Facing Mideast Facts
In a blow to decades of myth-based policy, Team Trump last week cut all US funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency — a special body that does as much to distort the peace process as to help Palestinian refugees.
Since its founding in 1949 to take care of, as The Post’s Benny Avni put it, the roughly “750,000 Arab refugees from the war Israel’s neighbors launched to erase it off the map,” UNRWA has worked not to end that refugee crisis but to prolong it.
Key to that perverse mission has been the decision to grant refugee status to the descendants of the original ones — a rule applied for no other refugees in all the decades since World War II and the founding of the United Nations.
Where a normal accounting would have the population down to a few tens of thousands, UNRWA recognizes some 5 million Palestinian “refugees,” including even great-greatgrandchildren whose families have been citizens of Jordan and other nations for decades.
And Palestinian leaders continue to claim that any final peace deal must grant a “right of return” to Israel to all 5 million. Worse, UNRWA-overseen schools, media and so on work to keep those grievances fresh. UNRWA staff are also regularly caught enabling terrorists in attacks on Israelis.
The UNRWA cutoff needn’t, and shouldn’t, mean an end to US aid to Palestinian communities in the West Bank and Gaza, but the State Department will have to find partners who can provide the help without the ideology.
This is the latest step in the administration’s broad reordering of Mideast policy to recognize reality, including the cutoff of $200 million-plus a year in grants to the Palestinian Authority because it refuses to stop paying salaries to convicted terrorists and their families as well as the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
As Trump warned the Palestinian leadership in January: The “hundreds of millions of dollars in aid and support” from America is “on the table and the money is not going to them unless they sit down and negotiate peace.”
Getting to a deal just won’t be possible until all sides face the truth.