Dr. Adi Schwartz of Ben Gurion University explained Wednesday that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) keeps the Arab and Muslim “fantasy” of destroying Israel alive by perpetuating the Palestinian refugee issue instead of solving it.
Schwartz spoke in the wake of a debate in Switzerland about defunding UNRWA, after evidence emerged of UNRWA employees supporting Hamas terror. (The lower house of the Swiss parliament voted to defund it; the upper house blocked that effort.)
All other refugees in the world are managed by the U.N. High Commission on Refugees; all other refugees are resettled in other countries. The Palestinians, uniquely among refugees, retain their “refugee” status even when they build their lives elsewhere.
UNRWA, established in late 1949 by the United Nations to deal specifically with the roughly 700,000 Palestinians who left Israel during a war started by Arab states to crush the new Jewish state, was originally supposed to last for 18 months. Instead, it has lasted for 75 years. Schwartz explained that the Arab states, which refused to recognize Israel at that time, saw the refugee issue as a way to keep the conflict alive. Today, the descendants of the refugees number 5-6 million; the hope among those who still reject Israel is that the refugees, when added to the existing Arab population of Israel, would outnumber the Jews population of Israel, turning Israel into a majority Muslim Arab state, or else turning Israel into an illegitimate, “apartheid,” minority-dominated state.
The “tragedy,” Schwartz said, is that the West donates to UNRWA in the hope of helping the Palestinians, while the Arab world sees UNRWA as a weapon to destroy Israel, and therefore the agency creates more conflict that the Palestinians ultimately suffer.
In Gaza, he pointed out, which Palestinians consider their own land, some 75% of the population are also being told by the international community that they are still refugees. This means they are not “home,” and are hoping to claim homes in Israel.
Palestinian support for the terror attack of October 7 showed the danger of this fantasy, Schwartz said. Therefore, “UNRWA should not be part of the solution,” Schwartz said. “It has no place in the Gaza Strip on the day after” the conflict.
Schwartz observed that in 2018, after the Trump administration stopped UNRWA funding (which was restored by the Biden administration, Palestinians did not mourn the loss of services, but mourned the loss of their so-called “right of return.”
Within Gaza, he noted, UNRWA is staffed by Palestinians — which is why UNRWA employees have been reportedly hiding hostages, and why Israeli soldiers keep finding rockets and ammunition near UNRWA boxes and within UNRWA packaging.
If the world wanted to rebuild Gaza after the war under “peaceful conditions,” Schwarz said, other agencies — such as the U.S. Agency for International Development — should be used, but UNRWA should be disbanded and removed from the Gaza Strip.
A recent peace plan for Gaza published by this author proposed: “The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) will be removed in favor of a new development agency, administered by countries within the framework of the Abraham Accords.”
While that would be a “very good idea,” Schwartz said, the most important point was to separate the political question from the relief question: people living in Gaza could not have “refugee” status anymore, because it guaranteed future conflict with Israel.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
