He goes on to refer to
education programs that foment hate against Israel and employees who aid terrorists… But so long as the Palestinians believe they have the support of the world in their effort to undo the verdict of the war they launched in 1948, the millions who call themselves refugees will never give up their goal of eradicating Israel’s existence. Though he mentions “the support of the world“, that’s not entirely true. Knowing who does support UNRWA and pays its bills, and who does not, has never been hard to figure out. Top of the list of course would be those phenomenally wealthy oil-drenched Arab fiefdoms for whom the Palestinian Arab struggle is their very reason for living and who routinely “renew” their “commitment” to, and “solidarity with“, the cause.
Of course not.
As we noted in a January 2013 post, “Only one non-Western entity, the Islamic Development Bank, is in UNRWA’s top twenty funders list – and that one comes in at nineteenth place with a contribution 3% the size of the hated Americans’ and 3.5% of what Australia (Australia!) contributes.” The numbers in the table we prepared below come from the UN‘s official record covering all donations for the year 2010 and ranked by size of overall contribution.
(The 2012 top-donors table is here.)
Ben Ari refers to Canada ending its UNRWA funding in 2010, and the Dutch declaring their intention to “thoroughly review” their UNRWA policies in December 2011. He writes how, in recent years, a growing awareness has emerged about UNRWA’s active political involvement, its lack of accountability, and what he calls “the unfettered freedom of speech enjoyed by its executive officers, defying the fundamental norms of objectivity and neutrality that oblige UN officials as international civil servants.”
For us, the role played by UNRWA as a fig leaf for the Palestinian Arab regimes is one of its most disturbing achievements. In a recent Guardian article, Margot Ellis, UNRWA’s Deputy Commissioner-General (though this is not mentioned in the Guardian’s web version of the piece) seeks to examine “why Palestine is suffering so badly” explaining, naturally enough, that it’s because of Israel. The only possible solution, she writes:
is to get rid of the underlying causes: the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory and the closure of Gaza which is stifling the economy, increasing poverty and unemployment, and forcing even greater dependency on aid provided by the international community. The need for emergency interventions would diminish dramatically if Gaza was opened up for normal business and trade. Consistent with everything we know about UNRWA, she sees no need to touch on the perpetual state of war against Israelis imposed by the jihad-minded Hamas rulers of Gaza on their principal victims, the Gazan Arabs. Nor on Hamas criticism of UNRWA schools for its inadequate focus on terror [source] as an educational goal.
But there’s something else about her stated views that bothers us no less:
In the West Bank, current underfunding projections would necessitate a significant reduction in food assistance at a time when food insecurity is rising, with more and more families – especially inside refugee camps – requiring assistance to meet their basic food needs. [Ellis in The Guardian, March 12, 2014] Think about that. UNRWA regards itself as addressing the basic food needs of thousands of Palestinian Arab families. We read those words and we’re thinking: an underfunding problem that causes people to starve? In a country (the one created by Mahmoud Abbas’ Palestinian Authority) that has sufficient budget capacity to award fat pensions, bogus senior jobs, and salaries three times the national average to men freed by political means from life terms in prison for murdering Jews, and celebrated for that reason? This Margot Ellis cannot bring herself to mention? Because one has nothing to do with the other?