ODIOUS UNRWA

Last week, news broke that 12 employees of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the agency tasked with providing assistance and protection for Palestinian refugees, were personally involved in the October 7 Hamas rampage.  One UNRWA employee was armed with an anti-tank missile; another filmed a hostage being taken captive; yet another, an elementary school teacher, served as a Hamas commander and participated in the massacre at Kibbutz Be’eri. Another UNRWA employee kidnapped an IDF’s soldier’s body.  (Corpses are valuable to Hamas because Israel is known to release large numbers of prisoners to secure the return of its soldiers’ remains.)

UNRWA’s involvement in the atrocities did not end on October 7. One of the hostages recently released from Gaza revealed that he was held captive in an attic in Gaza for nearly 50 days by a teacher employed by UNRWA.

A second even more disturbing report disclosed that 10% of UNRWA employees have ties to Hamas or the Palestinian Islamic Jihad; while about 50% are close relatives to people with ties to those terrorist organizations.

These reports, provided by the Israeli government, were deemed “highly, highly credible,” by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Other governments agreed on the reports’ reliability. After their release, 15 nations suspended their financial contributions to UNRWA.

While the revelations may seem shocking, the most shocking thing about them is the fact that they shock. For anyone familiar with the history and performance of the agency should not have been surprised.

UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini  insists that the agency is dedicated to “upholding the values of the United Nations” and that it conducts its business with “zero-tolerance policy for hatred.”

The first claim is actually true. UNRWA does uphold the values of the United Nations, an international body that regularly targets Israel for condemnation.  A few years ago, its General Assembly passed a resolution dismissing any Jewish connection to the Old City of Jerusalem.  A UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women has blamed the tendency of Palestinian men to beat their wives on Israeli settlements. The Palestinian Authority’s UN delegation has blamed Israel for global warming. As Abba Eban, a former Israeli Foreign Minister, once quipped: “If Algeria introduced a resolution declaring that the earth was flat and that Israel had flattened it, it would pass by a vote of 164 to 13 with 26 abstentions.”

But the second part of Lazzarini’s statement – that UNRWA has “zero-tolerance for hatred” – is a lie. UNWRA was founded upon hatred of the State of Israel, and it has lived to up its disreputable origins ever since.

UNRWA was founded in 1949 to deal with the problem of the roughly 750,000 Palestinian refugees displaced in the War of Independence. That number has grown to about 5.9 million today, because UNRWA follows the unique practice of attributing refugee status, not only to actual refugees, but also to their descendants. UNRWA should have gone out of business decades ago. It survives and thrives because its definition of “refugee” assures it of an ever growing number of clients, which in turn entitles it to an ever growing budget and employee roster.

Roughly 800,000 Jews were displaced from their Arab homelands in the aftermath of the War of Independence at about the same time. But none of them are refugees because they were welcomed and granted citizenship in the State of Israel. Aside from Jordan, none of the Arab countries have granted citizenship to the Palestinian refugees and their descendants. Instead, they are confined to camps administered by UNRWA.

UNRWA deals only with Palestinians. The rest of the world’s roughly 30 million refugees are handled by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, which limits refugee status to the people actually displaced.

UNRWA employs more than 30,000 people, most of whom are engaged in “education.” To grasp the kind of education UNRWA provides to the Palestinians under its care, one should turn to a recently published joint report by the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education and UN Watch. The report documents case after case of UNRWA employees praising and encouraging the murder of Jews on social media. Each case is based on the UNRWA employees’ actual postings on the internet, which are readily verifiable.

In an October 2017 post, Labibeh Iskandarani, an UNRWA employee, posted a photograph of Adolph Hitler on Facebook, along with a caption reading:  “Hitler, are you sleeping? Wake up, honey, there are still some people you need to burn.” Three other UNRWA employees “liked” the post.

In June 2021, an UNRWA teacher in the West Bank, Nizar Khalil Abu Shaheen, shared and endorsed as “words that should be read” a post explaining how wealthy Jews control the United Arab Emirates and manipulate the Emiratis into establishing a Jewish settlement.

Does it make any sense that simple-minded and unambitious Emiratis are running this complex machine? The Emirates, and Abu Dhabi in particular, has [sic] the highest percentage of wealthy people in the world—an estimated 75,000 millionaires, most of which [sic] are rich Jews.

….

Question: Why don’t the capitalists rule the UAE directly, instead of these desert Arabs and their titles? The answer to this question is given in Henry Ford’s book, The International Jew, published in 1921, in which he states that “the Jews prefer to lead the world from behind.”

On March 29, 2022, a Palestinian named Diaa Hamarsheh went on a shooting spree in the Israeli town of Bnei Brak, killing 4 civilians and a responding Christian Arab policeman. An UNRWA math teacher named Adnan Shteiwi was so moved by the attack that the next day he posted a poem glorifying the murderer:

And what splendor is like you, o Diaa! Glory to your spirit, and eternity in Paradise

The martyr, Diaa Hamarsheh, Palestine shall not forget you, and your name shall forever remain in letters of fire, might, and magnificence.

On October 8, 2022, almost a year to the day before the October 7 pogrom, a Palestinian named Udai Tamimi murdered an 18-year old IDF female soldier named Noa Lazar, pictured below, at a checkpoint while she was changing shifts.

Adnan Shteiwi, an UNRWA math teacher, thought this was wonderful. He posted a poem glorifying Tamimi as a “martyr,” and referring to “his pure body,” as “a sacrifice to Allah.”

Arwa al-Najjar Umm Islam, another UNRWA math teacher, joined in celebrating Noa Lazar’s murder. She posted a photograph praising Tamimi for “curing the wounds of the homeland.”

On November 14, 2014, two Palestinian terrorists murdered five Jewish worshipers in a West Jerusalem synagogue, along with a responding Druze police officer. The terrorists used axes, knives, and a gun. Riad Nimer, an UNRWA teacher in Lebanon, lauded the attack as “a unique and heroic act of self-sacrifice.”

In May 2021, Zaher Fanous, an UNRWA teacher in Syria, posted a gruesome photo gallery depicting the destruction caused by Hamas rockets lobbed at Israeli civilians. He added the caption: “Happy holidays, Tel Aviv.”

These repugnant messages were not communicated secretly behind closed doors, or casually at a bar after an exhausting day at work. These messages were shared and posted publicly, on social media. The UNRWA teachers and employees sharing them were not acting surreptitiously. They were acting openly. They not only harbored the pernicious sentiments expressed in the posts – they knew that their readers and fellow UNRWA employees would hold them too.

UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini may prattle on about UNRWA’s “zero-tolerance policy for hatred.” But the real voices of UNRWA reveal something very different. These voices explain the participation of UNRWA employees in the Hamas pogrom, and they illustrate the “values” which the UNRWA employees teach their youthful Palestinian charges.

That is why the report that 12 UNRWA employees were personally involved in the October 7 massacre should not shock. Twelve crossed the border to commit crimes. But the entire organization was with them in spirit. If they could not be there to join in the murder and rape personally, it was only because they were hard at work in Gaza, attending to the business of indoctrinating young minds to grow up to be the next cadre of murderers and rapists.