UNRWA: an Institutional Barrier to Middle East Peace
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
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. 1 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.