Holding UNRWA Responsible

"Hi Marta, I am baffled how someone seemingly educated like you can spread lies to raise a few dollars. I just received your email saying that 'the ongoing war in Gaza comes after75 years of continuous displacement and dispossession'."

"No, Ms. Malaspina, it comes after the Hamas attack of October 7th in which Palestinians murdered 1,200 Jews in cold blood. Why can't you be honest?"

"We will expose these lies and encourage our own government in Canada to stop funding UNRWA because it's not truthful. Your note again proves it in writing."

"So, your fundraising email, because it shows the true colours of UNRWA, will bring about the defunding of UNRWA."

Avi Benlolo, Abraham Global Peace

A Palestinian man rides a vehicle in front of the logistics base of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip on July 30, 2019. Photo by SAID KHATIB/AFP/Getty Images

This is the response by Avi Abraham Benlolo, founder and CEO of the Abraham Global Peace Initiative, to UNRWA's Digital Fundraising Team's Marta Malaspina, from whom he had received a widely circulated fundraising email alluding to Israel as an occupier/aggressor of Palestinians in Gaza. The email was sent under this woman's signature, and the response addressed her directly. Considering the source of the response, it isn't likely Ms. Malaspina will have lost much sleep over it. 

It's odd how sometimes you come across names that seem to echo the sentiments of the bearer. Seeing the name 'Malaspina', one is reminded of 'malice', 'malicious', 'malediction', and other such unsavoury descriptives of human nature, and they all seem to fit this woman and her team and the United Nations unit she represents perfectly. This is the very same UNRWA dedicated in 1948 to the singular role of support to 'Palestinian refugees' in perpetuity.

This is the UNRWA that is a major employer of Palestinians. Palestinians who go about their business of spreading hatred of Israel, their designated enemy, a competitor for territory that Palestinians claim as their own, despite that the territory under contention represents the ancient heritage of the Jews, as ancestral Judaean land which under Roman occupation millennia past, was also called 'Palestina' as a province under Roman control.

Young Palestinian boys hold toy guns in a play held in Gaza as part of the ‘Palestine Festival for Children and Education,’ April 2016 (Channel 2 news)

Oh and yes, the same UNRWA whose schools for Palestinian children see school curricula replete with passages over the illegal occupation by Israel of land consecrated to Islam, that Jews yanked out from under the Palestinians under the fallacy claims of the land being ancestral to Judaism -- robbing Palestinians of their claimed patrimony. Claims that teachers working for UNRWA are happy to clarify for their students.

 

In classes where school plays can take the form of depicting Israeli atrocities inflicted on Palestinians and their children in a dreadful genocide the children are taught they can personally help to avoid, in dedicating themselves to the martyrdom cause of resistance, being exposed to the glories of a life of militancy and the use of lethal weaponry. Children who see the courageous resistance of Hamas as their guiding light.

A young Palestinian girl attacks 'Israeli soldiers' with a knife in a play held in Gaza as part of the 'Palestine Festival for Children and Education,' April 2016 (Channel 2 news)

 

But UNRWA, of course, knows nothing about these 'irregularities'. And nor has it any knowledge that their schools are often used as weapons depots, much less that Hamas terrorists set  up rocket launching sites adjacent to schools, as they do to hospitals and mosques. And the more these indiscretions are revealed, the less UNRWA knows about their existence.

There are, however, some who are listening and watching and drawing their own conclusions, particularly in the wake of the horrendous slaughter imposed by Hamas terrorists on southern Israel on October 7, a day of cold-blooded planning that saw operatives flooding into Israel through breaches in the separation wall at the Gaza border, invading towns and villages and kibbutzim where families were murdered, girls and women mass-raped, hostages taken back to Gaza, and Israel left in mourning.

Germany, which has funded UNRWA to the tune of $1 billion in the last five years, has announced all further funding is heretofore frozen. "UNRWA is not making a contribution to a peaceful solution", Germany's Greens' Max Lucks stated. "Not a single cent from Germany should reach teachers who glorify the terror of Hamas." Nothing even remotely similar comes out of the mouth of Canada's Prime Minister who recently increased its generosity to UNRWA.

A move to withhold 39 million euros from Palestinian groups, including from UNRWA has similarly come from the European Union. NGOs known to incite hatred against Israel. Now, the EU and other funders demand that UNRWA and other agencies enforce contracts requiring their schools and programs be monitored.

"I can see now that UNRWA, unfortunately, is holding the Palestinians themselves as hostage", says Avi Benlolo, speaking of the fundraising letter as an example in that UNRWA "is the only refugee organization in the world for one specific group [Palestinians]. Unlike other societies promoting coexistence, assimilating refugees, UNRWA has failed to promote integration into the societies in which Palestinians have moved"; i.e., Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.

A completely new system, organized to help Palestinians in the provision of humanitarian relief but whose objective is that of developing a sustainable society is required, suggests Mr. Benlolo. An entity internationally funded to advocate for cooperation rather than isolation, and absorption of refugees into current places of residence. Not 'refugee camps' under the ongoing narrative that a 'return' is feasible at some future date. A belief that can only be as frustrating as it is impossible.

As for Malaspina and her colleagues at UNRWA, blithely disregarding the barbarity of October 7, calling for 'solidarity' with the Palestinians, ignoring the Jewish women who were raped, the Jewish children who were mutilated by the same people supported by her agency. A new agency is needed to help rebuild  a society able to coexist peacefully alongside Israel.