A bill has been introduced in Congress to require long overdue accountability from the United National Relief and Works Agency, abbreviated as UNRWA. The bill makes sense — up to a point.
The more fundamental question is: Why does UNRWA still exist?
It was founded some 75 years ago to aid those displaced by the attack of five Arab nations on the fledgling State of Israel in 1948. Critical fact: Not a single other refugee problem from that time still exists. That is because the refugees of that time, as well as the benevolent agencies or political entities of that time, wanted to solve the other refugee problems. The goal was to resettle the refugees, not to perpetuate their plight.
Not so the Palestinians. Their goal, as well as that of their supervisory entities, was to perpetuate their refugee status. They have succeeded beautifully in advancing that perverse goal. The ultimate idea was to displace Israel, not to resettle displaced Palestinians.
A major instrument of this malign, internationally unique effort was UNRWA. As the years — and decades — wore on, it consolidated as a political tool, its effectiveness in nurturing terrorism inversely proportional to its effectiveness in resettling Palestinians. The agency should be abolished. Short of that, it should not be funded by the US. Short of that, the bill in Congress includes provisions that would be fundamentally ethical in any other context but are controversial in the UNWRA context. As reported by JNS, further American aid to UNWRA should be subject to these detailed conditions:
• No UNRWA employee is a member of a terrorist organization such as Hamas or Hezbollah, or has advocated terrorist activity, or engaged in anti-American, anti-Israel or anti-Semitic rhetoric.
• No UNRWA infrastructure or resource is being used by terrorist organizations.
• UNRWA is subject to a comprehensive financial audit and has implemented a system of vetting and oversight to prevent any diversion of UNRWA resources to terrorist organizations.
• No UNRWA school or facility uses textbooks or other educational materials to disseminate anti-American, anti-Israel rhetoric.
• No recipient of UNRWA funds is a member or affiliate of a foreign terrorist organization.
• UNRWA holds no affiliations with financial institutions that the US deems or believes to be complicit in financing terrorism.
That such details even need to be articulated, let alone put into law, testifies to the inherently and the historically malevolent nature of this organization. Trump was right to defund it. Biden is wrong to refund it. If he must, let it at least be under these conditions.
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