OPINION:
Some eight decades after the end of World War II, employees of the United Nations are murdering Jews, and American taxpayers are paying for it.
The day before International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East said that several of his employees had allegedly taken part in the largest massacre of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust. The agency’s support of terrorism, however, has long been an open secret.
Last Friday, Philippe Lazzarini, the agency’s commissioner-general, acknowledged that Israeli authorities have provided it with “information about the alleged involvement of several UNRWA employees in the horrific attacks on Israel” on Oct. 7. Mr. Lazzarini stated that he had “immediately terminated the contracts of these staff members.”
Other damning revelations have followed.
Intelligence reports shared with The Wall Street Journal indicate that no fewer than a dozen agency employees “had connections” to the Oct. 7 massacre, and at least six took part in the attack. Two helped kidnap Israelis, and “two others were tracked to sites where Jewish civilians were shot and killed.” The report stated that “others coordinated logistics for the assault, including procuring weapons.” Even teachers with the agency took part.
The scope and scale of the agency’s complicity is massive, with intelligence estimates indicating that no fewer than 1,200 of its 12,000 employees in Gaza “have links to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and about half have close relatives who belong” to these U.S.-designated terrorist groups. Agency vehicles and facilities are also alleged to have played a role in the attack.
As for the U.S., it has called to “temporarily suspend” funding to the U.N. agency — although a State Department spokesperson told reporter Jeryl Bier that contributions to the agency before Jan. 24 remain in effect. In other words, U.S. taxpayer money is still making its way to the organization. As of this writing, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency retains its status in the United States as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.
Other nations, including the United Kingdom, Germany and the Netherlands, have also suspended funds. Others, including Spain, Belgium, Ireland and Norway, have failed to do so and are seemingly unbothered by financing the mass murder of Jews.
As Seth Cropsey, president of the Yorktown Institute, a Washington think tank, said: “The U.N. may or may not be a farce, but the European states that continue their contributions to UNRWA are helping to answer the question.”
Yet the actions of the agency’s employees shouldn’t come as a surprise. Far from being an aberration, antisemitism is its raison d’etre. The agency exists to perpetuate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — and it has done just that for more than seven decades.
The U.N. Relief and Works Agency was founded in 1949, ostensibly to resettle refugees from Israel’s 1948 War of Independence. Yet the organization was soon politicized.
All of the world’s other refugee populations are under the jurisdiction of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, which, despite dealing with six times as many refugees as the Relief and Works Agency, has only one-quarter of the staff. The Relief and Works Agency’s definition of “refugee” also includes people who are generations removed from the 1948 war, people who are citizens of new states, and people who live in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip — places that Palestinians themselves claim as part of a future Palestinian state. Uniquely, the Relief and Works Agency’s categorization of refugee is not dependent on need and applies to citizens of recognized countries.
While the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees explicitly seeks to end refugee status, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency seeks to perpetuate it for generations. Far from ending suffering, the Relief and Works Agency creates it.
Its definition means that a child born in Gaza under Hamas rule is a “refugee.” So is Gigi Hadid, an American-born millionaire model who lives in Los Angeles. By promoting this irredentist narrative, the agency ensures that the conflict can end only with the destruction of Israel. But this, too, is precisely what the agency’s textbooks and educators teach.
UN Watch, an organization that works to reform the United Nations, has steadfastly documented virulent antisemitism being taught at Relief and Works Agency schools, which serve as an incubator for Jew-hatred. A Jan. 11 UN Watch expose of a Telegram group of 3,000 of the agency’s teachers found celebrations of terrorist attacks and anti-Jewish violence. Employees of the U.N. agency cheered the Oct. 7 massacre. As Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, pointed out, “in more than 249,000 messages, replete with celebrations of Hamas terrorism … not one UNRWA teacher objected.”
As for Mr. Lazzarini, he decried the funding cuts and expressed shock at the revelations that employees under his purview were terrorists. But this doesn’t pass muster.
A 2014 report by the Center for Near East Policy Research found that Hamas and Islamic Jihad “control the UNRWA stations in Gaza,” and in 2012, “UNRWA in Gaza elected Hamas to all 11 seats in UNRWA’s teachers’ union.”
A 2015 internal investigation found that schools run by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency were used by Hamas to hide weapons and launch attacks during the 2014 Israel-Hamas war. Video evidence confirmed it.
The agency has long covered up its complicity with terrorists. And it has received considerable aid from press outlets that should know better.
In 2018, the Trump administration, citing the agency’s troubling history, cut funds to it. But instead of noting the agency’s terror ties and antisemitism, news outlets including The Washington Post and Foreign Policy magazine omitted facts about the U.N. Relief and Works Agency’s sordid record, portraying the cuts as part of an “isolationist” impulse that would harm peace efforts. Of course, the opposite is true.
Efforts to present the U.N. Relief and Works Agency as a respectable stakeholder have continued. Indeed, the day before these ghastly revelations, a spokesperson at the State Department said that it would be given a “central role in Gaza after the war.”
The U.N. Relief and Works Agency, however, has done enough.
• Sean Durns is a senior research analyst for CAMERA, the 65,000-member Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.
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