Israel successfully eliminated several terrorists in the United Nations-administered zone in Jenin and confiscated many weapons. Rather than consider why the UN harbors so many terrorists, the global body used the opportunity to fundraise.
Under the banner of “Jenin Emergency”, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) ran a series of advertisements appealing for funds for the “Jenin Palestine Refugee Camp.” It inverted reality and made the terrorist enclave the victim of Israeli aggression, rather than self-reflect as to why the UN is the mother hen of a terrorist training facility.
Other charities jumped into the circus and started spending money on promoting this false narrative to collect monies for their coffers, even a peaceful sounding group like “Save the Children.”
The “DONATE” and “DONATE NOW” buttons flooded the screens with appeals for “humanitarian aid” for the “suffering and hardship that the children in the Jenin refugee camp are enduring.” The sites relayed stories of an assault of the “Israel Armed Forces” on residents of Jenin. Nowhere was there a discussion of the Arab killers who live in their midst and the overwhelming support that the terrorists receive from their neighbors.
Today, 57% of Palestinians support terrorist attacks against Jewish civilians inside of Israel.
The Palestinians have already started their “intifada” and have gone on the offensive asking for donations to fund their terrorism against Jews. While the poorly named “Second Intifada” witnessed Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Iran being the main sponsors of the murderers, today, anti-Israel charities are asking the rest of the world to underwrite the spilling of Jewish blood.
Boat packed with as many as 750 fleeing migrants capsizes off Greece in June 2023
Since 2014, the United Nations International Organization of Migrants estimates that 56,912 migrants and refugees are dead or missing. This year is set to be perhaps the deadliest on record, as thousands of people flee their homes due to war or poverty.
The United Nations and media spend a scant moment mourning these poor souls. Men, women and children who reluctantly ran to far-away lands in pursuit of peace were quickly forgotten. No actions are taken to prevent the frequent tragedies.
The United Nations has other priorities:
For synthetic “refugees” over real refugees; and
For people who seek to murder over defenseless souls
The UN has dressed up Palestinian Arabs who have been living in the same land for generations, as a special class of “UNRWA Refugees”. It pardons their jihadi violence against Israeli Jews as a matter of routine and concocted resolutions.
The media closes its eyes and minds to the facts that Palestinian Arabs are not refugees who do not deserve a special UN agency accompanied by a promise of invading a UN member state. Politicians suspend belief that they favor a two state solution while simultaneously advocating that the Jewish State shouldn’t be Jewish and forced to take in millions of Arabs from a few miles away.
The UN held a week-long conference on counterterrorism in June, and subsequently informed Israel that only the rest of the world can combat the global scourge. Israel must accept jihadi violence as penance for its existence.
The UN Security Council is now scheduled to meet to invert reality in discussing Israel’s successful raid to eliminate terrorists in Jenin but will not convene to dismantle UNRWA camps in Gaza and the West Bank which serve as the incubators for Muslim extremists.
It is terribly sad that politicians, the United Nations and media do not attend to peaceful people in actual dire need. It is a horrific state of reality, that the world supports jihadi extremists living next to Israel in their quest to kill Jews and the only Jewish State.
Once again Israel is being forced to combat terrorists who have committed and plan to commit murderous attacks on civilians. Once more, the locus for the attacks is coming from United Nations’ “refugee” camps. Once again, the majority of the terrorists are Arabs whom the UN has told have rights to move into grandparents’ homes in Israel.
UNRWA Wards By The Numbers
For the year ending December 2021, according to UNRWA, there were 6,539,844 Palestinian wards who accept services from the agency, of which 5,807,653 (89%) were “refugees” and another 732,191 (11%) were other people whom the UN thought deserved particular support. Of the 6.5m, 863,708 (13.2%) are above age 60, suggesting perhaps only 2.6% of the total, or 175,000 are actual refugees from 1948 who lost homes a few miles away in Israel, after they launched a war to destroy the Jewish state.
The total number of UNRWA Refugees jumped by about 2.5% by year end 2022 to 6.7 million, while the number of actual refugees continues to decline. The total for West Bank wards was around 1.12 million (16.7%) and in Gaza it was 1.76 million (26.3%), which means that around 43% of all UNRWA wards already live in the area of 1948 Palestine, just a few miles from where ancestors had lived.
The majority of UNRWA wards live in Jordan, about 2.55 million (38% of the total wards), and have Jordanian citizenship. Jordan had been part of the original Palestine Mandate in 1922, and then attacked Israel in 1948 and illegally annexed the eastern portion of Israel which became known as the “West Bank” in 1950. After expelling all Jews from the region, Jordan granted all non-Jews in the area citizenship in 1954. Jordan abandoned its claim on the “West Bank” in 1988, and began pulling its citizenship from Arabs in the region.
The balance of UNRWA wards live in Lebanon (557,300) and Syria (674,500).
UNRWA offices in Jerusalem (photo: First One Through)
UNRWA Camps in the West Bank
Roughly 25% of UNRWA’s West Bank wards live in official UNRWA “camps”. There are 19 camps currently including:
The Jenin Camp was established in 1953 and houses about 23,000 people at the western end of Jenin in the northern West Bank. It encompasses about 0.42 km which yields a population density of roughly 33,333 per sq km. For comparison, Manhattan’s population density is about 28,000 per sq km.
UNRWA’s Jenin Terrorists
UNRWA’s camp in Jenin has long served as the launching point for terrorists as well as a safe haven for murderers.
2002 Massacre
On March 27, 2002, roughly 250 people sat down for a festive holiday seder meal for Passover in the Park Hotel in Netanya along the Mediterranean Sea. A 25-year old member of Hamas from the nearby West Bank city of Tulkarm walked into the hotel and blew himself up, killing 30 and injuring 140. Hamas praised the attack and said Israelis “have to expect those attacks from everywhere, from every Palestinian group.” The Palestinian Authority named a soccer tournament after the terrorist the next year.
In response to the attack, part of a wave of Palestinian terrorism that killed 135 Israeli civilians in that month, Israel launched Operation Defensive Shield a few days later. From April 1-11, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) entered the Jenin Camp which was home base of many of the killers. Rather than bomb the area from the air which might have resulted in the injury of Arab civilians, the IDF deployed infantry into the narrow streets. Palestinian militants set boobytraps which killed and maimed over a dozens soldiers, so the IDF brought in armored bulldozers to clear them out. The militants surrendered on April 11 and the IDF cleared out of the area the following week, but not before losing 23 soldiers.
Center of Jenin Camp in April 2002, cleared of wanted militants, land mines and boobytraps
June and July, 2023 IDF Incursions for Jenin Camp Terrorists
The Jenin Camp has long been a stronghold of the political-terrorist group Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. In September 2021, a new group called the Jenin Brigades was formed, soon accompanied by the Lion’s Den. The terrorists groups committed in excess of 50 attacks against Israeli civilians and soldiers, many attacks staged under the umbrella of UNRWA.
On June 19, the IDF came to arrest two UNRWA ward terrorists. As the Jenin Brigades open fire on the IDF, the Israelis responded with live fire. Eight Palestinian gunmen were killed, most of them confirmed terrorists. UNRWA confirmed that the majority were wards under its care.
As the IDF left the camp, the terrorists detonated a roadside bomb under an Israeli armored vehicle, wounding eight soldiers. Israel deployed a gunship helicopter to help rescue the soldiers from the hornet’s nest.
After yet additional terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians, Israel launched another incursion into the camp on July 3rd. The 48 hour operation once again focused on a small section of the UNRWA camp, where the IDF removed Palestinian terrorists, weapons and weapon-making factories.
UNRWA Ward Terrorists
The high percentage of UNRWA wards who are terrorists goes to the heart of the conflict: it is not about “occupation” or lack of sovereignty, as these people are in Palestine and under Palestinian rule. These terrorists have been told by the United Nations that they are entitled to move into homes where grandparents used to live inside of Israel. They are frustrated by the failure to get their “right of return” which the global body has promised.
Entrance to UNRWA refugee camp as a keyhole with a key on top, demonstrating that the pathway to homes inside Israel is via UNRWA.
The United Nations has incubated a destructive cult mentality which is leading to terrorism and death. It is well past time to shut UNRWA, and the first camps to be shuttered are those under Palestinian rule, the launching pads in Gaza and the West Bank.
On November 29, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) condemned the sudden appearance of a “man-made cavity underneath the grounds of an UNRWA school in Gaza.” The agency “protested strongly to the relevant authorities in Gaza to express outrage and condemnation of the presence of such a structure underneath one of its installations.“
For the uninformed, the “man-made cavity” was a tunnel dug by the political-terrorist group HAMAS to store weapons and move their soldiers to attack and abduct Israelis. The “relevant authorities in Gaza” is the leadership of HAMAS.
But the words “Palestinian”, “Hamas”, “tunnels” or “terrorist” were completely absent in the otherwise strongly worded statement. It was as if UNRWA was only worried that a sinkhole might damage the structural integrity of their building.
UNRWA pretends that it is a neutral party to the conflict like the Red Cross, simply providing shelter, education and healthcare services inside the camps that it runs. The UNRWA statement made the point in closing with “UNRWA reiterates its demand that all parties respect the neutrality and inviolability of United Nations premises at all times. Such flagrant breaches of neutrality are serious violations of the Agency’s privileges and immunities, and they jeopardize the ability of UNRWA to provide support and protection to the 1.4 million Palestine refugees in need in Gaza.“
The reality is that UNRWA is not neutral. It frequently leaves its jurisdiction to investigate Israel. It specifically calls out Israel by name, while not doing so for Palestinians.
A recent example was UNRWA’s condemnation of Israel evicting Arab squatters in Israeli-owned homes in the Sheik Jarrah section of Jerusalem. That neighborhood lies outside UNRWA’s jurisdiction and purview.
A few weeks ago, UNRWA joined with several other UN agencies to go to Beit Iksa in Area B of the West Bank, near the Israeli town of Mevaseret Zion. It joined Palestinian farmers in an olive harvest – again, nothing to do with its mission and far outside of so-called “refugee camps.”
Meanwhile, when Palestinian children lost their lives in Syria from playing with dormant bombs lying on the ground from the civil war, UNRWA bemoaned the loss of life but only mentioned that the children were victims of the generic “conflict” without blaming the government of Syria.
Yet when a Palestinian man was hit by an Israeli army truck in a small town southeast of Hebron, no where near an UNRWA facility, UNRWA “condemned” Israel saying it showed “evident disregard for their responsibilities vis-à-vis internal law and standards.“
Supporters of Hamas in the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza, gather to express their solidarity with the Jenin refugee camp, against the Israeli operation in Jenin to root out Palestinian terrorists who killed three civilians in Tel Aviv on April 10, 2022. A few weeks later, the head of UNRWA went to Jenin to show his support for Palestinian Arabs in Jenin. (Photo by MOHAMMED ABED / AFP)
When UNRWA lambasts Israel far from its field of operations but refuses to clearly condemn Hamas and its terrorist tunnels abutting its facilities, it further underscores that the agency is not neutral and therefore deserves neither privileges nor immunities.
On March 5, 2022, there will be races in Brooklyn, NY and Washington, DC to raise money for the mental health of the children in Gaza. Unfortunately, the fundraiser is to promote mental and emotional dysfunction.
Promotion for “Gaza 5K” run in Prospect Park, Brooklyn
The Gaza 5K race is sponsored by UNRWA, the Palestinian-political agency that masquerades as a global humanitarian organization. The fundraiser aims to raise $350,000 to:
“Your fundraising can enable UNRWA to employ mental health counselors recruited locally from the Palestine refugee population. UNRWA counselors provide psychosocial support to address the mental health needs of refugee children and families in Gaza. The people of Gaza suffer from trauma due to repeated Israeli military assaults and the continued blockade. Counseling offers kids in Gaza a safe space to express their emotions and fears and a way to learn valuable coping skills.“
Almost the entire UNRWA staff of 29,000 are local Palestinian Arabs. To say that the counselors are “recruited locally” serves to further the lie that UNRWA is run by a bunch of peace-loving Europeans, and these counselors are an aberration.
These days, as people watch over a million people flee the war in Ukraine, as well as the wars in Syria and Afghanistan, it is shameful to use the concocted phrase Palestinian “refugee children.” These kids aren’t fleeing a war zone. They, their parents and their grandparents were all born in Gaza. They live next to cousins – many, who are not refugees – with the same language and culture. The fact that their great-grandparents lived for a few years about 20 miles away in what is now Israel does not make them refugees.
Further, the “repeated Israeli military assaults and the continued blockade” are in REACTION to the aggressive goals and tactics of the Gaza leadership. The political-terrorist group Hamas that runs Gaza is a genocidal anti-Semitic group that has repeatedly engaged in crimes against humanity in their attacks on Israeli civilians. UNRWA’s distortion reverses cause-and-effect and therefore, perpetrator-and-victim.
Further, the lie once again proves that UNRWA is not a humanitarian aid agency that simply seeks to simply provide healthcare and education to Gaza’s youth, but a charged anti-Israel political group.
The children of Gaza do need mental health counselors – to deal with their society that instills hatred for Jews and women.
Gaza is one of the worst places in the world for “honor killings,” in which family members kill a woman in the family that brings shame to the family “honor.” Palestinian courts routinely give a pass to family members who engage in the heinous act.
Consider the mental health of a Palestinian child who participates in the killing of his sister, and is celebrated by the community.
Hamas runs summer camps for children where they are taught to make “sacrifices” in the war against Israel. These child soldiers are as young as 10 years old. A spokesperson for the terrorist defended the practice saying “The Al-Qassam Brigades has organized the Vanguard of Liberation camps for over ten years, as it believes that the youth have a significant role and that it has a responsibility towards the generation that all sides are trying to tempt and divert their attention from their cause and priorities.”
Palestinian children compelled to participate in a Hamas military parade. Photo: Twitter.
Girl schools in Palestinian territories are named after Dalal al-Mugrahbi, a terrorist who killed 37 Israeli civilians, including a niece of a U.S. senator and 13 children in the infamous Coastal Road Massacre in 1978.
Yehuda DimentmanIn February 2022, Palestinian Authority TV airs ethnic cleansing comments of daughter of Palestinian terrorist who shot and killed unarmed Israeli in December 2021.
Consider the mental health of a Palestinian child who is brainwashed that killing Jews is a cause to be celebrated.
UNRWA is a disgraceful anti-peace organization disguised as a humanitarian agency. If you are at the UNRWA 5K race on Saturday, wear an Israeli flag to demand radical changes in the UNRWA-HAMAS alliance.
UNRWA is a deeply flawed organization that manages to get worse.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East claims that its mission is one of humanitarian work devoid of any politics but that is plainly not so. It proclaims to be independent when it it is clearly not.
“Independence is understood to mean that “humanitarian action must be autonomous from the political, economic, military or other objectives that any actor may hold with regard to areas where humanitarian action is being implemented.” In other words, without independence and the autonomy that it affords the Agency, UNRWA would be at risk of being diverted from its humanitarian trajectory and its commitment to the other three Humanitarian Principles of humanity, impartiality, and neutrality.“
“It is only by being truly independent that UNRWA can respect the principles of neutrality and impartiality, and therefore only be driven by humanity.“
While UNRWA claims to understand that neutrality, impartiality and independence are critical for its mission, it remains a tool for the roughly 30,000 Palestinian Arabs who work for the agency, the 6.4 million (and growing) people who are registered with the agency, and the global anti-Zionist community which enjoy ripping at the seams of the Jewish State.
In time for the holidays and tax planning, UNRWA continues to ask Americas for money, seemingly unsatisfied with the $7.6 billion that tax payers have given to the Palestinians since 1993, which has yielded no peace. The agency which claims that politics is poison to its mission, led with politics in its 2021 year-end appeal:
UNRWA led with distorted politics in its year-end appeal for donations
UNRWA asked for money for “families in Gaza and Lebanon to secure their basic needs, giving them options and hope. (UNRWA’s emphasis),” ideally with donations of as large as $1,000. The reason that they need this money is declared in the opening lines: “Occupation, repeated military assaults, crippling blockades.” Are these three lines anything but smears and politics? Are they even factually correct? Since when is Lebanon under theses stresses? The Gazans initiate the repeated military assaults and are the cause of the blockade.
Knowing that it led with inflammatory language, the second paragraph backtracks and starts “Politics aside,” Indeed, politics. What else can be expected from an organization run by the largest political machine in the world, which makes it particular inept at carrying out humanitarian missions.
UNRWA is a prison which keeps millions of people tethered to the organization with the threat that if they deregister, they will no longer be classified as refugees and not entitled to millions of dollars from Israel.
It unilaterally extended its mandate beyond the contours of its formation which called for its wards to be either compensated or settled somewhere, with the declaration in April 2020 that it will live on until “a comprehensive solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict on the basis of the two-state solution.” That’s ridiculous. Why would a future-compensated descendant of a refugee living in Lebanon continue to need free housing, healthcare and education from UNRWA while Israelis and Palestinians debate water rights in the Jordan Valley?
Entrance to UNRWA’s Aida refugee camp near Bethlehem portrayed as a keyhole with a key on top, demonstrating that the pathway to ancestors’ homes is via UNRWA.
And it is bad at what it does. It is proportionately staffed by 20 times as many people as the UNHR which cares for actual refugees. Palestinian parents who have a choice, send their children to non-UNRWA schools.
UNRWA is a political tool dressed as a humanitarian organization. It is an embarrassment for the UN, the Palestinians forced to stay tethered to the over-staffed beast, and the well-meaning countries and people who fall for the marketing and advertising blitz with donations of hard-earned monies.
Queen Rania of Jordan – herself a Palestinian Arab – at a United Nations event in September 2009 to mark the 60th anniversary of UNRWA
UNRWA, the controversial UN agency which is solely devoted to the descendants of Palestinian refugees and other local people, held a two day fundraising appeal which began on November 16, 2021. Led by the governments of Jordan and Sweden, they appealed to countries around the world to donate to a temporary agency which was established in 1949.
According to UNRWA, it serviced 5.7 million refugees and 685,000 other people (mainly poor people and those married to descendants of refugees) in the five fields of operation. That means that 10.7% of the UNRWA’s wards are not refugees, even under the exaggerated definition that UNRWA uses. In the West Bank, the numbers are even more stark, where 19.5% of the UNRWA base are “others.” Many of these extra clients are poor Arabs in Jerusalem, as noted in the fine print of the UNRWA report.
UNRWA added services to thousands of poor Arabs in the eastern portion of Jerusalem, resulting in an inflated 19.5% of UNRWA wards in the West Bank being “others” compared to just 10.2% in Gaza.
As evidence of distortion in the West Bank, there are very few students relative to the population, especially compared to Gaza. While the percent of the population below 14 years old is high in both locales at 35.3% and 42.5% in the West Bank and Gaza, respectively, (and 17.4% and 18.0% for 15-24 year olds) only 4.2% of UNRWA’s West Bank wards are in UNRWA schools, while the figure is 17.4% in Gaza – four times the rate! That’s because children in the West Bank have many more options and prefer to stay away from UNRWA’s schools.
UNRWA services 287,000 students in Gaza but only 46,000 in the West Bank. The youth in the West Bank prefer using non-UNRWA schools because they have a choice while there are few options in Gaza.
Despite UNRWA’s schools being unpopular in the West Bank, the agency continues to hire. The pupil-to-student ratio was 20, in sharp contrast to 30 students per teacher in Gaza.
The US Ambassador to the UN may be in on the joke as she tweeted during her visit to a UN school on November 17: “Today, I met with educators and students at Jalazone @UNRWA Girls School in Ramallah. I was inspired by their stories and dreams for the future, and I spoke to UNRWA officials about how to make their work stronger, more efficient, and more accountable.“
Moves of UNRWA to Jerusalem and Wards to Statelessness
For the period of January 1, 2012, UNRWA began to break out the “other” category for the first time. It was also the last year that it published the annual report from Gaza. Starting the following year – a year which saw the US Democratic Party yell at its national convention that it no longer considered Jerusalem as the capital of Israel – it began to publish its report in Jerusalem, as noted at the bottom of the reports.
Over the nine years since this breakout started, the refugees in the West Bank grew from 727,471 to 871,537, a growth of 20%, while the other wards grew from 147,156 to 211,116, a 43% jump – over twice the rate. The situation was even more dramatic in Jordan, where the UNRWA refugee population grew 17% while the other category grew by a whopping 130%. It’s not hard to speculate that people married in to get free services from UNRWA, and the fat agency could funnel cash and services to actual refugees from the Syrian civil war who flooded into Jordan.
The majority of UNRWA’s clientele actually had Jordanian citizenship from the time the agency was founded until 1988. Jordan illegally annexed what is now commonly called the “West Bank” in 1950 and gave all the Arabs there citizenship. Many Arabs moved back-and-forth between Jordan and the West Bank (both part of the original Palestine Mandate) until 1967 when it became harder to do so after Jordan (and West Bankers) attacked Israel and lost the region. Jordan continued to give those Arabs Jordanian citizenship until it withdrew it abruptly in July 1988, making these Arabs stateless.
A total of 55.5% of UNRWA wards would still be Jordanians had the king not removed their citizenship.
Staffing
In 2000, UNRWA had a staff of 22,447 to address a population of 3,806,055, or a staff member for every 170 registered persons. At the end of 2020, the staff was down from immediate prior years due to the Trump administration cutbacks, but up overall to 28,563 staffers for 6,388,887 people, or one staffer per 224 people. By way of comparison, in 2020 the UNHCR global refugee agency had to deal with 76.7 million people fleeing wars far from their homes requiring brand new housing and schools, was staffed by only 17,300 people, or a staffer for every 4,433 real refugees.
UNRWA has operated in the exact same geography with the same people speaking the same language for decades but still has a staff that is 20x the size proportionately of UHCR which has to handle real refugees fleeing across the world requiring everything new.
Summary
UNRWA is grossly over-staffed, especially relative to the global refugee agency that really does need the resources. It inflated its mandate by adding nearly 11% new people to its roster and moved its center to the contested city of Jerusalem and began servicing eastern Jerusalem’s poor Arabs, making the agency yet more politicized. Further, in terms of competence, UNRWA has shown that it is unable to attract students to its schools.
One needn’t look to news stories and editorials about UNRWA’s supporting anti-Semitism, harboring and employing terrorists, redefining “refugees,” extending its mandate and hearing how Arabs are deregistering from UNRWA to realize how disastrous it is. The agency’s own numbers make clear that it is inept and past time to be shut down.
The United Nations, liberal media and politicians are bemoaning the Israeli and Egyptian blockade of Gaza, arguing that it is a form of “collective punishment” and is creating an economic disaster in the small coastal enclave. Those articles and arguments all fail to describe why the blockade exists and why it is essential for it to continue.
The landside blockade of Gaza began in June 2007, shortly after the political-terrorist group Hamas ousted its rival Fatah from the area. A naval blockade went into effect in January 2009 to further clamp down on the region, after the December 2008-January 2009 war against Israel launched by Hamas.
Ruled by a Terrorist Organization
Hamas is an extremist Islamist terrorist organization sworn to Israel’s destruction and the murder of Jews. It is a designated foreign terrorist organization by the United States and many western countries. Its 1988 founding charter is the most anti-Semitic political document of the modern age, a combination of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf and the Russian forgery, Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Palestinian Arabs elected Hamas to a majority of the Palestinian parliament in 2006. The organization calls for the destruction of Israel in any form and calls for a global jihad against the Jewish State.
Repeated Warsfrom Gaza
Hamas has launched wars from Gaza against Israel in 2008, 2012, 2014 and May 2021. When not sending missiles all over the Jewish State, it launches arson balloons to burn Israeli fields, digs tunnels into Israel to abduct Israelis, and attempts to destroy the separation fence and infiltrate Israel.
Gazans Want To Kill Israeli Civilians
The Anti-Defamation League did global polls in 2014 and 2015 and found the Palestinian Arabs were by far the most anti-Semitic in the world, with 93% of the population harboring anti-Jewish attitudes. However, while almost every Palestinian Arab is anti-Semitic, the Gazans and West Bankers have different views about physically attacking Israeli civilians.
The gap in attitude between Gazans and West Bankers about violently attacking Israeli civilians inside of Israel has continued to grow (source: Palestinian PCPSR polls)
Palestinians poll themselves every quarter about their attitudes on a variety of topics. One of the questions asked each poll is “Concerning armed attacks against Israeli civilians inside Israel, I…” with choices ranging from “strong support”, “support” to “oppose”, “strongly oppose” and “I don’t know.” The fact that the poll asks such question says a lot about Palestinian society generally, but an analysis of the trend in the chart above is important.
Between 2001 and 2008, the attitudes among Gazans and West Bank Arabs were much the same, with Gazans preferring killing Israeli civilians inside of Israel by an average of 11.6% more than West Bankers. After the 2008-9 Gaza war and the implementation of the naval blockade, the gap in attitudes widened. Between 2009 and 2017, Gazans preferred attacking Israeli Jews inside of Israel by a gap of 22.1%, almost double the 2001-8 period. Between 2018 and today, the gap has become even more pronounced, with Gazans voting for violence by a difference of 43.9%, nearly doubling again. Further, after the 2014 and May 2021 wars, Hamas’s popularity soared as did the uptick in Gazans desire to see more Jewish blood.
The difference in attitude is stark and the sentiment is frightening. And it is not theoretical.
In March 2011, after a the horrendous slaughter of a family of five by Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank, Gazans celebrated the murder (51.0%) while West Bank Arabs did not (75.6%).
Palestinian poll taken shortly after slaughter of Fogel family in Itamar, including an 11 year old, 4 year old and 3 month old, all stabbed to death.
This attitude was not an outlier. In August 2019, Palestinian Arabs blew up a 17 year-old girl, Rina Shnerb, while she was on a family hike. Over 80% of Gazans supported the attack.
Palestinian poll taken shortly after bomb blew up and killed Rina Shnerb.
It is hard to imagine that there are any places in the world where there would be any support for stabbing to death a 3 month old lying in its crib, or for blowing up a 17 year old girl going on a nature hike. But in Gaza, the MAJORITY support the slaughter of innocent Jews.
For people who want to counter and prevent violent extremism, and who care about peace, justice and the sanctity of human life, it is well past time to pull all support from the terrorist enclave of Gaza, including shutting UNRWA in the area. Human rights and decency demand it.
U.S. President Joe Biden decided that he would start to donate American taxpayer money to the specialized United Nations agency solely devoted to Palestinians, despite the troubled agency making few reforms. UNRWA has been constantly criticized for promoting anti-Semitism, has harbored weapons for terrorist groups and has long been a thorn in the Arab-Israeli peace process.
UNRWA actively perpetuates a false narrative that Palestinian Arabs are refugees from their homeland – even though Palestinians view all of pre-1948 Palestine as a single entity, meaning that they still live in their perceived homeland if they reside in Israel, Gaza or the West Bank.
Moreover, UNRWA encourages a storyline that all Palestinian Arabs are refugees. This is patently false. Many are stateless, but not refugees.
As seen in the charts above, according to UNRWA’s own numbers, 73% of Gazans are refugees (or more accurately, descendants of refugees) while another 8% are given services by UNRWA even though they are not refugees by any definition. Roughly one-in-five Gazans are simply residents, who have had family ties in the strip for generations who never had children with a descendant of a refugee (who would otherwise then get hereditary refugee status according to UNRWA).
The numbers east of the Green Line (EGL) / the “West Bank” are quite different, where over half of the Arabs are residents who have descendants from the region. Roughly 40% of Arab West Bankers registered with UNRWA as refugees to get free housing, education and healthcare, with another 9% “grantees” also getting services from the agency.
Another piece of commonly-stated fiction is that the Arabs have no self-determination and live under Israeli control. As Biden would say, that is “malarkey.”
Israel completely pulled out of Gaza in 2005 and gave the local Arabs there complete self-determination. With that freedom, Arabs voted the terrorist group Hamas to 58% of the Palestinian parliament in 2006 and watched Hamas take over the Gaza Strip in 2007. Hamas has thus far launched three wars from the area in 2008-9, 2012 and 2014.
Regarding EGL, Israel handed control of Areas A and B to the Palestinian Authority as part of the Oslo accords in the 1990’s. Only 14% of West Bank Arabs live in Area C under Israeli-control.
No matter. The world still berates Israel despite handing the PA land and being rewarded with wars, and condemns the Jewish State again for defending itself. No one pauses to contemplate why Israel would consider repeating the abuse at the hands of Palestinians, the UN and the media.
The Arab and Muslim-dominated United Nations manufactured a false narrative that Palestinian Arabs are refugees under Israeli-control which the anti-Israel media parrots in their quest to see the creation of a Palestinian State. In reality, it is those very lies that hinder the chance of reaching an enduring peace.
The Biden Administration announced that it is going to send $150 million of American tax dollars to UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. This “temporary” agency was established after the Arab war to destroy Israel in 1948-9, to care for “persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict.” It has continued to extend its mandate for decades, now caring for grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those “persons.”
Several parties voiced their disapproval with the United States’ UNRWA donation. Former Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said “UNRWA, is among the most corrupt and counterproductive of all UN agencies. President Trump was right to abandon it.” Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Gilad Erdan added “We believe that this UN agency for so-called ‘refugees’ should not exist in its current format.“
UNRWA office in Jerusalem. (photo: First One Through)
To consider how the U.N. has handled “so-called ‘refugees'” in this “counterproductive” agency, imagine two Arabs leaving Palestine during the 1948-9 Arab-Israeli War. One had come to Palestine from Iraq in 1925 and the other from Syria in 1935, both settling in Jaffa. The Iraqi-Palestinian owned his home and his business and was reluctant to leave everything he had built but concluded that the war zone was too risky and returned to Iraq in 1949. The Syrian-Palestinian was renting his home and worked on a farm outside of town. He returned to Syria early in the war, assuming that the five invading Arab armies would finish the Zionists in short order and he could return to a Jew-free city, maybe even under the flag of Syria.
At war’s end, the Zionists were able to hold onto land – more than suggested under the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan and less than allocated under the British Palestine Mandate – and had no interest in allowing the return of those Arabs which wanted to see Israel destroyed.
The Iraqi-Palestinian Arab decided to abandon his Jaffa home and business and started life anew among his cousins in Iraq. However, the Syrian-Palestinian opted to not start again in his old neighborhood where he lived fifteen years earlier, and instead decided to take the free housing, food, education and medical services offered by the United Nations as part of its UNRWA initiative. His grandchildren continue to live as wards of the world because of that decision.
Another person impacted by the Arab-Israeli War was not an Arab but a Jew. He came to Palestine from Yemen at the end of the 19th century and moved to Jerusalem. The Jordanian army routed him from his home during the war and he returned to Yemen. Not long after, the anti-Semitism in Yemen became intolerable and he and his family moved to Canada.
All three of these individuals were “persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict,” but only one got services from UNRWA. The Palestinian Jew and Iraqi-Palestinian Arab each lost their homes and livelihood and were offered nothing from the United Nations. Only the Syrian-Palestinian Arab who chose to not move to his hometown in Syria, became a special grantee class. As long as he and his descendants remained a grantee, there was a U.N. promise that they would get property and/or money from the country which was transforming Jaffa and the surrounding region it controlled into an economic and technological miracle.
Today, the grandchildren of that Palestinian Jew and the Iraqi-Palestinian Arab are both successful businessmen and pay less attention to politics than they do to football. They think about the United Nations as much as they contemplate a hangnail from five years ago.
But the grandchildren of the Syrian-Palestinian have built their entire way of life around the largess of the United Nations and its promise that it will force Israel to hand them money or land as long as they continue to take UNRWA’s free education, medical services and housing. The U.N. is mother’s milk, a teat which has fed their entire family for generations with more gifts to come.
Watching these three “refugees” is an elderly fifth generation Palestinian Arab who had participated in the 1936-9 riots to keep the Jews out of Palestine and lobbied the British to halt their immigration as the Holocaust started in Europe. He headed to Gaza as the first tanks from five Arab armies invaded Israel. His roughly 60km trip from Jaffa to Gaza is about the same as from Manhattan to Stamford, CT. Had there never been a war and he had decided to relocate to Gaza (as several cousins did before the 1948-9 War), he would receive neither cries of empathy nor charity, but today he has over 100 descendants living for free in UNRWA housing around Gaza.
If the U.N. is attempting to resolve the lost property of people who fled the war zone, why should it matter whether they are registered as “refugees” and take services from UNRWA? Shouldn’t the Iraqi-Palestinian Arab and Palestinian Jew be entitled to consideration? Why should the Syrian-Palestinian get so much compensation when he never owned property?
The UNRWA policy leads one to conclude that its goal is not about money and property but to physically relocate a select sub-segment of the persons impacted by the war – only Arabs – into the Jewish State. Such UNRWA policy is in direct conflict with the stated U.N. goal of a two-state solution, one Arab and one Jewish, by injecting nearly 6 million Arabs into the Jewish State. One cannot be simultaneously in favor of two states and maintaining UNRWA.
There are significant issues to consider in the Arab-Israeli Conflict but the matter of Palestinian “refugees” has long been artificially manufactured. It is well past time to shut it down.
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