Perpetuating Palestinian misery
UNITED NATIONS AGENCY VIEWED BY MANY AS PRIMARY OBSTACLE TO PEACE
The Aug. 31 announcement by the Trump administration that all U.S. funding to UNRWA — the UN Relief and Works Agency — would cease, immediately, was met with fury. Or was it?
On cue and script, the Palestinian Authority leadership lashed out at America, accusing the administration of the “annihilation of international law and security and stability in the region,” encouraging radical forces and terrorism.
The possibility of reduced funding leading to increased desperation and extremism is a very real possibility. It is well understood among the top echelons of the global foreign policy and defence communities that Israel prefers a more graduated, managed response to UNRWA’s flagrant abuses, ensuring that humanitarian needs are met without compromising security. Behind the recent headlines, there is significant concern within the Israel Defense Forces in particular, as to how further economic challenges in Gaza, in particular, may incite terror and, possibly, war.
The American position, however, should not come as a surprise to anyone. This administration tends to act rather boldly. The Secretary of State, the National Security Advisor and the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations have been clear and consistent in their criticism of UNRWA: that the billions of American dollars poured into the agency over seven decades have been misused to incite anti-Israel hatred and obstruct any hope of a peaceful resolution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Founded in 1949, UNRWA was intended to manage the immediate and short-term welfare needs of Palestinian refugees. It has, over time, hardened into an organization that many view as the primary obstacle to peace.
It begins with Palestinian “exceptionalism.”
In 1949, there were between 600,000 and 750,000 displaced Palestinians, virtually all of whom were subsequently officially registered as refugees. According to Dr. Einat Wilf, former member of the Knesset, leftist academic and expert on UNRWA, at the end of the 1948 Israeli War of Independence, there were approximately 1.3 million Palestinians in British Mandatory Palestine. (Jordan is comprised of 70 per cent of the territory of the former Protectorate.)
At the end of the war, 150,000 Palestinian Arabs either remained in or returned to their homes in the fledgling Jewish state. Approximately 250,000 were in other Arab states and 900,000, the vast majority, in the West Bank and Gaza.
In an exhaustive new book on the UNRWA issue (to be published in English next year), Wilf (with coauthor Dr. Adi Schwartz) painstakingly peels layers of historical lies and political malevolence to expose the current outrage that is UNRWA.
It begins with a very simple fact that is at the core of the conflict: unequivocal Arab rejection of the legitimacy of a Jewish nation state in modern-day Israel.
Whereas no one can dispute the fact of Israel’s existence, accepting it as a legitimate national presence is quite another matter.
In his autobiography, Israeli diplomat Abba Eban recalled his meeting in London with Arab League Secretary General Azzam Pasha on the eve of the UN Partition Resolution in 1947, which the Arabs opposed. Pasha was plain:
“If you win the war, you will get your state. If you do not win the war, then you will not get it. If you establish your state the Arabs might one day have to accept it, although even that is not certain … there will have to be a decision and the decision will have to be by force.”
The Arabs voted against the Partition Plan and shortly after attacked the newly declared state of Israel.
As with all war, there are tragic consequences.
In the unprecedented turmoil of the post-Second World War years, it is estimated that 80 million Europeans were displaced, many permanently. More than 750,000 Jews were expelled from Arab countries following the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. Countless conflicts in the ensuing decades have resulted in millions of displaced persons and refugees being resettled, most far from their original homes. Inherited refugee status, encouraged by an entrenched cycle of dependency and misguided notion of a “right” of return has not been applied in any global conflict other than the Israeli-Arab one.
The fantasy of return is stoked by UNRWA, which promotes the conferral of “refugee” status upon all descendants of individuals who left homes within the pre-’67 borders and never returned. Those numbers are actually closer to 30,000, not the more than five million recognized by UNRWA.
Each one of those five million is incited, by UNRWA and an entrenched culture of rejectionism, to believe in the fantasy, unfounded in international law, of a legal right to return to the birthplace of their ancestors, in effect, demographically ending the Jewish state.
Dave Harden, a highly regarded former senior USAID executive with decades of field experience in the Middle East, is critical of the sudden U.S. withdrawal of funding for UNRWA without a plan to manage and contain the inevitable, consequent disruption. He worries that the economic pressure could embolden Hamas and other extremists at the expense of the Palestinian Authority.
However, Harden’s view of UNRWA is that after 70 years, the structure and incentives of the agency have “ossified to create welfare dependency.”
“UNRWA just subsidizes dysfunction,” Harden explained on Tuesday, speaking with the National Post. “Palestinians do not want three more generations of food baskets.”
Instead of fire and brimstone rhetoric and promoting further cycles of violence, and decades of misery, perhaps this moment presents an opportunity to Palestinian leadership to work with the Israeli and international communities to address the reality and not fantasy of the situation.
ISRAEL PREFERS A MORE GRADUATED, MANAGED RESPONSE TO UNRWA’S FLAGRANT ABUSES.