Defund UNRWA

A few days ago an Israeli air strike killed a member of a Palestinian missile team that had been firing rockets from Gaza. Now the United Nations has come out with an unusual statement of bewilderment and utter shock as the truth has come out. The dead man, Awad al-Qiq, was a U.N. employee and headmaster of a top prep school in Gaza. He was also the chief rocket-maker for Islamic Jihad.

Mr. Al-Qiq — not surprisingly, a science teacher — worked for one of the schools run by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). Now that he is out of the rocket business, the employment of such a "respectable" individual by the sole U.N. agency devoted to Palestinian refugees deserves an explanation.

In a new report by the Global Research in International Affairs Center by this author and Professor Barry Rubin, "UNRWA: Refuge of Rejectionism," the case is made that this group is a major cause of the continued Arab-Israeli conflict, the incitement of a whole generation of Palestinians to terrorist violence and even the suffering of the refugees themselves.

The report's recommendation is simple and workable: UNRWA should be dissolved and its functions divided between the far more effective and depoliticized U.N. High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and the Palestinian Authority (PA).

Excerpt from a piece entitled “We Are the Next Target” written back in 1994:

But by far the largest aid program for the PLO can be found in the United Nations, which is funded primarily by the United States. During the 1948 war that established the nation of Israel, some half a million palestinian Arabs panicked and fled to surrounding areas.[137] Rather than allow them to resettle, the United Nations set up its Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) to maintain these refugees in special camps as welfare dependents. These dozens of camps, in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and the West Bank and Gaza, remain under UNRWA administration to this very day. The UNRWA has spent billions of dollars, mostly from the United States, supposedly on such humanitarian projects as education, medicine, welfare, and other basic services, as well as to hire some 17,000 local palestinians to operate the program.[138]

In reality, the palestinians on staff have largely been PLO members who have seized control of the UNRWA. Much of this was discovered when the Israelis drove the PLO out of Lebanon in 1982. The refugee camps, and the schools and hospitals in particular, had been transformed into military bases containing vast stores of weapons. All U.N. schools indoctrinated palestinian youth in revolutionary PLO ideology, and some had even become terrorist training centers complete with weapons, uniforms, and modern technology. The UNRWA published various propaganda materials on behalf of the PLO, and some evidence indicated that the agency had secretly funneled money directly into PLO terrorist operations.[139] In 1977, one PLO official told an undercover reporter that the UNRWA budget, then about $200 million per year, constituted almost the entire income for the PLO.[140] Although estimates of the PLO budget vary widely, UNRWA spending may now pay for about half of all PLO activities.[141]

Since the 1970s, other U.N. agencies have also provided their resources to the PLO or its front groups in the West Bank and Gaza. These include the International Labor Organization, the World Health Organization, UNESCO, the U.N. Development Program, and about a dozen other agencies. The PLO helps direct the spending of these programs, and its members are trained on U.N. grants. Many U.N. agencies produce PLO propaganda materials, or host forums for PLO spokesmen. But most importantly, these agencies have been funding the growing PLO infrastructure in the West Bank and Gaza, which now organizes and sustains the intifada.[142]

The United Nations Interim Force In Lebanon (UNIFIL), a peacekeeping force that operated from 1978 to 1982, was a spectacular example of U.N. collaboration with the PLO. UNIFIL ignored the formation of PLO military and terrorist bases in the “demilitarized” zone, allowed armed PLO units nearly unhindered movement, and refused to stop brazen terrorist attacks. UNIFIL provided supplies, including sophisticated communications equipment, to the PLO, and gave the PLO intelligence reports on Israeli military positions. Some UNIFIL troops were even caught smuggling explosives into Israel for terrorist purposes. Israel was finally forced to invade when the PLO began conducting attacks from within UNIFIL territory, sometimes even under the U.N. flag.[143]

It is little wonder that Yasir Arafat and other PLO leaders, and the Soviet Union, have since 1990 called for U.N. peacekeeping troops to protect a new PLO state in the West Bank and Gaza.[144] The Clinton administration has recently joined this chorus, and the Rabin government of Israel is preparing to give in.[145]

The war to destroy Israel is waged against Jews and Arabs alike by a relatively small handful of Communists. However, it is not only the Holy Land that is in danger, for the PLO sees itself as part of a world revolution. If the PLO succeeds, the Communists will unleash global terrorism on an unprecedented scale. The hijackings of airplanes, kidnappings of Americans in Iran and Lebanon, and bombing of the World Trade Center are mere hints of the firestorm to come.

But at the same time, the Communist revolution and the PLO depend almost entirely on U.S. aid, and thus can easily be stopped. The American public would never approve such aid to Communists or terrorists, but most people have no idea that this is happening. The national news media simply buries the story. And therein lies the solution to stop the terrorists. We must educate our fellow Americans about the betrayal of Israel, and we must join together to withdraw the United States from the United Nations—not just from the UNRWA or some other agency, but from the entire U.N. The PLO and its Marxist allies have permeated that organization, guaranteeing that the war against Israel will always receive U.N. support until the United States leaves altogether.

This is easier to accomplish than it sounds. The U.S. House of Representatives, the lower house of Congress, is composed of 435 representatives, each elected from a district of about half a million citizens. The Constitution grants the House the sole power to initiate funding bills for all federal programs. This means that the House, by a simple majority vote, can override the Senate and even the President by cutting off the funding to any program it chooses, effectively abolishing that program. By voting to stop financing the United Nations, and to withhold foreign aid from countries backing the PLO, the House could destroy the PLO and assure Israel’s security. We need only 218 votes in the House—a majority by one—to achieve this goal.

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