American Thought Leaders - The Giant UN Agency Hijacked by Hamas: Asaf Romirowsky

Episode Date: May 9, 2024

“As long as the world can believe that Palestinians are refugees in perpetuity and are stateless in perpetuity because of a so-called colonial empire that has been thrust upon them by the Jews, then they have the sympathy of the world. And that has been their success story.”Following Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, many of us became aware, for the first time, of UNRWA, the United Nations agency serving Palestinian refugees. It receives hundreds of millions of dollars from the United States every year.“UNRWA has basically transformed itself into an advocacy organization for the Palestinian people—what I would consider to be a case study of where the client has hijacked the service provider. So, where you have an entire apparatus of an agency, but that has the imprimatur of the United Nations, and so gives the illusion of neutrality, integrity, and whatnot,” says Asaf Romirowsky, a Middle East historian and co-author of “Religion, Politics, and the Origins of Palestine Refugee Relief.”Established in 1949, UNRWA was supposed to be a temporary organization. So how did it become one of the largest and costliest U.N. agencies? And how is it that the number of Palestinian refugees has ballooned sevenfold, according to UNRWA, when virtually all other refugees established after World War II have been resettled?To find out, I sat down with Mr. Romirowsky, executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.“UNRWA has been proven to be exactly synonymous to Hamas. The fact that they had Hamas servers under their headquarters, the fact that they had individuals who were part of the perpetrators of the attacks on October 7—UNRWA is no longer a legitimate organization. They have never been to my mind. ... It’s an obstacle to peace, rather than a solution to peace,” says Mr. Romirowsky.“I think that there’s a disconnect—and this has always been something we’ve observed here and in Europe about the reality on the ground and what it takes to create peace. I think peace is a goal and should be the goal. But ... there has to be mutual recognition. ... There has been a refusal to accept Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.”Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

So as long as the world can believe that Palestinians are refugees in perpetuity and are stateless in perpetuity, then they have the sympathy of the world. And that has been their success story. For the last 75 years, Palestinian refugees have been supported by a UN agency dedicated only to them. Today, UNRWA has become one of the largest and costliest UN agencies and is playing for many a surprising role in the Israel-Gaza war. Asaf Ramarovsky, executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, explains. The fact that they had Hamas service under their headquarters, the fact that they had

individuals who were part of the perpetrators of the attacks on October 7th. UNRWA is no longer a legitimate organization. It's an obstacle to peace rather than a solution to peace. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Asaf Romerovsky, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. So recently, a lot of us were made aware of this little-known, apparently incredibly well-funded UN agency, UNRWA. This came out in these hearings recently on the Hill,

where there was a telegram group of something like 3,000 Palestinian teachers that were associated with this particular agency. The group had prominent people praising October 7th. So explain to me what's going on here. Sure. UNRWA is the number one service provider of education, of medical services to the Palestinian people. UNRWA is known as the acronym for the UN Workers Relief Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.

And what has happened over the past 75 years, that UNRWA has basically transformed itself into an advocacy organization for the Palestinian people. What I would consider to be a case study of where the client has hijacked the service provider. So where you have an entire apparatus of an agency that has the imprimatur of the United Nations, and so gives the illusion of neutrality, integrity, and whatnot, and basically has become this political advocacy wing for the Palestinian people, predominantly serving when it comes to clinics, social services, or predominantly education. And so when you talk about the teachers in the memo that you were referring to, UNRWA is the largest employer of Palestinians, predominantly many teachers,

and the majority of Palestinian society are alums of the UNRWA school system. And we've learned of late now, a few hundred were involved in the Barbaric Act of October 7th. So that's very interesting. I'll just mention this. I've had interactions with the UN High Commission for Refugees. And that's the global UN body dealing with refugees, right? And so UNRWA is, to be frank, I wasn't even really aware of UNRWA until relatively recently. But it seems to be playing that role solely for Palestinians. Is that right? So how did that come about? That's exactly correct.

UNRWA is an anomaly within the larger map of refugee organizations. There are two, as you mentioned. One is UNRWA, and the other one, the sister organization, is UNHCR, the only UN agency devoted only to their existence and to their maintenance versus other refugees worldwide. The UNHCR is devoted to them, which is the sister organization. So the uniqueness of the fact that Arab Palestinians have their own UN agency, they have worked hard to maintain this stasis. UNRWA's mandate is solely focused on Arab-Palestinian refugees in the sense that they define a refugee as anybody who was in mandatory Palestine between 1946 and 1948, and the kicker is and their descendants. UNHCR, which comes about in 1950, basically says you're a refugee for one generation. And to your point, there have

been millions of refugees since World War II that have been assimilated by UNHCR, all have been re-assimilated after one generation or whatnot, with the exception of the Arab Palestinians, as a result of UNRWA. And by the way, to the other part of the anomaly of UNRWA, UNRWA was created by its own definition as a temporary organization, temporary that has no end. UNRWA is committed, or UNRWA's entire raison d'etre, to the so-called existence of the Arab-Palestinian right of return. The belief that there is going to be a right of return to land that no longer exists or land that never existed to begin with. And so UNRWA basically maintains and sustains Arab Palestinian refugees in the stasis from generation to generation, which is part of the inheritance and the lineage aspect that plays along with being considered to be an UNRWA's books. At the end of 48, 49, there are about between 625,000 to 700,000 refugees

that were created as a result of the war itself. Now, Israel, before the war began, says to the Arabs, don't wage war on us. Have peace. Let's work on coexistence and whatnot. Those Arab-Israelis who stayed and did not flee, they are the Arab Israelis. Those who are citizens, the Arab Israeli population is counted within UNRWA's definition. What do they think about that? They know that they're better off inside of Israel because of the amount of rights that they get and the amount of freedoms and whatnot. It's particularly interesting to me that Israeli citizens are also considered Palestinian refugees

under, you know, the refugee rules I'm aware of anywhere. If you become a citizen of a state that you're no longer a refugee. Yes, this is part of the anomaly of UNRWA. I mean, Arab Israelis who are Arab Israeli citizens who became naturalized citizens post-1948, 1949, they are the ones who enjoy all the rights of being a citizen of the state of Israel. They are represented in the Israeli parliament. They have judges. They vote.

They're part of the Israeli parliament. They have judges. They vote. They're part of the Israeli democracy. However, according to UNRWA's accounts, which is part of the fallaciousness of the actual number that UNRWA puts out there, they still consider them to be refugees. And so the entire numbers game that UNRWA is dependent on is the existence of Arab Palestinian refugees. And so anything to expand the numbers. The Palestinians that left the territories and are in Syria, Jordan, or Lebanon, do you have any sense of what portion of that is of the population? And frankly, around the world.

I guess there's also small pockets. The largest Palestinian population outside the United States is Jacksonville, Florida, and Dearborn, Michigan. Jordan is populated close to 80% Palestinian. There are arguments that Jordan is Palestine, and the fact that Queen Rania herself is of Palestinian descent. And so there is a fragmentation. West Bankers are Jordanians. Gazans are Egyptian. There's no exchange of populations. They don't like each other. There's no intermarriage between the two as far as the refuge, as far as Palestine. But they're Palestinian.

But they're Palestinian. Before, you know, you were considered part of, like, it was kind of clannish. They were part of large families. Sure, sure. So the Khalidis and the Shashibis, they were all considered to be, you know, kind of tribal royalty. Sure, sure, sure. And so wherever they were settled, you know, it's kind of where you were the land. That was kind of the rule of the land, you know, is where the area was. Palestinian cohesiveness.

Arafat was the only one who basically walked and spoke Palestinian society in the sense that he represented both West Bank and Gaza. But there is no cohesiveness. And now there's a war. So there's more refugees created? No. Palestinian society at large, by UNRWA's account, is considered to be a refugee population. They are refugees not of the current war, according to their definition.

They're refugees of pre-48. Because under his definition of who is a refugee is anybody, even if you were a temporary worker in mandatory Palestine, from 1946 to 1948. What has happened over the years is that there has been the lineage component. So Palestinian lineage is patriarchal. In the 1960s and 70s, they made it matriarchal to double the numbers. And you can inherit Palestinian refugee status. And so that has been the ongoing growth of numbers. What is currently happening in this current war, since October 7th, is you have Hamas, which is the governing body, the Islamist group that is

governing Gaza. They're already refugees, according to UNRWA's accounts. But, you know, they're not expanding, you know, their numbers are not expanding more than they already were expanding as a result of the war. If Israel, you know, what happens on the day after tomorrow scenario, as far as where are all these people going. One of the reasons that the Egyptians and the Jordanians are not opening up their border is because they understand the threat, the threat of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is Hamas. Remember, the Muslim Brotherhood was ruling Egypt. They know exactly, they kicked the Brotherhood out of Egypt. They have no incentive whatsoever and no desire whatsoever at all to bring into Egypt Hamas members.

However, Egypt is not innocent in this regard because much of the smuggling that you saw going in and out over all these years has been used for the tunnels to go into the Sinai and to go into Egypt. The question is, you know, where are they going from there going forward? Palestinian authority is weak. Palestinian authority is corrupt. You're talking about a Mahmoud Abbas who is serving in his 20th year of a four-year term. I mean, so they're also not an alternative to the governance of Hamas. And so that's the question that you're seeing play out here.

Basically, you're telling me that there's an attempt to maintain kind of the refugee status in perpetuity, right? Or unless Israelis leave or are eliminated. Right. So how do you achieve peace? So let me also contextualize that as well. If you look at the history of the peace process, there have been three issues that have come about as it relates to conversations regarding what a two-state solution, if there was, though I would argue it's not feasible these days, would look like. But theoretically, within that construct, it's been about a shared capital with Jerusalem, it's been about the 67 borders as far as the disputed lands,

and it's been about the so-called right of return. The right of return relates to all refugees or all those who are defined as refugees by UNRWA. UNRWA defines today between six to seven million refugees worldwide, which has all been expanding by generational lineage. Anybody who has a citizenship elsewhere is also an Arab-Palestinian refugee. So they've been able to expand the numbers, resurrect the dead, double count. We have a long history of problems that exist within this regard. Every time UNRWA goes to ask for more money, it asks for more money based on the existence of the number of refugees. And so there is a direct correlation between the funding and the number of refugees,

which is, again, part of the by-design narrative that UNRWA has to expand the number of refugees because that way that's how they stay in business. I mean, this is a very clear mathematical connection between the two. If the conflict was solely just a territorial conflict, we would have seen resolution many years ago. But it's not only a territorial conflict. This is where the identity plays into this narrative. The right of return is perceived to be as a divine right. That is to say that no Arab leader has the ability to give up what is seen as divine by God. And so this is why it continues to grow and fester and metastasize the belief that Arab

Palestinian refugees are refugees in perpetuity and continue to grow. And that's been part of the architecture. Historically speaking, there have been percentages that Israel has agreed to accept, and through declassified documents we know this. If you're looking at the end of 48-49, you're talking about no more than 30,000 individuals. 30,000 individuals for a full rate of return, call it a day, no problem. Israel has agreed to accept more. This is a fictitious status. We're not saying people should not receive aid based on necessity,

but not based on a fallacious status. And that's exactly what's happening now as it relates to the symbolism of being an UNRWA refugee, because basically you can receive money in perpetuity. So peace has to come when there's going to be an end to the right of return, mutual recognition, which I would say has to be a number one issue altogether, and everything else can fall into place. American foreign policy, you know, when it was, you know, when it came to the 1950s and 1960s, on the heels of when these agencies came about, were devoted to three

issues when it comes to refugee populations, resettlement, reintegration, and repatriation. On both three accounts, UNRWA has failed. UNRWA tried to stay true to its mandate, becoming a neutral party, working on resettlement and reintegration. However, because UNRWA was created as an Article 22 of the United Nations General Assembly, it's based on voluntary contributions. So the Arab world basically told UNRWA, if you want to stay in business, we'll give you money so long as you maintain the Arab-Palestinian refugees as refugees,

which is the sole reason why no Arab country, with the exception of Jordan, has ever offered the Arab-Palestinian citizenship in order to prevent resettlement and in order to give the impression or give the hope that Israel would indeed become Palestine. That's been the by design goal of UNRWA at large. And so if you ask UNRWA when will they get out of business, they will say when there is resolution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while at the same time they're the gatekeeper of the one single issue that I would argue ensures the fact the conflict will never end. So UNRWA has gone against resettlement. The assumption among, frankly, many people is that effectively Israel took people's land away who have a right

to it. This is the narrative that's the cause of all the problems. So how do you respond to that? Okay. So the assumption that Israel stole the land or removed people indigenous to the land is not true. There was already a state in the making already in the 30s. Historically speaking, there has always been a Jewish presence in the land. And actually, what took place leading up to the War of Independence in 1948, and even prior to that, you look historically about the proposals, about dividing up the land, even going back to the earliest part of the 20th century. At every juncture, the Jewish

community accepted the, you know, dividing up the land, the Arabs refused to, going up to the partition of 1947, where there was a clear rejectionist ideology that says that there could be no coexistence. In effect, the historical trend to this very day is that from the Arab-Palestinian narrative, rejectionism has always trumped statehood at every juncture and every opportunity for conversation about a peace process, pre-state and post-state. And that has been the ultimate motivator for the Arab-Israeli wars. The argument has been, and this is also important for your viewers to understand, that any land that was Muslim is Muslim in perpetuity. And so if the current state of Israel was Muslim land under the time of the Muslim expansion, so the perception from the Arab-Palestinian perspective

is that Jews are occupying, quote-unquote, land that is Muslim land. The occupational narrative has been the driving force within Palestinian society, and I would say it is also predominantly psychological. Also, if you do a deeper dive into Palestinian identity, I would argue that 90%, if not more, of Arab-Palestinian identity is rooted in anti-Semitism. There is no independent identity that is disentangled and that will allow for coexistence. So UNRWA takes care of all the education for Palestinians. Primary education. Primary, yeah, that's right, primary education. So it was astonishing looking at these, you at these text messages in the Telegram group that were revealed

is a lot of people basically supporting the events of October 7. How do you explain that? UNRWA makes no distinction in their hiring processes or in the way that they have any kind of background checks. So if you're a Hamas member by night and you're an UNRWA teacher by day, the kind of education that you're being taught is Hamas education. If you investigate, and this is something, by the way, that has been done and demanded by ongoing U.S. congressional hearings and demands to analyze what is happening, what is being disseminated in Arab-Palestinian textbooks. And we constantly find glorifying of martyrology.

We find the fact that Jews are sons and pigs and monkeys, where maps of Israel don't exist, the idea of from the river to the sea, the idea of annihilating Jews, and it should be all Palestinian. So coexistence does not play into this at large. Back in the 90s, for example, during the Oslo Peace Accords, there was a demand that Israel and the Palestinian society change their textbooks. Israeli textbooks were already pro-peace, but Palestinian textbooks have none of that. There's no discussion about coexistence at large. And so this is exactly what

we've been fighting for the past 22 years. I think that there's a disconnect about, and this has always been something we've observed here and in Europe, about the reality on the ground and what it takes to create peace. I think peace, to your point, is a goal and should be the goal, but there has to be mutual recognition. There's been a refusal to accept Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state. Arab-Palestinian propaganda, Palestinian propaganda as large, has hijacked any conversation about actual scholarship and discussion about the history of Israel, the history of how Israel came about, the history of the Arab-Israeli wars, because the argument is simplistically put and I would even say watered down is to a victim-victimizer mentality,

trying to portray the Arab-Israeli conflict as a binary issue. And I find that to be, as an historian, disingenuous and anathema to the region at large, which is rich historically, politically, culturally, theologically, all intertwined. And one needs to understand who the players in the region are, what they've been trying to achieve, and what is actually happening on the ground. Case in point, when the Abraham Accords came about a few years ago, you started to see normalization between Israel and its Arab neighbors, however significant that was, and it was, the fact that it made little to no difference on the discussion on American college campuses, which are solely committed to focusing the lens in which they view the Arab-Israeli conflict and Israeli-Palestinian relations through the lens of the boycott movement, that is the only lens in which they can understand the issue. And that is disingenuous. Not all roads need to go through Ramallah. And what you saw happening when you're talking about

the Gulf states in particular is that they told their Palestinian brethren, look, Israel is, we don't always disagree, but we can have peace through them, and we can have an understanding through economics and exchanges and ideas of what it will look like to actually collaborate and work together. And they actually recommended to their Palestinian brethren, maybe you should try that. But of course, that was flatly rejected. In Clinton's memoirs, and towards the end of the Clinton administration, there is an exchange between Yasser Arafat and Bill Clinton. And Clinton would argue that he devoted the extent of the eight years of his presidency to trying to achieve peace between Israelis and Palestinians. And the exchange goes, and I'm paraphrasing here what took place there,

Arafat says to Clinton, Mr. President, you're the greatest president the world has ever seen, etc., etc. Clinton's response was, no, I'm a failure, and you made me a failure. Because at every juncture, which goes to the famous quote, you know, that the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Palestinians have flat out been afraid to follow through. They knew that would take away from their centrality. UNRWA maintains the symbolism of Palestinian society, that is statelessness and refuginess. So as long as the world can believe that Palestinians are refugees in perpetuity and are stateless in perpetuity because of a so-called colonial empire that has been, you know, that has been thrust upon them by the Jews, then they have the sympathy of the world.

And that has been their success story. I don't think UNRWA can be reformed. I mean, I think that UNRWA needs to be disbanded. You have to wean Palestinian society off of UNRWA. UNRWA acts as a shadow government. UNRWA is a big black hole over all these services, educational, medical, you know, when it comes to social services and other kind of needs. We need to break that monopoly to get any kind of accountability and transparency as

to where our monies are going. Up until the Trump administration froze the money, we're talking about $400 million in U.S. taxpayer dollars. There are other alternatives, and I would start with looking at the World Food Program, UNICEF, WHO, or other agencies within the U.N. architecture to try to break the monopoly. You've got to do a needs assessment. UNRWA does not only operate in Gaza. UNRWA also operates in Lebanon. UNRWA also operates in Jordan.

UNRWA also operates within the Palestinian areas, within Judea and Samaria, West Bank. And so there is many functions that UNRWA provides. And to consolidate exactly what this needs assessment actually is, then you could actually get to a point of saying, okay, here are the needs, here's what needs to happen. The fact that they had Hamas service under their headquarters, the fact that they had individuals who were part of the perpetrators of the attacks on October 7th. UNRWA is no longer a legitimate organization.

They've never been to my mind. It's an obstacle to peace rather than a solution to peace. While we were doing research for this talk we're having right now, one of the numbers that came across my desk is that the Palestinian leadership is getting more per capita than European leaders received under the Marshall Plan. So that's astonishing. I'm not surprised. I mean, I think that the Palestinian Authority gets double dips as far as monies. They get money for USAID. They get money through UNRWA.

They're dependent on contributions. I mean, Arafat's goal, going back to Yasser Arafat, was to make the Palestinian cause the cause celebre of the Arab world at large. And this is what he sold during all the meetings that existed during the Arab League of Nations and whatnot, the famous three no's of Khartoum, no negotiation, no compromise, no peace with Israel. The idea was that until the Palestinian issue is resolved, nobody in the Arab world should rest or should have peace with the Israelis. Now, that architecture started to break after Israel had peace with Egypt.

And so the centrality of the Palestinian narrative slowly but slowly started to diminish. And so Arafat's goal and successive leadership, as we see till today, have been focused on ensuring the centrality of Palestinianism in the eyes of the world and in the eyes of the Arab world. And so when they need attention, part of the way to get attention is to start a war, which is what we saw on October 7th. So there's been a lot of discussion about aid not getting to the Palestinians. I understand UNRWA is the entity responsible for education, health, and of course distribution of aid. So how's that playing out? Well, as you can see, I mean, you have Israel who has tons of trucks that are coming in

with aid and are about to come into Gaza. What is happening when they get to Gaza is that the aid is being stolen by Hamas and is being marked up. And, of course, the Palestinians are being basically used as pawns as always. And, of course, UNRWA itself is not delivering the aid because they've been co-opted by the agency itself. So the aid is not getting to the right people. It's not getting to the people who need the stuff. And UNRWA supplies are basically on hold. So the blame game is basically arguing that Israel is not getting

the aid to the Palestinian people because somehow they're obstructing aid, which is not the case. Actually, UNRWA and Hamas themselves are using the aid trucks and the vehicles to smuggle in and out of Gaza. So the concern is also not only a question of the aid, but also about the integrity of the aid and the safety vis-a-vis the terrorism element that's playing into all of this. And so what's happening now is, of course, that there is a desire of Hamas to show to the world starvation and famine. So if the aid doesn't get to the population, then they could project that image to the world itself. So what they do is that they will steal the aid. They will try to overcharge Palestinians, which they do.

And because many of them are unreal workers, they're part of that entire process. Gaza is densely populated, and part of the challenge that the IDF has had, the Israeli Defense Forces, has been to disentangle or try to deal with the combatants of Hamas versus the civilian population. And now, in contrast to the Israeli Defense Forces, Hamas embeds itself within Palestinian society. They use the infrastructure. They use human shields. They use babies. They use women. They rape. They behead. They maim. This is the kind of tactics that they've been

doing. There are indeed a lot of problems in Gaza, But the way Israel has fought this war through urban warfare, no other military has done that, at risk to the Israelis themselves, because Israel has had to go into an urban, you know, a densely populated area. And don't forget the fact that for the past 20 years, Hamas has been building lower Gaza. You got an entire metro, five stories down, if not more, we found even longer as far as 20 stories, where you have an entire network that is longer than the tube in London, as far as this entire maze of how this lower Gaza has been built. But as we saw now with the recent attack at al-Shifa, where it's been the main nucleus of Hamas leadership, you had hundreds of known terrorists and leaders of Hamas who have

all been basically camped in these places, using them exactly to create targets for the Israelis. And that's been the challenge. This is exactly the standoff that you're seeing now between the united states and israel as it relates to the last stronghold going into rafa which is the southern city that borders with egypt nobody has exact numbers about the amount of casualties because they are uh coming out of the ministry of health of Gaza, which is basically Hamas. They have an understanding that the more so-called casualties that exist, there'll be more pressure on Israel to stop the military campaign. Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister cannot look himself in the mirror or in the eyes of the family of the hostages' families without getting some kind of clear, distinct way of winning this war and bringing back as many hostages as possible home safely.

And that's been the ongoing challenge of how to deal with this war. And so Palestinian society is stuck in this stasis, partially because of its leadership, which has been corrupt, and the money that goes into how they use that money, pay to slay, as far as killing Jews and non-believers and Israelis around, and in addition to the fact that they are using their imagery, the fallacious imagery of statelessness in order to create worldwide sympathy. You see Palestinian society and Palestinian leaders going to the UN and saying, we want you guys to basically parachute a state onto the arena without doing the hard work, which has to do with actually having a conversation of who you're having peace with.

But they want a state in lieu of the State of Israel. And so that's also part of how they understand the reality to be. And so any conversation doesn't go anywhere. The Palestinian Authority needs to be reformed. Terrorist organizations, Islamist organizations like Hamas have no room around the negotiating table. Above all, ending the right of return and ending UNRWA's existence. That is also a non-starter. Because if UNRWA is still in business,

we're talking about 10, 15 years down the road, it's not going to be six or seven million refugees. It's going to be 20 million. That's a non-starter. If these individuals want to be citizens of a Palestinian state to be, great. but they cannot be refugees because this is tasking the American taxpayer dollar and it's not moving the needle anywhere closer to resolving the peace process, which is why UNRWA is an obstacle towards peace. Well, Asaf Ramarofsky, such a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you. Thank you all for joining Asaf Ramarofsky and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.