UNRWA is an obstacle to peace, should be abolished

United Nations agencies and officials are no strangers to scandal and infamy. U.N. peacekeepers caused a cholera epidemic in Haiti and committed horrific sexual abuses in Congo. In the 1980s, Kurt Waldheim, a former U.N. secretary-general, was unmasked as a former Nazi. Now comes the scandal of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, better known as UNRWA.

Israeli officials presented the U.S. with a dossier detailing involvement of 12 UNRWA employees in the massacre of Oct. 7. As reported by the Times, the charges range from kidnapping an Israeli woman to storing rocket-propelled grenades to murdering civilians. The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that “Intelligence estimates shared with the U.S. conclude around 1,200 of UNRWA’s roughly 12,000 employees in Gaza have links to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and about half have close relatives who belong to the Islamist militant groups.”

The new revelations were enough for the Biden administration to suspend its funding for the agency while it investigates. As of Tuesday, other major funders have followed suit.

But the fundamental problem is the UNRWA may be the only agency in the U.N. system whose central purpose is to perpetuate grievance and conflict. It should be abolished. The U.N. has two agencies dedicated to refugees. One, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, is responsible for the well-being of nearly all the world’s more than 30 million refugees. The other is UNRWA, which theoretically operates under the umbrella of the high commissioner but is really its own organization. No other group gets its own permanent agency.

Why? In part, because Arab countries such as Lebanon cruelly refused to fully absorb Palestinian refugees, refusing them not only citizenship but also, in many cases, the right to most forms of work. In 1991, Kuwait went further by expelling hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, because Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat supported Saddam Hussein during the Persian Gulf War.

The changing borders and independence movements of the postwar era produced millions of refugees: Germans, Indians, Pakistanis, Palestinians and Jews. Nearly all found new lives in new countries except for Palestinians. They have been kept as perpetual refugees as a means of both delegitimizing Israel and preserving the irredentist fantasy that someday their descendants will exercise what they believe is their “right of return,” effectively through the elimination of the Jewish state.

The Biden administration and other governments need to ask hard questions of UNRWA’s senior officials, starting with Commissioner General Philippe Lazzarini. If Lazzarini and his deputies didn’t know UNRWA was employing potentially hundreds of Hamas members or sympathizers, what sort of oversight were they exercising? And if they did know, are they not responsible?

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict can’t be solved so long as millions of Palestinians have been turned into the world’s only permanent refugees. By doing that, UNRWA makes itself an obstacle to peace — reason enough for it to go away.