by Dr. Einat Wilf
It was quite ironic
that during the fighting in Gaza, the Israel Defense Forces was shot at
from facilities of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, and had to return
fire, as over the years no one defended the existence of UNRWA more than
the IDF and the Israeli defense establishment. But now, with the
fighting over, it is time for Israel to do what it should have done
decades ago -- remove the layer of protection and legitimacy it grants
to UNRWA. Israel should recognize UNRWA for what it is -- a hostile
Palestinian organization that perpetuates the dream of the return of
Palestinian refugees to Israel -- and treat it accordingly.
Israel's policy on
UNRWA was set by the defense establishment. It was based on the premise
that UNRWA was "the lesser of two evils" -- or as a Defense Ministry
official put it to me, "UNRWA is crap, but Hamas is more so." This is a
narrow view of the issue. Even if UNRWA itself does not attack the IDF
directly, it ensures that there will always be someone to do so in the
future. Under a thin veil of humanitarian activities, UNRWA acts with a
clear political agenda, aimed at perpetuating the situation of
Palestinian refugees and fostering the dream of their return to Israel.
This is how UNRWA builds the ideological foundation for the next
generation of fighters against Israel.
Officially, UNRWA
provides educational, health and social services to the around 5 million
Palestinian refugees living in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria and
Lebanon. In reality, UNRWA is directly responsible for the fact that 5
million people are registered as Palestinian refugees, a large number of
whom continue to live in refugee camps. UNRWA works to inflate the
number of registered refugees in two ways. First, the descendants of
refugees from 1948, already the fifth generation, are automatically
"entitled" to refugee status. And second, UNRWA thwarts any attempt to
absorb refugees where they currently live or in third countries. If
UNRWA operated the same way as the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees,
which is responsible for all other refugee groups in the world, today
there would be only tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees, rather
than millions.
When Israel changes its
policy and removes the protection it grants to UNRWA, it will be
possible to bring about a dramatic change in the organization and its
political activities. The reason for this is that UNRWA does not get its
budget directly from the U.N., but rather its continued existence
depends on donations totaling around $1 billion per year from Western
nations, including around $250 million from the U.S. and more than $500
million from Europe.
Over the years, various
Western officials have asked the obvious question: Why do Western
taxpayers fund an organization which acts in stark contrast to the
policy of finding a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? But
every time even the slightest possibility arises of cutting funding to
UNRWA, Israel intervenes to ensure that the funding continues to flow,
due to the defense establishment's concern that any decrease to the
funding will lead to a conflagration on the ground and a new intifada.
If Israel expects, as
it should, that any future peace agreement with the Palestinians include
final recognition of the Jewish people's right to their own state in
their historical homeland, then it must act in accordance with that
principle and cease its protection of UNRWA -- an organization whose
goal is that Israel will never win legitimacy as the state of the Jewish
people.
Dr. Einat Wilf is a senior fellow with the Jewish People Policy Institute and a former member of Knesset.
Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=9817
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
No comments:
Post a Comment