Time For UNWRA To Go

As has been widely reported, to the chagrin of most of the world, Israel has outlawed all operations of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNWRA), which is the main UN aid agency for so-called Palestinian “refugees” in Yehuda, Shomron and East Jerusalem. While revelations of UNWRA personnel participation in the Oct. 7 attack on Israel persuaded many to review their support for the organization – except for the suspension of funding by the U.S., its main supporter and several other countries – UNWRA seemed to have weathered the storm.

However, the new Israeli legislation, highlighted by President Trump’s bombshell proposal to relocate Palestinians from Gaza to their Arab neighbors, has brought to the fore an even more fundamental issue with UNWRA than its collusion with Hamas terrorists. More than most anything else it has hindered the resolution of the Israel-Palestinian conflict by fostering the notion of a special Palestinian brand of “refugee” that is properly resistant to resettlement in the normal course of events.

Thus, as the Israeli political scientist and author Emmanuel Navon has noted in his Times of Israel blog, there are two separate UN agencies tasked with assisting refugees, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and UNWRA. UNWRA was established in December of 1949 to assist those Palestinians displaced by the 1948 war and the UNHCR was established a year later and charged with assisting all refugees around the world except for the Palestinian variety.

But the key differences between the two is their respective definitions and treatment of refugees. There were approximately 700,000 Palestinian refugees in 1948, but according to UNWRA they now number 5.4 million. That is, according to UNWRA all the patrilineal descendants of the 1948 refugees regardless of their status and country of residence are automatically granted the status of refugee. In a word, UNWRA does not see relocation of Palestinian refugees to, let’s say Jordan, Syria or Lebanon, as part of its mandate, nor does it encourage it. Indeed, if anything its program militates against it.

On the other hand, UNHCR seeks “permanent or durable solutions” for the refugees, including “local integration” and “resettlement.” Navon cites the UNHCR’s Resettlement Handbook: “Local integration is an important facet of comprehensive strategies to develop solutions to refugee situations, particularly those of a protracted nature… Overall, ethnic, cultural, or linguistic links with the local community can increase the chances of successful local integration.”

By all logic, with the creation of UNHCR, UNWRA became redundant and should have been dissolved. But it wasn’t. And in retrospect, there was method to the madness. As Robert Satloff of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy has detailed, in its early years, UNWRA’s mandate included resettlement as an objective, but this provision was deleted by the late 1950s under pressure from Arab states who were determined to claim all of Israel.

So, in reality, President Trump’s plan is arguably in keeping with international precedent, contrary to what many are suggesting. At all events, it is time for the UNWRA protocols to give way to those of the UNHCR. UNWRA has enabled the fabrication of the existence of millions of Palestinian refugees and has perpetuated the Israel-Palestinian confrontation. Where the UN is concerned, what is good for the rest of the world should be good for the Middle East as well.

It is time for UNWRA to go.