UNRWA is a 75 year old United Nations program that is unique. No other group of refugees has a UN organization specifically dedicated to them, and there have been countless migrations away from wars and disasters in those 75 years.
Want a list? Here’s a selection of the big hitters since the formation of UNRWA in 1949:
- Venezuela
- Syria
- Afghanistan
- Yemen
- Vietnam
- Yugoslavia
- Iraq
- Rwanda
- Mozambique
- Sudan
No dedicated UN organizations for any of these people, and the reasons are obvious. First, the United Nations cares not a whit for refugees except as they can be used to generate funding from the member countries. Second, most of these people were absorbed into neighboring countries or simply returned home, so the various crises were temporary. And third and most troubling, there was no unified bloc of UN member countries dedicated to the destruction of any of these sources of refugees, except for Israel.
The Arab world was ferociously against the reestablishment of the state of Israel, and immediately started a war whose intent was its destruction. They lost, and the Arabs who had been living in the area and left, many at the direction of those Arab countries, had nowhere to go.
Why is that? Because the Arab countries surrounding the new state of Israel did not want them! So they dumped them in refugee camps and begged the world and the UN for help. Which they got. But those camps rapidly morphed into cities, with markets and malls and hospitals and all of the accoutrements of modern life, with the bonus of funding from the rest of the world.
That funding — for schools and food and infrastructure — was funneled through the UNRWA, which now employs almost 30,000 people, most of whom are themselves the descendants of those original refugees! How the great-grandchild of someone who left Israel in 1948 is considered a refugee is a question for the ages!
Refugee: noun: a person who flees for refuge or safety, especially to a foreign country, as in time of political upheaval, war, etc.
Seems reasonable, but with the growth of those refugee camps came the opportunity for tremendous graft, and a political cudgel with which to beat Israel. So there was no impetus for resettlement of the original refugees, and in fact the opposite occurred. The “Palestinians,” complete with a Soviet-inspired terrorist organization known as the “Palestine Liberation Organization” became the darlings of the unaligned world, and their plight was front-and-center at the UN. Israel became both a proxy for the developed Western nations, and a convenient focus of anti-Semitism.
The oceans of money (from the UN, the EU, and oil-rich Arab countries) pouring into these “refugee” camps was increasingly used not for the maintenance and improvement of the residents, but for the creation of a vast structure of indoctrination via education. And the primary subject was the demonization of Israel with the ultimate goal of its destruction. With so much graft opportunity, is it any wonder that much of that funding was also redirected to the various terrorist organizations that sprang up? The PLO was the progenitor of them all, stealing most of the money for its leaders pleasure. Yasser Arafat (The first head of the PLO) amassed a fortune that Israel estimated at $1.3 billion!
And the current leadership is no different. In Gaza, the Hamas leadership is fabulously wealthy, using their terrorist organization for personal gain and much of it for personal safety (some live abroad). But a lot of the money is redirected for the purchase of weapons, the construction of a quasi-military infrastructure, and the funding of a large fighting force.
And who administers those funds as they flow into Gaza? Who is employed as teachers and administrators and nurses and doctors? The descendants of the original refugees who have been indoctrinated into the cult of death whose focus is the murder of Jews and the destruction of Israel. And they turn around and teach that to their children! Many of the schools in Gaza are run directly by Hamas and funded by UNRWA.
Is it reasonable to assume that UNRWA knows what is being taught in its own schools and those they fund? Is it reasonable to assume knowledge that the funds supposedly allocated for civilian construction are being redirected for the construction of a vast complex of tunnels and terror facilities? Is it reasonable to assume that huge amounts of money are used for purchase of weapons rather than food?
How can UNRWA claim ignorance when the evidence is literally all around them? Hundreds of miles of tunnels cannot be built in secret! How can UNRWA claim ignorance when there is direct evidence that their employees participated in the pogrom of October 7th? How can UNRWA claim ignorance when even the EU has criticized them for their use of educational materials in their schools that call for the destruction of Israel; when the curricula of their schools is explicitly dedicated to Jew-hate?
That the people of Gaza (and the West Bank) are rabid Jew-hating death-cultists is bad enough. But the fact that the United Nations, through its Arab-controlled UNRWA actively funds the systems that perpetuate it is even worse. Because as the world has seen since the creation of the PLO in 1964, the aim is simple…kill Jews and destroy Israel.
