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Last week, President Donald Trump said the United States may withhold future aid payments to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees over what he called the Palestinians' unwillingness to talk peace with Israel.The United States is the largest donor to the agency, with a pledge of nearly $370 million as of 2016, according to UNRWA's website.

That act is a thousand times worse than recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital, because the refugee issue has been capitalized on for seventy years, with billions of dollars poured into it, all going to waste. The world perpetuated the "Palestinian refugee problem", whose problem was created as a result of the Arab armies' invasion of Israel one day after the Jewish State declared its independence, despite the fact that not one refugee remains of all the others who existed in the 1940s, the "Palestinian refugees."

The refugees have become addicted to living on foreign aid and taking it away will force them to work like everyone else. Third, every refugee whose funding has ceased will decide to solve his problem independently: Some will emigrate to other countries, others will be absorbed in their current locations, and the refugee problem will disappear after all those decades spent keeping it alive with massive amounts of European and American money.

UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness said over the weekend, "The human impact of losing significant funding could be catastrophic in the real lives of real people whom the U.N. is mandated to protect."

The problem is UNRWA

Ron Prosor

A doctor trying to find a medicine to treat an illness must, first of all, determine its etiology. One of the main obstacles on the path to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the U.N. agency founded with the purpose of assisting only Palestinian refugees, and that perpetuates the fantasy of their return.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHRC), the U.N.'s worldwide refugee agency, has dealt with some 66 million true refugees from civil wars, blood-soaked conflicts and natural disasters in recent years. Meanwhile, UNRWA, which was founded in 1949 specifically for Palestinian refugees when there were only some 700,000, ostensibly assists 5.3 million people it defines as refugees today, but any connection they have to true refugee status is completely incidental.

For starters, some of these refugees do not exist at all. The most recent population census in Lebanon found that two-thirds of the refugees listed in UNRWA reports were simply made up. Some 300,000 people exist only in UNRWA reports. It is clear that UNRWA has an interest in inflating the numbers – they do good business from this. Their budget per refugee in 2016, for example, was four times as much as the UNHCR had: $246 compared to $58.

UNRWA was born of sin, and in sin it remains. The organization perpetuates the Palestinian refugee issue, prevents a political settlement from being reached, contributes to anti-Israel incitement and robs aid to real refugees.

As long as UNRWA continues to exist, we only sentence ourselves to have no settlement in the present. At the same time, we ensure that in another decade or two, when students currently enrolled in UNRWA schools take their high school matriculation examinations, nothing will have changed for the better after the years of incitement they have undergone. We must look at Israel's long-term interests and to those who strive to strike a future peace agreement.

The world knows this, just as Israel knows this, but it has been comfortable for everyone to sit on the sidelines and do nothing to fix UNRWA's distortion of history. Until, that is, the Trump administration came and said loud and clear that UNRWA is part of the problem and cannot be part of the solution.

When the U.S. announced it was considering halting American funding for UNRWA, Israel should have held on to this suggestion with both hands. The Israeli response, however, which reflected the defense establishment's thinking, was to stutter and hesitate. Israel was shortsighted, preferring a short-term quiet for which we will all pay for heavily in the mid- to long term.

The defense establishment fears the instability caused if the funding for UNRWA stops. In my view, there are U.N. organizations that are already active, like the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and others, that can supply humanitarian services to answer the needs of these Palestinians relatively quickly. Many Palestinians who receive money and services from UNRWA would shed no tears if they would receive this aid from another organization, one that has not indoctrinated them. Will this be easy? No. Are some of the defense establishment's arguments rational? Yes. But this view looks at the long term. We have a ticking time bomb here, and if we do not defuse it now, in the long term it will blow up in our faces.

We are standing now at a historical crossroads. The American administration has expressed a new line of thinking regarding the U.N. and the Middle East, and is now unwilling to fund organizations that act against the national security of the U.S. UNRWA is an organization that acts against the national security interests of the State of Israel and all those in favor of a regional peace agreement. Closing UNRWA would be the first step in treating the sickness before it becomes truly becomes malignant.

http://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/the ... ted=224289

UNRWA – Terrorism Under UN Patronage

Lital Shemesh | 03/01/2018

Over the years, UNRWA has become a human shield for terrorist activity, and the truth is that we are no longer surprised: UNRWA was established in 1950 to serve as a temporary organization until the Palestinian refugee problem is resolved. But instead of solving the problem, all the organization did was preserve and increase it by granting refugee status to all descendants of those living in Palestine. Yes, even to the grandson of the grandson of the grandfather who once lived in the area.

This definition is not valid in any other case of refugees in the world except the Palestinians. In the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which treats all the other refugees in the world, the number of refugees diminishes over time. UNRWA provides only humanitarian relief and enjoys a unique right as it is the only UN agency reporting to the UN General Assembly; The mandate of the General Refugee Agency, on the other hand, is to provide international protection to all refugees and seek a permanent solution with the help of governments. It allows refugees from all over the world a number of options for a solution – absorption in the country in which they reside; Re-absorption in a third country willing to receive them; Return to their country of origin. The problem is that the first two options are rejected by the Arab states, and the third option is not accepted by Israel, which has absorbed more than a million Jewish refugees from Arab countries and resettled them in Israel.

As stated, the definition of UNRWA causes the number of refugees to increase over time, and their solution to return all the descendants of Palestinians to the State of Israel means the elimination of the Jewish state. All the funds transferred to them serves this purpose. The organization employs close to 30,000 workers, and the funding it receives amounts to more than $ 1 billion a year – money flowing from the United States, Europe, Saudi Arabia, Japan and more.

UNRWA contributed to the promotion of a Hamas-Islamist-Jihadist ideology in the schools it runs, and UNRWA school staff in Gaza are affiliated with Islamist organizations. There are Hamas events in the UNRWA schools that praise the martyrs and the Jihad, sometimes with the involvement of UNRWA teachers.

So far, the organization has been tenaciously nurturing four generations of refugees, and the numbers are growing from year to year. The countries of the world must wake up and bring it to an end. The vast amounts that they transfer to UNRWA only preserve the conflict, and do not resolve it.

http://en.mida.org.il/2018/01/03/unrwa- ... patronage/