Barry Werner – The US should Stop Funding UNRWA
UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) runs the Palestinian refugee camps in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. If you visit the West Bank or Jordan (Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria are pretty much off-limits these days), it’s not at all difficult to recognize the Palestine refugee camps, they are the ugly slums that lie just beyond the reasonably livable neighborhoods where most people live. Palestinians are bribed to live there by subsidies. The refugee camps are reverse-Potemkin villages intended to photogenically immortalize the suffering of the Palestinian people.
UNRWA does not help refugees return to living a normal life; instead, UNRWA is in the business of perpetuating their refugee status and the refugee status of all their future generations on the premise that they will all be allowed to return to Israel someday. There are various estimates of how many Arab refugees there were in 1948, but UNRWA claims the highest number, 750,000. Today, UNRWA claims there are about 5.3 million Palestine refugees eligible for their services, presumably waiting to claim their right of return to Israel, a country whose total population is 8.8 million.
UNRWA is the willing captive of Arab extremists. UNRWA claims it is forced to work with extremists or it won’t be allowed to operate at all, but history shows that UNRWA is only too willing to cooperate. Does UNRWA provide education? You can be sure it does. But who does it hire to provide that education? That’s right, Arab extremists teach the children to hate Jews and to take back Israel, and they train the children in warfare. UNRWA facilitates Arab extremists weaponizing the suffering of the Palestinian refugees against Israel (turning ploughshares into swords).
The world should rescue the Palestinian refugees from being victimized by UNRWA. UNRWA abuses them by casting them in the role of perpetual victims. They are not “refugees” in the way the word is normally understood.
UNRWA’s inflated budgets and fiscal irregularities are also disturbing, and there are credible reports that UNRWA works directly with terrorist groups in Gaza.
What would happen if the US, UNRWA’s most significant funding source, stops supporting UNRWA? If the US manages to put UNRWA out of business, UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) could take over its functions. Then instead of trapping the Palestinians in everlasting refugee status they would finally be allowed to live normal lives, and the tension their growing refugee presence causes in the Middle East will be eased.
Interestingly, Chief Palestinian Negotiator, Saeb Erekat said President Trump threatened “to starve Palestinian children” by threatening to cut the US funding of UNRWA. That is a revealing statement because it gets to the heart of the problem. The PA/PLO is trying to morally blackmail the West. The message is that unless the West supports UNRWA in encouraging Palestinian children to renew the war on Israel, the PA won’t spend any of its own money on feeding its own children, and it will be the fault of the West if their children starve. With that kind of logic, they can take over the world. They can say unless you give me everything I want, I will allow my children to starve and I will tell everyone that you are responsible for it. The truth is that even if the PA/PLO won’t feed their own children, the Western world, if not the Arab world, would certainly make sure there would be a transition program to keep Palestinian children from starving.
There are those who describe how UNRWA could be reformed. Personally, I think the best thing to do would be to put the present administrators of UNRWA out of a job.
