Within a few hours of UNRWA's admission that its employees participated in the massacre of Hamas on October 7, more than ten Western countries announced one after the other about the suspension of funding to the agency. The realization that instead of helping humanitarian purposes, Western money was being devoted to murdering Jews and removing them from their land shocked - and rightly so - the decision makers in Washington and the capitals of Europe.
It's better late than never, but the truth is that this is what the West has been doing for several decades - transferring more than a billion dollars every year from Washington, Brussels, Berlin and Stockholm to UNRWA, which are used for one purpose: perpetuating the conflict and exacerbating it, and raising generations of Palestinians filled with hatred who will be ready Also in the future to do what their brothers and fathers did on 7.10.
A trapped floor above a UNRA kindergarten in the Nur al-Shams refugee camp // IDF Spokesman
UNRWA has not been serving humanitarian goals since the 1950s. Even then, studies showed that the standard of living of the Palestinians in the refugee camps was higher than what they had before 1948, as well as that of most of the Arabs in the neighboring Arab countries. Reports from American diplomats from Arab capitals to Washington even then presented a picture Gloomy: Neither the Palestinians nor the Arab countries were willing to cooperate with the efforts to rehabilitate the refugees, since in their eyes rehabilitation means recognizing the existence of Israel as a fait accompli.
There was no humanitarian need then, but there was a political need to perpetuate the refugee problem.
Neither the Palestinians nor the Arab world were willing to let go of a significant tool in the fight against Israel, such as a unique UN agency, and therefore slowly changed its activities from providing aid to providing education, health and welfare services. In the Gaza Strip, this is particularly evident: Hamas leaders can devote their energies for planning the murders of Jews, because there are those who take care of the services for the population. Instead of Hamas taking care of more than 2 million people in the Strip, there are those who do it for them - and with Western funding.
Weapons in UNRA agency bags
In combination with a special definition of refugees, which inflates the number of Palestinian "refugees" by more than 20 times compared to accepted international standards, together with its insistence on not rehabilitating a single Palestinian refugee, UNRWA fosters the Palestinian vision of the elimination of Israel.
Instead of serving the noble goals of resolving conflicts by peaceful means, UNRWA is doing everything so that reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians will never be possible. Every other refugee in the 20th century was told that he must move on and rebuild his life; only the Palestinians, through UNRWA and funded by the West , are given an impetus to continue basking in their hatred of Israel, and to realize this hatred through horrific means.
Israel also made this unfolding disaster possible.
In fact, in recent years it was precisely she who spread a diplomatic iron dome over UNRWA, whenever there were initiatives to end its funding. An attempt to buy peace in the short term and the tactical thinking of the IDF, according to which UNRWA is the least bad alternative, led to Israel being the lobbyist The largest in the West to continue funding an agency whose entire purpose is to ensure that Israel ceases to exist.
Weapons in a sack belonging to UNRA, photo: IDF spokesman
Now Israel needs to take advantage of the opportunity that has come its way and demand not only the temporary suspension of funding, but the complete cessation and dissolution of UNRWA once and for all. The Palestinians in Gaza are not refugees, they should never have been defined as refugees, and therefore they have no need for an agency either. refugees
There is no place for UNRA the day after, and attempts to restore the Strip through the agency will lead us to exactly the same point we reached on October 7. Let's hope that this time the token has already fallen.
The author is a research fellow at the Meshgav Institute for Zionist Strategy.
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