Israel is right: UNRWA is a rogue agency
UNRWA officials at the site of an Israeli airstrike in the Nuseirat camp in the central Gaza Strip, July 15, 2024. Photo by Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90.
by Henry Kopel
(JNS) — Once again, the so-called human-rights community is in high-outrage mode against Israel. What’s the crime this time? Israel’s new law banning the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees from operating in Israel, Judea and Samaria, and the Gaza Strip.
Amnesty International condemned the “unconscionable law,” while both Human Rights Watch and Oxfam International scolded Israel’s “unprecedented and dangerous attack” on the agency. The European Union declared Israel’s action “absolutely unacceptable,” while the Biden administration threatened another weapons embargo.
All this public indignation might make sense if UNRWA was just a provider of food, shelter and schools. But it is not. A mountain of evidence shows that UNRWA’s actual mission consists of indoctrinating Palestinian children to hate Jews and emulate suicide bombers; keeping each generation of Palestinians stuck in refugee camps and stewing with rage against Israel; and storing Hamas weapons and hiding its terror tunnels and headquarters in UNRWA buildings.
Earlier this year, the NGO on whose board I serve — the Abraham Global Peace Initiative — produced a detailed report calling for the immediate dismantling of UNRWA. Its co-signers include the courageous Palestinian human-rights advocate Bassam Eid. The report outlined many issues stemming from the U.N.-aligned agency.
UNRWA operates hundreds of schools across the Mideast, teaching more than 540,000 Palestinian children, all of whom use the Palestinian Authority’s textbooks, which relentlessly “encourage and praise jihad against Israel.” They portray Israel “as a usurper, occupier and aggressor, and Jews and Israelis as cunning and deceitful.” The curriculum constantly glorifies “violence, martyrdom and jihad across all grades and subjects. Even math lessons find a way to inculcate the young by using the “numbers of dead martyrs to teach arithmetic.”
A 2023 audit by the NGO UN Watch found UNRWA schools saturated with lessons like these:
A fifth-grade classroom display celebrated terrorist Dalal Mughrabi, who in 1978 led the ambush of an Israeli bus in which 38 Israelis, 13 of them children, were murdered. The lesson plan was titled “Hooray for the Heroes.”
A ninth-grade Arabic-language assignment contained a Palestinian firebomb attack on an Israeli bus, mockingly praising the attack as “a barbecue party.”
A poem from a seventh-grade Arabic-language text calls Israel a “despicable enemy” that will be expelled “with blood and flesh.”
A sixth-grade Arabic study lesson urged students to “nourish the homeland with his blood,” using this sentence to teach proper grammar: “I will commit jihad to liberate the homeland.”
With 16 million refugees uprooted in the wake of World War II, the United Nations established the High Commission for Refugees. Its mandate was to resettle all refugees as promptly as possible, often in the refugees’ new countries of residence, not the lands from which they fled.
In the 1948 Palestinian-Arab war that sought to annihilate Israel, approximately 600,000 Palestinians fled the war zone. The United Nations then established UNRWA, tasked like UNHCR to resettle them as promptly as possible, including in their new countries of residence.
But unlike all other refugees, Palestinian and Arab leaders pressured the United Nations to block such resettlement. UNRWA’s mission became the opposite of UNHCR’s. Its goal was to keep displaced Palestinians and their descendants in camps until Israel was destroyed and their descendants could reclaim the land.
This corrupt inversion of UNRWA’s founding mission is also what drove UNRWA schools to become indoctrination centers, infusing each Palestinian generation since 1948 with the genocidal hatred of Israel and Jews. It goes a long way toward explaining why every subsequent effort to achieve a “two-state” peace plan was always doomed to failure.
UNRWA’s problems in Gaza aren’t just limited to education. Israel’s ground war against Hamas revealed that dozens of UNRWA schools were being used to store Hamas weapons, including “rockets, anti-tank missiles, launchers and automatic rifles.” Many UNRWA schools also contained hidden exit/entrance shafts for the terror group’s tunnel network.
As if that were not bad enough, the Israel Defense Forces also discovered an underground Hamas intelligence center located directly below UNRWA’s main Gaza headquarters. The center housed numerous computer servers, offices and living/dining quarters for terrorists. Electric cables connected UNRWA power sources to Hamas’s server rooms, through which UNRWA provided all the Hamas intel center’s electricity needs.
Given this extensive UNRWA support for Hamas’s terror operations, it is hardly surprising that UNRWA staff were also found to have directly participated in the horrific mass rapes and slaughters of Oct. 7, and the imprisoning of innocent Israelis as hostages under inhuman conditions.
UNRWA long ago went off-mission from its original U.N. mandate to resettle the 1948 Palestinian refugees. Instead, its mission has been one of genocidal indoctrination, refugee perpetuation, and terrorist support and facilitation — all financed by lavish Western aid subsidies. It is a rogue agency whose efforts have obstructed any possibility of peace while keeping millions of Palestinian Arabs in squalid refugee camps.
For anyone concerned about the actual well-being of the Palestinian people and for those who genuinely seek a resolution to the century-long Israel-Palestinian conflict, the last thing they should advocate for is UNRWA’s continued involvement in the region. Instead of denouncing Israel’s move to ban UNRWA, America and its allies should join with Israel to defund and dismantle this rogue agency.
Henry Kopel is a former federal prosecutor and the author of War on Hate: How to Stop Genocide, Fight Terrorism and Defend Freedom (Lexington Books, 2021).
