The world says no to UNRWA's demanding money, yet no one is discussing the obvious solutions

Last Friday, UNRWA held a donor's conference at the UN headquarters in New York. The agency's head laid out its financial problems in his opening remarks.

Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) sounded the alarm about the Agency’s deepening funding crisis. Addressing this year’s Pledging Conference for UNRWA convened by the President of the General Assembly, Commissioner-General Lazzarini warned of the risk of the Agency’s collapse.  

 “While we are grateful for the pledges announced, they are below the funds that the Agency needs to keep over 700 UNRWA schools and 140 clinics open from September onwards,” said Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini.

Some of the Agency’s most committed donors have indicated they will substantially decrease their contributions in 2023.

Today, according to reports, UNRWA announced how many new pledges it received.

The answer is - close to zero.

Sama News reports:

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees UNRWA announced shocking data today, noting that it received $13 million in new pledges during the donors' conference held in New York last Friday.

UNRWA said in a statement today, "Most of the pledges referred to in the conference were merely confirmation of the amounts already received and spent in the first five months of 2023. As expected, donors are using the pledging conference to publicly confirm the support they have already provided to UNRWA this year."

Some of the announced donations, according to the UNRWA statement, were "a public confirmation of the amounts previously discussed and agreed upon with UNRWA. This money has not yet been received, but will be transferred to the agency in the coming months. We've already factored these funds into our financial projections for the rest of the year. This money has already been calculated, and the issue of receiving it will not change our financial situation, as some of the financing pledges referred to are for the year 2024 and beyond. "

UNRWA stressed, "In short, and unfortunately, only about 13 million US dollars have been announced...This funding will help reduce the expected deficit this year. Since we need about 70 million US dollars per month to cover our basic costs, this amount will not be enough to sustain the services after September.”

I could not find this announcement on the UNRWA platforms as of this writing, but it rings true. Donors have been getting tired of forever increasing demands by UNRWA - and since UNRWA has no mechanism to take people off of their rolls, it will keep increasing forever.

We've discussed before what must be done. Some 2 million "refugees" live in Jordan as Jordanian citizens. They should not be getting a dime. Jordan is a sovereign nation and provides education and health care to its citizens; nearly all of the UNRWA recipients there are full citizens, and there is no reason for the world to pay for their shelter, doctors and schooling. 

Jordan instead keeps the Palestinian and non-Palestinian citizens in separate schools, separate medical facilities and to an extent separate living areas.

Sounds like apartheid, doesn't it? But this apartheid is funded by the entire world!

There is similarly little reason for UNRWA in the West Bank. The Palestinian Authority has its own schools and fairly good medical facilities, Palestinian "refugees" should be allowed to use them like every Palestinian. UNRWA funds could be redirected to the PA for a couple of years to take care of the logistics of combining the two systems, but there is no reason for the world to fund Palestinian "refugees" who live within the borders of British Mandate Palestine - they are not refugees under any reasonable definition.

Of course, nearly all UNRWA aid recipients are not refugees. But before dismantling UNRWA altogether, lets solve its financial problems in a reasonable way without causing undue hardship on those who really are dependent on UNRWA services, in Lebanon, parts of Syria and Gaza. 

No one is asking these questions, at least not out loud. But without asking these questions and making the decisions to treat Palestinians just like anyone else in need, using the same criteria and the same eligibility, then things would become far worse for the Palestinians that UNRWA is supposed to be supporting.

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What @UNRWA's head didn't tell the UN Security Council

On Thursday, UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini gave a statement to the UN Security Council saying, as the agency has said every year for decades, that it is in existential danger.

There is plenty UNRWA can do to cut costs, though.

For example, it can close nearly all of its operations in Jordan, with some 2 million so-called refugees. The vast majority of them are Jordanian citizens, and UNRWA has never explained why it is needed to provide services like schooling and free medical care to people who are full citizens of Jordan, and who are not refugees by any definition. Why should Palestinian children in Jordan attend different schools from other Jordanians? Why should they get free housing in "camps" when they have the same opportunities as other Jordanians? 

The UNRWA recipients who live in the West Bank and Gaza are not refugees either - after all, they live in the areas of British Mandate Palestine. To call the descendants of those who left from the pre-1967 borders of Israel "refugees" is insane, but it is even crazier to consider them "internally displaced persons" after 73 years. They are citizens of "The State of Palestine." They have passports recognized by most countries. They should be taken care of by their own governments of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas; there is no reason for UNRWA to exist there. 

Lazzarini touched upon how UNRWA's Lebanon "refugees" are emigrating to Europe. What he didn't mention is that most of the "registered refugees" have already left, but UNRWA still counts them as people they are helping. UNRWA claims to be helping 479,000 "refugees" in Lebanon, when the actual number is 300,000 less. Hundreds of thousands of UNRWA "registered refugees" live in Europe or the US but UNRWA still claims them as their own. This would be considered a scandal for any other publicly funded institution.

Also left unsaid is why the UN is responsible for the education, housing and medical care of Palestinians - but no other groups. They spout slogans to justify their existence like "Education is a right" - but why does the world have to pay for that right for Palestinians and not for suffering people anywhere else?

Lazzarini did mention the people like me who point out these issues and topics that he avoids answering. "Coordinated campaigns to delegitimize UNRWA with a view to erode the rights of Palestine refugees are increasing in frequency and in maliciousness," he told the Security Council. I didn't know that the many critics of UNRWA throughout the decades were part of a "coordinated campaign." This is Elders of Zion-level conspiracy thinking. 

Lazzarini also said,  "Shifting geopolitical priorities, shifting regional dynamics, and the emergence of new humanitarian crises have deprioritized the Israeli- Palestinian conflict." In plain English, this means that even though the world has much bigger problems and crises to deal with, it must prioritize Palestinians above all of them - because if they were given the priority commensurate with their actual importance, the UNRWA budget would plummet.

And that is the key issue. UNRWA's existence implies that Palestinian "refugees" are more important, more desperate, needier, poorer, and hungrier than any other refugees and any current victims of war. By any objective measure, they are in better shape than the citizens of many poor countries. The vast majority do not meet the definition of "refugee" in the Refugee Convention. 

UNRWA was created to be a temporary agency. Lazzarini's appeal is to ensure that it remains permanent, and that it continues to grow unimpeded, forever. 

It is up to the world that created UNRWA to create a plan to phase it out.

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Arab countries again spurn UNRWA at pledging conference

UNRWA held a pledging conference in New York starting on Thursday. While it managed to get an additional $160 million in funding, it says it is still $100 million short of its needs.

At his opening remarks, UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini inadvertently described UNRWA's exact problem:

UNRWA cannot be compared to any other UN humanitarian agency.

You have mandated UNRWA to provide government-like services.  But we do not have the fiscal and financial tools of a government. 

Yet no one is asking why a humanitarian agency is performing government-like functions? Palestinians live under governments in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria - why don't those governments do their jobs and provide medical, educational and housing aid to these faux refugees who have lived under these governments' rule far longer than the Syrian and other real refugees that they do take care of?

The US representative speech highlights the problem:

[The] United States reiterates our support to UNRWA and urges other donors to provide robust, reliable funding to help address the Agency’s long-term sustainability.

UNRWA was always meant to be a temporary agency. Its plans should be to dismantle itself over time, and move the responsibility for the Palestinian "refugees" to where they belong - with their host governments. It shouldn't have long-term sustainability - it should have a strategy to eliminate itself.

The Palestinian Director of the Authority (302) for the Defense of Refugee Rights, Ali Huwaidi, noted that the Arab world did not pledge anything at this conference:

We noticed in the pledges conference that no Arab country contributed any additional amount to what it provided at the beginning of 2022, and there is a Qatari, Kuwaiti and Saudi regression, and it is known that the UAE stopped its support completely in February 2022, although the Arab countries are obligated to pay 7.8 percent of the general budget.

They know that UNRWA is part of the problem, not part of the solution. UNRWA exists to keep a culture of permanent victimhood and hate, and to give Palestinians false hope that one day they will "return" to a country they have never seen and destroy Israel demographically. This justifies treating them like garbage in the meanwhile. 

UNRWA should work with the host countries to redirect its budget towards having its responsibilities transitioned to real governments. There is no reason Palestinians who are nearly all Jordanian citizens should live in "refugee"camps. There is no reason Palestinians in Lebanon should have no rights to even buy land or hold many jobs in the land they have lived in for over 70 years. There is no reason Palestinians in the areas of British Mandate Palestine should be considered "refugees." There is no reason the very definition of "Palestine refugee" should not be the same as that of every other refugee. There is no reason why descendants of refugees should automatically inherit that designation.

The reason UNRWA has failed is because for decades UNRWA has not tried to solve the original refugee problem - they exist to perpetuate it, and to justify perpetuating it. 

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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