UNRWA’s Bloated Farce
According to the Times of Israel, “A Republican senator introduced a bill Thursday that would require the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) to change its definition of what constitutes a Palestinian refugee in order to receive future US assistance.” The Trump administration wants UNRWA, corrupt and inefficient, to be cut down to size. They want “Palestinian” refugees to be limited to those who really are refugees, that is, people who left Mandatory Palestine, or Israel, almost 70 years ago. They want “Palestinian refugees” to be defined the same way all other refugees have been defined: as people who have fled a particular territory or country, which does not include their descendants. How many “Palestinians” who left Palestine/Israel between 1947 and 1949 are alive today? Estimates range from 20,000 to 40,000. Compare that with the five million “Palestinian refugees” that UNRWA now claims are eligible for its services. But it is UNRWA that is wrong.Read the peerless Howard Jacobson's speech about Jeremy Corbyn and antisemitism
One further point that deserves to be made is that even those Arabs who left Palestine/Israel from 1947 to 1949 are not exactly “refugees” in the full meaning of the term. They did not flee persecution at the hands of Israelis. There was no persecution. Some left before, or during, the hostilities, to get out of the way of battles they assumed the Arabs would win, in the belief that they could soon return. Others left after the Arab defeat, for they assumed — wrongly — that the victorious Jews would treat them as the Arabs would have treated the Jews had they won. Again, there was no forcing them out. They did not flee. They chose to leave. If this history were to be taken into account, there would be no “Palestinian” refugees in the proper sense of the term.
UNRWA is a completely corrupt organization. It has been grossly overstaffed, mainly by extravagantly-paid “Palestinians.” The more UNRWA inflates its rolls with the names of millions of descendants of refugees, described and treated as refugees themselves, and the more dead people it keeps on those rolls, the more aid UNRWA can request from its donors. Who are those donors? Ambassador Nikki Haley has pointed out that the fabulously rich Gulf Arabs give very little to support the “Palestinian refugees.” Of the top fourteen contributors to UNRWA, only one — Saudi Arabia — is an Arab country. All the rest are in Europe, save for the United States, which has been the most generous contributor, by far, to UNRWA.
The Americans have now done something the Arabs find outrageous and, until now, unthinkable. They have decided to refuse to continue accepting, much less, bankrolling, this state of affairs. They want exactly one thing: for the world to define a “Palestinian refugee” as someone who left Mandatory Palestine, or Israel, between 1947 and 1949, and to stop pretending that the millions of descendants of those people are “Palestinian refugees” themselves. After the billions that the United States has poured into UNRWA, it has both the right and the duty to put an end to funding that bloated farce. It is willing to help UNRWA minister to the needs of the 20,000-30,000 Arab refugees still living, but not to those five million descendants. If UNRWA refuses to agree, let it go its own way. Our contribution, and ideally that of our Western allies as well, should at that point be reduced to zero.
Something tells me you're expecting me to call Jeremy Corbyn an antisemite. There's been a bit about it in the press, and I... well, you know...Labour MPs are conferring legitimacy on anti-Semitism
But I'm not going to call him anything. He says he isn't an antisemite, Hamas says he isn't an antisemite, the white supremacist David Duke says he isn't an antisemite, and that's good enough for me.
Am I being ironical? Ladies and Gentlemen, I'm incapable of irony.
We know what an antisemite look like. He wears jackboots, a swastika arm-band, and shouts Juden Raus; Jeremy Corbyn wears a British Home Stores vest under his shirt and is softly spoken. Antisemites accuse Jews of killing Jesus; Corbyn is an atheist and seems not to mind if we did or didn't. Whether that's because Jesus was Jewish and killing him meant one less Jew in the world, is not for me to say. And - and - he doesn't deny the Holocaust...
Mind you, he knows a man who does. In fact he knows a surprising number of men who do. That he denies ever having been in their company - until photographs turn up of him rubbing noses with them at the gravesides of mass murderers, offering to show them his belief systems if they'll show him theirs - 'Gosh, they're the same size!' - should come as no surprise. You can't spend your whole life in the company of blood-libellers and holocaust-deniers and expect to remember them all by name.
Former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has been roughed up enough lately and I am loath to add to the calumnies but something he keeps saying bothers me. ‘The hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews.’ Sacks has dropped this aphorism into speeches and articles for the past few years and no wonder: it’s a pithier version of the Niemöller verse, a shorthand for the metastatic nature of prejudice.
First of all, I’m not convinced it’s true. They always come for the Jews but they don’t always come for the Communists or the Catholics or the trade unionists, not least because the Communists and the Catholics and the trade unionists are sometimes busy coming for the Jews themselves. There is a more fundamental objection. ‘The hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews.’ To which I ask: So what if it did?
What if the fractious bigotries stirred by the Labour Party limited themselves to the Jewish people? Would they be any more tolerable? Why does the left recoil instinctively from hatred of blacks and Muslims and Asians but require a three-hour PowerPoint presentation and a course of diversity training when it comes to Jews? Why is empathy unlocked only by fear the tormentors of the Jews may one day turn on others?
The answer is that the left, specifically the brand of left which Corbyn appeals to, divides the world into three categories: Victims, victimisers and the virtuous. Ethnic and religious minorities have been targets of historical imperialism and contemporary intolerance and so they are victims. Western white men have been largely responsible and so they are victimisers. The left champions the former against the latter and so they are the virtuous.