#WTH Understanding the meaning of UNRWA

Its mission is helping Palestinians; its aim is to eradicate Israel

Last week we talked to Jonathan Schanzer from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies about UNRWA, the United Nations Relief Works Agency. Don’t miss it….

The Israeli Defense Forces recently uncovered an “important communications center and intelligence hub” for Hamas. Directly underneath UNRWA HQ in Gaza. Using the UN agency’s electricity. UNRWA insists it was unaware. Congress is nonetheless going to allow U.S. funds to go to the group.

To explain how UNRWA is funded, in almost all U.S. legislation, the money goes through other budgets — for refugees etc — and is not earmarked for the UNRWA specifically. Despite myriad restrictions, various administrations have transferred billions directly to UNRWA, mostly through these accounts.

In the wake of revelations that UNRWA staff directly participated in the October 7 attacks, has chat groups with thousands of employees that support Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and that as much as 10 percent of UNRWA’s staff are somehow part of Gaza’s terrorist networks, Congress — the Democrats in particular — have balked at cutting UNWRA’s funding.

Why are we been harping on this right now? Because the Foreign Operations Appropriations bill that funds UNRWA (and much, much else) has been in conference deciding the questions outstanding between the House and Senate. Obviously, the UN has lobbied for its most generous funder to keep funneling US taxpayer dollars. The State Department Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration — from which UNWRA gets its cash — has argued that no one else can operate in Gaza. That view is perhaps informed by the fact that the Deputy Assistant Secretary in the bureau was UNRWA’s DC chief.

Other aid agencies that work in the Middle East insist they can backfill UNWRA. But Democrats who are willing to tolerate support for terrorism in order to have an uninterrupted flow of aid to Palestinians aren’t so sure. Why are they so afraid? Electoral politics — Muslim groups have vowed to punish the Biden administration for its support for Israel. But there’s another reason too, and it goes to the heart of everything UNRWA stands for.

To understand UNRWA, one must understand that it is the only international refugee agency devoted to one population — the Palestinians. To further understand, one must know that UNRWA has made a business of growing the number of Palestinian refugees exponentially. Consider, this agency was created for the post-Israel war of independence Palestinian population that fled what became the State of Israel. UNRWA counts that population — then in the hundreds of thousands — and their children, their grandchildren, their great grandchildren and innumerable others as Palestinian refugees, and insists there are almost six million.

The Palestinians who live under Hamas rule in Gaza? Refugees. The Palestinians who live in the West Bank and Gaza under the Palestinian Authority? Refugees. Lebanon? Jordan? Syria? Refugees. All over the world, with passports from dozens of nations? Refugees. Why continue to call these people refugees?

We can’t boil down the question of Palestine to a substack. But we can say that one of the principal reasons to claim almost six million refugees is to suggest that no peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians can fail to accommodate those refugees. How many millions could demand the so-called “right of return” to Israel? If UNRWA has its way, enough to ensure the end of Israel as a Jewish state. Preferably enough to ensure that the State of Israel cannot viably exist.

That is the UNRWA raison d’être. And UNWRA and its supporters have ensured that anyone who seeks to limit UNRWA’s funds and remit will be labeled an enemy of the Palestinian people and their question for justice and the right of return.

Listen to our podcast discussion for more.

HIGHLIGHTS

So, UNRWA. Where did they come from?

JS: This is an organization was created in the immediate aftermath of the Declaration of Independence by the State of Israel. It was designed initially to deal with a relatively small problem, and that was that there were something like 600,000 Palestinian refugees who were forced out of their homes or lost their homes in a war that, of course, they declared on Israel back in 1948, '49. But UNRWA was created to try to deal with this problem.

Now, the very fact that UNRWA had a mandate was a bit strange because when we think about the refugee issues, everywhere else around the world, there is one agency and one agency only, and that is the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. And yet somehow the Palestinians have this agency dealingwith their refugee crisis, sui generis. So now over the years, first UNRWA became part of the narrative that every one of these refugees would go home. And that of course meant that they weren't talking about two-state solution, they were talking about the destruction of the State of Israel.

Then what we began to see is the creation of new refugees by this agency. So in other words, rather than resettling them, they created this process where the descendants of refugees were also considered refugees. To the point that today, rather than 600,000, we have 5.9 million people claiming refugee status. That is an insane number, and of course, mathematically impossible given that the vast majority of the original refugees have passed away due to old age and sickness and everything else. So these are the sort of core problems.

But then in recent years, specifically since the 2007 Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip, UNRWA became a partner in the governing of Gaza. And in so doing, they not only produced a ton of just terrible material in the schools and in the kind of cultural areas where they're active, but we began to see Hamas guys firing rockets next to schools and hospitals run by UNRWA, tunnels under those facilities. And now all of a sudden we're hearing about actual fighters. We've long heard about some of the people that have been teachers and moonlighting as Hamas, and they were dismissed, and it was driving the Israelis crazy that no one was listening.

What does UNRWA do for people in Gaza?

JS: I would actually argue that it doesn't do much, but what they advertise on their website is that they provide food and medicine and education and a whole range of social services to the people of Gaza. And a lot of people would say, well, that's great, and because the people of Gaza need it. And I actually would say, yeah, maybe, but why is the government in Gaza not doing that? Why do they have a UN agency doing this so that Hamas doesn't have to spend the money in order to handle these services? In other words, what's happened here is that UNRWA went out and they've spent tens, hundreds of millions of dollars in international assistance to provide for the food and medicine and other services that we're talking about here, and that is essentially material support to Hamas.

In other words, it took Hamas off the hook. They didn't have to deal with the services that were required by the 2.2 million people living in Gaza, living by the way in squalor in many cases, Hamas had almost zero responsibilities. And so while UNRWA was doing all of this, Hamas was busy building a military infrastructure beneath the ground. What we now see is 350 miles worth of commando tunnels that the Israelis have uncovered. That is larger than the London Underground. That is insane. But the only way that I believe that Hamas could have actually done this is if they didn't have to worry about the day-to-day governance in the Gaza Strip. And by the way, we've seen Hamas leaders talk about this, where they say, we are not worried about the people of Gaza. Our job is resistance. Our job is fighting Israel. And so therefore we left all of this to UNRWA so that we could go about our daily job, which is devising new and creative ways to kill Israelis and to bring war to Israel.

But what are children in UNRWA schools getting?

JS: They're getting poisoned. It's funny, that's the last thing that I think of, Dany, when I think about all the crimes of UNRWA. But you're 100% right to point it out. So first they started talking about how everybody who called themselves a refugee, again, descendants of refugees or the original refugees, that they were going to go home, and that ultimately that they were going to reclaim the territory that they called Palestine. So they were being fed this by UNRWA for many years. They were actually a cornerstone of this really toxic nationalist ideology. Irredentism, right? Plain and simple. But then I think you need to look at what they've done more recently. And that's where you start to look at the textbooks, where the math equations are like, well, if you have one martyr and then you add another nine martyrs, how many do you have? Where they start using the terminology that Hamas will wield every day in the media, they have allowed that to trickle into the textbooks and into the programming that they see every day.

Examples of UNRWA propaganda?

JS: They've normalized this idea of Jihadism. They've normalized this idea of killing Israelis. And the fact that this was happening with U.S. taxpayer dollars, with taxpayer dollars from other countries, other allied western countries around the world, was insane. And again, the Israelis were going nuts about this 10 years ago, 15 years ago. Everybody sort of yawned about this because they just said, well, it's rhetoric, and of course they hate you and that's not going to change. But I think what we can now say with certainty was that all of this was just a symptom of what was happening a little bit further beneath the surface. As we now know, it's not just that there are 1,200 fighters, but in fact a handful of them took part in the 10/7 slaughter. There was a WhatsApp group of UNRWA employees that were cheering on the slaughter of 10/7 and begging for more. In other words, the rot goes deep here. It's actual violence, it's incitement to violence, it's the normalization of violence. It should be unthinkable within the UN system. But even right now, we're seeing that the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres is not even talking about shutting this down.

So why are people only waking up to UNRWA rot now?

JS: I think actually the thing that finally broke the dam was the Israelis pulling together intelligence and sharing it with the United States and sharing it with other allied countries showing beyond a shadow of a doubt that UNRWA was involved not only in the 10/7 slaughter, but that UNRWA has been involved in terrorist operations going back for quite some time.

And Biden “paused aid”…

JS: Honestly, I'm still concerned that the Biden administration is putting a pin in this. It's just a temporary pause. It's not a long-term fix. I mean, they should be tearing this thing apart. They should be destroying it and creating something else. There should not be local workers from Gaza involved here. There should be outsiders only. It should be trusted NGOs doing this. It should be trusted UN agencies doing it. And yes, there should be a discussion about the resettlement of the original refugees and a rejection of the idea that this can be handed down in perpetuity to the progeny of the original refugees.

And UNRWA is perpetuating the crisis?

JS: UNRWA is a huge part of the problem. You have an indoctrination of 2.2 million Gazans where you see the way that the kids have responded to this, that they've bought into a certain culture.

You see it obviously, adults continuing to embrace this notion that Israel is a temporary problem and that eventually these people are going to go back, even though we've now seen 75 years, a track record now of a country that's not going anywhere. UNRWA has been part of this narrative that Israel is going to go away. And then of course, this makes them wildly popular in the Gaza Strip. This is a narrative that is parroted or maybe even originated by Hamas, but it's actually not even really rejected by the PLO, by Fatah, by the so-called pragmatists or the moderates within the Palestinian political arena.

But UNRWA efforts don’t extend to Lebanon, Jordan…

JS: You go up to Lebanon and you go to the refugee camps there. And those camps are literally run by radical groups. The Lebanese army can't go in, and so these radical groups govern there much in the same way that Hamas is governed in the Gaza Strip. And so of course, this is the same garbage that the kids are going to be taught. The culture that is imbued within the population, it's never going to change.

The radicalization levels are so incredibly high there, you can't imagine it. Then you go to Jordan. Basically, the same problem. I mean, look, you could say that at least in Jordan, people are able to leave the camps. Fine, but they're still being indoctrinated with this garbage. And then even you go to the West Bank, and this does raise the question that I've always wondered. How is it that you can be living in the Palestinian authority, you can be living under that government and yet still find yourself getting services from a refugee agency when you're living in Palestine? How is that even possible? So, there are these crazy, weird standards.

What about Congress? Isn’t their job to stop this kind of thing?

JS: In short, I don't know. I think, again, this idea of tiptoeing around the Palestinians, almost infantilizing them to a certain extent, "Well, they need this and they can't do it without us, and we need to just make sure..." I mean, there is also, by the way, a fear of the so-called Arab street. There's nothing that makes anybody more afraid than angry Arab populations that are upset with the United States. There has just been a lot of this.

And look, what needs to be understood here is if you want to give money to the Palestinians because of the poverty that let's just say a segment of the population is wrestling with, or if you want to deal with the education issues, fine. I mean, if that's how we want to allocate our funds, that's great. Why do it through an agency that is already known to be providing material support to Hamas, allowing their fighters to operate underground, allowing their fighters to fire rockets from within the compounds of the schools and hospitals that they operate? We should know better. We should know that this is a rotten address for American aid.

We are just afraid to pull the plug on this thing because of the political message of what UNRWA stands for. This is an organization that supports people who say that they have a right to return to their homes from 1948. And if you tell them that they can't, then they go bananas.

The heart of UNRWA’s goal?

JS: The point here is that this agency exists to perpetuate the Palestinian refugee issue. Every other UN agency is dedicated to resettling and reintegrating and solving crises, ending crises. That's what you do. So you have people that had to flee a war zone, but there's no UN agency demanding that people from Rwanda go back to their homes. Millions and millions of people have been resettled in the post-World War II era according to these principles. This is what the high Commissioner for refugees does. UNRWA does not. UNRWA has not resettled anyone. There are no solutions to the Palestinian problem. It is only the perpetuation of the Palestinian problem, and that has been UNRWA's position from very early on. There will be no resettlement of refugees. We will add more refugees to the roster, even though they're not refugees.

There was actually that famous series of tweets that Mike Pompeo put out in the waning days of the Trump administration where he said that the total number of refugees are under 200,000. This was the Secretary of State doing this. People went nuts because he was talking about math. I mean, these are actual numbers. By the way. I don't even think that those numbers are real. I've heard estimates from the Israelis that it's probably under 35,000 of the original 600,000 refugees from 1948 or '49. Look, I don't know how you get to the right number here. That delta between 35,000 and 200,000 is significant in the sort of context that we're talking about here. But bottom line, UNRWA had no interest, has no interest in solving this problem. They look at the Palestinian refugees or the so-called refugees on their registry as clients, not as people who need assistance, and that ultimately you want to get them off the books.

But cutting of funding for UNRWA will harm Palestinians.

JS: Let's just be clear. What the Israelis shared was not just the 12 people, but that there was 1200 people, roughly 10% of the local Gazan working for UNRWA were involved in Hamas terrorist activity. That's a major problem. 10% is not a few bad apples. 10% is a significant chunk, enough for people to start to worry about what it is that this organization is trying to accomplish and how it's been run.

But then I think gets to the broader question, which is, okay, Palestinians need assistance in Gaza. I will be the first to tell you that that is 100% true. If you look at the misery there, the lack of supplies, the illness, the people who are internally displaced, no question. I mean, it's actually kind of ironic and sad that right now for the first time, we have actual refugees in Gaza as opposed to all of those that have been on UNRWA's registry who were not actually refugees. They had homes.

Now, those homes have, unfortunately, many of them have been destroyed in this war launched by Hamas. But then the question becomes, what do you do to help them? And I think the answer is bring in aid, bring in assistance, have the UN help if the UN wants to help. Don't let it be this organization that has been infiltrated by Hamas, that has created a lot of the problems that we're dealing with right now and never solved them. That is really the answer. And so my answer has been consistently, bring in an agency, literally any other agency other than UNRWA. I don't care who does it. It just cannot be this organization that has been complicit in the perpetuation of the conflict that is now taking yet another horrible toll on the Middle East. And UNRWA is once again, right at the center of it.

Governance of the West Bank and Gaza is another major issue…

JS: If you're going to try to revitalize the PA, then maybe have them do what should have been done in the first place, which is there should be a government handling government services. God forbid, right, that a government would actually do this and be responsible to its own people. But there are bigger problems too, because I mean, we didn't talk about it here today, but Hamas and the PA are at war with one another. I mean, literally, people talk about a two state solution. They're two Palestinian statelets right now, and they're not governed by the same entity. So you need to solve that. You need to create a more functioning government. You need to get UNRWA out of there. You need to get a different agency, someone else providing that kind of assistance in the short term with a long term plan that gets the government providing for the people again. That's really what we need to be doing here.

But the idea of keeping a UN agency in perpetuity, operating in a disputed territory where it's taking one side against the other and actually inciting the violence, this does not sound like peacekeeping. It doesn't sound like stability. It sounds like insanity.

Full transcript here.

SHOWNOTES

Congressional Testimony - United Nations’ Bigotry Towards Israel: UNRWA Anti-semitism Poisons Palestinian Youth  (Foundation for Defense of Democracies, 8 November 2023) by Jonathan Schanzer

Congress must fix UNRWA’s Hamas problem (Jonathan Schanzer, Washington Examiner, 31 July 2021)

UNRWA explainer-- United Nations’ Bigotry Towards Israel: UNRWA Antisemitism Poisons Palestinian Youth (Jonathan Schanzer hearing, FDD, November 8 2023)

The Terrorist-Aid Agency (Jonathan Schanzer, Commentary, 7 January 2024)

A U.N. Agency Is Accused of Links to Hamas. The Clues were There All Along (Wall Street Journal, 2 February 2024)

Report: U.N. Teachers Celebrated Hamas Massacre (UN Watch, November 2023)

UNRWA textbooks still include hate, antisemitism, despite pledge to remove - watchdog (Times of Israel, 7 July 2022)

UNRWA Education: Textbooks and Terror (IMPACT-se, November 2023)

Examples of UNRWA Curriculum Here: UNRWA Education: Reform or Regression? A Review of UNRWA Teachers and Schools Concerning Incitement to Hate and Violence (IMPACT-se, March 2023)

UNRWA: Hate Starts Here: How UNRWA Teachers Indoctrinate Palestinian Children and Promote Terrorism and Antisemitism (UN Watch, November 2023)

How UNRWA Supports Hamas (Jewish Policy Center, 2007)

Hamas Official: Protecting Civilians in Gaza Is Up to UN Refugee Agencies (Center for Immigration Studies, 1 November 2023)

Hamas condemns UNRWA removal of teacher for incitement to terrorism (UN watch, 23 March 2023)

Expose the Palestinian ‘Refugee’ Scam (Wall Street Journal, 5 July 2018)

The UN teaches Palestinian children to murder Jews (Washington Examiner, 29 November 2023)

10 Things to Know About the UN and Hamas (Foundation for Defense of Democracies, 16 November 2023)

Statement on UNRWA Allegations (U.S. Department of State, 26 January 2024)

How Hamas Manipulates Gaza Fatality Numbers Examining the Male Undercount and Other Problems (Washington Institute for Near East Policy, January 2024)