In the Media

Sky News Australia – 8 November 2024

On November 3, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs officially informed the United Nations that it was cancelling the contractual arrangements with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) it had first signed in 1967. This will effectively stop UNRWA from operating in Israel after a three-month transition period.

This announcement followed the passage of a law in the Israeli Knesset last month stipulating Israel must sever its ties with UNRWA.

That law unleashed a wave of criticism against the Jewish State.

Foreign ministers from Australia, France, Germany, South Korea and the United Kingdom released a statement in which they expressed their “grave concern” over the legislation, describing UNRWA’s work as “life-saving” – as if it’s an organisation that simply cares for the welfare of the Palestinian people.

But that’s not even close to accurate. UNRWA is an organisation that is designed not to help people rebuild their lives and thrive, but to hinder them from doing so in the name of politicised goals.

A simple comparison tells the story.

In 1946, the International Refugee Organisation (IRO) was created to help resettle the millions of refugees from World War 2. In 1950, IRO was succeeded by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which still exists today. As of 2023, the UNHCR had about 20,000 staff working in 136 countries and territories.

Its mandate is to co-ordinate international actions to protect refugees and resolve refugee problems worldwide. That means dealing with refugees from Syria, Sudan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Myanmar… anywhere.

According to its own website, the UNHCR has “helped more than 50 million refugees to successfully restart their lives” since its establishment.

Every refugee in the world falls under the UNHCR’s mandate, except for one group – the Palestinians.

They have their own refugee agency – UNRWA – that deals exclusively with Palestinian refugees. Its mandate is not to resolve the refugee problem, like the UNHCR, but to perpetuate it. UNRWA is not permitted to resettle any Palestinian refugees in new permanent homes and has no authority to seek any lasting solution for the refugees so they can resume normal life.

UNWRA’s mandate is to “provide assistance and protection to Palestinian refugees pending a just and lasting solution to their plight.”

Notice the difference? The UNHCR mandate is to resolve refugee problems worldwide, while the UNRWA mandate is to keep Palestinians in limbo forever, until unspecified outside forces provide a “just and lasting solution” to their plight.

What’s more, UNRWA has also developed its own definition of a refugee, to include all descendants of the original refugees displaced in the 1948 Israeli-Arab war, in perpetuity. Even if the great grandchild of a refugee from 1948 has citizenship in another country like Jordan or indeed Australia, they are still a refugee according to UNRWA. As a result, the roughly 750,000 refugees from the 1948 war have ballooned to something like 6 million today. This number will keep climbing forever due to this absurd definition – one not available to any other refugee on Earth.

Furthermore, while the UNHCR has a staff of 20,000, working in 136 countries and territories helping almost 32 million people, UNRWA has a staff of over 30,000 (99% of whom are Palestinian) working in just five areas, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, to service a claimed six million refugees (though this is almost certainly an exaggerated number). That’s 150% more staff to assist less than one-fifth the number of needy people.

Israel absorbed most of the 800,000 or so Jewish refugees forced out of Arab countries in the wake of 1948. It is indeed a tragedy that Palestinian families were not treated similarly – and instead have suffered generations of displacement, impermanence and statelessness. Yet this is a result of the fact their Arab brethren nations apart from Jordan have refused to absorb them for more than 75 years. Many still deny Palestinians who have lived on their soil for generations both citizenship and basic rights, often keeping them in “refugees camps” – really dense neighbourhoods – while fobbing off their welfare needs onto UNRWA.

On top of this, over the past year, UNRWA has been very clearly shown to be complicit in terrorism, with its buildings and facilities being used for military purposes by Hamas, some staff members directly implicated in the October 7 massacre, and many others demonstrated to be active members of Hamas and other terrorist groups.  Yet UNRWA head Philippe Lazzarini continues to plead ignorance about all of it.

UNRWA has shown itself to be an organisation so corrupted that it is beyond redemption – both in terms of its mandate and its ugly history. So, while much of the global community continues to criticise the Israeli Government’s actions in refusing to deal with UNRWA, it should consider this simple fact.

Over the past 74 years, the UNHCR has helped successfully resettle 50 million refugees for a brighter future. Over that same time period, UNRWA has not helped even one.

Justin Amler is a policy analyst at the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC).