Reps. Mike Lawler (R-NY) and Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) introduced a bill to dismantle the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East and redistribute its humanitarian responsibilities to regional governments.
The Replace UNRWA with Real Humanitarian Assistance Act provides one of the most actionable plans to follow through on the advocacy of the agency’s longstanding critics, who have documented its propensity for enlisting local personnel tied to terrorist groups. Among UNRWA’s biggest critics has been UN Watch, a non-governmental organization dedicated to monitoring the failures of the United Nations. The bill introduced on Tuesday advocates the same path that Hillel Neuer, the executive director of UN Watch, has laid out to dismantle the agency while finding proper substitutes for the humanitarian needs it covers.
“We’ve been the lead organization monitoring UNRWA in the past 10 years, and we’ve concluded, based on hundreds of pages of in-depth reports, that the agency is beyond reform,” he told the Washington Examiner.
“For about eight, nine years, we were calling for major reform. We asked them not to hire teachers who glorify Adolf Hitler on a regular basis, not to hire teachers and employees who openly promote Hamas terrorist attacks on a regular basis on their social media, and presumably in the classrooms as well,” Neuer said. “And the response from UNRWA was denial. They attacked us. They defamed us. Everything but addressing the issue.”
The Washington Examiner contacted UNRWA for comment.
Through UNRWA’s resistance to the attacks against it, Neuer argued, it has become apparent that the agency is impossible to reform, and that “the entire raison d’être of the agency as it exists today is to keep Palestinians in a state of dependency and to perpetuate resentment, grievance, war, and terrorism.”
UNRWA manages over 5 million Palestinian refugees across several different countries, making any talk of dismantling the agency entirely too daunting for many international observers. Neuer said the exact solution would vary from place to place, but it would mostly involve respective governments nationalizing UNRWA assets operating in their territory. The easiest case would be Jordan, where some 2 million Palestinians live.
“The obvious thing there is whatever money … that the Europeans, for example, want to give for these individuals, rather than give it to UNRWA — which every dollar spent under UNRWA is under the framework of telling the beneficiaries that your mission in life is to dismantle Israel — they should just change the name … instead of saying the ‘UNRWA school in Jordan,’ it’ll say the the ‘Jordanian Ministry of Education School.’ And you can have the same teachers and the same budget, but it’s no longer under the UNWRA framework. So that’s an easy situation,” Neuer said.
Gaza would be the most complicated to get a proper replacement given Hamas’s tight control over the strip, but he was confident in an easy solution in the West Bank. Though ceding that the Palestinian Authority is “extremely problematic” and “not Boy Scouts,” he believes it represents the best case for taking over UNRWA’s assets.
“There’s some chaos there, but in the long term, Palestinians should rule themselves. They’re not uniquely deficient people,” he said, calling them “very resourceful.”
“Sadly, we saw it in a very negative way — they spent two decades turning all of Gaza into hundreds of miles of terror tunnels and created a massive invasion campaign,” Neuer added. “They have resources. The ideology is twisted. So if you have the right values, they can run their own schools.”
By Neuer’s logic, even if the PA weren’t to live up to ideological expectations, transferring the humanitarian responsibilities to them would be far preferable to relying on the U.N., as it would reverse the “perverse logic” that feeds the cycle of bitterness and violence between Israelis and Palestinians.
“The PA has significant problems, but every dollar that goes for UNRWA, it’s not just the money; it’s the legitimacy,” he said.