explains why and how Hamas could so easily take over UNRWA because that agency was tailor-made by the UN to keep the Palestinian refugee problem alive, not to fix the problem.
Gaza became the perfect incubator for nursing al-qadiyaa al-felastiniyya (the Palestinian problem) and UNRWA was the perfect midwife. UNRWA and Hamas became a perfect fit.As the United Arab Emirates newspaper Al-Bayan observed in 2002, UNRWA schools had become “greenhouses for suicide bombers.” Anyone who has seen pictures of UNRWA schools and the homes of UNRWA “educators” – bombs and grenades stored next to books – knows the obvious truth.
Any solution to the Gaza terror hothouse will require a complete re-thinking of Gaza itself, as well as throwing out – not reforming – UNRWA, Hamas, and the PLO.
Organizations that have been built on terror and racial and religious hatred cannot be reformed, any more than the Nazis could be reformed.
Let us remember that the UN itself, which runs UNRWA, is an organization whose majority is non-democratic and often tyrannical. Don’t expect the UN to make these organizations work with the institutions of the West. They have always been the heart of the problem in the Middle East – not the solution.
The writer served as Israel’s ambassador to the UN and as the director-general of the Foreign Ministry.