This Ongoing War: A Blog: 03-Sep-15: Decades of UNRWA malfeasance and now a chance to shine a little light and bring change

Thursday, September 03, 2015

03-Sep-15: Decades of UNRWA malfeasance and now a chance to shine a little light and bring change

An UNRWA elementary school in Gaza City's Al-Shati camp
for "refugees" in April 2014. The camp was established in 1948
and today continues to be home for generations of people [Image Source]

We just signed the Change.org petition calling for an official investigation into Chris Gunness' role at the unique Palestinian-Arabs-only UN "refugee" organization. We added this comment:

Precious lives continue to be lost and ruined through the ongoing failure by international stakeholders to address UNRWA's chronic failures. Chris Gunness' overt prejudice and his distortion of UN values justify immediate investigation of his outrageous malfeasance - a small but appropriate start.

While the failures at UNRWA have our attention, here's a reminder of a concrete proposal we put forward a month ago to address one of the most egregious of them: "06-Aug-15: Educating their children: a modest, peace-focused proposal". It's about bringing radical change for the better to the education that Palestinian Arab children get in their schools.

This evidently seemed a good enough idea for the "Spokesperson and Director of Advocacy and Communications for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East" to respond the same day asking for more information. Naturally enough we promptly supplied it:

Twitter source

Until you delve into what goes on there, the Gunness/UNRWA affair might seem petty, personal or vindictive. It's anything but. UNRWA provides an indispensable safety net for the malign activities of the people in charge in Gaza and the other territories controlled by the Palestinian Authority, with life-and-death consequences for their children as well as ours.

It ought to be part of the solution and keeps claiming to be that, particularly to the Western donor nations who keep it going. In reality, it's central to the problem.

UNRWA's billion-dollar-annual-budget coupled with a sickening focus on educating for terror goes unremarked, unchecked and un-stopped by all of the world's agencies for the protection of children. In no particular order, they include UNICEF, Defence for Children International, UNESCO, Child Rights International Network, UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, the Washington-based Jerusalem Fund, Save the Children, Arab Council for Childhood Development and others.

Thousands of bureaucrats, hundreds of fund-raisers - and no one with enough time or passion to address the daily disaster which is Palestinian Arab education.

Unaccountably, we have heard nothing further since providing Gunness with our contact details and an additional copy of our educational proposal. Hard to understand why a man with his huge responsibilities and facing such monumental challenges would not want to discuss Israeli help, but there you are. A real puzzle. And a great pity that the possibility of bringing positive, constructive change may be getting ignored once again.

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