23-Apr-17: The disturbing affair of the senior Hamas figure who was also a senior UNRWA figure and now isn't

This is a follow-on to several posts we made over the last two months concerning Hamas influence at senior levels of UNRWA management. 

For background, see "26-Feb-17: Hamas' new Gaza leadership, and what it says about educating towards a desperately worse future" and "27-Feb-17: UNRWA is shocked, shocked, to discover..." and "06-Mar-17: What has UNRWA known all these years about its staff terrorists?"

Now this:

The United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees says a Gaza staffer suspected of being elected to the Islamic militant Hamas group's leadership no longer works for the agency. Agency spokesman Chris Gunness says Saturday Suhail al-Hindi is no longer employed by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency. He declined to say whether al-Hindi had quit or was fired, saying the agency doesn't "discuss the terms of departure of individual staff members." In February, UNRWA suspended al-Hindi — the chairman of the agency's Palestinian workers' union — pending the results of an internal investigation sparked by Israeli accusations that the school principal was a member of Hamas' new political leadership. Al-Hindi denied links to Gaza's rulers. Hamas is listed as a terrorist organization by the United States and most of Europe. ["UN Gaza staffer out after allegations of Hamas ties", Associated Press, April 22, 2017]

Reassuring that the personal interests of UNRWA managers with ties to the Islamist terrorists of Hamas are in such safe, considerate and delicate hands.

On the other hand, given how every penny of the billions spent annually by UNRWA are fund-raised from donor countries and organizations, isn't the public owed more than the spit-in-your-eye explanation offered by Mr Chris Gunness? As its official spokesperson, is "declined to say" a legitimate part of his job description?

The unwillingness of UNRWA management in general, and particularly Gunness, to own up to the malign influence of terrorists on Hamas' operations and on its outcomes (especially on children educated in the UNRWA schools) over a period of generations is something that in a fair-minded and ethical world would be addressed by the people to whom UNRWA owes an accounting.

How many other senior Hamas terrorists hold down jobs in UNRWA, Mr Gunness? Does it not matter?

27-Feb-17: UNRWA is shocked, shocked, to discover...

Iconic scene from the 1942 classic movie, Casablanca

An Associated Press report issued early this morning (Monday) bears directly on what we posted a day earlier ["26-Feb-17: Hamas' new Gaza leadership, and what it says about educating towards a desperately worse future"]

Middle East | AP | February 27, 2017 

UN suspends Gaza staffer amid allegations of Hamas ties 

JERUSALEM (AP) — The U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees suspended a Palestinian staffer Sunday, a spokesman for the U.N. agency said as Israel alleged the employee was elected to a leadership position with the Islamist group Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Chris Gunness of UNRWA said Suhail al-Hindi, the chairman of the UNRWA Palestinian workers' union in Gaza and the principal of a UNRWA elementary school, was suspended due to "substantial information" received by the agency.
The Israeli defense body COGAT said al-Hindi was elected to Hamas' politburo in a secret vote this month, though al-Hindi denied that. The U.N. agency forbids its staff from holding political office.
Maj. Gen. Yoav Mordechai of COGAT said in a statement Sunday that he demanded the U.N. agency investigate the matter. Israel considers Hamas a terrorist organization.
"We have seen the latest communication from the Israeli authorities," Gunness said. "Before that communication, and in light of our ongoing independent internal investigation, we had been presented with substantial information from a number of sources which led us to take the decision this afternoon to suspend Suhail al Hindi, pending the outcome of our investigation. As with all UN Agencies, we will ensure that a staff member's due process rights are followed."
The agency temporarily suspended al-Hindi in 2011 for participating in events with Hamas officials.
Israel and UNRWA have long had a rocky relationship. Israel has accused the U.N. body of cooperating with militants, while UNRWA has accused Israel of hindering its operations in the Gaza Strip.

We know only what open sources can know, though our experience with Hamas (as the parents of one of the children its agent's murdered) predisposes us to be sensitive to and suspicious of claims by third-parties about what they do and don't and did and didn't know about their own involvement with Hamas. On that basis, we say:

• When Chris Gunness says the temporary suspension of Al-Hindi arose from information presumably just received a few minutes or a few days or a few weeks before the executive decision was taken, this is nonsense. The UNRWA people in Gaza have for years been swimming in a cess-pool of Islamist, Hamas and radical/extremist Arab ideology and activity. Members of UNRWA management see and know exactly what they want to. Not more and surely not less.
• At every level of its operations in Gaza and Jerusalem and in Judea and Samaria, UNRWA plays a knowing, indispensable role in enabling some of the most hideous hate-based education to be found anywhere in the Middle East. The phenomenon of Palestinian Arab children with knives in their hands and a passion for Jewish blood in their hearts is the return on decades of UNRWA investment.
• The sudden discovery of a Hamas figure in its ranks is not some sort of rare exception to be dealt with by a summary suspension. That suspension is driven not by a desire to purify UNRWA's good name but a tactical response to the events of the current news cycle. There will be no purge of Islamist terrorists from the ranks of UNRWA. UNRWA has for decades been infected systemically by the kind of people and actions that this morning they say they want to remove.

We have written often - with great bitterness, we confess - about the ongoing deadly, Western-funded scandal that is UNRWA. More than sixty of our blog posts over the past decade have "UNRWA" as a key-word. You're invited to click this link to access them.

26-Feb-17: Hamas' new Gaza leadership, and what it says about educating towards a desperately worse future

What UNRWA hath wrought in Jerusalem: From a documentary film made by the Center for Near East Policy Research [Click YouTube to view it now]

(UPDATE: After reading this post, you may be interested in this follow-up piece of ours: "27-Feb-17: UNRWA is shocked, shocked, to discover...")

[This post, like a number of others before it, has been translated to Polish ("Nowi przywódcy Hamasu w Gazie i co to oznacza dla edukacji ku coraz gorszej przyszłości") by courtesy of Malgorzata Koraszewska over on the Listy z naszego sadu website. Our sincere thanks to her, and great appreciation to readers of this blog in Poland.]

One of the ugliest dimensions of the conflict between the Arabs and Israel is the tight, bear-hug relationship that exists between the oddest of United Nations agencies - UNRWA - and the Islamist terrorist group Hamas. There's fresh and disturbing evidence today for those willing to look, as opposed to those who systematically look away, preferring not to know.

The United Nations has a major stake in taking care of the world's refugees. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is based in Geneva and has won two Nobel Peace Prizes (1954 and 1981). Its origins were not so auspicious. It began life as a creature of UN General Assembly Resolution 319 (IV) in December 1949 with a mandate to operate for three years. That was later broadened by additional UNGA resolutions until today. Its mission is

to provide, on a non-political and humanitarian basis, international protection to refugees and to seek permanent solutions for them... [source]

A person would have to be especially mean to object to goals like those. Giving support on a humanitarian, non-political basis - what could be more appropriate? Providing them with protection, and especially for their children - the most helpless of the helpless - is often the thing that fragile, dispossessed people most lack. And seeking a solution? Well - obviously.

Which brings us to the Palestinian Arabs who, uniquely among all people of the world classified as refugees, are not served at all by UNHCR.

Is this a screaming injustice? No. That's because they, and only they, among all the world's unhappy people with a deep grievance, have a "refugee" agency all their own. And, as we noted in an earlier blog post ["14-Aug-16: Who actually cares that foreign aid is diverted from needy Gazans to terror? Not who most people think"], what an agency it is. Just to highlight some key points:

• The odd distinction: UNHCR deals with all the world's refugees except for those addressed by UNRWA. UNHCR has by far the larger work load but a staff (of about 9,700) that's only about one third the size of UNRWA's.
• The astounding disparity in resoources: "UNHCR has one staff member for every 5,500 refugees and other persons of concern. UNRWA has one staff person for every 182 people registered by UNRWA." [Source, March 2015]
• The sheer vastness of the UNRWA payroll: UNRWA's latest headcount was "over 30,000... most of them Palestine refugees and a small number of international staff, in two headquarter offices (Gaza and Amman), five field offices (Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and West Bank), and in four Representative/Liaison Offices (New York, Geneva, Brussels and Cairo)" ["Working at UNRWA" - accessed this morning]. It's an open secret that many, probably most, of those on the UNRWA payroll do essentially nothing. It's a welfare scheme designed to subsidize Palestinian Arab indolence and lack of productivity - on the West's nickle. Until this decade, almost no Arab money ever arrived at UNRWA.
• Calculated opacity: Almost all other U.N. agencies report to an executive board, allowing at least some chance of functional oversight. UNRWA reports directly to the entire 193-member General Assembly, where responsibility is broadly dispersed and easily avoided. According to a paper in 2010 by the agency's own chief of legal affairs, Lance Bartholomeusz, UNRWA enjoys the added flexibility of having no clearly defined mission: "its mandate is not conveniently stated in one place and must be derived from all other relevant resolutions and requests."
• Perpetual non-motion: Thus unencumbered, UNRWA has ensured its own survival by transforming itself into the patron of Palestinian grievance, conferring refugee status down the generations... ["The U.N. Handmaiden of Hamas", Claudia Rosett in the Wall Street Journal, August 07, 2014] 

Beyond all the anomalies and the waste, corruption and inefficiency in this truly grotesque picture, there's also the matter of the identity of interests shared by (a) UNRWA and (b) the Islamist terrrorists of Hamas. This again is something about which we have written in numerous past blog posts. See for instance "30-Jul-14: Is Europe's uncritical funding connected with Hamas' ongoing terrorism?" and the references there to UNRWA's official spokesperson, the unlovely Chris Gunness, who

frequently echoes Hamas messaging in the mainstream media, and European officials then amplify his talking points in their capitals. His Twitter account and interviews are replete with indictments of Israeli actions in Gaza, but his condemnations of Hamas rocketing of Israeli civilians are muted, if they are issued at all.

Gunness comes in for well-deserved excoriation in an important 2014 review by researcher David Bedein in the Jerusalem Post analyzing what UNRWA's schools actually impart to the Gazan Arab children who suffer the misfortune of falling into their clutches:

UNRWA’s 30,000 employees make no pretense of neutrality. UNRWA employees are organized in professional unions without any affinity to organizations that advocate peace. In Gaza, the UNRWA workers union and the UNRWA teachers union have elected Hamas in successive elections to lead their unions since 1999, with 93 percent voting for Hamas in the 2012 elections. A mantra that [UNRWA spokesperson Chris] Gunness repeats frequently, most recently on Fox News, is that “there is no evidence that Hamas terrorists are on the payroll of the UN.” However, the European Parliament funded a study that documented Hamas takeover of the UNRWA unions in March 2009... ["One for the Gunness Book of Records: The myth of an UNRWA policy of peace that does not exist", Jerusalem Post, December 25, 2014]

Now for some new revelations, courtesy of a bulletin issued this past Thursday by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Center in Tel Aviv.

It refers to elections recently held for the Hamas politbureau, Hamas' peak institution in the Gaza Strip. We wrote ["13-Feb-17: Another Shalit Deal milestone: Four terms of life imprisonment but this murdering jihadist now heads Hamas in Gaza"] about the identity of the jihadist who emerged as Hamas' new head of operations in that process.

Dr. Suhail Ahmed Hassan Al-Hindi addresses a protest rally directed
against UNRWA in Gaza, October 2016. The subsequent strike led to
a settlement with UNRWA management. Al-Hindi is flanked
by other Hamas figures [Image Source]

The Amit Report notes that Sinwar was one of fifteen people elected to lead Hamas, and that their ranks are

dominated by members who hold extremist views.

One of those newly-elected extremists, Dr. Suhail Ahmed Hassan al-Hindi, has for the past five years been chairman of UNRWA's staff union in the Gaza Strip - a union controlled by Hamas, and one that has demanded, and gotten via sanctions, strikes, riots and shutdowns, major concessions from UNRWA's management.

Confronting UNRWA on resource issues, budgets and salaries amounts to confronting the donors who fund it. UNRWA's funding throughout its seven decade-long history has been overwhelmingly - almost exclusively - provided by the governments of Western countries, led by the United States. [For background: "05-Jun-16: Where does the money for the ongoing decades-long UNRWA fiasco come from?"]

In the most recent such round of demands against UNRWA management in October 2016, Al-Hindi - flanked by key Hamas figures - announced a series of demands including a general strike [see Alreselah (Arabic) October 25, 2016]. That confrontation eventually resulted in a December 2016 "fundamental understanding with UNRWA [that] ended its protests and sanctions" [Amit Report quoting gazaonline.net, December 20, 2016]

The reality of Hamas infiltration of UNRWA gets some minor degree of media attention from time to time, but generally is resolved by the Hamas side being bellicose and noisy and the UNRWA side backing down. In 2009, for instance, John Ging, an Irish lawyer serving as director at the time of UNRWA operations in the Gaza Strip, threatened to fire UNRWA employees who belonged to Hamas or organizations with similar terrorist agendas [background here] after those affiliations emerged and got some attention. The threat was never carried out and he left the position. (He has been at the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in New York since February 2011.)

This is relevant to Dr. al-Hindi. In addition to his labor relations position at UNRWA, he holds down a day job as principal of an UNRWA education facility, Palestine Boys' Elementary School. An October 5, 2011 report on the English-language Ma'an News Agency website mentions his key role

Al-Hindi stands outside UNRWA headquarters in
Gaza on October 5, 2011 as he leads a teachers'
strike against the UN agency  [Image Source]

Thousands of teachers on Wednesday protested at UNRWA headquarters in Gaza City over the dismissal of a union official, a Ma'an correspondent reported. The Local Staff Union called for the general strike on Wednesday, the second such action in a week, to protest at UNRWA's suspension of the head of the union, Suhail al-Hindi. Hamas sources said the UN agency had accused Hindi of meeting with Hamas political officials. Buses took some 7,000 teachers employed at UNRWA-run schools to UN headquarters in Gaza city where they held a sit-in, calling for an end to "UNRWA political punishment of employees." "Death rather than humiliation" read a banner held by striking teachers. "Deception, lying and hypocrisy have become the core values of UNRWA," read another.
The strike affected all of UNRWA's 243 schools in Gaza. Hindi told the teachers he would stand against "oppression and injustice" but added that Palestinians saw UNRWA as a symbol of the cause of refugees and that its role should be preserved "until the Israeli occupation is removed" ...Chris Gunness, UNRWA's chief spokesman in Jerusalem, said disputes should be resolved internally and not through actions that undermine agency operations and services to refugees in Gaza.

Pretty clearly, Gunness and UNRWA were aware then, six years ago, that Al-Hindi was a leading Hamas figure. But they had no problems taking him off suspension, and retaining his services in all the years since then.

Al-Hindi's name appears on the list of the members of Hamas' newly-elected political bureau published this month in the Palestinian media. The Amit Report calls this mention "reliable" (attributed to a "senior Hamas source" and quotes the Quds Press news agency in support), which says the same thing. But look what happened:

After his election had been publicly announced, Dr. al-Hindi issued a series of vigorous denials, claiming he had not been elected to the bureau. He even claimed he planned to sue those responsible for the reports. So far, Hamas has not formally related to the issue of his election... His vigorous denials may be the result of the fact that publicizing his election will make difficulties for him (and Hamas) in dealing with UNRWA. In the past UNRWA objected to its staff belonging to Hamas or other organizations, although the agency never took decisive action to enforce its objections. [Amit Report, February 23, 2017]

The report makes some important observations about what this means in terms of the future of Gaza's children:

The election of Dr. Suhail al-Hindi to Hamas' political bureau in the Gaza Strip is another illustration of Hamas' deep penetration into the Gaza Strip's educational system and of the great power of its activists in UNRWA institutions in the Strip. That allows Hamas to systematically indoctrinate Gazan school children with its extremist Islamist ideology. In addition, Hamas' great influence on the educational system in the Gaza Strip enables it to hold paramilitary activities within schools, training young children to join Hamas and the ranks of its military wing. Since Hamas is the power ruling the Gaza Strip, its ideological and military activities in the educational system are not curbed either by UNRWA... or by the Palestinian Authority(which is formally responsible for the educational system in the Gaza Strip, but as in many other governmental areas, its actual influence is limited). [Amit Report, February 23, 2017]

UNRWA itself declares proudly that it operates 252 schools in the Gaza Strip, serving more than 240,400 school students:

These children grow up in bleak conditions, frequently surrounded by poverty and violence. School provides them with one place where they are able to learn the skills for a better future.

We believe the numbers but the "better future" claim is preposterous as we have noted over and again when referring to the culture of terrorism, murder and suicide that is now deeply and very evidently ingrained in the lives of Gaza's children. See "27-Oct-16: Who put those knives into the hands of these two little Palestinian Arab boys?" and "10-Feb-15: The Islamists of Gaza: Yet again preparing children to kill and be killed" and "15-Jan-14: When a society praises itself for turning its children into human bombs, whose problem is that?"

UNRWA, ostensibly an agency that exists to ameliorate the suffering of Arab refugees in reality serves as a cornerstone of the seven-decades-long Arab strategy to keep the Palestinian Arabs displaced, as miserable as possible and in the news. By their own reckoning, UNRWA's people and budget play a huge role in the education of Palestinian Arab children. They are certainly part of the problem and not of the solution.

As misconceived, camouflaged and fraudulent as UNRWA's role in the disaster happening daily in Gaza's education system is, UNRWA does not deserve all the blame for the horror. Other contributors, including UNICEF, Defence for Children International, UNESCO, Child Rights International Network, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, the Washington-based Jerusalem Fund, Save the Children, Arab Council for Childhood Development deserve long-overdue attention for the unforgivable and complicit silence and apathy that serve as their indictment.

05-Jun-16: Where does the money for the ongoing decades-long UNRWA fiasco come from? Updated data

A pre-teen boy at an UNRWA school in Jerusalem and the 
guidance he received thanks to a billion dollar budget 
funded by Western countries [Click to view the video source]

UNRWA was created almost seventy years ago and has evolved into the UN's single largest arm, employing more than 30,000 staffers. 

Fully 99% of that hugely blown-up total workforce is made up of locally recruited Palestinian Arabs, says Wikipedia. 

So long as the mind-numbing, ongoing flow of cash and diplomatic coddling keeps on, UNRWA will not slow down - or achieve any of the goals which it was created to pursue.

Its purpose in life, as expressed in UN Resolution A/RES/302 (IV) from December 8, 1949, is

relief of the Palestine refugees... to prevent conditions of starvation and distress among them and to further conditions of peace and stability, and that constructive measures should be undertaken at an early date with a view to the termination of international assistance for relief...

But in reality, those goals, essentially short-term and temporary, were abandoned decades ago. Temporary fixes are often the most permanent of structures. 

People new to the amazing Palestinian Arab refugee tale might find it hard to believe what a person needs to do in order to qualify as a Palestinian Arab refugee:

Palestine refugees are defined as “persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict.” [UNRWA's website]

Yes. If you had lived there for 23 months, you were entitled to UNRWA support (pensions, allowances, food, clothing, basic household items, schooling, psycho-social activities, health services, shelter, welfare services) for life, and so are your children, and their great-great-great-great grandchildren until forever. 

A little girl tells the interviewer in her UNRWA school in Jerusalem what
she has been taught about why her people have to make war [Source: Video]

The UN incredibly defined Palestinian Arab refugee status as something you inherited... in perpetuity. 

So then how surprising is it to know the number of Palestinian Arab "refugees" has been exploding for decades? How could it not? And why would a Palestinian Arab family ever admit to a family member having died or succeeding in life?

According to UNRWA's published data:

In May 1951, UNRWA inherited a list of 950,000 persons from its predecessor agencies. In the first four months of operations, UNRWA reduced this list to 860,000 persons, based on painstaking census efforts and identification of fraudulent claims. The 1948 registered refugees and their descendants now number five million,

Having multiplied itself by a factor of nearly six in these 6+ decades of furthering "conditions of peace and stability" and of funding by others, does anyone imagine this number of beneficiaries is going to get smaller? Ever? There is no doubt at all that it is going to keep ballooning and unless UNRWA is forcibly stopped so will the problems it has created.

Yet on one perfectly reasonable view, UNRWA has succeeded. A large majority of those Palestinian Arab refugees live today in homes unconnected to refugee camps, reside in one of the two Palestinian Arab statelets - the one based in Ramallah, the other in Gaza - under Palestinian Arab control, or hold citizenship in various countries. 

Needless to say, if you have been following the scandal down through the years, UNRWA and its fans don't see this as success. Or as reality. They invest serious energy in endlessly reframing the catastrophe so that it's about homeless, hopeless refugees, totally dependent on charity, driven by endless yearning for a lost homeland (the one that served many of them for 20 months), and always, but always, needing more cash. 

Now let's note that UNRWA is not the United Nations' only refugee agency. UNHCR, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, deals with all the world's refugees except for those who come under the rubric of UNRWA. There are many times more refugees being helped by UNHCR than there are Palestinian Arabs being helped by UNRWA. Yet UNHCR, with by far the larger work load, has a staff that's only about one third the size of UNRWA's:

At the end of 2015, we employed over 9,700 people. Around 89 per cent of our staff are based in the field. We work in 126 countries, with staff based in a mixture of regional and branch offices and sub and field offices. Our staff work hard to help the displaced, specializing in a wide range of disciplines, including legal protection, administration, community services, public affairs and health.[UNHCR Figures at a Glance]

Qataris and their cash [Source: Arabian Business, March 2015] 

And note this statistic: "UNHCR has one staff member for every 5,500 refugees and other persons of concern. UNRWA has one staff person for every 182 people registered by UNRWA." [Source, March 2015]

So given that the UN operates two parallel but very separate refugee agencies with massively different per capita resource deployment (obviously favoring UNRWA), who pays for the Palestinian Arab one? The obscenely wealthy Arab oil potentates, perhaps? Or the Qataris who will host the 2022 FIFA World Cup and are spending, as The Guardian memorably reported half a year ago, $200,000,000,000 on soccer stadiums and other essentials? 

Not even close. 

We published a table of UNRWA's main donors based on 2013 donations [source] a while back ["04-Jun-15: Exploding for decades: UNRWA needs more, more, more"] while explaining that its funding is perpetually in crisis. It listed the Top 20 contributors to UNRWA for that year, and showed that the Arab donors in the Top 20 contributed 16.1% of what the entire Top 20 gave.

Earlier, the 2012 UNRWA donor table [here] showed Saudi Arabia on the list as the sole Arab donor. 

And earlier still, the 2010 numbers [here] showed not a single Arab donor in the Top 20 list, and this after more than sixty years of UNRWA activity.

Seeing a pattern?

We have just taken a close look at the 2015 donations to UNRWA via an official UNRWA publication [online here]. The numbers are correct as of the last day of 2015. Some highlights:

• The overall sum pledged (not received - they don't yet know that number) is $1.2 billion. 
• Of this, all the Arab donors - countries, princes, sheikhs, oil potentates, banks - taken together provided 13.4% of the total. 
• It follows that non-Arab donors are providing 86.6% of the budget - and that's before we get into the sordid matter of countries who pledge but don't pay.
• By far the largest share of the overall burden is borne by the United States: 26.8% of UNRWA's Programme budget, and 37.0% of UNWRA's Non-Programme budget. (Non-Programme budget is the grab-bag title given to these components: Projects; Syria Appeal; Gaza Recovery & Reconstruction; Emergency Appeal (oPt); Nahr el-Bared Palestine Refugee Camp Relief and Reconstruction.)

Here is our list of UNRWA's major enablers based on those December 2015 statistics:

We prepared this table by transcribing UNRWA's published money data and then doing some basic
statistical interpretations

The Arab donors contributed about 13.5% both on a Top 20 basis and on a whole-donor-list basis. That's a significant decline, percentage-wise, over the 2013 numbers.

Another child explains what he learned in his Jerusalem-area UNRWA
school [Click to see the video]

We think the video clip we showcased in another post of ours ["30-May-16: Listen to the children to understand who is weaponizing them and how [Video]" produced by The Center for Near East Policy Research just a few days ago gives a good sense of what UNRWA donors are getting for their donations - in business terms, their return on investment, or ROI. (Check out the additional background on the YouTube page that hosts the clip). 

Though the video runs for less than ten minutes, it turns the turgid prose - and figures - above into very uncomfortable realities. 

It also puts faces and voices to the hundreds of thousands of child-victims of the appalling UNRWA, a self-praised United Nations agency with a track-record of destroying lives, as we explained just last week here: "30-May-16: Barbarism, bigotry and blood-lust: What a UN-provided education delivers". This is a humanitarian disaster, one that far too many prominent politicians and diplomats prefer we don't comprehend or see. 

To review some more of the awful things for which UNRWA stands and that keep us concerned, see

• 30-May-16: Barbarism, bigotry and blood-lust: What a UN-provided education delivers
• 30-May-16: Listen to the children to understand who is weaponizing them and how [Video]
• 15-May-16: Putting their "nakba" in perspective
• 04-May-16: Begging for spare Arab change at UNRWA
• 25-Jan-16: Felons, funding, fooling, failing
• 29-Dec-15: Gaza and what manipulative, highly-politicized foreign aid can buy
• 03-Sep-15: Decades of UNRWA malfeasance and now a chance to shine a little light and bring change
• 06-Aug-15: Educating their children: a modest, peace-focused proposal
• 19-May-14: Will momentary focus on UNRWA throw any light on PA and Hamas abuse of their own people? 
• 20-Nov-13: It's Wednesday. Time for yet another UNRWA funding crisis
• 19-Jun-13: We actually do understand why Arab states put almost no money in the Palestinian Arab "refugee" fund pot. We just don't get why the US does.
• 19-Apr-13: Refugees, hypocrisy and unity: just follow the money
• 4-Jul-12: What is it about UNRWA?
• 5-Jun-12: If there's one single thing about UNRWA that we wish people understood, it's this

[This post, like a number of others before it, has been translated to Polish ("Skąd pochodzą pieniądze na trwające dziesięciolecia nieszczęście pod nazwą UNRWA?") by courtesy of Malgorzata Koraszewska over on the Listy z naszego sadu website. Our sincere thanks to her again, and great appreciation to readers of this blog in Poland.]

30-May-16: Barbarism, bigotry and blood-lust: What a UN-provided education delivers

Palestinian Arab girls being educated UN-style in an UNRWA school
in Jerusalem [Image Source]

If you have not already viewed the video clip we showcased in another post of ours ["30-May-16: Listen to the children to understand who is weaponizing them and how [Video]"] earlier today, doing that now may help you make sense of the report that now follows.

It was released for publication this morning (Monday) that Israel Police have cracked the stabbing attack that took place in Jerusalem's Armon Hanatziv neighbourhood on the evening of Remembrance Day, May 10, 2016. Here's part of what we wrote about that notably savage (even by the standards that apply in our part of the world) and cowardly attack three weeks ago:

The victims, according to Haaretz, are a pair of "elderly women", reported to be "aged in their 70s"who "had gone for a walk in the neighborhood, also known as East Talpiot, on Tuesday morning when they were attacked by two masked individuals." Their injuries would be serious enough for younger, more robust people but they sound quite worrying, knowing what we know of their ages: "One of the women sustained stab wounds to her limbs and upper body, while the other sustained wounds to her upper body." Ynet reports that they described their attackers as two masked Palestinians wearing jeans and black shirts. The two women, described by hospital staff in the Ynet report as aged 86 and 80, were walking with three other friends when they were attacked from behind. This is frequently how "resistance" operations are done, reflecting on the inherent courage required by such acts. [From our blog post "10-May-16: Practitioners of "resistance" inflict serious stabbing injuries on two elderly Jerusalem women"]

Those earlier suspicions were well-founded: the attackers now under arrest all live in Jabel Mukaber, a Palestinian Arab community with a well-deserved reputation for savagery, nestled in the southern suburbs of Jerusalem. All three of the arrestees are minors, aged 16-17. Children.

Ynet gives this background:

Jabel Mukaber as it appears in a Times of Israel article here

The three decided to meet at a small supermarket in Jabel Mukaber. Armed with knives and an ax which they took from their homes, the three proceeded in the direction of the promenade where they waited for their Jewish victims. A third suspect left the scene after becoming afraid that the attack would lead to the demolition of his parents’ home. As the women passed the two boys, they began stabbing them and striking them with the wooden handle of the ax. The two then fled the scene in the direction of their village while throwing and hiding their weapons on the way. One made it home and the other took refuge in his school...

Times of Israel adds:

After the attack,the suspects are believed to have stashed the weapons nearby before one went home and the second went to school. Later on, one of them returned to the scene, retrieved the knives and cudgel, and hid them in Jabel Mukaber... Throughout the day, the two suspects “spoke with one another through WhatsApp and Facebook messages and planned to carry out another stabbing attack in light of the ‘success’ of the Peace Forest attack,” the police said. However, the pair were arrested before they could carry out such an attack, a police spokesperson said.

And this small postscript:

During the investigation, it also emerged that the mother of one of the suspects was arrested one week ago [meaning after her son had been arrested for the Peace Forest attacks] for attempting to carry out a stabbing attack at the Zeitim Checkpoint at the entrance to Jerusalem... [Ynet]

What does it take to turn teenage Jerusalem Arabs into stabbers, plotters and would-be murderers? Of Jabel Mukaber and its predominantly-Jewish neighbours in Armon Hanatziv, an article a year and a half ago ("Arabs and Jews at odds in East Talpiot", Times of Israel, August 3, 2014) said this:

The main entrance to the neighborhood is adjacent to the Armon Hanatziv Promenade, the terraced park popular with locals and tourists for its views of the Old City, including Mount Zion, the Temple Mount, the Kidron Valley, the City of David and the Mount of Olives. Relations are generally good between the neighborhood residents and the villagers, say locals. The Arab residents are often visible in East Talpiot, shopping in the local Co-op supermarket, stopping in at the local bank branch and using the local medical clinics.

Since that time, a long list of terror attacks, including several mind-numbingly savage instances of extreme Arab-on-Israeli violence, have been executed by residents of Jabel Mukaber. They include the November 2014 attack on men at prayer in a Har Nof synagogue ["20-Nov-14: In the face of savagery, what do you do?"] in which four worshipers and a security guard were hacked to death. And, less than a year later ["13-Oct-15: A bloody day and the malevolence behind it"], the murders on a city bus of Haviv Haim, 78; Alon Govberg, 51; and Richard Lakin, 76. (Click here to view some other of our previous Jabel Mukaber terrorism posts.)

As the postscript above shows, another thing that can turn a teenager into a murderer is a mother who seeks to do the same herself.

But the major factor - the one that, year after year, delivers barbarism, bigotry and blood-lust directly into the veins of Arab children, the one that instills life-changing attitudes - is education.

Which is why we want to point out, in the wake of the Jabel Mukaber murder bust revealed this morning, that every single one of the sweet-faced Arab schoolchildren being educated in UNRWA schools and interviewed in the simply-shocking video we mentioned above, lives in Jerusalem where we do, and is educated here.

Mr Gunness, UNRWA spokesperson, on the right, from a YouTube posting
entitled "UNRWA's Chris Gunness Embarrasses
Himself on 'The Kelly File'", August 5, 2014

Not in Gaza. Not in Hebron or Jenin, but in the precincts of Israel's capital city, and by means of an annual budget provided by the United Nations and its UNRWA arm, of which a third is funded by taxpayers of the United States and most of the rest by Western, non-Arab countries.

Can nothing be done? Never say never.

We offered a practical suggestion not long ago, and urge our readers to look at it (again) now: "06-Aug-15: Educating their children: a modest, peace-focused proposal".

We sent it off last summer to UNRWA's official spokesperson and were pleased that he responded right away with what seemed like some politely mild, though appropriate, enthusiasm. Then, for reasons that are beyond us even now, he inexplicably went silent on us. If you're reading this, Chris Gunness, we hope you still plan to give us a call.

Holding our breaths, we're not.

30-May-16: Listen to the children to understand who is weaponizing them and how [Video]

From the video

Someone ought to send a Whatsapp to the diplomats who deliver high-sounding pronouncements in those endless United Nations debates searching for peace and enhanced human dignity and refer them to the video clip below. It's produced by The Center for Near East Policy Research (there's more background on the YouTube page that hosts the clip).

It's new and focuses on a UN agency that is actually doing far more in relation to peace than all those speeches put together.

Trouble is, what the UN agency in question is doing in relation to peace is the exact opposite of seeking peace or making peace happen. It may, in fact, be the single most effective organization in the world for ensuring that deaths and extreme misery on both sides of the Arab conflict with Israel keep happening.

That agency, funded almost exclusively by Western countries to the tune of $1,200 million annually, is called UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. Its continued existence, nearly seventy years after it was set up as a temporary fix for a relatively small problem, is part of a bizarre narrative in which a legion of UN insiders keep marketing it as part of the solution when in reality it is a core and essential component of the problem.



Anyone sincerely concerned to save the lives of the children who appear in this video will immediately appreciate that something is seriously, lethally wrong with the entire UNRWA operation. The fact that its official spokesperson has a penchant for ad hominem attacks on its critics (including nasty and largely misleading dismissals of the individuals behind the making of the video itself) is part of the problem. A non-trivial part, but just a part. This plot has many villains.

Diplomats and public officials of every one of the countries that pay lip service to what UNRWA does without facing up to the ongoing catastrophe that it perpetuates are as culpable as UNRWA's spokesperson and its 30,000 (yes) school principals, teachers and staff people.

That's just one of the factors that brought us to write this:

"19-Jun-13: We actually do understand why Arab states put almost no money in the Palestinian Arab "refugee" fund pot. We just don't get why the US does." 

And this:

"03-Jul-15: Misery, terrorism and money-making: a cynics' guide".

There is no hope for peace - absolutely none - until what UNRWA does daily is understood and stopped.

15-May-16: Putting their "nakba" in perspective

Image Source

Israelis joyously and thankfully marked 68 years of renewed independence, massive economic advancement and attainment on all fronts this past Thursday. The Palestinian Arabs call the same process "catastrophe".

Much of the economic fuel for both of the two Palestinian Arab statelets - the one ruled by the PLO and Mahmoud Abbas from Ramallah; the other by Hamas in Gaza - comes not from industrial growth, not from economic progress, not from anything self-generated by them in the past 68 years. It comes, tragically, from a two-edged sword: massive gifts via foreign aid and cradle-to-grave support from a UN-created refugee agency, UNRWA.

Many billions of dollars/euros are represented by that last sentence - more money is spent on this particular cluster of self-proclaimed, humiliation-averse refugees per capita than on any other refugee group in history - by far.

Among the numerous aspects of UNRWA's odd and highly problematic existence that make it exceptional and peculiar is that it serves only the people called the Palestinian Arabs.

Many otherwise well-informed people fail to notice that every other refugee on earth has to turn to a different UN agency, UNHCR, operating according to a completely different set of rules and principles. Only the people who say they are the Palestinian Arabs are served by UNRWA. (Why this is so, and what it means in practice, is part of an astonishing narrative that needs a separate post.)

Comprehending this is often the first step to putting a meaningful framework around the lethal fury that propels much of the Arab world, and those who advocate for a Palestinian Arab outlook on life, today and for the past seven decades. And long before it as well. Occupation has almost nothing to do with it.

Today, as the friends of the Palestinian Arabs prepare to mark their Nakba, there is a (truly) simple question worth asking: How do they decide whom to call a Palestinian Arab refugee?

The best place we know for the answer is the UNRWA's own website:

UNRWA is unique in terms of its long-standing commitment to one group of refugees. It has contributed to the welfare and human development of four generations of Palestine refugees, defined as “persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict.” The descendants of Palestine refugee males, including legally adopted children, are also eligible for registration.
UNRWA services are available to all those living in its areas of operations who meet this definition, who are registered with the Agency and who need assistance. When the Agency began operations in 1950, it was responding to the needs of about 750,000 Palestine refugees. Today, some 5 million Palestine refugees are eligible for UNRWA services.

You might want to read that a second time. The UNRWA definition, which for practical purposes is what everyone means today when they refer to "Palestinian refugees", is -

• Someone who lived in the area of the British Mandate for Palestine during a window of time that (a) lasted for less than two years during a period of massive Arab immigration into the towns, cities and regions being built up by the Jews, and (b) ended nearly seventy years ago
• And anyone who today can point to an ancestor who fits into that window - for ever and ever into the future, down through the coming generations of new "refugees".

It's unique, inexplicable and self-defeating on so many levels.

There is much else that is catastrophically wrong with how Palestinian refugee-ism is defined. For instance, does anyone at UNRWA record when a "refugee" dies and his or her meal ticket ought to expire? The figure of 5 million beneficiaries of UNRWA services is suspect, unchecked, misleading and essentially meaningless. And can we really speak of 5 million refugees when two million of them have full citizenship in other Arab countries [source], and an unknown but large number are citizens of Europe, Canada, Chile, the US and other non-Arab countries?

As news coverage focuses today on the Palestinian day of catastrophe, spend a moment pondering how large that catastrophe truly is, how little chance there is of it being reversed by the Arabs (among the resource-richest states on earth), how small is the incentive for them to stop this endless cash-fest, how often all of this is used to justify acts of savagery and bigotry, and - finally - who, in reality, brought them into the morass in which they find themselves today.

UNRWA's notorious spokesperson Chris Gunness is personally invited to offer some answers.

[This article is cross-posted as an op-ed on the Times of Israel site today.]

16-Nov-15: The terror in Paris: An odd and disturbing view from Stockholm

The most hunted terrorist in Europe, in a 2014 video clip from
the midst of the Syrian bloodbath [Image Source: MEMRI]

A year ago, Sweden's foreign minister Margot Wallström went to Cairo. It was her first official visit to anywhere outside the EU.

Sweden was one of about fifty countries represented in a conference that sought to figure out how to rebuild Gaza in the wake of the destructive 2014 war between the Hamas Islamist regime and Israel and to collect money for that purpose. (Israel has a vital interest in seeing things get better in Gaza but understands that for deplorable reasons this is not going to happen under Hamas.)

We know now the Cairo conference was not the biggest of successes: the Iranian mouthpiece PressTV reported half a year later ["No home rebuilt in Gaza after 2014 Israel war: UNRWA", April 23, 2015] that things were barely moving. According to Chris Gunness of UNRWA, his agency had gotten funding that barely enabled it "to reconstruct 200 of the 9,161 houses totally destroyed." What a mess.

But not for Ms Wallström. She got back to Stockholm quite pumped up, reporting in an interview to Radio Sweden [here] that Sweden was hailed by the Palestinian Arabs as

"heroes... [because] we plan to recognise the Palestinian state. That is why we are placed in a category of heroes here... They are very pleased and hope this will inspire others. One also believes it is courageous of us to lead the way and so have been very well received."

It's easy to imagine Ms Wallström getting a kick from the sort of attention she received in Cairo. On the whole, 2015 has not been a fun year for her and her ministry. Fawning attention, as well as admiration and respect, have been in short supply. This is particularly true of its (and her) broader Middle East strategy. Even we ripped into it - see "20-Mar-15: A peek into how Middle East politics work in reality". Fair warning: don't read it if you're looking for flattering observations about Sweden's foreign minister.

Friday night's Swedish TV interview with the country's
hapless foreign minister [Image Source: Screen Capture]

Now, in the wake of Friday night's horrific terrorism inflicted on Paris, we get a sense of where that uplifting feeling of being someone's hero has brought Margot Wallström and the government in whose name she speaks. 

This past Friday night, she was interviewed on SVT2T, a Swedish television station, mere hours after the ISIS attacks on multiple Paris venues that left more than 130 dead, hundreds more injured and a great city in deep shock and bewilderment. Asked if she was concerned about the radicalization of Swedish youth including those who fight with Islamic State, she said there was cause for concern, not only in Sweden but everywhere. And an underlying cause:

"To counteract the radicalization [in Europe]," Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallström said in a televised interview only hours after the Paris attacks, "we must go back to the situation such as the one in the Middle East in which... the Palestinians see that there is no future. We must either accept a desperate situation or resort to violence." [Wall St Journal]

(A special shout-out to David Metzler, a Swedish-speaking Jerusalemite whose blog post on the Times of Israel site [Justifying Paris] first drew attention yesterday to the stunning Wallström rationalization for Islamist mass-casualty terror.)

Israel's foreign ministry responded with a scathing announcement earlier today. It manages not to mention Ms Wallström by name, heightening (we think) the impression that in Jerusalem it's seen as personal:

The Swedish foreign minister has consistently demonstrated bias against Israel and exhibits genuine hostility when she indicates a connection of any kind between the terrorist attacks in Paris and the complex situation between Israel and the Palestinians... Whoever fatuously attempts to create a link between radical Islamist attacks and the current problems between Israel and the Palestinians is fooling himself, his people and international public opinion. [Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Jerusalem - November 16, 2015]

Fatah's sickening view: No need for Arabic-to-English translation

It would be unkind, too simple and, in a serious way, misleading to treat the Wallström formulation (Middle East situation = desperation or violence = Paris restaurant patrons are machine-gunned) as constituting a moment of Swedish madness. 

In fact, it meshes with the line currently taken by the Palestinian Authority. The Facebook page of Fatah, whose head is the PA president Mahmoud Abbas, advances the case that it was Israel that played the key enabling role in the shootings and bombings in Paris, when it published a cartoon (that's it over on the right) depicting

a conniving Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu overlooking Paris with a telescope beside a smiling ISIS terrorist wielding an assault rifle. [The Investigative Project, today]

It gets even more explicit. It's reported today that a featured op-ed in the Palestinian Authority's official daily newspaper, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, says the Mossad, Israel's national intelligence agency, orchestrated Friday night's Paris massacres.

Sweden's foreign minister may have been having a very bad Friday. Or she may actually believe the counter-factual and deeply offensive "explanations" she offers for the ISIS savagery in France. We're not sure. But there's little doubt her views do pretty accurately reflect those of large numbers of people.

Something about which we have no doubt is that she will have failed to persuade - and does not represent - Abdelhamid Abaaoud. He's the jihadist suspected by French authorities of masterminding Friday's attacks in Paris:

Abaaoud, who uses the nom de guerre Abu Umar al-Baljiki, has been on the run since police stormed a jihadist cell in the eastern Belgian town of Verviers in January... Abaaoud is from Molenbeek, a poor district in Brussels, in which at least one of the Paris attackers and a number of people arrested in subsequent raids had spent time... In an interview with IS's online magazine, Dabiq, in February, Abaaoud said he had recently arrived in the group's self-declared caliphate after fleeing Europe following the raids in Verviers. [ABC Online, today]

In a MEMRI video clip from March 2014 [online here], Abaaoud delivers a monologue from a trench in Syria, stating that it is "nice to see... the blood of the infidels". He makes no mention of Israel, Palestine or desperation. He does however ask rhetorically "What can be sweeter than martyrdom in the path of Allah?"

It would be a mistake to dismiss this lust for death and blood as among the reasons young European Moslems are making their way to the killing fields of Syria. And from there to the boulevards and cafes of Paris.

Most of us have our own ways of feeling good about ourselves and life. We now know something about what brightens the Swedish foreign minister's mood, and the same for Europe's most hunted Islamist. Each, in his and her own way, is delusional and simplistic. Each undermines the logic of the other, but the views of both are, in the end, marginal. When it comes to the lethal dangers of terror, the rest of us - and our political leaders - cannot afford to be sucked in by self-serving ideological cant.