Mick Hartley

Whatever happens now in Gaza -and it’s not looking good, as Hamas regains control through public executions and the killing of any possible rivals – at least let’s hope some lessons have been learnt. Like, for instance, not promoting the lies, which enabled groups like Hamas to gain control, that all Palestinians are refugees, waiting for Israel and the Jews to disappear. As UNRWA has been doing for generations.

Adi Schartz at the JC:

No amount of reconstruction will bring peace if the ideological foundations of Hamas – and of Palestinian society more broadly – remain untouched. The massacre of October 7 was not an aberration born of despair; it was the logical outcome of an idea that has animated Palestinian politics for a century: the refusal to accept Jewish sovereignty anywhere between the river and the sea. Until that changes, no peace plan will succeed, and no ceasefire will hold.

For decades, Western diplomats have misdiagnosed the conflict as a territorial dispute – about borders, settlements, and security arrangements. Yet at its core, for the Palestinians, it is about legitimacy: Israel is viewed not the homeland of the Jewish people but an alien colonial implant. Jews are viewed not as an indigenous nation returning home but as foreigners who imposed themselves through force. Like the French in Algeria, they are expected to leave. At best, they might be tolerated as a religious minority under Muslim rule – never as a nation entitled to self-determination.

This ideology has not only survived for more than a century but been institutionalised and sustained – through the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, or Unrwa. Created in 1949 as a temporary body to assist the roughly 700,000 Palestinians displaced during Israel’s War of Independence, Unwra has become a permanent agency with a single overriding purpose: to perpetuate the refugee status of Palestinians indefinitely. Whereas the role of the international community should be to create the circumstances for enhancing peace, in this case it did the exact opposite.

Unlike the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, which resettles refugees and ends their statelessness, Unrwa enshrines it. Only in the Palestinian case is refugee status permanent and passed down to descendants for eternity. The result: the number of Palestinian “refugees” has swelled from 700,000 to some six million (Palestinian leaders routinely claim eight or nine million). In reality, more than 95 per cent of them were never displaced from anywhere. They were born in Gaza, Ramallah, Amman, or Beirut.…

In Unrwa schools, textbooks glorify “martyrs,” maps erase Israel, and pupils are taught that “return” – meaning the destruction of Israel – is not a dream but a duty. Unrwa has become part and parcel of Palestinian rejectionism.

UNRWA is the only UN agency dedicated to helping refugees from a specific region or conflict. It was originally established to provide relief to all refugees resulting from the 1948 war, but the Israeli government took over responsibility for the Jewish refugees in 1952. No Arab country has stepped forward to take responsibility for the Arab refugees however, despite all the talk of Arab Nationalism and Arab unity. Keeping them as refugees – and the responsibility of UNRWA – is too convenient, and reinforces the point that the state of Israel, for them, can never be acknowledged. The refugees will stay refugees – now some six million registered with UNRWA – until Israel is destroyed. 

Meanwhile in the UNRWA-run schools in Gaza the pupils are taught Jew-hatred and the glories of martyrdom. And while the UN funded education in Gaza, Hamas was free to ignore the usual responsibilities of government and build its network of tunnels, and stockpile the weapons and rockets to be used against Israel.

UNRWA was always part of the problem, not part of the solution.