Got a link? On Monday, Israel’s parliament overwhelmingly passed two laws dealing with UNRWA, the acronym for the euphemistically titled United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which self-promotes as a humanitarian organization devoted to the well-being of Palestinian refugees.
Decades ago, when it was founded, that may have been truer. Today, UNRWA is a farce that’s controlled by Hamas and other interests, which openly advocate for the destruction of Israel.
This has been well-chronicled over a long period of time. Among UNRWA’s mandates, for example, is the operation of schools for Palestinian refugees.
At every stage of their schooling, Palestinian children are taught to hate Jews and Israel, which is presented as being an illegitimate state that stole their ancestral land. They learn that to kill Jews is the highest calling and brings honour to their families and nation. The curricula used by UNRWA — and paid for by western countries, with Canada being one of its most generous benefactors — promotes extreme violence and blind hatred.
Anyone suggesting that such matters have been addressed and that UNRWA schools just teach reading, writing and arithmetic is either egregiously uninformed or intentionally lying.
In the immediate aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War, when Israel fought for its survival on three fronts, its speedy victory was unexpected.
The tiny and poor country did not have the financial or other resources to attend to the needs of the large Palestinian population that was suddenly living under Israeli control.
Einat Wilf, a former member of the Knesset with the left-leaning Labor party, is an expert on UNRWA, having written the seminal book on the origins and development of the organization. She recalls the chaos immediately following the Six-Day War.
On June 14, 1967, four days after the war ended, there was an
exchange of letters between the commissioner general of UNRWA and a senior foreign policy adviser to the Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs, in which they agreed, on a non-binding and voluntary basis, that UNRWA would continue to service the Palestinian population residing in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
“A lot of people are under the mistaken impression that Israel must co-operate with UNRWA,” Wilf told the National Post in an interview on Tuesday. “As if this is like some treaty obligation, but it’s not.” The agreement was made in good faith on the understanding that UNRWA would fulfill its humanitarian obligations. It was also cancellable at any time with one week’s notice.
“Despite the continuing allure and power of the letters U N,” Wilf explained, UNRWA “is actually a Palestinian organization. So the people who work in Gaza and the West Bank are Palestinians.… They can still do their job. They can teach the kids the next day that Palestine from the river to the sea will be free.”
This slogan is a staple of the hatred taught in UNRWA schools. It openly calls for the destruction of Israel, as does Hamas.
Since October 7, Israel has exposed evidence that many of UNRWA’s schools and health-care facilities in the Gaza Strip double as Hamas bases, or are connected to the tunnel network that is used solely for military and terrorist purposes.
UNRWA Commissioner General Philippe Lazzarini has asserted that
he was unaware that the organization’s headquarters in Gaza City sat atop a massive Hamas server farm that was feeding off its power supply. Lazzarini’s assertion is untenable. And that is just one of so many examples.
Support among thousands of UNRWA workers for the October 7 attack and the ensuing savagery
is glorified in online groups and chat rooms.
Even Lazzarini has conceded publicly that UNRWA employees may have participated in the savagery of October 7. We also know that physicians and UNRWA teachers were among the Palestinians who
held Israeli hostages captive in their homes.
Yet in recent days, both Canada’s minister of international development,
Ahmed Hussen, and its ambassador to the United Nations,
Bob Rae, have condemned Israel’s position of refusing to co-operate with UNRWA — a UN agency that is effectively controlled by Hamas and other terrorist interests committed to its annihilation.
Their posts on X state that Israel’s refusal to co-operate with UNRWA threatens an already dire situation in the Gaza Strip.
I challenge Ambassador Rae to direct his criticisms towards Hamas (and its benefactors, Qatar and Iran), which has been known to seize aid shipments entering the Gaza Strip.
Ambassador Rae should be apoplectic about UNRWA’s brazen corruption and cruelty. He might also challenge Egypt for refusing to allow aid to flow into the Gaza Strip from its territory. But Rae is silent on that.
Palestinian suffering in the Gaza Strip could be stopped tomorrow. The bloodshed of the last year could have been easily averted.
Ambassador Rae should be hectoring Hamas to lay down its arms and release the hostages — dead and alive — immediately. If he chose to use his influence in that way, there would be a much swifter and more positive outcome, from a humanitarian perspective, to the endless suffering.
Chastising Israel for severing ties with UNRWA is a grotesque moral inversion.
Canada should place the blame for the humanitarian situation in Gaza where it rightly belongs — on Hamas — rather than chastising Israel
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