As the war in Gaza continues, there is one incontestable fact: UNRWA, a UN agency put in place 75 years ago to help Palestinian refugees, has outlived its useful life.
When I was growing up in 1950s New York City, it was a rite of passage to take a school trip to the United Nations headquarters in Manhattan. Mine took place while I was in fourth grade. We 10-year-olds were awed by the fluttering flags that grace the property, the majesty of the towering headquarters building, and even at that age could appreciate the gracefulness of the General Assembly Building. We attended a meeting of the now gone Trusteeship Council. We were taught that the UN was the world’s best chance to bring peace to the world. We’ve seen how that’s worked out.
The Trusteeship Council, one of the main organs of the UN when it was created in 1946, was established to supervise the administration of “trust territories,” such as Western Samoa and Tanganyika, as they transitioned from colonies to sovereign nations. This was in keeping with Franklin Roosevelt’s determination to free people around the world from their colonial masters following World War II. Allies and foes would lose colonies.
Interestingly, because Palestine was not a British colony, but a mandate created by the League of Nations, there was no international supervision of events in Palestine as there would come to be in the trusteeship territories. Instead, Britain, unable to control the Arab population’s attacks against the Jews and after being hammered by the Irgun during the war years, threw in the towel and asked the fledgling UN to get it out of Palestine.
The Arab loss of the War of Independence was by their own doing
The Partition Plan adopted by the UN and accepted by the Jewish leadership in Palestine gave the British their exit and led to the creation of the State of Israel and the War of Independence, which the Arabs did not have to start; but they did, and lost.
The dislocation of Arabs from Palestine, whether caused by Arab or Israeli actions, could have been quickly solved by another UN agency: the UN High Commission for Refugees, which followed in the footsteps of earlier League of Nations refugee programs. The stated goal of the UNHCR was and is to “help the millions of Europeans who had fled or lost their homes.” It would have taken just the stroke of a pen to include Palestinian refugees, as well as the 700,000 Jews who were forced out of Mideast countries where they had lived for a millennium.
Instead, part of the grand plan of the Arab countries to keep the fire of Arab rejection of Israel burning was to give special recognition to the Palestinians by giving them their own agency with the UN’s creation of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, UNRWA. Rather than work to resettle Palestinians and integrate them into Palestinian or Arab society, UNRWA’s goal is to perpetuate Palestinian misery. How else can one explain why there are UNRWA-supervised refugee camps in the midst of the Palestinian Authority’s largest cities nearly 30 years after the PA assumed control?
As recently explained in a Wall Street Journal article, “UNRWA has kept Palestinians in permanent refugee camps” which has led to raising generations of Palestinians fed on the lie of a return to Israel and treating them as people who are not capable of standing on their own two feet. Neighboring Arab countries, too, have done their share of instilling hatred for Israel and Jews by not absorbing Palestinians within their borders into local society by giving them citizenship or work permits.
The disclosures of UNRWA employee involvement in the October 7 massacre and the use of its facilities in Gaza to assist the Hamas war effort is just the tip of an iceberg that extends deep below the surface. What lurks below that surface is a thoroughly corrupt UN agency that long ago decided to be part of the “refugee” problem rather than its solution.
Do away with UNRWA and replace it with the UNHCR; it’s going to be an improvement.
The writer is president of the Religious Zionists of America. He is the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995, and the author of A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terror. Note: The RZA is not affiliated with any American or Israeli political party.