REPLACE UNRWA!

"There's a substantial difference. More than fifteen countries representing more than half a billion dollars have frozen their funding." 

"In our ten years of documenting this, there's not one instance where one of the friends on Facebook, their peers -- most of whom are fellow UNRWA staff, teachers, employees -- said, 'Whoah, Ahmed, I'm shocked that you just glorified Hitler and that you praised the terrorist attack."

"There's not one instance of that. It's the complete opposite, and we've documented that in videos where they liked it, endorsed it, praised it."

"This line about twelve bad apples is just so preposterous."

Hillel Neuer, executive director, UN Watch

"[UNRWA took] the recent allegations very, very seriously."

"There's about two million people who depend on our assistance. We have 150 shelters that have become home to a million people who have been displaced."

"We bring food and medicine; we bring medical teams."

Juliette Touma, spokeswoman, United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East

 

Since October 7's horrors of unrelieved barbarity was visited on the civilian population of Israel; Jews mostly but also Bedouin and foreign farm workers, a sadistic savagery visited upon infants, children, women, men and the elderly, fully revealed in all its macabre, gory details by videos that the perpetrators themselves proudly took of tormenting, mutilating, raping, killing, no one can be ignorant of the Hamas marauders pogrom on southern Israel across the border from Gaza, nor the plight of the abductees taken into Gaza as hostages.

 

Hillel Neuer, a practising lawyer specializing in international law became aware of an opening at UN Watch in 2004. Born in Canada, he attended McGill Law School and became an acolyte of the university's human rights program led by Irwin Cotler who served as Canada's Attorney General under the Liberal government of Prime Minister Paul Martin. Mr. Cotler's passion for human rights ignited a similar flame in Mr. Neuer.

 

"I very much wanted to follow in his path and be a defender of human rights and [to] advocate for the Jewish people, the State of Israel, and to defend their rights", he said in a recent interview. That is precisely what he does, has been doing for two decades, revealing the hypocrisy within the international body that has become his focus in life. Where the world's most obvious and criminal regimes have sway and head UN positions on human rights; the most serious violators of human rights sitting in judgement on nations with impeccable human rights records.

 

Mr. Neuer's critiques over continual, unending sanctions against one tiny country among the 193 nations of the world highlight the absurdity of a world body dedicated to justice, human rights and peace directing its ire against a nation that is as close to upholding those values as any other upstanding member of the United Nations, highlighting the power of blocs like the unaligned nations and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. Two of the world's most blatant human rights abusers, Russia and China, sit on the five-nation Security Council. 

In February on the 20th anniversary of Hillel Neuer's leadership of UN Watch one speech, "Where are  your Jews?" in a challenge to Arab UN delegations to address the evacuation of ancestral Jewish communities from their ancient homelands within the Arab nations of the Middle East was seminal, right-to-the-point, and went unanswered. 

 

 

Weeks following the Hamas invasion of Israel a report documenting close to two dozen UNRWA staffers celebrating the atrocities on social media was released by UN Watch. In January an analysis of a group on the Telegram social media site that features thousands of UNRWA educators in Gaza, found widespread support for terrorism. "May Allah grant them victory" wrote  Shatha Husam Al Nawajha responding to a teaching colleague's comment that Hamas operatives were "breastfed Jihad with their mothers' milk".

Following the 1948 Arab-Israel war when joint Arab-nation militaries attacked the nascent Jewish state and were defeated, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency was created to look after the needs of the estimated 750,000 Palestinians who fled the contested area. At the very same time, with the creation of the State of Israel, Arabized Jews who had lived for millennia in the Middle East and North Africa were expelled, their belongings transferred to state ownership.

While the exiled Jews found refuge in Israel or in a wider diaspora, the Palestinians were placed in refugee camps in Arab countries that refused them citizenship, leaving them to live in squalor. They were meant to represent a living, breathing sore on the body politic in the claim that Israel was responsible for their plight; a people who had been promised by those Arab states that they could return once Israel was annihilated, neither of which aspiration met with reality.

Ever since, in the 70 years that followed, the world has regarded the Palestinians, through the auspices of the United Nations, as refugees, a status of permanency never before encountered with the many huge pools of refugees caused by civil wars, nation-to-nation conflict, natural disasters or any other globally unsettling cause. The leaders infuse them with rage over the creation of a Jewish state in an ancestral Judaic geography, inciting Palestinians to 'resist' the 'oppression' of a Jewish presence with unadulterated lethal violence.

UNRWA, conceived with the purpose of maintaining Palestinian 'refugees', nurtured their belief that they would some day return. In fact, many never left, and today, totalling over two million, they are citizens of the State of Israel; those who fled or were forced out in 1948 whose issue -- children and grandchildren are now counted among the 'refugees' will never return -- now total 7 million; an absurdity in and of itself.

UN Watch's findings, following the news that ten percent of UNRWA's workforce is tied to Palestinian terrorist groups were presented in January in testimony before the U.S. Congress by Mr. Neuer. Prior to that an Israeli intelligence dossier revealed that 13 UNRWA members comprised of seven primary and secondary school teachers along with math and Arabic instructors, had taken part personally in the October 7 massacres in Israel.

Revelations that electrified major donors of the UNRWA program, including its largest donor, the United States. Among others, Australia, Canada, Japan, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom saw fit to suspend their funding of the UN agency. Mr. Neuer predicts that funding will be reinstated by UNRWA donors even with promised reforms neglected. UNRWA, given its disastrous performance, he feels, will be dismantled, its mandate replaced by other bodies of the UN.

Enough is enough. UNRWA must be dissolved and replaced. UN Watch