UNRWA has subjugated the Palestinian people
National Post, 04 February 2024
The UN agency's existence after all these years means Palestinians are not considered capable of managing their own affairs
There has been much wringing of hands, furrowing of brows and raising of eyebrows over the “news” that some employees of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) participated in the terror attacks of Oct. 7. Some pearls have even been clutched.
Canada has “paused” its funding of UNRWA, even though it has already sent $48 million this fiscal year. The figure includes $20 million sent as emergency aid for Gaza after the Israel-Hamas war had begun. Another $25 million was sent as the first instalment of $100 million in funding announced last June. Officials at Global Affairs Canada are shocked to find out that gambling is going on in Casablanca. Might there have been some way to know what UNRWA was up to?
They might have tried reading the Post. Here is the headline on Avi Benolo’s column from last June, not last week: “Liberals to spend $100M to prop up terror-supporting Palestinian governments.”
To be clear, if the vaunted Israeli intelligence services did not know that Hamas was planning an attack on the day it took place, no foreign government could be expected to know that UNRWA might be complicit in such. However, that UNRWA has, for decades, been up to anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli mischief is no surprise to anyone with even a passing familiarity with the region.
For those who might need a primer, Terry Glavin tells the tale from the 1960s onward, arguing that, even compared with terror groups, “UNRWA has been the greater impediment to peace, because its entire purpose is to sustain a huge and ever-expanding population of Palestinian refugees in the delusion that one day, the Jewish state of Israel will be destroyed, and they’ll all be free to return to their ancestors’ towns and villages.”
“The problem with UNRWA isn’t just a few bad apples, or a bushel or a peck of bad apples,” Glavin writes. “It’s the entire tree, trunk, root and branch.”
If the branch is the complicity in terror, the trunk is the teaching of hatred for Israel and Jews in the schools of Gaza and the West Bank. But the root also needs more attention.
Why is UNRWA running hundreds of schools in the Palestinian Authority (PA), which was established 30 years ago with the Oslo Accords? Why does UNRWA provide medical and social services more than 70 years after it was established in the aftermath of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War?
The principal problem with UNRWA is not that it does bad things, or even that it does good things badly. The problem is that it is doing things that the Palestinians ought to be doing for themselves. No self-respecting people would want their health system to be run by the Red Cross years after a natural disaster. UNRWA in Gaza is like FEMA (the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency) still running New Orleans years after Hurricane Katrina.
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