Episode 92: Why does Israel hate UNRWA?

Why is the Israeli government refusing to work with Unra?

UNRWA, the major UN agency that works with Palestinians, I have been asked this question hundreds of times online in person. People hear that the Israelis are very angry about it, very upset about it, somebody may be heard about it, not willswork or read her book, and the question comes up again and again, this is an agency that delivers a tremendous amount of aid, provides thousands

“and thousands of teachers to schools and, for example, in Gaza, what is so bad about it?”

What is so wrong about it? What's so difficult in working with it? The Israelis, by the way, have worked with every aid agency, every kind of aid agency. There's sometimes been clashes, sometimes been tensions, but the Israelis welcome most aid agencies.

So what is wrong with Unra?

There are basically three problems with Unra from the Israeli perspective, and the ones

that make all the news that catch all the attention, they're not the important ones. For example, direct complicity with terrorism. Israeli intelligence has argued, has claimed, has found evidence for, at least 12, and possibly the latest report was 19 Unra employees in Gaza, who directly participated in the October 7 Massacre.

This is a terrible thing to discover, of course, that a UN aid agency employee took part in a literal massacre, and the UN's own oversight office actually fired nine of them, because they found evidence that they may have been involved. So something about those Israeli claims is correct, I suspect, everything about those Israeli claims is correct.

If only because it's limited to 19 people, half of them, the UN did actually agree and fire.

“Now, here's the thing, Unra has something like 13,000 employees in Gaza.”

So the argument that 19 of them might have taken part in this Hamas invasion of Israel, it's splashed, it's huge, it's dramatic in terms of the media narrative. That's not the fundamental problem with Unra. Unra could just say, we hate this, there are evil people, we're ashamed that they were on our staff, 19 out of 13,000, and just kick them out.

There's a deeper problem with Unra, and here's the second layer, Israeli intelligence

actually argues that something like 1500 members of Unra's Gaza staff, 12%, are active members of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, that Unra provides essentially a kind of financial backbone in literally paying 1500 salaries to Hamas members. Now, this is a much more significant involvement, put it this way. It would be harder for Unra to claim it didn't know that 12% of its staffers are literal

“card carrying members of Hamas or Islamic Jihad, and here too, right, we have a lot of evidence”

for a lot of this being correct, but it's also less of an argument than you would think. It seems really damning, and if the Israelis have evidence, Unra has a big problem. But you know, in places that have a tyrannical sort of warlord cultural control over the society, not just political control, but the organization that rules because of religious reasons, because of social reasons actually really runs the society.

In a place like that, and it exists elsewhere, I mean, you could see this in Somalia, you could see this in other places, not just Gaza, but in a place like that, aid organizations often get co-opted in this way. It's a really simple point. Hamas doesn't literally control Unra on the ground in Gaza, but because Hamas controls

the ground in Gaza, Unra can't operate except by Hamas's pleasure, and because Hamas can control the population of Gaza, nobody can be hired doing Unra position unless Hamas at least doesn't oppose it. So it's very simple for Hamas, looking to pay salaries to its staffers, to say, "Hey, there's an Unra job over there at that aid agency at that school at that clinic. My person's gonna get that job, I need that salary for my person."

Now they don't even have to go through Unra, it's not like some office in Geneva or New York has to approve it. They just have to tell the person who gets the job to quit, so that the person Hamas wants gets the job, and if they don't, they have a very serious problem with Hamas on the ground, and we've seen Hamas has killed hundreds and hundreds of Palestinians at the very least in order to maintain its control of Gaza, and it's

direct control of Gaza's population and the flow of aid and the flow of money. If it's just 12%, that's actually remarkably good, because you would expect Hamas to use more of Unra's salaries on the ground, to put its people in place. I suspect that's

can show that their names overlap to names on Hamas' rosters that were captured in Gaza.

“And again, this in itself, it's a sign of deep collusion on the ground that is very nearly”

unavoidable for an aid organization that does more than just literally deliver the aid. World Central Kitchen doesn't have this problem, because it brings in the food and then walks out, brings in the food and walks out. But if you're going to run schools in Gaza in higher 13,000 people, most of those salaries are teachers. You're going to end up dealing with the powers that be on the ground, and so you're going to be deeply infiltrated by Hamas.

No matter what, that itself is not Unra's great crime. They don't care. They don't do anything about it. They're complicit in it in the sense that they pretend they don't know it. But that itself is not reason enough to explain why Israel has actually demolished Unra's headquarters and passed laws for bidding Unra from receiving utilities, from Israeli authorities, municipalities, and has actually begun to systematically remove Unra from the ground, from Gaza

“and from Israel. There's military infrastructure. The IDF has released evidence of Hamas tunnels and”

command centers located directly under Unra facilities throughout Gaza. One example was this

amazing, just Hamas data center that was under the Gaza City headquarters of Unra. Gaza City

headquarters of Unra is a major installation, right? It's a major piece of Unra's infrastructure. Gaza City was the biggest city in Gaza. So if you find a major Hamas data center under the Unra facility in Gaza City, and you find that the electrical cables providing electricity to that data center come out of Unra's own electrical system in the Unra headquarters, then you begin to understand that the connection is a tiny bit deeper. Unra could not not have known. Huge numbers

of Unra people on the ground would have to have been part of building out that Hamas data center under the Unra facility. That's much more damning. It's still not unique. We see for example in South Lebanon, with Unifill, which based on the UN Security Council resolution in 2006 that ended

“the second Lebanon war was supposed to be overseeing. Hezbollah's disarmament was supposed to be”

confronting. Hezbollah when it violated the UN resolution. And in fact, everywhere there was a Unifill facility in South Lebanon, Hezbollah simply built infrastructures, weapons, caches,

tunnel entrances, adjacent or almost attached to the Unifill facility. Unifill never

confronted Hezbollah. And the only people who could be actually hurt by confronting Unifill were the Israelis. The Israelis couldn't bomb a Unifill facility. And so Unifill ended up becoming human shields to Hezbollah, sites and facilities. And we saw this literally dozens of times in South Lebanon. In that sense, Unra's facilities being used by Hamas, whether it's numerous instances of weapon storage and unra's schools and unra facilities and clinics, rockets being fired

from right against the wall of a school, that did exist in Lebanon as well. That exists in other places. So all of these things, they're sexy, they're easy to get on the news. It's a dramatic news story, if an unra employee invaded Israel and murdered people. But it's not the fundamental problem with Unra. The Israeli opposition to Unra isn't even that Hamas uses an abuses it. The Israeli problem with Unra goes deeper still. The first step in that deep dive has to

do with not how those schools are used, who teaches in those schools, how Hamas might sometimes manipulate its way into receiving some of the budgets for the schools that Unra runs in Gaza, but in what's actually taught inside the schools. Unra teaches inside the schools, textbooks and curriculum teachers and events and summer camps run by some schools that have explicit insight into violence, explicit anti-Semitism. I mean, old school European

style Jews control the world anti-Semitism and those are in Unra texts produced in Unra facilities in Unra schools by Unra paid teachers who sometimes upload this stuff to social media. And this is real. This is problematic. Is it every teacher in every school? No, how systemic is that only in places where Hamas has some influence ideologically? Well, that's just about everywhere. Hamas spent a great deal of its efforts in the 17 years of rule Gaza

to inculcate its ideology and its understanding of history and its understanding of Islam and its understanding of Israel into the younger generation. And we see that in polls of of Gaza's. They are unbelievably radicalized. Radicalized to the point where they can barely make decisions that are healthy for them. Gaza has natural gas off the coast. Nobody can stop the war long enough from the Gaza inside to just develop the natural gas. And I get back

to the war. There are no decisions. There is no cultural willingness to do anything that isn't

Hamas's ideological war. We've seen opposition to Hamas in Gaza, but it has never reached the

against Hamas in a serious way. Hamas succeeded in the massive project of radicalizing Gaza

through these schools. That's deeper. Unra is a platform in which Hamas and the the most extreme ideals of the Palestinian National Movement trap Gaza's. It isn't just at the teachers at the bottom family members of Hamas, people who Hamas wants to take care of. Get a teaching job in some

“unreschool. It's much more important to know that Sohail Al-Hindi, a leader of the Unrestaf Union,”

was a high-ranking member of Hamas's political bureau. Leaders, top leaders that UN officials from Geneva and New York actually have to sit down with are card-carrying, high-ranked, proud, publicly listed members of Hamas's top institutions. There's a lot of sympathy, a lot of romanticized heroicizing of Hamas in the Unra ranks right up to the UN, right up to headquarters. Are you still with me? We're going deeper. And now we're getting to the fundamental problem with Unra.

And it has nothing to do with what Unra says and has nothing to do with what Unra does on the ground. It has to do with why Unra exists. You didn't need to found a special refugee agency. The United Nations Relief Works Agency for Palestinians. You could have handled the Palestinian case file exactly the way you handled the Jewish refugee case file in those very years or every other refugee

case file, 50, 60, 70 million refugees of the 20th century. All of them were handled by the same

UN agency. UNHCR, the High Commission of Refugees, which is today called the UN Refugee Agency. Everyone, every kind, every conflict, every context. We're handled by UNHCR. And UNHCR didn't fit the Palestinian case in the view of the officials who put together Unra. Because UNHCR defines a refugee as somebody kicked out of their country who can't go back. And who has no citizenship and no permanent residence somewhere else. And who needs help to bridge that

gap. From a place they can't go back to, to building a new life in a new place. That's a refugee.

“And that's what UNHCR is there to help with. Millions of Jews had that issue. And we're helped”

by UNHCR, by UNRA, by various agencies over the course of the postwar period. But not Unra,

UNRA is the only agency that exists especially for one tiny group of refugees. And to provide those refugees, not with services because anybody could provide those services. A great many other NGOs provide services on the ground in the West Bank Gazam on Palestinians in Jordan and Syria and Lebanon in elsewhere. But because of its definition of a refugee. UNRA's definition of a refugee is radically different from UNHCR's under-owner rules, written into UNRA's original

founding charter. A Palestinian refugee is someone who was in Palestine between 47 and 49. In other words, over the course of the 48 war. This person was forced out, fled, either one in the 48 war. And this person now has a status of refugee. I'll just be blunt for all time, for all time. Even if they have the citizenship of another country, even if they have a permanent home in another country, even if they are born with citizenship or two citizenship. In, for example, Jordan

and spent their professional lives in the United States and became great well-known scientists and won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry this year. They are still refugees under UNRA rules. Why are they refugees? In what sense are they refugees? Why is it important to call them refugees? In fact, it's inherited. Your children have that status. Even if they were born in that other country, even if your child was born in the United States and rose up to become

president of the United States under UNRA rules, it is possible to have a US president who is a refugee. What is the word mean? Under UNRA rules, your grandchildren can be refugees. It can go on for all time and forever. Why? And here we get to the crops. UNRA was not created to help Palestinians. Everyone else can help Palestinians. A thousand NGOs help Palestinians every day. UNRA was created to ensure that one group of refugees on this earth had a different definition

“of refugee from all other groups and that definition was basically that the only way their refugee”

status ends is with the end of Israel. Mass, total, complete, return of millions of descendants of 1948 refugees into Israel. That is the UNRA definition of a refugee built to produce that outcome. That rule of UNRA's refugee definition is actually the excuse why Lebanon

For generations, Lebanon refused to let them own land, own real estate, work in professions.

“There were rules in Lebanon. Some of them still in place against Palestinians in Lebanon”

who are three four generations already born in Lebanon that are basically the worst of the

Zarrist oppression rules against the Jews in eastern Europe. And this is considered moral. This is considered good. UNRA thinks this is a good thing. UNRA is considered by the Israelis

“to be part of the problem because UNRA is emphatically part of the problem. It is the heart”

of the campaign to argue that Israel should not. Doesn't have the right to and cannot in the end

exist. And therefore, in October of last year of 2024, the Knesset passed laws barren UNRA from operating in Israeli territory prohibiting state officials from communicating with it.

UNRA was cut off from the Israeli state in December 2025. The legislation was passed

to legally block electricity, water, banking to UNRA facilities. The Israelis, as part of the Gaza operations, part of the removal of Hamas, have said the ideology and the international organizations sustaining the ideology that Israel is destroyable and must be destroyed.

“Israel will stop cooperating with that. Here's the thing. If UNRA changed that, dealing with”

refugees who are actually refugees, and not with refugees are the great grandchildren and refugees kept that way because of UNRA, if UNRA changes that, and demands what UNHCR demands, which is that the world take in refugees. If UNRA becomes an actual refugee agency, rather than an agency whose ideological infrastructure is the destruction of a state of a UN member state, all the rest is fixable, everything about UNRA is fixable, except the heart and soul of it,

the purpose of it. Israel's not at war with UNRA, UNRA's at war with Israel. Thanks for listening.