Tag Archives: UNRWA

The Myth of Pocketbooks

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The United Nations has chosen the wrong enemy.

António Guterres wants the world to believe that peace can be engineered with a spreadsheet — that inequality is the disease, redistribution the cure, and justice a matter of financial rearrangement. In his January 15 address, he warned that concentrated wealth corrupts institutions and that most low-development countries are in conflict. The implication is unmistakable: balance the books and peace will follow.

“The top 1 per cent holds 43 per cent of global financial assets.  And last year alone, the richest 500 individuals added $2.2 trillion to their fortunes.

Increasingly, we see a world where the ultra-wealthiest and the companies they control are calling the shots like never before — wielding outsized influence over economies, information, and even the rules that govern us all.

When a handful of individuals can bend global narratives, sway elections, or dictate the terms of public debate, we are not just facing inequality — we are facing the corruption of institutions and our shared values.” – UNSG Antonio Guterres

But choosing the wrong enemy guarantees the wrong war.

Because evil is not an accounting problem.

The UN’s failure begins in its diagnosis. It treats terrorism as a social pathology when it is, in fact, an ideological one.

Terrorism is not born in empty wallets. It is born in minds captured by belief.

Two decades of research have demolished the claim that poverty causes terror. Terrorists are rarely the poorest of the poor. They are often educated, middle-class, and technically trained — the engineers of jihad, the lawyers of holy war. The suicide bomber is seldom starving. He is convinced.

If poverty produced terrorism, the poorest societies would be its factories. They are not. Many desperately poor states remain largely untouched by global jihad, while terror movements arise from politically radicalized societies with functioning middle classes and ideological incubators.

What correlates with terrorism is not poverty, but ideas combined with power: religious absolutism, revolutionary nationalism, grievance cultures, and failed identity — not failed GDP.

Arab girls at the Dalal Mughrabi High School for Girls, named after a terrorist who killed dozens of Israelis, including 13 school children

This is not an academic distinction. It is the fault line between clarity and catastrophe.

If money could defeat jihad, Gaza would be the proof. It is not — it is the refutation.

Gaza has received billions in international aid. What emerged was not prosperity, but the most elaborate terrorist war machine ever embedded in a civilian population: tunnels beneath hospitals, command bunkers under schools, rockets from playgrounds, children trained for martyrdom.

This was not a failure of funding. It was the success of ideology. And the UN instigates that very ideology claiming that Israel should have no sovereign control of who enters its country, and specifically that almost every Arab living in Gaza will move into Israel with UN support.

“We are totally committed in the cause of peace in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan and far beyond.” – UNSG Antonio Guterres

Hamas did not build tunnels because Gazans were poor. Hamas built tunnels because its charter demands Israel’s destruction, because martyrdom is sacred, because jihad is identity. Money did not create this worldview — it merely financed its execution.

You can flood a society with aid, but if its governing ideology is annihilationist, all you finance is a more capable war machine.

Once the UN misdiagnoses ideology as economics, the next failure becomes inevitable.

For decades, it has constructed and sustained a grievance system around the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) that functions symbiotically with jihadist aims. Through its agencies and resolutions, it has promised millions of SAPs who have never lived in Israel that they will one day “return” en masse into Israel — effectively proposing Israel’s demographic erasure through mass population transfer via international decree.

No state can survive if an external body claims authority over who may enter it and redefine its citizenship from the outside. Yet the UN has made this assault on sovereignty a central plank of its Palestine policy — while calling it “humanitarian.”

Through UNRWA’s unique multigenerational refugee status, displacement becomes inherited identity rather than a temporary humanitarian condition. Grievance becomes doctrine. Statelessness becomes culture. A territorial dispute becomes a perpetual weapon.

And then the UN asks for more money to sustain it.

Why does the UN persist in this inversion?

Because it refuses to judge belief systems.

It will not confront jihad as an ideology.
It will not describe Islamic terrorism as such.
It will not wade into cultural or civilizational dynamics because it sees itself as a neutral global body.

But neutrality toward ideology does not produce peace. It produces permission.

And because the UN will not fight belief systems, it substitutes economics.

It reframes terror as inequality.
It reframes jihad as deprivation.
It reframes mass murder as misallocated capital.

In doing so, it becomes part of a broader machinery seeking to shift wealth and power from the Global North to the Global South — not merely for development, but as moral rebalancing, regardless of whether this addresses the real drivers of violence.

Redistribution becomes its ritual response whenever violence erupts.

Which means: more authority, more money, more relevance for the UN.

This is not accidental. It is institutional self-preservation dressed as virtue.

So the world is invited to believe the problem is billionaires rather than beheaders. That terror is born from inequality rather than indoctrination. That peace will come from redistribution rather than defeating enemies.

Evil is not a pocketbook problem.
It is an ideology.

And no amount of redistribution will make a death cult lay down its weapons.

UNRWA’s Jerusalem Exception

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Every UN humanitarian agency coordinates with the authority that governs where it operates—except in Jerusalem. That exception is not a footnote. It is the story. And it exposes a mandate failure driven by politics, not humanitarian necessity.

UNRWA holds that humanitarian work requires coordination with governing authorities. In practice, it does so almost everywhere: with Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the Palestinian Authority—and even with Hamas in Gaza, despite Hamas’s terrorist designation by the United States, the EU, the UK, and others.

In Jerusalem alone, UNRWA refuses to coordinate with Israel, the authority exercising full municipal, policing, and regulatory control over the city.

Call it “coordination for access” if you like. It is still coordination. And municipal coordination is not a sovereignty concession (if one believes that Israel does not have sovereignty over eastern Jerusalem despite annexing it in 1980); it is a humanitarian necessity.

How the Facilities Came to Exist

UNRWA’s Jerusalem facilities were established between 1949 and 1967, when Jordan seized and annexed the eastern half of the city in a move not recognized by the UN or the international community. UNRWA nonetheless coordinated with the Hashemite authorities to build schools, clinics, and service centers—because humanitarian work requires coordination with whoever governs in fact.

That history matters. UNRWA’s Jerusalem footprint exists specifically because it once coordinated with an unrecognized occupier.

UNRWA offices in Jerusalem (photo: First One Through)

The Reversal

In 1967, Jordan entered the war, violated the armistice, and lost control of Jerusalem. Israel assumed governance and unified the city. Palestinian Arab residents became permanent residents with access to Israeli courts, healthcare, municipal services, and the right to apply for citizenship.

At that point, UNRWA reversed its logic. Where it coordinated with Jordan despite non-recognition, it now refuses to coordinate with Israel—by labeling eastern Jerusalem “occupied Palestinian territory,” theoretically negating its obligation to work with Israel.

That label sits uneasily with the UN’s own history. The 1947 Partition Plan never intended Jerusalem—east or west—to belong to an Arab state. The city was designated a corpus separatum, an internationally administered entity. Jerusalem was never meant to be Arab sovereign territory.

The contours of “Corpus Separatum” (in pink) in the United Nations 1947 Partition Plan stretched over Greater Bethlehem and Greater Jerusalem, marking the region as an international Holy Basin to be administered by the UN

An Outlier by Design

UNRWA’s mandate emphasizes cooperation with local authorities to ensure access, security, and civilian protection. That cooperation exists everywhere except Jerusalem. UNRWA coordinates with armed groups and unrecognized authorities elsewhere, yet refuses coordination with the governing authority in the city where coordination is most essential.

Refusing to coordinate with the authority responsible for public safety is not neutrality. It is an affirmative political act—one that inverts humanitarian logic by privileging narrative over civilian protection. UN immunity exists to facilitate coordination, not to replace it.

Continuity of Care—and the Standoff

Israel has enacted laws to shutter UNRWA offices in Jerusalem. UNRWA refuses to comply, invoking immunity and operating facilities largely outside municipal oversight. The confrontation exists because UNRWA chose inconsistency in the one city where consistency matters most.

“The UNRWA Jerusalem Health Centre, which serves hundreds of Palestine refugee patients every day is, for most of them, their only possibility of having access to primary healthcare….
These [Israeli] measures are a violation of the inviolability of United Nations premises and an obstacle to the implementation of the clear mandate of the General Assembly for UNRWA’s continued operations in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem.” – UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres January 15, 2026

The closure of UNRWA offices in Jerusalem would not create a humanitarian vacuum. Education, healthcare, and social services are already provided through municipal systems, national institutions, other UN bodies, and a dense NGO network operating in the city. What would end is not care delivery, but UNRWA’s parallel governance model.

Palestinian Arabs in Jerusalem rely daily on municipal emergency services, hospitals, and courts. UNRWA’s non-coordination removes the safety mechanisms coordination is meant to provide—for civilians, staff, students, and patients alike.

The Reckoning

UNRWA coordinated with Jordan when Jordan’s rule was unrecognized. It coordinates with Hamas despite terrorist designations. Yet it refuses to coordinate with Israel while Israel governs the city, extends legal status to its Arab residents, and has a network of service providers which can easily replace UNRWA in Jerusalem.

That is not humanitarian principle. It is selective politics.

Consistency is the minimum requirement of a mandate.
A mandate that works everywhere but Jerusalem is not a mandate—it is a message, and it is that UNRWA is not a humanitarian organization.

UNRWA remains a rusty tool of the 1947 Partition Plan which insists that holy sites in Jerusalem never fall under Jewish rule.

It’s Not You, It’s UN

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Of the many classic lines from the TV sitcom Seinfeld, “it’s not you, it’s me,” is a great one, used as an excuse to get out of a relationship. It’s a phrase familiar to anyone who has ever been in a relationship which one party simply does not enjoy and wants to terminate gently.

There is no relationship so poorly constructed and toxic today as between Israel and the United Nations, harmonious at the start but broken bit by bit since that time. In an effort to complete it’s desire of completing the creation of two states, a Jewish one and Arab one as conceived in the General Assembly vote of partition in November 1947, the institution has fabricated lies and noxious resolutions against Israel and Jewish dignity everywhere.

Follow what the UN does, and what it says, and a stark pattern emerges: Palestinian Arabs are granted surplus political rights across the entire map, while Israel is denied the basic attributes of sovereignty. This is not mediation. It is architecture, scaffolding producing a permanent conflict.

1) Start with the most basic injustice: where Jews may live and pray

Begin where ideology becomes lived reality.

Across territory, the UN labels Palestinian Arab non-Jewish residence as inherently legitimate everywhere, while Jewish residence is declared subject in advance, legal where a Jewish State was once allotted but illegal everywhere else. Through instruments like United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334, Jewish civilians are criminalized simply for living beyond armistice lines—before borders are agreed, before negotiations conclude, before sovereignty is determined.

This is unprecedented. In every other territorial dispute on earth, civilian life is separated from sovereignty. Here, it is collapsed—selectively.

Then comes the religious core.

At Judaism’s holiest site—the Temple Mount / Al-Haram al-Sharif—the UN endorses a so-called “status quo” that allows Muslim prayer as a matter of course while forbidding Jewish prayer outright. Jews may visit in finite numbers. They may not worship.

No neutral body sanctifies a regime where one faith’s prayer is normal and another’s is treated as provocation. That is not stability. It is hierarchy—polished with diplomatic language.

2) Escalate to sovereignty itself: borders without control

Every sovereign state controls who enters and who becomes a citizen. Israel is uniquely told this right is negotiable.

Through endless reaffirmations of a mass “right of return,” the UN demands that Israel absorb millions of Palestinian Arabs who never lived there—descendants of a war launched to destroy the state—thereby erasing Jewish self-determination by arithmetic rather than war.

No other UN member is ordered to commit demographic self-nullification as a condition of legitimacy. Only Israel is told that survival itself is subject to international approval. International demand.

A state that cannot control entry is not sovereign. A state treated this way is not being mediated in a peace process—it is being managed.

3) Why this only happens here: permanent UN wardship

The cause is clear.

The UN did not simply sympathize with Palestinian Arabs; it adopted them as permanent wards, institutionalized most clearly through UNRWA—a bespoke agency unlike anything else in the world.

Refugee status became hereditary. Dependency became intergenerational. There is no sunset, no graduation, no expectation of resolution. Failure carries no cost because accountability is externalized.

A guardian cannot be an honest broker. An institution whose relevance depends on a client’s grievance cannot afford peace. This isn’t humanitarianism anymore. It’s custodianship—and custodianship is the enemy of compromise.

4) The doctrinal rupture: inventing a “right to a state”

Only after the machinery is in place does the UN supply its legal fiction.

International law recognizes self-determination, not an inherent entitlement to sovereign statehood. Statehood is an outcome—earned through borders, reciprocity, and mutual recognition.

The UN rewrote this rule only and specifically for Palestinian Arabs, treating sovereignty as a pre-awarded verdict because of a partition plan it voted upon in 1947 that the party refused to accept. Once the destination is guaranteed, compromise becomes optional. Negotiations become theater. Pressure flows in only one direction.

No other people receive this upgrade. Only here does the UN convert aspiration into entitlement—and then insist it is merely being neutral.

5) The smoking gun: December 1990 recasting the conflict and the legitimation of violence

Then the mask slips.

In December 1990, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 45/130, reaffirming “the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples … for liberation from colonial and foreign domination by all available means.” The resolution was designed to close the chapter of apartheid in South Africa, but took a heavy detour into the Israel-Palestine conflict, recasting the entire partition plan of 1947. It referenced “colonial” entities fifteen times, “Palestinians” twenty-five times, and made the establishment of an Arab state a matter of freedom from racist and external oppression, not a discussion about self-determination.

In UN practice, this language cast Israel as a colonial entity and Palestinian Arabs as a people entitled to armed struggle to dismantle it.

From that moment on, terror could be reframed as resistance, and compromise as collaboration. The UN crossed the line from mediator to moral endorser of one side’s maximalist narrative.

6) The arithmetic of the fraud

Add it up and the numbers don’t lie.

Under the UN framework, Palestinian Arabs receive:

  • A guaranteed future state
  • Political rights inside Israel
  • A trans-sovereign right of return into Israel
  • Permanent UN patronage and advocacy
  • International legitimation of “armed struggle” against Israel

Israel, meanwhile, is left with:

  • Provisional borders
  • Conditional legitimacy
  • Criminalized civilian residence in disputed territory
  • Restricted religious freedom
  • Denied control over immigration
  • Violence against it rhetorically excused

In this jaundiced framework, Jerusalem, which was NEVER designated to be a Palestinian city even under the 1947 partition plan, can be called “occupied Palestinian territory,” a complete fabrication even according to the  UN itself.

This is not a formula for two states. It is one-and-a-half states for Arabs and half a state for Israel—and the imbalance is enforced, not accidental.

The conclusion the UN avoids

The United Nations is not an honest broker; it is an interested architect whose rules ensure the conflict cannot end, and Jewish dignity remains conditional around the world.

By sanctifying exclusion, denying sovereignty, adopting one side as a permanent ward, inventing rights it had no authority to grant, and legitimizing violence as “anti-colonial,” the UN has guaranteed perpetual war—then blamed one of the parties for refusing peace.

In Seinfeld, one party is afforded the opportunity to end the relationship; one party has the option of providing a face-saving excuse to part ways quickly and smoothly. Not so for Israel and the United Nations, where the UN continues to manufacture obstacles and then gaslight the Jewish State that it is the root of the problem.

The UN speaks as if it is a “moral compass” in an “age of chaos.” Perhaps it once was, at least directionally. It is definitely not in the Middle East today, where its votes and actions have led to the death and misery of millions.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres speaks at the UN headquarters in New York in September 2025

UNRWA Now is For ALL Arabs

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The United Nations has now openly confirmed what critics long understood: UNRWA isn’t an agency for a specific class of 1948 refugees—it exists for ALL Palestinian Arabs.

In a recent statement, the UN described UNRWA as essential for “millions of Palestinians, including Palestine refugees,” collapsing even the agency’s own elastic definition. The distinction has vanished. The entire population is the constituency.

UN admits that UNRWA is “irreplaceable lifeline” for every single Palestinian Arab.

This is a fundamental admission.
UNRWA was created in 1949 as temporary relief for Arabs – and only Arabs – displaced in a particular conflict. Twisted at its start, it has evolved into a hereditary, permanent system—unlike any refugee regime in the world—preserving grievance rather than enabling the “two state solution” the same UN purports to advance. Now the UN goes further, implying UNRWA’s mandate covers every Palestinian Arab regardless of any manufactured refugee criteria.

That is not humanitarian work. It is political infrastructure.

By broadening its mission to one entire group, the UN reveals UNRWA’s true function: a nation-building institution for Palestinians, not a neutral welfare agency. The “refugee” label is just a cudgel to wage war against the Jewish State.

The UN’s own wording now confirms that UNRWA is not designed to end a refugee situation; it is designed to expand it—to serve all Palestinian Arabs whether they fit the already-distorted definition or not.

A system once justified as emergency relief is a highly partisan political project.
And the UN has finally said so out loud.

Guterres Sickening “Inspiration”

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United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres crossed a moral line when he called Palestinian Arabs an “inspiration” and a model of “resilience” this week. Inspiring how? By the crowds who celebrated the October 7 massacre? By polls showing majorities still glorifying the murders of Israeli civilians? By a culture whose media, schools, and leaders reject coexistence and sanctify violence?

Statement by UNSG Guterres about Palestinian Arabs on November 18, 2025

Guterres didn’t qualify his praise. He erased the difference between the paltry few who seek peace and the dominant culture that cheers attacks on Jews. He took a society steeped in martyrdom worship and Jew-hatred — a culture that teaches children to dream of a land without Jews — and wrapped it in moral language.

That isn’t nuance. It’s whitewashing.

And the moral preening about UNRWA, the “irreplaceable lifeline for millions of Palestinians, including Palestine refugees“, which by his own admission is not just about an agency for descendants of displaced people from 75 years ago, but for ALL ARABS? That agency which was intimately engaged in fighting a war against Israel? He insists that the international “stand firmly” with the agency which fosters the violence and perpetual state of war?

Guterres has dignified the ideology that drives repeated attacks on Israeli families. He has signaled to the world that Jewish suffering is incidental, and Palestinian rejectionism is to be emulated.

If the Secretary-General looks at a society that celebrates slaughter and sees “a testament to the human spirit”, what won’t he excuse next?

It’s time for moral clarity. If Hamas supporters chant, “There is only one solution! Intifada Revolution!’— then outside the UN, people should gather in front of the campus with the truth:

“There is only one response — eradication of Hamas!”

Peace will never come from praising a culture of violence. Only from defeating it.

UNRWA: The Antithesis of Its Mission

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The United Nations Relief and Works Agency, UNRWA, declares that it operates on four humanitarian principles — humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence.
It is none of those things.

UNRWA is unlike any other UN agency. It is not the UNHCR, which manages refugees from every nation and conflict on earth. UNRWA is a creature of exception — created for a particular people, in a particular region, in a particular war.

The agency claims it was established to address the plight of refugees from Palestine following the 1948–49 Arab-Israeli War. But was that truly its purpose?
When the fighting ended, thousands of Jews were also expelled from their homes east of the 1949 Armistice Lines (E49AL) — from Jerusalem’s Old City, from Hebron, and across Transjordan’s illegally occupied territory. They, too, were refugees from Palestine. Did UNRWA help any of them? No.

Jews expelled from the Old City of Jerusalem via the Zion Gate by the army of Transjordan

From its inception, UNRWA was built to serve Arabs alone. Even when those same Arabs became full Jordanian citizens, the agency continued to provide them with housing, food, education, and medical care — benefits that by any logical standard should have ended once citizenship was granted. Instead, UNRWA preserved refugeehood as an inheritance, not a temporary condition.

Over time, UNRWA’s mission has morphed from relief to perpetuation.
It has shown itself highly partisan, politically entangled, and morally compromised. Its schools and clinics may operate under the UN flag, but the agency’s allegiance is often indistinguishable from the politics of rejectionism that dominate its host territories.

The entrance to UNRWA’s Aida “Refugee” Camp, near Bethlehem, with a key atop a keyhole, to demonstrate that the pathway to moving to Israel is via UNRWA

During the 2023 Gaza war, UNRWA boasted that only it had the infrastructure to provide food, education, and healthcare to the Gazan population.
Yet when 250 Israelis were dragged into Gaza as hostages, where was this agency of “humanity”? Did it deliver a single bandage or calorie to the kidnapped Israelis held underground? Did it condemn their abduction, or even acknowledge their suffering?
It did not.
UNRWA’s humanity proved selective, its independence nonexistent.

Its operations in Gaza function only through integration with Hamas, the political-terrorist organization that rules the territory. Schools double as weapons depots; employees have been implicated in massacres; aid is distributed by political loyalty, not human need. Leaders at the OCHA, another UN “humanitarian” group, are not shy to say they view Hamas a legitimate political representatives of Palestinians, not as a terrorist group.

UNRWA now has additional offices outside of its field operations. It opened an office in Turkey to “expand its political and financial support base,” backed by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), a political group. Very political. Neither independent nor neutral.

UNRWA is not a neutral humanitarian actor. It is a political instrument masquerading as one.
It fails every principle it proclaims.

It should be closed permanently.
Its essential services — food, healthcare, and education — can be absorbed either by host countries where these so-called “refugees” have lived for generations, or by the UNHCR, the global refugee agency that serves all peoples without prejudice.

So long as UNRWA exists, it will preserve resentment, dependency and hatred.
That agency founded in the shadow of war is the leading obstacle to peace.

UNRWA, Hamas, and Genocide: A Lesson in Propaganda Over Truth

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As accusations of genocide in Gaza dominate global headlines, it’s important to revisit a revealing episode that exposes the deeper priorities of Palestinian political culture—from Hamas to institutions like UNRWA and even the Palestinian Authority.

Starting in 2009, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) made multiple attempts to introduce Holocaust education into its school curriculum. Hamas, which governs Gaza, unequivocally rejected the idea. Its officials declared that teaching about the Holocaust would “poison the minds of Palestinian children.”

  • Yunes al-Astal, member of the Hamas faction in the Palestinian Legislative Council said teaching the Holocaust in UNRWA schools would lead to “marketing and spreading a lie.” He said that adding the subject to the curriculum was “a war crime” and “support and service of the Zionists” (Filastin al-Yawm, August 30, 2009).
  • Sami Abu Zuhri, Hamas spokesman in the Gaza Strip, said that Hamas opposed adding Holocaust to the curriculum because its objective was to justify the “Israeli the occupation” of the land of the Palestinian territories (Reuters, August 30, 2009).
  • Abd al-Rahman al-Jamal, head of the Palestinian Legislative Council’s education committee for Hamas, told a BBC correspondent that the Holocaust was “a big lie.”
  •  Mustafa Sawaf, editor of Hamas’ Felesteen, wrote an editorial (September 1) entitled slamming UNRWA’s intention to teach the Holocaust an attempt to brainwash the younger generation in the Gaza Strip and to “prettify the image of the murderous, criminal Jews.”
  • Jamila Al-Shanti, Hamas Minister of Education, said that “Talk about the Holocaust and the execution of the Jews contradicts and is against our culture, our principles, our traditions, values, heritage and religion.” (Washington Post, September 2, 2009).
  • The Hamas-affiliated Popular Committees for Refugee Affairs denounced UNRWA, claiming that the Holocaust had not yet been scientifically proven and that teaching it was liable to cause students to identify with the Jews. Members of the committee absolute refused to have their children “learn the lie invented by the Zionists” (Filastin al-‘An website, August 30, 2009). According to the Committees, “the Holocaust was not real and outstanding Western scholars have proved that.” (PalToday website, August 30, 2009). It added “Holocaust studies in refugee camps is a contemptible plot and serves the Zionist entity with a goal of creating a reality and telling stories in order to justify acts of slaughter against the Palestinian people.”

UNRWA teachers in Jordan also refused to teach about the Holocaust, saying “teaching UNRWA students about the so-called ‘Holocaust’ as part of human rights harms the Palestinian cause… and changes the students’ views regarding their main enemy, namely the Israeli occupation.”

The Palestinian Authority remained silent or dismissive about Holocaust education in the West Bank.

Consequently, UNRWA held back from pushing the issue, as its mantra is to work within the framework of the “host countries” in which it operates.

This episode illustrates three key realities:

  1. UNRWA and Hamas are not the same—but not separate either. UNRWA claims neutrality, but its own documents state that it must work with the local authorities—in Gaza, that’s Hamas. This means Hamas effectively vetoes what UNRWA can teach and what it can do, no matter what UN policy says.

2. Antisemitic attitudes aren’t limited to Hamas. The resistance to teaching the Holocaust spans Palestinian political and educational institutions well beyond Gaza.

3. Propaganda overrides fact. From Holocaust denial to blood libel-style rhetoric, the dominant trend has been the elevation of anti-Israel and antisemitic narratives over historical truth. Even Columbia professor Edward Said – who vilified the State of Israel – acknowledged the antisemitic and conspiratorial discourse in Palestinian circles regarding Holocaust denial. James Zogby went so far as to call the violent antisemitic obsession, a “tragic deformity in Palestinian political culture,” when speaking at the United Nations in June 2023.

Whether or not what is happening in Gaza today constitutes a genocide is a matter of intense debate. But what is beyond dispute is the long-standing, systemic preference in Palestinian political culture to weaponized falsehoods to spread propaganda to destroy the Jewish State.

Every Year a Refugee

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How many generations should someone be called a “refugee?” Two? Ten? My parents were refugees and I consider myself the son of refugees. But not a refugee. To do so would be a mockery of millions of people fleeing homes to faraway lands where they have no family, infrastructure or knowledge of the local language.

Alas, while every year the world adds and removes refugees from the global tally, there is a permanent exception.

There are roughly 122 million displaced people worldwide (68 million internally displaced, 38 million refugees and millions of others seeking protection), and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is tasked with helping them. Its mission is clear: assist people fleeing conflict or persecution to either return home when it’s safe, or resettle in a new country where they can rebuild their lives and become citizens. Refugee status, according to UNHCR, is meant to be temporary. A tragic but manageable step toward normalcy.

But for one group of people, the rules were rewritten.

In 1949, the United Nations created a separate agency: the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). Its job was not to help all refugees, but a specific set—Arabs who left or were displaced from what became the State of Israel during the 1948 war.

Unlike the UNHCR, UNRWA never intended to help these refugees resettle or gain citizenship elsewhere. In fact, when Jordan annexed the to be named “West Bank” in 1950 and granted full Jordanian citizenship to the Arabs living there in 1954 (Jews were specifically excluded from Jordanian citizenship) —including the so-called refugees—UNRWA still kept them on its refugee rolls. Why? They were no longer stateless, no longer displaced from their community, and in most cases, were living just miles from where they or their families once resided.

No other refugee population in the world is treated this way.

The Palestinians under UNRWA are not counted based on where they live or whether they’ve rebuilt their lives. They’re counted based on ancestry—any descendant of someone who lived in Mandatory Palestine in 1946 and left during the war is considered a “refugee.” That includes people who are now citizens of Jordan who have never set foot in Israel, and those who live under Palestinian rule in the West Bank and Gaza.

This isn’t about resettlement. It isn’t about a “two-state solution.” It’s about return. Not return to a country they fled—but to homes where their grandparents once lived, in a country that has since fought multiple wars for its survival and established itself as a sovereign nation.

This has locked the Middle East into a perpetual state of conflict. UNRWA doesn’t just preserve the status of Palestinian refugees—it amplifies it, funds it, and builds an international bureaucracy around it. It has denied Israel’s right to control its own immigration, and basic principle of sovereignty.

Worse, the UN’s actions have turned a situation normally considered a humanitarian issue into a real estate dispute. By insisting that people return to a house—not a country, as outlined in international human rights law—the global political body has exceeded its own mandate. This isn’t a question of national self-determination, but one of personal property claims. UNRWA isn’t so much a champion of the creation of a state beside Israel; it champions individual return to specific homes, decades abandoned or destroyed, now occupied by others in a sovereign country.

Meanwhile, the descendants of every other refugee group in the world—from Sudan to Ukraine—are helped by the UN to find a path forward. Only the Palestinians are encouraged to walk backward, into the houses of their grandparents.

UNHCR helps refugees stop being refugees. UNRWA helps them stay that way.

Every year, new wars create new displaced people. But only one group stays on the list year after year, generation after generation.

For Palestinian Arabs, the 1948 war is still being fought. Generations of people haven’t been birthed into refugee status as much as the region is in a 100 years war. While the world may use political terminology of an UNRWA ward who has never been to Israel as a descendant of a “refugee,” Palestinians simply see a permanent property right which will never be forfeited. The UN simply provides cover under the “refugee” monicker.

Every year, a refugee. By design. In partnership.

Related articles:

Palestinian Authority Demands That UN Come Clean On UNRWA (November 2024)

‘Right Of Return’ Must Be Integral To Negotiations (September 2024)

There Is No Basis For A Palestinian “Right of Return” (July 2024)

After UNRWA (February 2024)

“Two States For Two People” And An Arab “Right Of Return” Are Mutually Exclusive (September 2023)

There Is No Backing For A Palestinian “Right Of Return” (December 2022)

When the Democrats Opposed the Palestinian “Right of Return” (August 2018)

The Start Of The Overdue Cancelation Of UN Immunity

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At its founding after World War II, the United Nations was declared a bold and righteous institution designed to bring about world peace. To accomplish its mission, it granted itself certain powers under the presumption that the agency’s role and workers were impartial and noble.

Alas, people are people, and the UN’s corruption and partiality grew over the years. It has made the UN not only a deformed shadow of its mission but a deeply dangerous and immoral tool cloaked in nobility.

When United Nations “peacekeepers” were deployed in Africa and Haiti, their role was to stop fighting between warring groups. However, during the deployment, many soldiers raped local women and some young boys. Investigations of the incidents confirmed multiple accounts of sexual assault, and noted that the UN’s shield of immunity protected the rapists, putting the local population at further risk.

Many UN “peacekeepers” have been accused of rape and shielded from prosecution by the UN’s cloak of immunity.

Over the past decades in Gaza, thousands of local Arabs join UNRWA, the UN’s “temporary” agency to house and educate the descendants of internally displaced Arabs who left homes a few miles away. It pays well and provides protection to carry out rapes and massacres like the one they perpetrated on October 7, 2023 in Israel.

Or so the UN terrorists hoped.

After many UNRWA workers were proved to have taken part in the barbaric massacre and provided material support to the U.S.-designated foreign terrorist group Hamas, victims of the atrocities and their families sued the UN. The UN claimed “immunity” from prosecution and the U.S.’s Biden administration agreed, stating “Because the U.N. has not waived immunity in this case, its subsidiary, UNRWA, retains full immunity, and the lawsuit against UNRWA should be dismissed due to lack of subject matter jurisdiction.”

In a pathetic attempt to mask its complicity, the UN fired some of the UNRWA workers, several of whom were already dead. It would not prosecute the fired living workers and left such matter of justice to local Gazans and Hamas to manage. UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini said he fired the workers “in the interest of the Agency,” not as a matter of justice for thousands of butchered, raped and injured civilians in Israel.

It was a despicable display of inhumanity cloaked in virtue.

UNRWA’s Philippe Lazzarini

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) had enough. On April 14, 2025, he introduced legislation called the LIABLE Act to strip immunity from toxic bodies like UNRWA. Upon introducing the legislation, Cruz said “The United Nations Relief and Works Agency officials have for decades knowingly provided support to Hamas terrorists, including salaries and materials. That support facilitated Hamas’s terrorist attack on October 7th, which was the worst one-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust and included the murder and kidnapping of dozens of Americans. Those victims and their families deserve the ability to hold UNRWA accountable, and the LIABLE Act would give them that opportunity.“

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX)

The United Nations has morphed into something deeply corrupt and unjust long shielded from prosecution, even for heinous actions. Perhaps the LIABLE ACT is the first domino to end the invincibility of barbarism under cover of white hats.

Related article:

Impunity Of Immunity Will Always Come For The Jews (November 2024)

The United Nations’ Adoption of Palestinians, Enables It to Only Find Fault With Israel (March 2016)

The Other October 7 Timeline

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Israel is conducting a thorough review of what internal failures led to the massacre on October 7, 2023. The inquiries and analyses are designed to both assure accountability for mistakes, as well as to prevent future tragedies. The primary focus is on Israel’s military deployment and readiness, which will likely conclude with several changes inside the military.

Another analysis is needed externally – focused on Hamas and Gaza. The timeline below is meant as a framework to better consider how to address the conflict going forward.

Timeline of Key Moments in Gaza That Set October 7 Massacre

1948-9: There are two principle differences between the area east of the 1949 Armistice Lines (E49AL/ West Bank) and Gaza:

  • The majority of E49AL/WB Arabs are locals, whereas the majority of Gazans used to live in Israeli towns and villages;
  • E49AL/West Bank was annexed by Transjordan and all Arabs were given Jordanian citizenship; Gaza was only administered by Egypt

The Arabs in the much larger E49AL had citizenship and sovereignty. While most of the world considered Jordan’s annexation illegal, the local Arabs had pride in their Muslim Arab country. They also had control of Jerusalem/al Quds, the third holiest site for Muslims.

Not so for Gazans, who were in a much more confined space without citizenship, sovereignty or holy sites. Instead, they were wards of the United Nations which promised them that they would move into the Israeli towns in which they once lived.

1967: The 1967 war was a much bigger loss for West Bank Arabs than Gazans, as the Gazans already had less. Still, being under the rule of the Jewish State made the lack of sovereignty much more bitter.

2000: The Second Intifada started at the collapse of the Oslo Accords. While pundits point to a Temple Mount visit by Israeli Ariel Sharon as the trigger for the multi-year Arab riots, it was the failure of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to secure all of Arab demands in the negotiations, including moving millions of descendants of refugees and internally displaced people into Israel. This was especially true for Gazans.

2004: As Israel put down the Second Intifada, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon secured a letter from U.S. President George W Bush on April 14 that in exchange for pulling all Israelis out of Gaza, the United States would back Israel in assuring that all Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) would move to a new Palestinian State and not into Israel, and that new borders of Israel would account for new major Jewish population centers to be incorporated into Israel.

President George W Bush 2004 letter to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon

2005-7: Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005 and the Palestinians elected Hamas to 58% of its parliament in 2006. In 2007, Hamas took over full control of Gaza, outsing its rival political group Fatah. In response to the antisemitic genocidal group sworn to its destruction taking over Gaza, Israel imposed a blockade of strip to halt the flow of arms. Gaza, now with self-determination, opted for radical Islam.

2008-14: Under the banner of jihad, independent Gaza did not focus on building up its economy and society but instead focused on destroying Israel. It launched wars against the Jewish State in 2008-9, 2012 and 2014, each put down by Israel. Meanwhile Hamas began to heavily invest in its underground infrastructure inside of Gaza, which in the past was principally used outside of Gaza for raids into Israel (like kidnapping Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in 2006) and smuggling goods from Egypt.

2018-2022: Under the banner of the “Great March of Return,” Hamas led Gazan society to prepare to invade Israel. With United Nations support, thousands of students from UNRWA schools would march to the fence with Israel, familiarizing themselves with the terrain and normalizing their presence for Israelis watching their movement.

Teasing a Gazan crowd about the October 7 massacre to come, Hamas Political Bureau member Fathi Hammad, former Hamas minister of the interior, leader speaks in July 2018 that within four years – by 2022 – Hamas will be prepared to rid Palestine of Jews

2021: When Israeli courts approved the eviction of Arab squatters from Jewish owned homes in the Sheik Jarrah section of Jerusalem, Hamas launched missiles into Israel. The action caused Israel to put the evictions on hold, educating Hamas that terror pays.

2023: By this time, Hamas’ underground infrastructure was in place and it had stockpiled thousands of missiles. It had gotten Israel accustomed to “peaceful” protests along the Gaza border fence. Better, it watched Israeli society fight amongst itself about judicial reform, and for the first time ever, a majority of Democrats favored SAPs over Israelis. With Iran on the verge of nuclear weaponry breakout and Hezbollah in Lebanon well armed with roughly 150,000 missiles, Hamas was poised for an all-out war, well beyond the limited skirmishes of prior years.

Gazans are more religious than West Bank Arabs and many more consider themselves entitled to move into Israel as UNRWA wards (81% vs. 49%). Those supporting Hamas were much more likely to understand the “Great Marches of Return” were about external political matters than those from Fatah (59% to 24%, according to a September 2023 PCPSR poll).

While the devastation to Israel on October 7 happened over a single day, it took years of planning. Just as importantly, there was societal buy in for the attack.

Key Takeaways

Israel – and the world – should consider the events that led to Hamas’ genocidal invasion of Israel and formulate strategies beyond eliminating Hamas and its military infrastructure.

  • The UN and Saudi Arabia must adopt the contours of the 2004 Bush letter. Over 80% of Gazans believe that the world supports their moving into Israel, validating their storming the fence. There will not be peace until the UN and Saudi Arabia make clear that a two state solution means SAPs move into a new Palestinian State, not Israel.
  • Dismantle UNRWA in Gaza and the West Bank. The United Nations has encouraged generations of students that Israel is not really a sovereign entity and that the UN will dictate that Israel will be forced to accept millions of Arabs. With clarity that Arabs will be settled in Gaza and the West Bank, there is no reason for UNRWA to exist in those territories.
  • Decimation and Vilification of Hamas. As Gazans suffered more over the course of the war, a greater percentage became interested in forging peace with Israel. Additionally, people who supported Hamas were more likely to have not seen any of the footage of the October 7 massacre and did not believe that Hamas conducted rapes. Therefore, Hamas should not only be defeated militarily, but vilified clearly so it will be abandoned by Gazans and West Bank Arabs.
  • Reroute funding. Gaza’s principal backers have been from Qatar, Iran and Turkey. All of these countries have hostile or tense relationships with Israel and foment anti-Israel hatred. Future funding for Gaza should principally come from countries with good relationships with the Jewish State.
  • No immediate plans for a Palestinian State. Gazans had internalized that terror pays, as the Second Intifada made Israel abandon Gaza, and the 2021 war stopped the evictions in Sheik Jarrah. The devastation of Gaza must terminate that notion. The only immediate plans for Gaza should be how to rebuild. Engaging in a discussion now about statehood would once again make local Arabs believe that there is nothing beyond the pale in pursuit of self-determination.

The timeline of how Gazans got to October 7 should inform the world about future actions, just as Israel’s inquiries into its military failures will change its practices.

Related articles:

Which Gazans Deserve Assistance? (January 2025)

The Hamas – Gazans Partnership (May 2024)

Destroying Hamas Convinces Gazans To Support Two State Solution. Why Doesn’t The UN Get It? (March 2024)

After UNRWA (February 2024)

When Founding Fathers Are Psychopaths And Cowards (January 2024)

Quantifying the Values of Gazans (May 2019)

The United Nations Can Hear the Songs of Gazans, but Cannot See Their Rockets (December 2017)