Aid to Palestinian Refugees

"They say, if you give someone a fish, you feed them for a day. But if you teach someone to fish, they can learn to feed themselves for a lifetime. And so is the quandary of the United Nations Relief Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) – an agency that was specifically designed to keep Palestinians refugees."
"It’s the only UN agency specifically set up in 1949 and internationally funded for a designated group of people – to keep them under refugee status for eternity or as long as Israel exists. Since the Second World War, millions of refugees have successfully resettled around the world, including over 860,000 Jews fleeing Arab countries, but UNRWA has kept Palestinians reliant on aid and as pawns in the Middle East conflict."
Avi Benlolo, President and CEO of Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies 

Palestinian children attend a class at the UNRWA elementary school in the Shati refugee camp in Gaza City, in April 2013. (AP/Hatem Moussa/File)

"...Dujarric [UN spokesman] said Guterres [UN Secretary General] considers UNRWA’s work 'essential to Palestinian refugees' and calls on U.N. member nations and others to continue supporting the agency’s 'crucial work'."
"Guterres told reporters later that he has been 'acting quite significantly to make sure that we strengthen UNRWA and UNRWA’s capacity to deliver'."
"He said he has been appealing to all countries to support UNRWA, stressing that 'we should distinguish what are the revelations made, or accusations made, in relation to members of the management of UNRWA from the needs to preserve UNRWA, to support UNRWA, and to make UNRWA effective'."
"Asked if Krahenbuhl should resign, the secretary-general said he supports 'due process' and any action he may take will be based on the results of the investigation."
Edith M. Lederer, Associated Press

A Palestinian woman stands outside a closed school run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), during a strike by the agency's employees union to protest against job cuts, in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip October 2, 2018. (photo credit: IBRAHEEM ABU MUSTAFA / REUTERS)

"If the claims are correct, then that is totally unacceptable."
"In anticipation of the independent investigation, we are going to stop our further payments [following the step taken by the Netherlands and Switzerland]."
"We will take a critical look at the report ... It is not because you stand up for a good cause that you can do whatever you want."
Minister of Development Alexander De Croo, Belgium

"[The organisation] regrets [the decision by Switzerland and the Netherlands."
"There is an ongoing investigation concerning UNRWA, and nothing that is being disseminated or discussed are findings of the investigation, only allegations and rumors."
"[The public should] wait for the actual conclusions of the investigation." [Donors should] keep their funding in place [for the Palestinian refugees]."
UNRWA spokesperson Tamara Alrifai

But why? Why should the international community continue to fund a vastly outdated United Nations arm whose purpose is to perpetuate ad infinitum the refugee status of people who fled a geography 70 years ago, and whose succeeding generations have swelled the refugee count by millions in an interminable choreography of victimhood? Where 'refugee' status is maintained as a deliberate political, religious statement of non-acceptance of the presence of a religious-ethnic group reclaiming their heritage geography.

The Commissioner of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) has been revealed to have utterly corrupted an already-corrupted entity whose theoretical purpose is to provide support to Palestinian refugees, in the provision of food, shelter, education, health care and any other recognized necessity of life. He ruled UNRWA like an entitled despot, engaged in sexual misconduct, nepotism, retaliation, discrimination and overall abuse of authority.

This, aside from the culture of supported anti-Semitism within the structure and sentiments of the UN agency that was a great employer of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, among those employees being members of Hamas, the terrorist group whose sole function is reflected in their mandate's guiding principle, as the destruction of Israel. UNRWA has acted as a self-sustaining bureaucracy, a fiefdom answerable to the whims of its executives. Its hostility to Israel has always been recognized.

UNRWA, in representing an institution that by definition is meant to avoid politics and in a spirit of global neutrality seeks to guide its nation-communities toward peace, reconciliation, opportunity, equality and fairness to all, fails to reflect that imperative. An internal United Nations report revealed allegations that UNRWA Commissioner Krahenbuhl fostered all manner of operational irregularities in the obvious belief that no criticism would ever come his way, as an inviolable arbitrator of 'justice' for the Palestinians.

Throughout UNRWA schools for Palestinian children educational curriculum is rife with anti-Semitic tropes. UNRWA has always acted with total impunity, its decisions going unquestioned, its obvious tilt accepted, and despite its staff openly engaging in anti-Semitic slander, and the UNRWA authority going so far as to support Hamas in its defiance of condemnations against its assaults upon Israeli civilians, even found during conflict with the IDF to accede to weapons storage in UNRWA schools, it is left unscathed by such revelations.

That it is the United Nations itself looking into UNRWA affairs, perhaps in an effort to quell increasing complaints and reports from former UNRWA officials, bodes ill for the quality of the investigation and its eventual findings. That the UN report had been 'leaked' to AFP and Al-Jazeera, two news organizations particularly known for their virulent anti-Israel bias should come under close scrutiny.

The Netherlands and Switzerland also decided earlier this week to suspend their contributions [File: Mohammed Ballas/The Associated Press]