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Without UNRWA There Would Be No Hamas
(National Post-Canada) Einat Wilf - Canada's temporary suspension of its financing of UNRWA over charges that some UNRWA staff participated in the Oct. 7 massacre in Israel should be made permanent. UNRWA has created the ideal conditions for murderous terrorist groups to emerge, from Black September, which carried out the gruesome slaughter of Israeli athletes in the 1972 Munich Olympics, to Hamas. Anyone who truly cares about charting a path to true peace in the Middle East should have every interest in ensuring UNRWA is dismantled. Seven decades ago, with empires collapsing across the world and new states emerging to replace the former imperial lands, tens of millions of people became refugees as they were fleeing across newly delineated borders. Those refugees were all settled in the places to which they fled (typically new countries with similar ethnic makeup to that of the refugees) or in new places. In Korea, the temporary UN agency UNKRA settled 3.1 million refugees from the war, at least three times the number of the Arab refugees from the Arab-Israeli war of 1947-1949, with a third of the budget allocated to UNRWA. It completed its job within a few short years and closed down. But the Arab refugees today known as Palestinians refused any form of settlement in place because they knew that would mean the war is over and that the Jewish state would thereby be legitimized. The Arab refugees were determined, even when a ceasefire with the Arab states ended the war, to keep fighting to ensure that the Jewish state is undone. Keeping themselves as perpetual refugees became one of the main weapons in the total Arab war against the Jewish state. After the agency failed to resettle even one Arab refugee, UNRWA's funders, the U.S. and UK, wanted to close it down, but the Arab countries would not hear of it. Since immediate relief was no longer necessary, UNRWA developed a sprawling education system run by the Arab refugees themselves in which a new Palestinian nationalism was born, uniting Arabs living in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Gaza around the goals of revenge and "return." 40% of the refugees live in the West Bank and Gaza. By their telling they live in Palestine. They were born there and lived there. They are not refugees and have no need of resettlement. Another 40% are citizens of Jordan and were born in that country. Nowhere else in the world is a citizen of a country, born in that country, somehow a refugee of another sovereign country. The remaining 20% are registered in Syria and Lebanon. Recent data shows that most of those have long left these countries. UNRWA and the Palestinian "refugee" issue are not marginal aspects of the conflict. They are at the core of the conflict and the reason for its perpetuation. UNRWA has been one of the most substantial forces in ensuring that the rejection of Israel never ends. As a long-term peace activist, I understand that the war cannot end if there is an organization, supported by Canada and other Western powers, that does everything possible to ensure it continues. The writer, a former IDF intelligence officer and Knesset member, is the co-author of The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace (2020).