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Abolish the UN's Palestinian Refugee Agency

(New York Times) Bret Stephens - UNRWA employees were involved in the Hamas massacre of Oct. 7 and Israeli intelligence estimates that 1,200 of UNRWA's 12,000 employees in Gaza have links to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. But the fundamental problem isn't that UNRWA is infested with terrorists and their sympathizers. It's that UNRWA may be the only agency in the UN system whose central purpose is to perpetuate grievance and conflict. It should be abolished. The UN has two agencies dedicated to the plight of refugees. One, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, is responsible for nearly all the world's 30 million refugees, with a mandate to help them resettle in third countries if they can't go home. The other is UNRWA. No other group except for Palestinians gets its own permanent agency. Why? In part, because neighboring Arab countries refused to fully absorb Palestinian refugees. The changing borders and independence movements of the postwar era produced millions of refugees, including 800,000 Jews who were kicked out of Arab countries that had been their homes for centuries. Nearly all of the world's refugees found new lives in new countries - except for Palestinians. The Palestinians have been kept as perpetual refugees as a means of both delegitimizing Israel and preserving the irredentist fantasy that someday their descendants will "return" through the elimination of the Jewish state. UNRWA's very existence keeps this hope alive. Palestinians should be citizens of the countries in which they live - just as some two million Arabs are in Israel. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict can't be solved so long as millions of Palestinians have been turned into the world's only permanent refugees. By doing that, UNRWA makes itself an obstacle to peace.
2024-01-31 00:00:00
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