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.

Israel: We Have A Problem

"Palestinian people's voices and aspirations must be at the centre of post-crisis governance in Gaza -- unified with the West Bank under the Palestinian Authority."

"We continue to believe that a negotiated two-state solution along the 1967 lines with mutually agreed-to swaps is the best way to advance a sustainable peace."

"Beyond any military operation, defeating Hamas requires defeating an idea, which is why it is critical to present a clear vision of a better future and a path to achieve that vision."

U.S.Embassy, Jerusalem, spokesperson

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Joe Biden.  Susan Walsh / AP file

Mindless pap. That ship sailed so long ago, there isn't even a wake. Do these diplomats study nothing? Thinking that whatever pops into their minds must be a solution, and that their position qualifies them to dictate to a state under existential threat how it must respond, what it must accept because this is the wish of the United States that bills itself as Israel's 'greatest friend and benefactor', supplier of funding and weaponry?

 

According to this spokesperson, Palestinian leadership for the future remains "a question for the Palestinian people". Fine. The Palestinian people view Hamas as their favourite leadership option. And as far as the Palestinian Authority is concerned (Fatah) it comes a distant second in popularity. Palestinians in Gaza consider Hamas to be their champions, despite knowing full well its performance on October 7 in Israel, raping, mutilating, killing over 1,200 Israeli children, men, women and elderly.

 

Three-quarters of Palestinians admire and support their very own terrorist group. In very fact, when Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad broke down the barrier between Gaza and Israel in their planned invasion, hundreds if not thousands of ordinary Palestinian citizens entered after them, and indulged themselves in the general melee of rape and murder and abductions. Of the 240 abducted children, women, men and soldiers, not all are in the hands of Hamas; PIJ maintains some of the hostages and so do 'ordinary' Palestinians. 

These are the people whom the United States administration and its diplomats feel will continue to make good neighbours for Israel, entitled to decide who it is they wish to be governed by. And although three-quarters of Palestinians in Gaza admire and trust Hamas, a much greater number, closer to 90 percent in the West Bank, cleave to Hamas, while rejecting the Palestinian Authority. What's the diplomatic solution from the U.S. side on that? Would they accept that if Canada, say, reflected a similar threat to the U.S.?

Two weeks ago U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the Gaza Strip must be given over to the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, once 'hostilities' are over. That the solution to governing the territories "must include Palestinian-led governance and Gaza unified with the West Bank under the P.A." He too has a short memory, having conveniently forgotten up on a high memory shelf the civil war that broke out between Fatah and Hamas when the latter fought the former in Gaza, in a not very collegial manner.

U.S. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby clarified that Washington is engaged in support of a P.A. that "has the support of all Palestinians so that they can effectively help with post-conflict governance, particularly in Gaza". What world do these people live in? If the ordinary news reader in countries far from the Middle East can read verified accounts of what is happening there that describe a situation totally unlike what these diplomats speak of, their 'solutions' are utterly risible.

In the very last election held in the territories in 2006, Hamas won the majority of seats in the Palestinian parliament, and it is obvious from polls taken by a credible West Bank polling group that were elections to be held again, Hamas, despite all that has happened, most particularly its willingness to provoke a situation that would inevitably result in tens of thousands of Palestinians being 'martyred' while Hamas invites the Israel Defense Forces to retaliate when missiles are launched from crowded civilian enclaves, would be re-elected.

It seems that Palestinians too, like the declarations made by Islamists, jihadists and Hamas and Fatah, love death more than others love life. So as long as Palestinians are satisfied to keep presenting themselves as martyrs for the greater cause of destroying Israel, Hamas and Fatah and Islamic Jihad will continue their deadly assaults against Israel, unless and until Israel finally destroys them first. 

 

As for ideas being harder to destroy than people's lives, that's completely true. And the Koran is full of such 'ideas', fertilizing the fervently psychopathic minds of Palestinians who love to portray themselves as victims.

Getty Images