"Freedom is the freedom to say that 2+2=4,” character Winston Smith writes in his secret diary at the beginning of George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece 1984.
As we see in the novel, the Party – the established order – can decide that 2+2, in fact, equals 5, despite all evidence pointing to the contrary.
Hillel Neuer must feel, at times, like Winston Smith. He knows the truth despite the best efforts of the Party and its associates to keep him in line.
Neuer, the prominent lawyer and human rights advocate who is the executive director of the nongovernmental organization UN Watch, has spent nearly 20 years at the helm, and pours his efforts into holding UN member states accountable for their actions and promoting transparency and accountability within the UN system.
What role does UN Watch play?
The NGO frequently submits reports and petitions to the UN Human Rights Council, highlighting human rights violations and calling for action to address them.
UN Watch has also become widely known because of its challenges regarding the UN’s perceived bias against Israel. The work of Neuer and his team has become even more critical since the Hamas attacks of October 7 and the mounting evidence of the complicity of UN bodies and their employees – the most culpable body being UNRWA.
UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) is the UN agency that provides assistance and protection to Palestinian “refugees,” and has been doing so for the past 75 years. Over the years, it has received billions of dollars of aid from Western countries.
The agency operates schools, healthcare facilities, and other social services for Palestinians in the Middle East. Still, there is mounting evidence that UNRWA employees, facilities, equipment, and graduates were complicit on October 7.
“We have been active on the UNRWA issue for about 10 years,” Neuer stated when he sat down with The Jerusalem Post. “We began to ask UNRWA to take action about their teachers, the school principals, and other staff who were regularly encouraging and promoting terrorism on their social media. Over time, we estimated we had identified over 150 perpetrators, and we estimate it must be thousands of the 13,000 UNRWA staff.”
It has long been charged that UNRWA indoctrinates Palestinian children with an antisemitic and anti-Israeli ideology. Critics point to examples of textbooks used in UNRWA schools that contain inflammatory antisemitic language and imagery, promoting violence and glorifying martyrdom.
“I’ve asked UNRWA: Of the murderers and rapists of October 7, the thousands who invaded Israel and committed mass murder, rape, torture, and mutilation, how many of them were not graduates of UNRWA schools? Of the several thousand, was it 10? Was it a 100? How many were not graduates from UNRWA schools, and their response was to attack us repeatedly?”
A Telegram channel consisting of 3,000 UNRWA teachers in Gaza filled with posts expressing support for the Hamas attacks of October 7 was also exposed due to a UN Watch report.
The problem with UNRWA, however, now goes deeper than merely textbooks and indoctrination.
Since the Israeli military invasion of Gaza to oust Hamas from power, the IDF has found evidence of Hamas weapons being stored in UNRWA facilities, and military equipment found in UNRWA bags that are meant to be for aid. Earlier this month, the IDF discovered a tunnel shaft near an UNRWA school which led to an underground shelter that served as a valuable asset for Hamas’s military intelligence wing, according to the IDF.
“What will happen in Gaza, at the end of the day, will depend on if Hamas is destroyed and who is in control afterward. In an ideal world, there shouldn’t be any UN agency. The Palestinians should run it [Gaza] themselves, the world should help them, and they should develop like a normal society,”
Hillel Neuer
The route connected to the tunnel also led to a path beneath UNRWA’s central headquarters in the Gaza Strip.
In addition to these concerns, there have been reports of Israeli hostages having been held in apartments owned or rented by UNRWA staff members in the Gaza Strip. These hostages, including civilians and soldiers captured by Hamas during conflicts with Israel, were reportedly hidden in UNRWA-administered properties to evade detection by Israeli security forces.
Israel has also alleged that at least 200 UNRWA employees were also members of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
ALL OF this has led Neuer and UN Watch to set up the International Summit For A Future Beyond UNRWA on February 26, scheduled to begin at the same time as the 2024 UN Human Rights Council begins its session.
“For 10 years, we repeatedly urged UNRWA to reform. We did not call for ending UNRWA. We called for reform,” Neuer told the Post. “It became clear to us after October 7 and the things that we saw, such as the Telegram group with 3,000 teachers, that UNRWA is not reformable.
“This conference is not talking about reform. It’s about replacing UNRWA. The terrorism coming out of UNRWA is not a bug. It’s a feature.”
The summit’s goal is twofold – to maintain genuine humanitarian aid for those Gazans who need it, while transitioning away from what Neuer calls “a failed agency.”
“We need a future beyond UNRWA,” Neuer said. “That’s why we’ve invited members of parliaments worldwide to come and speak. We have humanitarian aid experts who will talk about how UNRWA can be successfully replaced. We’re going to have ambassadors, Middle East peace envoys. It will be a very serious international summit, and it will take place the very day when the UN Human Rights Council has its annual opening, and [UN] Secretary-General António Guterres will be meters away from our event.”
The question, however, is what can be done regarding UNRWA staff members and their ties to Hamas.
Although a fair number of UNRWA’s 13,000 employees may be from outside of the Middle East, the agency depends on Palestinians and Gazans as employees. Hamas is the elected choice of the Gazan people (although elections have not been held since 2006). Would replacing UNRWA with a different body not lead to similar results, if the ‘boots on the ground’ are precisely the same people?
“I have to begin by recognizing that whenever the UN operates in a totalitarian zone that’s controlled by a totalitarian regime or terrorist group, the UN naturally gets subverted,” Neuer told the Post.
His comments echo those of Philippe Lazzarini, UNRWA’s commissioner-general, who told The New York Times earlier this month, “Our employees are part of the social fabric in Gaza and its ecosystem. And as part of the social fabric in Gaza, you also have Hamas,” alluding to the organization’s connections with the terrorist group.
“The universal problem is that whether you call it UNRWA or something else, you’re going to have that problem,” Neuer contemplated.
“Still, it [replacing UNRWA] would be a huge gain, in my opinion, because the essence of UNRWA is this narrative that the war of 1948 is not over. Israel had 800,000 refugees from Arab lands, and they don’t exist anymore as refugees.”
Neuer’s point is crucial for the future of UNRWA and the future of the Palestinians. Nowhere else in the world and in no other conflict has a people been allowed to claim refugee status and derive all the benefits of their own agency for 75 years.
Several generations of Gazans have been born and lived in the territory since the War of Independence in 1948, yet they still have refugee status. Millions of Palestinians have been granted Jordanian and Lebanese citizenship over the years, yet they are still considered refugees by the international community.
The Palestinians, in this, are a unique phenomenon.
“What will happen in Gaza, at the end of the day, will depend on if Hamas is destroyed and who is in control afterward. In an ideal world, there shouldn’t be any UN agency. The Palestinians should run it [Gaza] themselves, the world should help them, and they should develop like a normal society,” Neuer said.
“The only thing that will give it [Gaza] a future is to root out the nihilistic, terrorist culture of murdering Jews as their [the Palestinians’] goal. And instead of looking toward the past, look to the future.”
While Israel is engaged in a physical battle on the ground against Hamas in Gaza, the task of defending the Jewish state in its struggle for honesty and truth with the wider world about what is really happening in Gaza is just as important.
And Neuer is determined to lay bare all of the UN’s misdemeanors. He is a man on a mission, and his mission is the truth. Hillel Neuer knows that 2+2=4, despite what the UN may try to tell him.