UNRWA: An institutional barrier to Middle East peace

Jeremy Havardi

Director, B’nai B’rith UK’s Bureau of International Affairs

October 2020

Executive summary

UNRWA has lasted 70 years and failed to provide any lasting solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Instead, it has exacerbated the conflict by inflating the number of actual Palestinian refugees, encouraging the most extreme and unrealistic solutions to the conflict and perpetuating extremism and intolerance in its educational activities. Its promotion of the Palestinian right of return to Israel, a non-existent right in international law, directly contradicts the UK government‟s support for a two state solution. The connections between UNRWA and Hamas are deeply troubling given the government‟s commitment to proscribing the terror group and working towards co-existence while its educational curriculum has encouraged virulent racism against Israelis and Jews. No other refugee agency or organisation is so beset with such fundamental problems or is as deeply compromised as UNRWA. As a roadblock to peace and to any negotiated settlement in the region, the agency is no longer fit for purpose. British taxpayers are entitled to ask whether their money is being spent wisely or whether it is being misused to fuel an extreme agenda.

...... B‟nai B‟rith is an international Jewish organization committed to combating racial and religious intolerance. With its international head office in Washington DC, permanent offices at the United Nations and representation in 59 countries, it is the oldest, largest and most active global Jewish human rights organization in the world. B‟nai B‟rith raises concerns about the growth in antisemitism, promotes Israel‟s relations with foreign countries and stands for the rights of all minorities. The website of its UK branch is www.bnaibrithuk.org.

Jeremy Havardi is the Director of the advocacy branch of B‟nai B‟rith UK. He is a historian and journalist whose books include The Greatest Briton, Projecting Britain at War and Refuting the anti-Israel narrative. His articles have appeared in The Spectator, The Guardian, The Jewish News, The Gatestone Institute, Military History Magazine and many other publications. He lives in London and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

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Introduction

UNRWA, or to give it its full title, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, has been in existence for over 70 years and provides primary and vocational education, health care and social services, infrastructure and camp improvement, microfinance and emergency response to those who are classed as Palestine refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Gaza and the West Bank. It claims to act in accordance with UN humanitarian principles of „neutrality, impartiality, independence and humanity‟.1

In 2018, the Trump administration announced that it would cease funding UNRWA.2 At the time, this was widely criticised as a maverick intervention, in part because the US was the organisation‟s main funder, in part because UNRWA was supplying so much of the food and welfare for Palestinians in different countries. Even though the administration could have more carefully spelt out why the agency was being defunded, there remain strong arguments for dismantling UNRWA and transferring its provision of services to other bodies, principally UNHCR (the UN High Commissioner for refugees).

There are at least five reasons why UNRWA is an organisational failure, constituting a major, perhaps the major, stumbling block to peace in the region:

1) It offers a completely distorted picture of the Palestinian refugee problem by inflating the number of actual refugees. 2) It encourages Palestinians to believe in the right of return, the single biggest stumbling block to peace – and thus works against the interests of a negotiated settlement. 3) Its education system encourages violence, jihad and racism against Israelis and Jews. 4) It enjoys a deep relationship with Hamas, an internationally proscribed terrorist organisation, whose aims run counter to those of the international community, including most of UNRWA‟s own donors. 5) It has a recent history of corruption at the highest levels of the organisation.

It is important to understand the extent to which the UK government is invested in UNRWA. As of 2019, the UK is UNRWA‟s third largest donor, behind Germany and the European Union. In

1 https://www.unrwa.org/humanitarian-principles, accessed 1 October 2020 2 Peter Beaumont and Oliver Holmes, „US confirms end to funding for UN Palestinian Refugees‟, Guardian, 31 August 2018. 2 terms of pledges made to UNRWA (cash and in kind) for 2019, the UK contributed $76,259,850 out of a total $972,431,207 budget (7.8%). EU countries, principally Germany, contribute over $300,000,000 (31%)1 while Saudi Arabia and the UAE have pledged over $100,000,000 to the agency (10.4%). There has been a significant funding shortfall since the US decided to cease its own very significant contributions.

On 2nd July 2020, the UK‟s Minister for the Middle East, James Cleverly, announced that the UK government remained firmly committed to supporting UNRWA and Palestinian refugees across the region in order to continue delivering vital services, including healthcare and education.2 British taxpayers are naturally entitled to ask whether this money is being put to good use or whether it is exacerbating the very problems the government seeks to resolve.

Why UNRWA is flawed

1. UNRWA’s toxic inflation of refugee numbers

To address the short-term needs of the refugees arising from the 1948 war in Palestine, the UN General Assembly established UNRWA with Resolution 302 (IV) in December 1949 to carry out humanitarian relief and work programmes for Palestine refugees. It began operations in May 1950 to provide services (at first mainly food) to these refugees and was intended to be a temporary initiative, not the permanent behemoth that it has become.

1 https://www.unrwa.org/sites/default/files/2019_overall_donor_ranking.pdf, accessed 22 July 2020 2 https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-aid-will-help-provide-millions-of-palestinians-with- healthcare-and-education, accessed 22 July 2020 3

UNRWA provided a definition of a refugee that would later be at odds with the definition of every other refugee in the world. For UNRWA, these refugees were: „Persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948, who both lost their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict‟.1 What is striking is how this differs from the definition of refugees in the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees: „Any person who: (2) owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country‟.2 Persecution is the key concept in defining a refugee as far as the UNHCR is concerned, but not for UNRWA.

Later, UNRWA‟s definition changed. In 1965, a third generation descendant of an original refugee was now classed as a refugee, and in 1982, all descendants of Palestine refugee males, including legally adopted children, regardless of whether they had been granted citizenship elsewhere, were classed as Palestinian refugees. This is at odds with Article I (c) (3) of the 1951 U.N. Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, which states explicitly that a person is no longer a refugee if he or she has „acquired a new nationality, and enjoys the protection of the country of his new nationality‟.3 The effect of UNRWA‟s unwarranted inflation was that the number of actual Palestinian Arab refugees, estimated at between 600,000 and 750,000 after the 1947-9 war, had expanded to 5.43 million refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and the West Bank and Gaza Strip as of 2019.

UNRWA spokesmen are on record denying that the classification given to Palestinian refugees is unique. In a piece published in Foreign Policy, one spokesman said that „multiple generations of Afghan, Bhutanese, Burmese, Nepalese, Thai, Tibetan, and Somali people have been recognized as refugees‟.4 Now of course, it is true that you can have multiple generations of an ethnic, religious or racial group that have refugee status. This is because, under the 1951 UN Convention, a primary refugee can have descendants within his or her family who are similarly caught up in the appalling situation of persecution faced by their ancestor. But, their status as refugees is inextricably linked to the fate of their ancestor and their derivative status depends

1 https://www.unrwa.org/palestine-refugees, accessed 1 August 2020 2 https://www.unhcr.org/4ae57b489.pdf, accessed 1 August 2020 3 https://www.unhcr.org/uk/3b66c2aa10, accessed 11 August 2020 4 Colum Lynch, „For Trump and Co., few Palestinian Counts as Refugees‟, Foreign Policy, August 9 2018 4 upon that link. In the case of UNRWA, a second, third, fourth or fifth generation descendant can live a life completely disconnected from the original refugee and still have derivative status as a refugee. That is the fundamental difference. Another is that other refugees in the world fall under the jurisdiction of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), with no other refugee people enjoying their own agency.

But it is worse than that. Whereas UNHCR exempts from the status of refugee anyone who has a newly acquired nationality, this is not so with UNRWA. Thus UNRWA still considers Palestinians living in Jordan (some 2 million people) with full Jordanian citizenship to be refugees. This is despite the fact that the majority will have been born in Jordan, lived their whole lives in Jordan and, in some cases, made wealthy careers in Jordan. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Palestinians who had been educated and fed in UNRWA camps were migrating in their hundreds of thousands to the Gulf States of Kuwait, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, looking for valuable job opportunities in these oil rich nations. Though many became financially independent individuals, none left the UNRWA rolls. They were still considered to be refugees, perpetuating their status for political reasons. The same is true today of Palestinians who moved to Lebanon and Syria. Many are estimated to have left the country, some for new lives in Europe, America or beyond but nonetheless remain on the UNRWA register.

As well as more than 2 million Palestinian citizens of Jordan, there are also well over 2 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza (excluding east Jerusalem) who are registered by UNRWA as Palestinian refugees. These are people who strain every sinew to tell the world that they living in the „state of Palestine,‟ albeit under occupation. In other words, they are living in what they claim to be their own (not yet fully created) state. How can they be living in the state of Palestine, their own national homeland, under the control of their own governments, and yet be refugees from that very same homeland? It is a truly bizarre situation – bizarre that is, unless you understand the second fundamental problem with UNRWA.

2. UNRWA encourages the ‘Palestinian right of return’

The right of return is the idea that all those classified as Palestinian refugees today, some five and a half million at least, have the right under international law to return to their original homes in Israel. Of all Palestinian demands, it is the one which most clearly shows that they are not willing to accept the legitimacy and existence of a Jewish sovereign state. But it is a demand that

5 has received endorsement from the UN General Assembly, especially in UN Resolution 3236 which has reiterated „the inalienable right of the Palestinians to return to their homes‟.1

Before examining UNRWA‟s sponsorship of the right of return, we need to adopt an accurate historical perspective on the events that led to today‟s problems. Firstly, the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem resulted entirely from the decision of the Palestinian leadership and the Arab states in the region to oppose the UN partition solution of 1947 which would have created an Arab and a Jewish state in mandatory Palestine.2 Had such a solution been decisively supported, as it was by the Zionist leadership, there would not have been an exodus of Palestinians from the area between 1947 and 1949. Moreover, during the war that took place in mandatory Palestine and then in the newly created state of Israel between November 1947 and January 1949, two refugee problems were created. The best part of one million Jews were expelled from the Arab countries in which they had been resident, in some cases for thousands of years, in what is known as the forgotten exodus.3

Let us also remember the context of the time. A multitude of refugee problems had been created as a result of the Second World War involving tens of millions of people. What was standard at the time was a simple, largely peaceful and seemingly just solution: to take those who had been displaced from their original country and to resettle and economically rehabilitate them in a country to which they had the closest cultural, linguistic and political affiliation. There are indeed many examples of this happening in the years after the war. 600,000 Chinese fled Mao‟s China following the establishment of a communist state in the country, some finding shelter in Hong Kong. Some 15 million Indian citizens, Hindu and Muslim, found shelter either in India or

1https://www.un.org/unispal/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/InfoNote_Cttee-DPR-March2012_E.pdf, accessed 1 September 2020 2Dan Williams, „Abbas faults Arab refusal of 1947 U.N. Palestine plan‟, Reuters, October 28, 2011 3 For a further discussion on this issue, see Uprooted: How 3000 years of Jewish civilisation in the Arab world vanished overnight by Lyn Julius. 6

Pakistan following the tumultuous policy of partition in 1947.1 Millions of ethnic Germans who were formerly living in Eastern Europe were expelled after the war and found shelter elsewhere, including in West Germany.2 Of course, the most prominent example here is that Israel took in hundreds of thousands of Jews from Arab countries after they were forced to flee for their lives. The notion that this would also apply to the Palestinian refugees was expressed by the UN Chief Trygve Lie in 1950 when he said that the hope was for refugees to live „an independent life in the countries which have given them shelter‟ and where they would be „integrated in the economic system of the countries of asylum‟.3

But over the next decade, any hope that Palestinians could be absorbed and economically rehabilitated by the countries in which they now lived was scuppered by the actions of Arab governments, particularly those of Egypt, Lebanon and Syria. They were kept confined to refugee camps and left to fester, a policy that was supported by Arab public opinion which regarded dissolving the Palestine problem as treason. The fundamental reason was simple – resettling the refugees meant normalising Israel. The Arab countries were firmly wedded to the view that the refugees all had the right to return to Israel and demanded this, regardless of any willingness to sign a peace treaty with the Jewish state. They saw the returning Palestinians as a fifth column that could enter the country and help to destabilise it, sparking another round of war that would reverse the purported humiliation of 1948. One exception was Jordan; King Abdullah did not insist on a Palestinian right of return to Israel and indeed was involved in negotiations with Israel prior to his assassination in 1952.

Today, UNRWA is the only refugee agency in the world that remains dedicated to the right of return for all Palestinian „refugees‟, with no second option considered. James Lindsay, the organisation‟s former general counsel argues that „UNRWA has gradually adopted a distinctive political viewpoint, the strain of Palestinian political thought espoused by those who intend on a „return‟ to the land that is now Israel‟.4 Certainly, a belief in the right of return is shared by all Palestinian leaders, including those who say they want peace with Israel, something that reflects a widespread belief in Palestinian society. The belief in the right of return is symbolised by the installation of a huge key, weighing nearly 1 ton and measuring 9 metres in length, which was

1 William Dalrymple, „The Great Divide: The Violent Legacy of Indian Partition‟, New Yorker, June 22, 2015 2 https://theconversation.com/postwar-forced-resettlement-of-germans-echoes-through-the-decades- 137219, accessed 4 September 2020 3 Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf, The War of Return: How Western indulgence of the Palestinian dream has obstructed the path to peace, p. 80 4 David Bedein, Roadblock to Peace, 26 7 installed by the entrance to the Aida refugee camp.1 UNHCR by contrast is prepared to consider a number of options if return is not possible, including the right to asylum and resettlement in a third country.

Why does UNRWA now claim that return is a fundamental right enshrined in international law? The basis of the claim of return is often taken to be resolution 194, passed in December 1948. It resolved the following: „That the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date‟ and that „compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return‟.2

A few points need to be made. Firstly, that clause has been wrenched out of context entirely, because resolution 194 also calls for negotiations between countries to reach a final settlement between them (paragraph 6) while another clause (paragraph 10) calls for regional governments to facilitate the economic development of the former Mandate territory. In other words, the whole raison d’être of 194 is to call for peace between the countries in the region rather than just establishing some separate, unconditional and inalienable right of return. Yet, the Arab states decisively rejected any idea of making peace with Israel in late 1948 and 1949.

Secondly, resolution 194 was non-binding and could not create a right, given that it was passed by the General Assembly, not the Security Council. As stated in the UN Charter, the Assembly merely makes „recommendations to the Members of the United Nations or to the Security Council‟.3 Thus the resolution could only suggest rather than require action by the parties involved. This is reflected in its language, where it is stated that refugees „should be‟ permitted to return home if they so wished. The word should has a somewhat moralistic quality, exhorting

1 http://icahduk.org/2016/06/09/a-visit-to-aida-refugee-camp/, accessed 9 July 2020 2 https://www.hrw.org/legacy/campaigns/israel/return/un194-rtr.htm, accessed 9 July 2020 3 https://www.un.org/en/sections/un-charter/un-charter-full-text/, accessed 11 July 2020 8 rather than demanding action. The UN did not give some absolute, unconditional right of return simply because of subsequent (wholly biased) UN resolutions.

More fundamentally, the resolution stipulated that the refugees had to „live in peace with their neighbours‟. Yet there is evidence that this condition would not be met. Contemporary Arab spokesmen predicted that the returning refugees would be the vanguard of a renewed assault on the Jewish state. Typical was the view expressed by Al Sayyad in February 1949 which stated that the returning refugees would form “a fifth column” in the war against Israel. In the same year, Egyptian foreign minister Muhammad Salan al-Din declared that the return of refugees to Palestine meant that they would return „as masters of the Homeland and not as its slaves‟ and this meant „the liquidation of the state of Israel‟.1

This was precisely why David Ben Gurion, Israel‟s first Prime Minister, resisted allowing some of those refugees to re-enter Israel after the war. In his words, it would be tantamount to national suicide, given that so many of the returnees harboured a burning hatred for the nascent Jewish state and would have declared war on it from within. Under US pressure, he made two offers to allow back a limited number of Palestinians, in return for a peace agreement – but Arab governments were not interested.

Over time, instead of allowing for the resettlement of Palestinian refugees as recommended by UN resolutions, the Arab states kept them in squalid refugee camps, ensuring that a permanent state of hostility with Israel would be maintained. It is little wonder that Ralph Galloway, a former director of UN Aid in Jordan, once said that the Arab states were refusing to „solve the refugee problem‟ in order to „keep it as an open sore, as an affront to the United Nations and as a weapon against Israel‟.2

The right of return is obviously unworkable because no Israeli government could countenance it. Quite simply, the return of 5–6 million Palestinians, even half that number, would spell the end of Israel as a Jewish state. Any treaty providing for a right of return today would instantly void the Jewish right to self-determination and is therefore a non-starter. It would lead to the abolition of a UN member state and would thus contradict the UN‟s core values. Yet UNRWA encourages this delusional dream on a daily basis, preventing a realistic appraisal of how this conflict might

1Efraim Karsh (2012) „The war against the Jews‟, Israel Affairs, 18:3, 319-343 2 Jay Sekulow, „UNRWA has changed the definition of refugee‟, Foreign Policy, August 17, 2018 9 be solved in the long run. By maintaining it, UNRWA stokes up the anger and resentment of Palestinians and encourages them to adopt a more hard line attitude.

3. Incitement in UNRWA education

Education has been a central component of UNRWA‟s work with Palestinian refugees since the start. Schools have a mission to educate Palestinian children so they can:

- Improve their lives and their societies as citizens of Palestinian, Arab, and global communities; - Become aware of the need for interdependence and tolerance toward differences among individuals and groups; - Balance their rights and needs with those of family, community, and global society.1

Contrary to this mission, and the PA‟s obligations under the Oslo accords, there is evidence that some schoolbooks used in UNRWA schools contain material that demonises and delegitimises Jews, Zionism and Israel.2

From the outset, schools became a focus for raising Palestinian national consciousness and training the hearts of the masses. But the mobilisation they were engaging in was exclusively fixated on opposing Israel in its entirety. In the 1960s, young Palestinians chanted an oath during the school day in which they declared: „Palestine is our country, our aim is to return, death does not frighten us, Palestine is ours‟.3

Fast forward today and UNRWA is responsible for educating about a quarter of all Palestinian children. The textbooks that it uses offer „a systematic insertion of violence, martyrdom and jihad across all grades‟ and expose students to „a full spectrum of extreme nationalist ideas and Islamist ideologies‟. They reject any possibility of peace with Israel and reject „legitimacy of any historical Jewish presence in what is today Israel and the Palestinian Authority‟. Jewish self determination in Israel is depicted as „an aggression against the Palestinian and Arab character of

1 „Fixing UNRWA: Repairing the UN‟s Troubled System of Aid to Palestinian Refugees‟, James G. Lindsay, Policy Focus 91, January 2009 2 http://israelbehindthenews.com/israel-and-jews-in-the-newest-palestinian-authority-pa-schoolbooks- taught-in-pa-and-unrwa-schools-de-legitimization-demonization-advocacy-of-violent-struggle-rather- than-peace-of-jihad-martyrdo/14346/, accessed 10 September 2020 3 Schwartz and Wolf, The War of Return, p. 124 and 10 the region‟ with Jews seen as „colonialist occupiers‟. New textbooks indoctrinate „death and martyrdom‟ and urge the need for jihad throughout Palestinian society. They also call for the ight of all Palestinians to return to pre-1949 Israel. The majority of the textbooks distributed come from the PA and, in Gaza, from Hamas so the problem of UNRWA education is, in essence, a wider problem of Palestinian education. Yet UNRWA cleaves to international standards of neutrality and tolerance and so cannot afford to be compromised.

Some examples of incitement will suffice, based on a recent study by the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se).1 A Grade 4 mathematics book teaches calculus by counting the number of „martyrs‟ in Palestinian uprisings. In the Grade 9 textbook Arabic language, a murderous attack on an Israeli bus is described as „a barbecue party‟. A Grade 5 version of the same book describes Dalal al-Mughabi, the woman who led an attack on an Israeli bus in 1987 that killed 38 civilians, as a woman whose heroism has „made her memory eternal in our hearts and minds‟. A Grade 3 book poetically describes the liberation struggle to remove „the usurper‟ from the land and calls on children to „exterminate the remnants of the foreigners‟. A Grade 11 History book contains an image which implies that Jews control the world.

A Grade 7 science book, ostensibly teaching Newton‟s Second Law of Physics, discusses the use of slingshots against IDF soldiers and a mathematics book for Grade 6 children shows coins from the period of the British mandate but with Hebrew inscriptions removed. One textbook describes Jerusalem as a holy city for Muslims and Christians but with no mention of Jews, while another says that Jews have no holy places in the region. These examples could be multiplied endlessly. They show how the PA and Hamas are priming the next generation for a

1 https://www.impact-se.org/wp-content/uploads/PA-Reports_-Combined-Selected-Examples_2019- 20.pdf, accessed 10 September 2020 11 continuous violent struggle against Israel and how all talk of a two state solution, at least from Fatah, is contradicted by the narrative they are imparting to children. By using their textbook, the supposedly neutral UNRWA has become a party to their narrative.

The advocacy group UN Watch had been working tirelessly to expose examples of hatred emanating from UNRWA employees.1 In 2017, they exposed dozens of examples of UNRWA schoolteachers in Gaza, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon posting material on Facebook that incited to jihadist terrorism and antisemitism, and that included posting Holocaust denying videos and pictures which praised Hitler. A subsequent report from 2019 has found more of the same.2

We should bear this in mind when we hear political figures lavishing praise on UNRWA schools. To take one recent example, a letter appeared last month in The Guardian, signed by a multitude of former European foreign ministers, claiming that these schools had „instilled the principles of tolerance and human rights in hundreds of thousands of young minds‟ and urging western countries to provide UNRWA with more funds. The sense of disconnection from reality is so evident.3

The UK government says it has a zero tolerance approach towards incitement to violence and it is clear that the books which are being issued fall foul of that. Nearly 60% of the UK‟s funding goes to schools in the West Bank and Gaza and thus it is right that DFID (now merged with the FCO) announced, back in February, that it would be reviewing its funding for the organisation. This issue must now be urgently addressed.

4. UNRWA and the terror connection

UNRWA‟s connections with terror are well documented and go back a long way. UNRWA camps in Lebanon and Jordan came heavily under the control of the PLO in the 1960s and 1970s and helped to produce some of the most violent and extreme figures in the Palestinian national movement.

1 http://www.unwatch.org/report-12-unrwa-linked-facebook-accounts-incite-antisemitism-violence/ 2https://unwatch.org/exposed-unrwa-staff-still-posting-jihadi-terrorism-and-antisemitism-on- facebook/, accessed 10 September 2020 3 „UNRWA must not be starved of funds‟, The Guardian, 20 July 2020. 12

Today in Gaza, where UNRWA maintains one of its two headquarters, most of its teachers are entirely affiliated with Hamas or its affiliate, the Islamic Bloc. Hamas officials have the freedom and autonomy to develop the school curriculum, unhindered by the UN. The school textbooks read by Palestinians have been developed by the Hamas education ministry and not surprisingly bear the imprint of the Hamas Charter. Schools have hung up posters of suicide bombers and have openly celebrated the murder of Israelis.

An important organ within Hamas is Al-Kutla il-Islamiya, which operates educational institutions in Gaza. It encourages students to be active within the Islamic movement and also acts as a recruiting sergeant for the Hamas military wing, the al-Qassam Brigades. It does this through a special programme called War Games. This teaches students how to use lethal weapons, including hand grenades, and to climb through various spaces. In other words, schools have been turned into launching pads for terror. This is a clear violation of article 38 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child which expressly states that governments „shall take all feasible measures to ensure that persons who have not attained the age of fifteen years do not take a direct part in hostilities‟.

Proof of the links with Hamas comes from Peter Hansen, a former UNRWA Commissioner General, who said: „I am sure that there are Hamas members on the UNRWA payroll, and I don‟t see that as a crime...We do not do political vetting and exclude people from one persuasion as against another‟.1 Yet Hamas is not merely a „persuasion‟ within Palestinian society so much as a promoter of a virulent antisemitic ideology which calls for the destruction of a UN Member State and which has carried out scores of terror attacks in recent decades. Not surprisingly, some 41 UNRWA students have gone on to become suicide bombers, killing 83 people.2 The vetting that UNRWA does carry out is only designed to exclude those with connections to Al Qaeda and the Taleban alone.3

In light of the above, it is hardly surprising that Qassam rockets were discovered in July 2014 at UNRWA Jabalia Elementary C and Ayyobiya Boys School in Gaza. Compounding the fact that a school was used to store lethal weapons, a UN board of inquiry found that the school was active at the time, with school gates unlocked and children allowed inside. UN Secretary General

1 ‘Canada looking at UN agency over Palestinian connection,‟ CBC News, Oct 03, 2004 2https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuiH25qOPz8&index=9&list=PLflgjoYrggtwJwF0ziiCjEBSqqb 6Zm2rA, accessed 10 October 2020 3 Bedein, Roadblock to Peace, 49 13

Ban Ki-moon stated that he was „dismayed‟ that Palestinian militants had‟ put United Nations schools at risk by using them to hide their arms‟, though he should not have been surprised.1

The UK‟s financial support for UNRWA is highly problematic in view of the government‟s commitment under the Terrorism Act 2000 to prescribe Hamas as a terrorist organisation. As Hamas representatives play such a key role in UNRWA schools, the government is funding an organisation with entrenched links to a proscribed terrorist entity. It is another reason why the UK Parliament must urgently review its funding of the organisation.

5. Corruption

Another problem that has stalked UNRWA in recent years is endemic corruption. The agency claims to have „a zero-tolerance policy for fraud and corruption‟ with a multi layered system of defence that consists of operational managers, senior management, and its own Department of Internal Oversight Services (DIOS).2 Yet there is evidence of corruption within the highest levels of the organization. The agency‟s ethics office produced a confidential report in 2019, later leaked to the media, which cited „credible and corroborated reports‟ that an inner circle within the organisation had engaged in „misconduct, nepotism, retaliation...and other abuses of authority‟. It stated that these abuses were for „personal gain, to suppress legitimate dissent and to otherwise achieve their personal objectives‟. The inner circle comprised some key individuals, including then Commissioner-General Pierre Krähenbühl. He was accused of creating a post for a woman with whom he was allegedly in a relationship and „creating a toxic environment for colleagues and frequent embarrassment for ERCD colleagues and others when dealing with member states‟. There were also numerous allegations against the Chief of Staff, Hakam.3 Krähenbühl, who vehemently rejected the findings of the report, later resigned as agency head.

Corruption is manifested in another way. UNRWA appears to have a vested interest in the conflict continuing because a huge number of its more than 30,000 employees are Palestinians who are classed as refugees.‟4 Hiring people from your own clients is bad practice, made worse

1 Tovah Lazaroff, „UN Secretary General: Palestinian militants put UN Schools at risk during Gaza war‟, Jerusalem Post, April 27 2015 2 https://www.unrwa.org/how-does-unrwa-protect-itself-against-corruption-and-ensures-financial- best-practices, accessed 24 September 2020 3https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/07/29/ethics-report-accuses-unrwa-leadership-of-abuse-of- power/, accessed 24 September 2020 4 https://www.unrwa.org/careers/working-unrwa, accessed 3 July 2020 14 by the fact that many are recruits to Hamas. As one commentator has put it, the organisation „has become so enmeshed in the terrorist population as to be effectively held hostage by it‟.1

Conclusion

UNRWA has been an institutional failure. Unlike other refugee organisations, it has seen an increase rather than a decrease in the number of refugees it manages, mostly due to its absurd and unwarranted inflation of refugee numbers. It has failed to find any lasting solution to the Palestinian refugee problem and has encouraged the most extreme solutions to the problem it was created to address. Its educational services have nurtured a Palestinian identity based almost entirely around a narrative of victimhood and injustice, one which vilifies the Jews and other western actors and which preaches that the only solution is violent resistance. A number of actions are recommended:

- UNRWA needs to be dismantled with its operations handed to the UNHCR, the PA and the Jordanian government. - Donor countries should therefore cease funding UNRWA and transfer their resources to other bodies, principally the UNHCR, that can better manage refugee issues. - The UNHCR should apply its own definition of refugees to the population it is serving instead of the bespoke one offered by UNRWA. - The UNHCR should remove from its register any Palestinian who is a citizen of a sovereign state (i.e. Jordan). - The UNHCR should apply UNESCO standards to its educational curriculum, ending the culture of incitement that is a feature of UNRWA. - The UNHCR should hire employees from UN staff, not from among the Palestinian population. No Hamas official should be employed by a UN agency.

Naturally, this would represent a paradigm shift in dealing with the complex realities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. UNRWA has developed a close relationship with the PA and with Hamas and there would be significant resistance to dealing with the UNHCR. In addition, UNRWA is a major employer within Palestinian society. But removing this agency‟s role would

1 Arlene Kushner, „The UN‟s Palestinian Refugee Problem‟, Azure no. 22, Autumn 5766 / 2005 15 also represent a transformative leap forward in rethinking the dynamics of the conflict, signalling that the West will no longer tolerate the intransigence and rejectionism of Palestinian extremism.

UNRWA has perpetuated the refugee problem and exacerbated Palestinian extremism - and thus constitutes a major stumbling block to peace and co-existence. If western countries refuse to do anything about this, they will remain deeply complicit in the failure to reach a peaceful settlement in the region.

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