Facilitating an ever-increasing Palestinian refugee population, UNWRA ensures its existence by exacerbating a crisis it was created to resolve.
By Craig Snoyman
On Friday 14 May 1948, David Ben Gurion declared that there would be an independent Jewish state. At midnight and as soon as the world had its first Jewish state for 2000 years, that state was at war with its neighbouring Arab states.
When the fog of war lifted, hundreds of thousands of Arab refugees had fled the Jewish state and hundreds of thousands of Jews had been expelled from Arab countries. The approaches to dealing with the refugees were dealt with very differently by the opposing parties. The cash-strapped fledgling state agreed to absorb all the Jewish refugees. The Arab countries placed the refugees that had fled Israel, into refugee camps with the promise that they could return to their homes once Israel was destroyed. These refugees were not allowed to integrate into the economies they found themselves.
To deal with the Arab refugee crisis, a new organisation was born. The United Nations established a relief organisation called the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, commonly referred to as UNRWA. While the UN already had a refugee assistance body, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), it was deemed necessary to create a special temporary body to deal with the Arab refugee crisis – “The Catastrophe” or “Nakba”, as the Arab countries called it.
According to UNHCR, a person is no longer a refugee if he or she has “acquired a new nationality, and enjoys the protection of the country of his new nationality”. Furthermore, according to UNRWA, a Palestine refugee is a “person whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948 and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict…as well as their descendants”. Each descendant of the original refugees from the war is automatically registered as a refugee. Palestinians remain refugees in perpetuity. UNRWA boasts that:
“When the Agency began operations in 1950, it was responding to the needs of about 750,000 Palestine refugees. Today, some 5.9 million Palestine refugees are eligible for UNRWA services.”
Under UNRWA stewardship, there has been no resolution of the refugee crisis and the number of Palestinian refugees has increased exponentially. Each Palestinian refugee can claim the right to relocate to the State of Israel (‘the right of return’). UNRWA, like Israel’s neighbouring Arab countries, has obstructed the resettlement of the refugees in the areas where they reside or allow for relocation in in other countries.
The humanitarian agency providing education, health care and social services to needy Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, UNRWA employs at least 30,000 personnel and has an annual budget of $1.2 billion. For as long as there are Palestinian refugees, UNRWA will, like Audrey the man-eating plant in Little Shop of Horrors, demand that the world “Feed me, Feed me”. By ever increasing the number of refugees, UNWRA ensures its existence by inhibiting resolution of the crisis that it was created to resolve.
Following generations of Palestinians having received an UNRWA education, respected polls over many years have consistently revealed disturbing attitudes of those who passed through the educational system. At least four generations have been taught that Israel has stolen their land, there is no such entity as Israel, that they will return to the homes of their grandparents or great-grandparents, and the Jews will be thrown into the sea or return to Europe. Under the Palestinian right of return, the Jews that remain will be a minority in their own country.
So many of the textbooks are so antisemitic that certain countries recently refused to continue sponsoring UNRWA. Maps in these textbooks deny the existence of Israel referring to it as Palestine. Each UNRWA school allows for students to be recruited to the Islamic Bloc, Hamas’s student group. UNRWA teachers have for many years been voted into senior Hamas positions, without sanction. Is it any surprise that 85% of the Gazan population expressed support for Hamas following the 7 October massacre and calls for the elimination of Israel, remain ever-present. By contrast, denazification education in post-WWII Germany resulted in patent antisemitism disappearing within one generation.
Over the years, complaints had been addressed to UNRWA, mostly by Israel, that Hamas:
– was constructing terror tunnels under its schools
– storing weapons in or near the Agency’s facilities, including schools
– its antisemitic academic syllabus and
– employment of active Hamas terrorists.
UNRWA has refrained from openly condemning Hamas or holding it directly responsible for any misconduct. UNRWA has avoided alienating Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Much like anything else in Gaza, nothing can be done without Hamas’s approval. However, by being an organ of the United Nations, UNRWA is clothed with legitimacy and swats away such complaints with impunity.
In 2014, it was an open secret that Hamas had a control centre under Al-Shifa hospital. This was denied by UNRWA and more vigorously by the doctors working in the Hospital. On a recent visit to South Africa to highlight Israeli “atrocities” in Gaza, Dr Madds Gilbert, addressed audiences stating that in the 20 years he had been working in hospitals in Gaza, he emphatically denied ever seeing any sign of Hamas activity in the hospitals. The facts that have been exposed by Israel since entering these ‘hospitals’ – revealing Hamas’ use of them for purposes of terror – reveal Dr Gilbert was at ease lying to gullible audiences throughout South Africa.
Since the invasion of Gaza, the Israeli Defence Force has revealed Hamas tunnels under virtually every UNRWA school and posted videos showing that every single hospital in Gaza served as a Hamas command post, with tunnels underneath them. One hospital head confessed that he and at least 16 staff members were also members of Hamas. The director of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan hospital in Jabaliya, revealed in a Shin Bet interrogation that his northern Gaza hospital was turned into a military facility under Hamas’s control and that at one point, it had housed a kidnapped soldier.
Also discovered was that UNRWA properties have been found to have stored rockets and munitions and that UN material had been used in the construction of terror tunnels. While it would appear that Hamas terrorists have had free access to UNRWA supplies, both pre-and post-discovery, UNRWA has remained silent.
Hillel Neuer of Human Rights Watch recently disclosed that UNRWA employees had their own private media communication channel. Immediately following October 7, over 2500 Hamas-supporting UNRWA teachers openly celebrated the massacre.
The war has stripped away UNRWA’s façade and exposed its complicity with Gaza’s terrorist groups who are out to destroy Israel.
Its initial mission long obsolete and fostering anti-Israeli sentiment and Jew-hatred, UNWRA now needs to be dismantled.
About the writer:
Craig Snoyman is a practising advocate in South Africa.
While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves. LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).
This article was written before the recent expose in which UNWRA was found to be so intricately entwined with Hamas. But to end the 1948 war is to prevent the exponential growth of “refugees” and integrate them. There are tough choices to be made, but now more than ever, there are compelling reasons for UNRWA to become a footnote in history
An American citizen with Palestinian grandparents living in Beverly Hills California is listed by UNWRA as a refugee and if he were to adopt a child that child would also be a refugee
This corrupt terrorist supporting organization must be shut down
Detroit born Member of the US House of Representatives, Rashida Tlaib, is the perfect example of a “Palestinian refugee” as defined by UNRWA. Her 13 siblings, all born in the USA, also qualify as “Palestinian refugees”