Mick Hartley

A damning look at the record of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA):

One of the largest humanitarian programs [in thge occupied territories] is the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). One-third of UNRWA’s $350 million annual budget is furnished by American taxpayers, and a little more than half comes from their European counterparts. UNRWA is unlike any other international agency. It was established in 1949 by the General Assembly to carry out relief programs benefiting Arabs displaced (some quite voluntarily) during the fighting that erupted after the new state of Israel was simultaneously invaded by its five Arab neighbors. (Remarkably, the UN offered no such succor to the numerous Jewish communities, some dating from biblical times, which were forcibly evicted from Arab countries.) Not only is UNRWA unique in its exclusive concern for original Palestinian “refugees” and their descendants (now numbering over 4 million according to the agency’s rather loose criteria), it is the only refugee services organization whose raison d’être is not to resettle its charges, but rather to keep them and their dependents in squalid temporary dwellings while they await their “right of return.”

The needless festering of grievance in the undeniably miserable 59 camps (27 of which are located in the West Bank and Gaza) is not UNRWA’s only flaw, however. Indeed, far from being an impartial dispenser of humanitarian relief, UNRWA has become an enabler of terrorists, complicit through sins of commission and omission, in the cycle of violence wracking the Middle East. […]

Over the years, the “educational” materials currently in use in UNRWA schools include the following:

Its tenth grade textbook History of the Contemporary and Modern World defines Zionism as “a racist ideology and political movement that appeared in the second half of the nineteenth century” and informs its readers that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were “a group of confidential resolutions adopted by the [Basel Zionist] Congress…the goal of which is world domination.” [And we dare criticize Hamas’s Covenant?]

Readers of its fifth grade textbook Physical Geography, its tenth grade Geography of the World’s Continents, and other volumes with maps will search in vain for any mention of Israel.

The high school textbook Health and Environmental Sciences contains a unit entitled “The Racist Annexation and Separation Wall and Its Impact on Environment.”

The fourth grade reader Our Beautiful Language gives students this assignment: “Let us research and write [an essay] about one of the Palestinian martyr leaders [suicide bombers].”