U.S. Defunds UNRWA - Netanyahu Hails Change As Stopping 'Refugee Perpetuation Agency'

Netanyahu hails US defunding of 'refugee perpetuation agency' UNRWA

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Foreign Ministry on Sunday praised the United States decision to defund the UN agency that deals with Palestinian refugees and their descendants, with the premier saying it was a “welcome and important change.”

The US announced on Friday that it would cut nearly $300 million in planned funding for the UN’s Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), castigating the agency for its practices, and will no longer provide funding at all.

During a visit to a school in the community of Yad Binyamin on the first day of the school year, Netanyahu said that Israel had absorbed many refugees during its existence and resettled displaced people, citing the years following the Holocaust and the wake of the 2005 disengagement from the Gaza Strip.

“Have displaced people not come to us from various countries? Holocaust survivors torn from their land?” he said. “They were uprooted, survived and came here. Did we keep them in the status of refugees? No, we absorbed them, including hundreds of thousands of Jews who left all their property behind and were uprooted from Arab countries in the [1948] War of Independence.

“We didn’t keep them as refugees. We made them equal and contributing citizens in our state,” Netanyahu continued. “That isn’t what’s happening with the Palestinians, where 70 years ago they created a special institution: not absorbing refugees, and instead perpetuating refugees.

“That’s why the US did something very important by stopping the funding for the refugee perpetuation agency known as UNRWA,” the prime minister added. “It is finally starting to solve the problem. The funds must be taken and used to genuinely help rehabilitate the refugees, whose true number is a fraction of the number reported by UNRWA.

“This is a very welcome and important change, and we support it,” he said.

The Foreign Ministry also issued a statement in support of the Trump administration’s step, slamming the UN body.

“UNRWA perpetuates the myth of the eternal ‘refugee’ status of the Palestinians. The sole purpose is sustaining an illegitimate instrument aimed at the destruction of the State of Israel. UNRWA is part of the problem, not of the solution,” the ministry said in a statement posted on the Twitter page of spokesperson Emmanuel Nahshon.

The move announced by the US drew swift condemnation from Palestinians and warnings from the agency’s administrators.

Nabil Abu Rudeineh, a spokesman for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, said Saturday that the Palestinian leadership was considering going to the UN General Assembly and Security Council in a bid to get the US to reverse its decision.

A day earlier, he described the move as a “flagrant assault against the Palestinian people and a defiance of UN resolutions.”





Palestinian Refugees: Trump's Reality Check

• "They are not necessarily doing things that would cause peace..." — US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley.
• "UNRWA has, instead of resolving the problem, done everything in its power to perpetuate it. Instead of peace and coexistence, it teaches hatred and incitement. Instead of fighting terrorist organizations, it collaborates with them..." — Ron Prosor, former Israeli Ambassador to the UN.
• "Responsibility for the Palestinians and the UNRWA budgets could be transferred to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, which looks after the rest of the world's refugees and, unlike UNRWA, works toward solving the refugee problem instead of perpetuating it." — Ron Prosor.
  
  
  
  
  
  

The Trump administration's reported plan to overturn US policy on the issue of Palestinian refugees is long overdue. According, initially, to media reports, the new policy -- scheduled to be unveiled in early September and based on sealed classified information from the US State Department -- will reduce the number of Palestinians defined by the UN as "refugees" from five million to 500,000, thus refuting the figures claimed by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). The UN figures include descendants (not only children, but grandchildren and great grandchildren) of Palestinians across the world who have never even set foot in Israel, the Gaza Strip or the Palestinian Authority (PA). The new plan will also apparently include a rejection of the Palestinians' so-called "right of return" to Israel of refugees and their descendants.

Washington also announced that it is cutting all US funding to UNRWA, and will reportedly "ask Israel to 'reconsider' the mandate it gives UNRWA to operate in the West Bank."

This reining in of UNRWA operations -- which began in January 2018, when President Donald Trump imposed a $65 million freeze on America's annual funding -- is significant, as it is the first time an American administration has actually sought out and acted upon evidence about the Palestinian refugee organization. Until now, the US has continued to provide billions of dollars to UNRWA, even as monitoring organizations – such as UN Watch, Palestinian Media Watch and NGO Monitor – have repeatedly exposed the complete and ongoing abuse of its mandate, which is already rather a marvel:

"Although the term "Palestine refugee" is central to UNRWA's mandate, the General Assembly has not expressly defined it. The General Assembly has tacitly approved the operational definition used in annual reports of the Commissioner- General setting out the definition. The operational definition has evolved slightly through Agency internal instructions but in practice there are political and institutional limits on the extent to which the Agency is able to develop the definition itself...." (Emphasis added)



Even more disturbing is that a State Department report delivered to Congress in 2015, which revealed crucial information about UNRWA's purposeful inflation of the number of Palestinian refugees, was marked as "classified" and its findings purposely kept hidden. The existence of the report was exposed by the Washington Free Beacon in January 2018, nearly three years later. In April, when the report still had not been made public, 51 members of the House of Representatives signed a letter -- spurred by the Middle East Forum -- calling on Trump to declassify the report.

In a comprehensive 2017 piece on UNRWA, former Israeli Ambassador to Canada Alan Baker detailed just how "political" the organization has become:

"... UNRWA by its own admission, has proudly evolved from a temporary relief and works program into a broad social welfare organization within Palestinian society. It has become an independent political body, based solely on the continuing existence of the refugee issue. It maintains its own independent political interests, policies, and funding mechanisms.
"UNRWA employs 30,000 people, almost all Palestinian and some complicit in acts of violence and terror against Israel such as allowing Hamas rockets to be stored in and fired from UNRWA schools or grounds. In one case, after the weapons' discovery, UNRWA handed the rockets to Gaza government officials – in other words, back to Hamas officials."