Israel is accused of shooting at United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) facilities in the Gaza Strip without making sufficient effort to avoid hurting innocent civilians encamped there. The Schabas-McGowan Davis report to be released on the 23rd of this month and soon to be leaked, will concentrate on proving these charges, while accusing the IDF of many more violations of international law.
Already, a strong report issued by NGO Monitor explores some of the many war crimes perpetrated by Hamas, which caused most of the civilian deaths in Gaza. Another report, issued by UN Watch, establishes and details the high moral standards governing IDF conduct in Gaza, which in many instances were far more exacting than international law requires.
The IDF has just issued another report, which is extremely well documented and reliably authenticated.
It demonstrates the utter falsehood of the biased charges.
The charges surrounding the shooting of UNRWA facilities mostly relate to the return of fire against attackers, and in one instance, a likely failed Hamas rocket which exploded in an UNRWA school yard.
UNRWA, for its part, has admitted that on three separate occasions its schools stored ammunition and rockets, claiming that this violated its policy of neutrality. It “corrected” the unfortunate violations by returning the ammunition to “local authorities.”
There can be little doubt about what these “local authorities” did with the ammunition and rockets given to them by UNRWA.
But it is interesting to ask who and what is this UNRWA which plays such a central role in the life of Gaza and of the terrorist organization Hamas. A comprehensive study on UNRWA has just been published by the Institute for Zionist Strategies.
UNRWA was created in 1948 to help the Palestinian refugees. After the end of WWII, there were millions of refugees and the UN had established an agency to help them. But because of the power of the Arab delegation, the UN set up a special agency to help Palestinian refugees. With malice aforethought, no definition of “refugee” was included in the founding enactment, so that UNRWA was able to establish its own criteria. While all over the world refugee status is personal and applies to those who fled or were evicted, UNRWA extends the definition to the children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and to all those who follow. Thus the approximately 650,000-800,000 genuine Palestinian refugees, many if not most of whom have died, are currently counted by UNRWA to number around 5.5 million.
In addition, while the major UN refugee agency, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), considers it most humane and effective to resettle refugees in the land of their current residence and not seek to uproot them again nor to impose turmoil and resistance in their former countries of residence where new, ethnic-based nation states have been created, UNRWA accepted the Arab League’s dictates to define its goal as the return of all refugees and their progeny to their original place of residence – no matter how much time has elapsed and no matter what has taken place there in the interim.
While UNHCR considers itself a facilitator to help direct the funds given by members of the UN to host countries which are to provide the services and thus facilitate integration, UNRWA did the opposite. It quickly established a huge bureaucracy which takes the contributed funds and then operates its own programs of education, welfare, health, culture, legal representation and many others. UNRWA is a major government agency within Hamas-controlled Gaza. It may not be called a government, but it is precisely that.
It operates schools, medical facilities, cultural centers and activities, and provides welfare payments and services.
UNRWA employs over 26,000 workers, including 200 highly paid executives.
Can anyone doubt that it is in bed with Hamas? As far back as 2004, all of its governing council members were Hamas activists, and 23 of the 27 UNRWA labor union representatives were from Hamas.
Who, besides UNRWA, could so beneficently employ the rank-andfile minions who build, staff and administer the vast Hamas military infrastructure? In fact, an August 2014 FBI report found that many tens – perhaps hundreds – of UNRWA employees directly commit acts of terrorism.
Compared to the UNHCR, UNRWA spends four times more per capita for administration and has 30 times more employees per refugee. In total, it spends about $1.2 billion for the 5.5 million “refugees” it helps compared to the $2.3b. spent by the UNHCR for the 40 million refugees which it aids.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that the sooner a refugee integrates into society, the faster he becomes well adjusted and productive.
The UNHCR seeks to do just this. It believes that its connection with the refugee must be short-lived and not symbiotic. It seeks to integrate the client into the place of his current residence. It will therefore not employ the “client” refugee nor encourage him to focus on the past.
It helps the refugee based on current emotional and physical needs, not past grievances. It seeks to help the client move ahead and advance rather than wallow in what could or might have been.
UNRWA, of course, does just the opposite. It creates an identity of interest with the clients. It employs them as much as possible. Its schools emphasize and romanticize their past and the hardship their families suffered. They (and their progeny until eternity) are defined as permanent refugees. They are kept apart from the local population and the agency’s policies contribute mightily to local antipathy and bitterness.
UNRWA seeks to preserve and nurture the problem, not resolve it.
The IDF is falsely accused of recklessly harming civilians seeking refuge at UNRWA facilities. Though the biased Schabas-McGowan Davis report soon to be visited upon us will again regurgitate these conclusions, they have already been largely disproven.
UNRWA was originally created for a period of a little over a year, but its right to life has been renewed 65 times. Enough. UNRWA should be allowed to expire. Mankind would benefit greatly, including especially its Palestinian clients, whose lives it has ruined for generations.
The author, an attorney in Israel and the US, is the founding president of the Institute for Zionist Strategies. He is the chairman of the board of NGO Monitor.
@ mar55:
You’re back, hope you’re vacation was enjoyable.
@ CuriousAmerican:
In your commentary you forgot to mention they need the money to buy cement and construction materials to rebuilt destroyed tunnels and build additional ones to attack Israeli children in their schools and Israelis working in their kibbutzes.
The only thing transparent about you is your hypocritical nature and your love for the enemy.
Do you think you can continue to come back to deceive us with your well practiced perfidy against the Jews?
Go. Marchate bribon.
@ mrg3105:
Hellooooo! Just waiting for Ted to start chit chat back up so I can respond to your last comment. 🙂 Chit chat expires every 10 days.
Amen! (to the heading of the article and the report)
I could use help in translating it from Hebrew to English
@ ArnoldHarris:
I would not want to do anything except: GET OUT OF THE UN!
We should not pay another penny to maintain an organization of liers and cheats who want our destruction but love our money. Supporting our enemies is committing suicide. Killing a rabid animal is the end of rabies from the source.
“Why doesn’t somebody do this”? “Why doesn’t somebody do that”? This is sounding like the anthem of the Jewish nation.
“Somebody” is the body politic of the Jewish ostensibly Jewish State of Israel, which, for some time now, has been electing to state power a bunch of wimps who act like the kapos of the Jew-killing industry of Nazi-occupied Poland in the early 1940s, but who fawn all over the goyim who run the US government whose collective ass-holes these semi-Jews think it incumbent upon themselves to lick.
No Jew of the State of Israel has anything to gain but much to lose by allowing the United Nations Organization and its UNRWA hirelings to continue to operate in Israeli-controlled territory as if the UNO or any other such organization or government had sovereignty in Eretz-Yisrael.
What to do with the “refugees”? For one thing, re-define them to represent reality. They ceased being refugees when some time in 1948-1949, when the newly-formed State of Israel survived the mass assault of the armies of all the neighboring Arab states. As a matter of fact, Israel should have booted out the UNO the day after the Six Day War was ended, with Israel in charge from Kantara on the Suez Canal to Quneitra on the far side of the Golan Heights.
Then and there, along with the quarter-million or so Arabs who marched themselves to the Jordan River crossings immediately after that war, the Israeli government should have cleaned out the UNRWA camps and sent all the refugees across the river to become King Hussein’s headache. And with nothing left for UNRWAites to do, it would be have even easier to pick them up, politely escort them to a long line of Egged buses, drive them to what was then Lod Airport, provide each one of them with his or her own chatzi falafel sandwich as going-away presents, and see to it they flew off into the western skies, never to return.
When you ponder such issues, and if you are as ferociously logical as any Jew ought to be in HaOlam HaZeh, there is typically only a single best way to resolve any problem. That includes the problem of the perpetual refugees.
That means, just cut the crap and get rid of them. First the UNRWA personnel, then their former clients, the “refugees”.
So what to do about all this now, going on 70 years later? Easy. Just use some of the money Israel still gets from the USA, mostly so you will buy their overpriced and increasingly militarily useless fighter-bombers, and use that money to smuggle those Arabs into any other place in the world where you can bribe the local authorities. Impossible, you say? Show me your your list of countries where such briberies do not take place on a routine basis.
And once emplaced there, what happens to those Arabs? Frankly, I couldn’t care less. Just so it won’t be happening on the soil of Eretz-Yisrael.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Exactly. Anti-Semites insist that we empathize with Jew killers, and many Jews capitulate to that demand.
Curio keeps implying that he `knows`us so well. He only knows the k and the w. He has missed the NO!
Thanks for the tip Bernard on how to post spammed comments! 🙂
It is somewhat difficult to ‘care’ about people who only want you dead but would rather torture you first, take all your money and land and then kill you. What’s the matter with us? Can’t we just overlook these ‘flaws’ and care a little more??
Ah yes…..and some people never change.
Here goes Curio warning us Jews to DO NO HARM. Notice he has to capitalize it to make sure we get the message??
And of course his other overstated comment he keeps repeating over and over…..’I know many here don’t care about the Arabs’. Boo hoo!
Hey, anti-Semites need jobs. They can’t all work for J Street. If you are going to shut down their places of employment, how can they afford to buy Pink Floyd cds?
The first rule of any treatment is do no harm.
DO NO HARM!
A good portion of the subsidies sent to the PA is spent by the PA public buying Israeli products. Israeli sodas, Israeli food products, and groceries.
I know many here do not care about the Arabs, but cutting UNRWA may hurt Israeli industry a bit as Palestinians buy less Israeli goods.
Have a detailed plan about what will follow UNRWA before dismantling it.
Dream on.
For the Arab-Islamic bloc that controls the UN, UNRWA is a potent weapon against Israel’s existence.
The prospects of it being dismantled in the foreseeable future are exactly zero.
UNRWA may stand in the way of the resolution of the Arab-Israel conflict but that is and has always been – since it was founded, its raison d’etre.