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What is UNRWA Doing in Gaza? – Part 3

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Yarmouk residents gathered to await a food distribution from UNRWA in January 2014. (Photo by UNRWA)
Rabbi Prof. Dov Fischer is rabbi of the Young Israel of Orange County, member of the RCA Executive Board and former national vice president of the ZOA. An adjunct professor of law at Loyola Law School, he was Chief Articles Editor of the UCLA Law Review and authored the books

Do you see why Kafka would sue if this were described as Theater of the Absurd? It does not even reach absurd. It is more properly comparable to a different production, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” where inmates take over an insane asylum. But at least there, a nurse stopped them. Here, no Nurse Ratched.

The UNRWA is a subsidiary of the United Nations. Its commissioner-general, appointed by the U.N. Secretary General, is the only head of a United Nations body authorized to report directly to the General Assembly. The UNRWA was founded by Resolution 302(IV) of December 8, 1949, and to this day remains unique within the world body as a relief agency assigned to serve only one class of people.

All the world’s other refugees are lumped all together in a separate agency, served by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). UNHCR now claims to serve the needs of more than 10.4 million refugees and over the years has served bonafide refugees in 120 countries ranging from the Balkans, Colombia, West Africa, and Chechnya to Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Timor, and the Horn of Africa. Palestinian Arabs alone are under the aegis of their own internationally funded welfare program, UNRWA.

Originally, 65 years ago, the UNRWA was responsible for serving “750,000 Palestinian refugees.” Today, as the “refugees” have died out and disappeared, the UNRWA has grown faster than an American “federal entitlement program,” somehow now serving “5 million eligible Palestinian refugees.” At this remarkable growth rate, the UNRWA will be serving 30 million or 40 million “eligible Palestinian refugees” in another 65 years.

Locally recruited “Palestinian refugees” make up 99 percent of UNRWA’s staff in the 58 refugee camps that UNRWA operates in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, and the land of Judea and Samaria that the Arab world calls “the West Bank.” The majority of UNRWA camps and nearly 60 percent of their residents are in the three Arab countries, the remainder in the areas administered by the Palestinian Authority and by Hamas.

According to the UNRWA, it is the main provider of basic social services in all those camps. 66,000 “refugees from Palestine” living in Gaza, “Palestine” at the Nusseirat camp. 87,000 at the Beach (or Shati) camp. 34,000 at the Bureij camp. 21,000 at Deir al-Balah camp. 110,000 at Jabaliya. 72,000 at Khan Younis. 24,000 at Maghazi. And 104,000 at Rafah refugee camp. All “Palestinian refugees” living in Gaza, the land they call the home to which they have returned — “Palestine.”

Is this not objectively, dispassionately insane? And Christian European countries with wobbly finances pay for this while the richest oil countries and Arab oil sheikdoms toss in some pushka (collection box) change?

Under the UNRWA’s auspices, the number of refugees it serves has grown from 914,000 in 1950 to more than 3.8 million in 2002 to 5 million today. The people are not refugees, but the program has taken on a life of its own, funded more than 25 percent by American taxpayers who would go through the roof and under the tunnels of Hamas Gaza if they had a clue where their taxes were going, while several Arab and anti-American oil-exporting countries contribute less than the cost of a shul Kiddush. Thus, the overwhelming majority of its population are the children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren of those who first were placed in UNRWA camps in 1950.

Meanwhile, between 1947 and 1950, approximately 750,000 Jewish refugees were driven from Arab countries in the Middle East. There was no United Nations agency to serve their health, educational, and social needs. So they were absorbed directly into the Israeli polity, and their offspring bear no indicia of refugee status. Rather, they are the very builders and fabric of Israel. They do quite well without being on United Nations welfare — and maybe that is part of the secret of success.

This makes no sense. In a time when U.N. fact-finding commissions are all the rage, here is a subject for American congressional fact-finders to consider investigating: Why are we Americans throwing away $300 million in tax dollars every year — billions in the past decade alone? A question to ask lovingly of American Congressional representatives and of United States Senators who are Israel’s friends and who are capable of launching a full investigation of the UNRWA fraud: O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Rabbi Dov Fischer is author of General Sharon’s War Against Time Magazine (Steimatzky: 1985). His political commentaries have appeared on the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, National Review, Los Angeles Times, and in other major American publications. He formerly was Chief Articles Editor of UCLA Law Review, is an adjunct professor of law at two prominent American law schools, and is Rav of Young Israel of Orange County, California.

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