Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - UNRWA & Hamas, the perfect affair - with Haviv Rettig Gur

Episode Date: January 29, 2024

The UN has one central agency responsible for handling all refugees globally, but Palestinian refugees have their own UN agency, UNRWA. Why? The number of Palestinian refugees has increased from 360,000 in 1948 to to 5.9 million today. And those Palestinian refugees or descendants of refugees that have citizenship in other countries maintain their refugee status, according to the UN. What’s going on here? The U.S. Government and a number of other governments just suspended funding for UNRWA based on learning that a number of its Gaza-based employees had been helping Hamas, including in the 10/07 massacre. On our weekly check-in with Haviv Rettig Gur, we discuss the history of UNRWA and the role it plays in the Gaza operating system. Items discussed in this episode: UNRWA — https://www.unrwa.org/ UN Watch report -- “UNRWA Hate Starts Here: How UNRWA Teachers Indoctrinate Palestinian Children and Promote Terrorism and Antisemitism” — https://unwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Hate-Starts-Here-2023-Report-UNRWA.pdf

How do you have a fourth-generation refugee? There is no such thing, except under UNRWA rules. And so UNRWA exists to perpetuate the Palestinian refugee problem, and to perpetuate the identity of these people, and not just the identity, to perpetuate the suffering. Because Arabs can say they're still refugees, that Palestinians should forever remain refugees until Israel is destroyed. What is that? Is that a pro-Palestinian position, or is that keeping the Palestinians forever imprisoned in 1940s and 50s ideology? It's 9pm on Sunday, January 28th here in New York City. It is 4am on Monday, January 28th, here in New York City. It is 4 a.m. on Monday, January 29th, in Israel. This past Friday, the day before the world marked the genocide of the Jews, the Shoah,

or the Holocaust, the UN's International Court of Justice issued a preliminary ruling in South Africa's case accusing Israel, the one Jewish state, of genocide. The infuriating news here is that this case got as far as it did, and it has now put on the agenda that there was plausibility to the charge that Israel has been committing genocide. The ICJ ruled that some Israeli actions in Gaza could fall within the definition of the Genocide Convention and instructed Israel to prevent acts of genocide and punish incitement and facilitate aid to Palestinian civilians in Gaza, which, by the way, Israel has been doing while often being stymied by Hamas and by bottlenecks at the Egyptian-Gaza border. Israel will now have to report back to the ICJ in a month, and the court could take years to decide this case.

That said, the ICJ did deny South Africa's request for an injunction for an immediate ceasefire. Now, buried in these court developments is that the ICJ was depending, for its evidence, on reports from what to many people is just an obscure agency called the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or its acronym UNRWA. This agency exists to care for Palestinian refugees from the period 1946 to 1948. Now, the timing of the UNRWA reports in the court proceedings were curious because UNRWA has just had to fire staff accused of involvement in Hamas's October 7th massacre of Israelis. That's right, UNRWA employees were directly involved. On Friday, the U.S. State Department announced a pause's right, UNRWA employees were directly involved. On Friday, the U.S. State Department announced a pause in funding for UNRWA because UNRWA is funded largely

by U.S. taxpayers and taxpayers from a number of other countries. Interestingly, UNRWA has for years issued statements of zero tolerance for hatred and anti-Semitism. But a new report by the NGO UN Watch will be presented to Congress this coming Tuesday, which shows, quote, how a telegram group of 3,000 UNRWA teachers in Gaza celebrated the October 7th massacre. The message group's administrators are seen praising Hamas's, quote, holy warriors and praying for them to murder Israelis. Oh God, tear them apart, one message says. Kill them one by one. Leave none of them behind, another says. Execute the first settler on live broadcast. One urged the Gazans stay in place to help Hamas. UN Watch has found similar anti-Semitic statements on UNRWA staff Facebook pages going

back to 2015. Now, back to these Palestinian refugees who seem to be cared for by a UN agency that has basically been a Hamas incubator. Who are these Palestinian refugees? How does one become eligible? According to the UNRWA website, we'll post the UNRWA website link in our show notes, refugees are defined as, quote, persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine between 1946 and 1948, and who lost both their home and their means of livelihood as a result of the 48 conflict. Now, the number of refugees in 1948, according to UNRWA, was 360,000. Today, according to UNRWA, the number of refugees is 5.9 million. How?

How's that possible? UNRWA defines Palestinian refugees not only as the original refugees, but, and I quote here, the descendants of Palestine refugee males, including adopted children. Now, the UN does not apply this standard to any other refugees anywhere in the world. Only for Palestinians does the UN define refugees by multiple generations of Palestinian Arabs, no matter how many, no matter where they now live. To be clear, again, there are no other cases in which the UN automatically transfers refugee status to the descendants of refugees. And these Palestinian refugees maintain their refugee status even after they acquire new

citizenship somewhere else. Now, finally, the UN has one central agency responsible for handling all refugees globally. But Palestinian refugees are the only category that have their own agency within the UN. They're the only ones with an UNRWA. Why? What's going on here? And also keep in mind that UNRWA's funds and administration have been relieving Hamas of its duty to take care of the people Hamas governs. Hamas has its people in UNRWA providing major social services in Gaza to the Palestinian people, but Hamas has no responsibility to provide the funds for these services. Those come from us, taxpayers around the world that are funding UNRWA and therefore funding Hamas's presence in Gaza. There's a lot going on here, which is another

dot to be connected to October 7th. And to unpack all of this, we welcome back Haviv Retikgour of the Times of Israel for our weekly check-in from Jerusalem. Haviv Rettigur on Unra and Hamas, the perfect affair. This is Call Me Back. And I'm pleased to welcome back to this podcast for my weekly check-in from Jerusalem, Haviv Rettigur, who between the last time we recorded a conversation, Haviv, and this time, we were in London together having a couple of conversations at events in the UK. So, Haviv, good to see you. It was good to be with you in London this week. It's good to be here, Dan. It was fun to see London. We drank tea. We didn't actually drink

tea, but we should have. What a missed opportunity. We didn't drink tea. Yeah. And I actually, as distraught as I am about the backlash against Israel and the Jewish people in the United States, I couldn't have imagined it worse somewhere else in the West, but it is definitely worse in London. And speaking to a number of Jewish leaders in London while we were there, I was struck by what they are dealing with. Yeah. Hundreds of people came to see us on our panel and we asked them outright, how do you feel? Are you frightened? We're seeing in the press, is to reflect your, everybody said yes. There's a sense of real, not physical imminent danger now, but a horizon of physical imminent danger that they are smelling and sensing coming down the road.

And so many said it to us who vote left, who vote right, who more religious, less religious. There's the very least of psychological tension there that frankly broke my heart. of Judaism and a little more caution about how you talk about Israel in public in the event that someone else in public overhears you. And so depending on where you're in the country, there's some concerns, some concerns are worse. Some parts of the country, the concern is higher than others, by layers. In the UK, it's a whole other level. I mean, I was with some members of the Jewish community just out and about, and the degree to which they are so cautious and almost locked down in giving away at any time, lest anyone overhear them talking about Israel or talking about their connections

to Israel. It was a whole other level of eerie sort of creepiness about having to live in a sort of hidden existence. Having to live quietly. That was awfully strange for an Israeli to see. Yeah. Okay. In the category of awfully strange, I wanted to talk to you about this news, but as you have pointed out to me, it's not really news, to you at least, or to most Israelis, but it is news here. For those of us who've been following Israel, this is not a surprise. But for some reason, it's made huge news, which is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, which is what this organization UNRWA is called. And it was formally created in 1949 by a UN resolution tasked with this organization.

Through this UN resolution was tasked with carrying out direct relief to some 700,000 Palestinian Arabs during following the war of 1948. And so this organization has existed for well over 70 years and has a budget today of over $1 billion a year, a budget of over $1 billion a year for the UN to provide relief to Palestinians, specifically in this case in Gaza. And over the last couple of days, Haviv, nine countries have announced, including the United States, that they are cutting funding to UNRWA. Perhaps this should have been done a long time ago, according to your analysis, but nine countries have announced that they're cutting the budget, which already well exceeds half of UNRWA's budget. So here, UNRWA has been deploying over a billion dollars a year

to Palestinians. And then basically overnight, over half of its budget's been wiped out, and there could be more to follow. What has changed in the last few days that has led to this move by all these different governments? I think there's a simple point that people can get the details of in the news report, which is that a dozen members of UNRWA, staff of a paid salaried staff of UNRWA, who are technically United Nations employees, took part in October 7th, literally took part in the crossing of the border, in the massacre, in the killing, in the kidnapping. And that specific demonstrable, they're on the videos, they're on Hamas videos, things like that, intelligence that Israel provided to all of these governments who are the major donor governments to UNRWA, was something that UNRWA itself knew.

And it saw this intelligence, it was told about these people. It could track them. It's a fact that nobody disputes. And that was the trigger. But it wasn't the reason. UNRWA is a profoundly problematic organization. It's problematic for the Israelis, who have cooperated with it for decades for particular reasons, and also have complained about it for decades for particular reasons. It's problematic for about it for decades for particular reasons. It's problematic for Palestinians in Gaza. It's problematic for Palestinians generally. It's a little bit of a unique agency at the UN. It has a weird place almost in an international sort of legal world because it has a unique definition of what refugee means. It's a little bit of a

mess to untangle this debate over UNRWA because it has many layers. But on the ground in Gaza, I think the bottom line is that on the ground in Gaza, it is profoundly integrated into Hamas's rule over Gaza. And what surprises me is that this surprises anybody. You don't even have to think badly of UNRWA officials in New York or in any office that they have anywhere. The very fact that UNRWA brings in such a massive part each month, tens of millions of dollars of the Gazan economy means that it's thousands upon thousands of employees on the ground are going to become controlled by Hamas. Hamas is a dictatorship. It's essentially a kind of mafia that takes over all resources that

come in, the smuggling tunnels into Egypt. Hamas took control of them and started taxing them. It didn't stop the trade through those smuggling tunnels. It took over and taxed them, right? And that's what it does with UNRWA. You can't get a job on the ground with UNRWA if Hamas doesn't want you to get a job on the ground as a teacher, as an administrator or whatever with UNRWA. That is such an obvious fact. Why would this mafia that runs Gaza not behave that way? How could it possibly allow that amount of resources flowing in, on which its own economy and its own rule, really, and stability depends, to be something it doesn't take over? And so it's just a, there's nobody who really disputes this point.

Obviously, UNRWA in Gaza operates at Hamas's pleasure and dispensation. And therefore, literally, we've seen the aid trucks come in for UNRWA and Hamas gunmen take them and drive away with them. And UNRWA's response to these videos coming out of Gaza was, no, no, no, they're protecting them so that the aid trucks all get to where they should go. And desperate people along the way don't grab the aid to make sure that the aid is maximized and efficient and all of that. In other words, Hamas runs the aid operation in Gaza for UNRWA, like UNRWA's defense is exactly this point. And so we have this organization that it is unlikely that only 12 UNRWA employees participated

in October 7th. It is unlikely that only the number that actually have been identified are actually serving Hamas members. It is unlikely that only that level of deep, deep cooperation and collaboration with Hamas is happening on the ground. And nobody should have expected otherwise. It's hard to imagine what people ever thought was happening on the ground. And nobody should have expected otherwise. It's hard to imagine what people ever thought was happening other than that.

We had an episode with Nadav Ayel a few weeks ago, which we called the Gaza Operating System, which was explaining how Hamas runs Gaza. And so I'm just flagging that for our listeners, if you want to do a deeper dive on just how the whole Hamas-Gaza machine works, this operating system, we go into detail on that. But can you just, Haviv, explain how Hamas rule depends on UNRWA? Like why – it's not just that Hamas benefits from UNRWA, but Hamas almost couldn't do what it does without UNRWA. I think that's an argument that some of UNRWA's critics in Israel make. I tend to agree with it, and it's also, again, not complicated. It's such a large part of Gaza's economy. It's aid that we know Hamas takes over almost instantly and controls in almost every way.

The unbelievable scale of the tunnels that have been discovered under Gaza, we always knew there were tunnels, we knew they were building them. We knew they weren't doing much else other than building those tunnels and building out their capabilities for this war. But it turns out that all the vast array of aid, which is such a large part of Gaza's economy and which UNRWA is such a large part of, were just either, you know, either Hamas literally took it all, physically stole it from warehouses or whatever, or the warehouses were simply Hamas warehouses and Hamas was the distribution network and that was okay with everybody. There was nobody else who could build the distribution network in Gaza that Hamas wouldn't take over anyway. And so you have to actually look at UNRWA to understand its basic role in terms of propping up and stabilizing Hamas's rule. You have to look at UNRWA as a percentage of Gaza's economy. The point here isn't just about UNRWA. It's about, you know, the U.S. has given billions to Gaza through U.S. aid over the years, over the decades. If you take that

entire aid ecosystem in which UNRWA is by far the largest distributor on the ground, I mean, right now in terms of distributing aid on the ground in Gaza, UNRWA is a monopoly. Nobody else can come in. It turns out that some of the contributions of the World Food Program are actually being distributed by UNRWA, which is strange because UNRWA is not an aid distribution organization. That's not its expertise. The World Food Program does know how to come into a troubled area with bad distribution networks and feed lots of people over a long period of time very quickly in emergency situations.

But UNRWA nevertheless is the only one doing that distribution on the ground because it's the monopoly. And it will remain the monopoly because on the ground it's Hamas. Controlled by Hamas, influenced by Hamas, you could take a slightly nicer spin to it, a harsher spin to it. It's all the same point. If you take the entire array of aid, which has this funnel of Unra that it goes through, even when it isn't money spent by UnRWA, or actually, it's still going to be distributed by UNRWA. If you take that entire ecosystem of aid, you hit billions.

And that very fact has freed Hamas to invest everything it has ever invested. It's a government, Hamas. When you have an organization that is both an irresponsible guerrilla group that doesn't believe it's responsible for civilians, and also a government that claims the right to rule a place because of an election that happened in 2006 and all this other stuff, if you free them of any of the responsibilities of governance, you literally feed their people, take care of their people, inoculate their people against diseases without them. And they allow you to do that because it frees them to build the next war in which their basic strategy is guerrilla, which is to say, hide behind civilians. You create the disaster that we have now. And so this argument that by replacing Hamas as a governing structure, it allowed Hamas to turn into the monster that it has become and drag Gaza into the war that it has dragged Gaza into. That's, by the way, not the only argument against UNRWA. It's just, I would say, it's not even the harshest. It's not even the most serious, but it is a big one and a profound one. The UNRWA, according to public reports and public filings employs more than 13,000 aid workers in the Gaza Strip alone, 13,000 aid workers, which is an astonishingly high number for a population of about 2.2, 2.3 million people. And those workers operate more than 150 permanent and temporary shelters

and some 80 mobile health teams. those 13,000 aid workers, are you saying there's no way those workers get hired without Hamas blessing? Yeah, which doesn't mean that Hamas necessarily, you know, only allows people into to work in Gaza if they are, you know, activists of Hamas itself, or, you know, activists of Hamas itself or, you know, fighters of Hamas itself. The large majority of UNRWA employees on the ground are teachers. What it does mean is that if Hamas doesn't want you to work for UNRWA and have that guaranteed salary and have that job stability in a place with very high unemployment, if they don't want you to, you don't. So Hamas controls that spigot of

getting an UNRWA job, and thereby, in as much as it wants to control UNRWA on the ground, it does. If it doesn't want to, it doesn't. It's not that it took over UNRWA physically and kills anybody who doesn't obey. If somebody truly doesn't obey and Hamas feels it's in its interest, that person will no longer be employed in UNRWA, or will no longer be employed in UNRWA or will no longer be found by UNRWA. And so yes, whenever it needs to, it can, to any extent that it desires, control what is happening on the ground with UNRWA. And you said that what you have laid out in this conversation so far is not the harshest criticism of UNRWA. What is the harshest criticism of UNRWA or the most serious criticism of UNRWA? There's a much deeper criticism, and it's been leveled by Israelis for

a very long time. And the international community has not really taken notice, but it is a very serious criticism. Einat Wilf, a former member of Knesset, has actually written a book about this. The criticism essentially is that all the refugees of the world, I'm going to give it at a very sort of simple level, all the refugees of the world are taken care of by the UN mechanism called the UNHCR, United Nations Refugees Agency. There is this refugees agency that looks at, takes over these sort of tries to help refugees all over the world and all the different conflicts of the world since the founding of the UN, basically. And one of its overwhelming and overriding priorities is to resettle the refugees. You have refugees coming out of Myanmar, coming out of sub-Saharan Africa in one of the wars of the Congo or wherever you have refugees. This is an

organization that tries to find them countries where they can resettle, tries to help feed and clothe them if they have trouble finding countries to resettle so they can go back after a conflict. Most are resettled. Most don't go back. Tens and even more than tens of millions of refugees have had help by the UN Refugee Agency to be resettled all over the world. There is one other UN Refugee Agency, and it's the only other UN Refugee Agency, and it is UNRWA, and it is unique. And it's unique in two ways. One, it is only for the Palestinians. The Palestinian refugee problem has its own UN refugee agency, specially tailored for it. And they do not fall under the other refugee agency

that all other refugees on earth fall under. But what's unique about it, and the reason that the Palestinians insist on having a separate refugee agency, is the definition of refugee is different. Under the UNHCR rules, if you become a refugee in some terrible conflict in some place in the world, I'm not going to pick a country because I don't want to be accused of picking on that country. Country X, and you are a citizen of X, and there's a war, and you feel the need to flee, and you flee, and you end up in country Y. And the UNHCR helps you resettle in country Z. Once you get naturalization in country Z, you are no longer a refugee. Your children born in

country Z as citizens of country Z who can rise up to be the prime minister of country Z, they're not refugees. There is no UN or international law or any definition by which they are refugees. Being refugees is part of their historical experience. Their grandparents were it, whatever, but they are not refugees. Under UNRWA rules, if you or your ancestors were in any way part of the 1948 experience of displacement, If you lived three months in Palestine during that war and were displaced by that war, most of them did not live three months. I don't mean to minimize the Palestinian experience of 1948,

but what I mean to say is the rules are so very specifically tailored to one goal. You are forever refugees, no matter what citizenship you get, no matter if you become the head of state of country Z. Your children are forever refugees. Yourchildren of 1948 refugees, who for three or four generations have had other citizenships, who are still refugees under UNRWA rules. And the reason that the UNHCR's rules, or the UN Refugee Agency rules, are meant to reduce the number of refugees in the world. The UNRWA rules are meant to expand the number of refugees in the world, and to make the Palestinian refugee problem unsolvable, except in one way, which is the

return of everybody to where they were at the beginning of the conflict of 1948, or really 1947. It's a set of rules that to the Israelis are so obviously, first of all, a complete departure from international norms, specifically for the Palestinians, and not out of any love for Palestinians. Because in Lebanon, they can continue to call the Palestinians who have been in Lebanon for 75 years now, Palestinian refugees and keep them living in refugee camps. And by the way, for decades, generations, denied them in law, the right to own property, to own real estate, the right to do business. Because of this category, Palestinian rights and the grandchildren of the Palestinian refugees, their rights have been denied in Arab countries for generations. This is a system and a

way of thinking that has massively perpetuated and even increased Palestinian suffering generation after generation after generation. And the Israelis look at this and they say, this is unique. This is to perpetuate refugee status for all time. This is ideological. And what is the ideology? Israel's 1948 founding needs to be reversed. And so the Palestinian refugee experience has long ago stopped being. Palestinians are the only nation on earth that can have a refugee camp within a city under Palestinian rule. And it's a Palestinian refugee camp. What is that? When Israel was founded, between 1947 and let's say 1952, there were about 700,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries, who all mostly ended up in Israel. And there were about 700,000 Palestinian refugees. Okay, so just you're talking about Jews living in places like Iraq and Jews living in Egypt, Jews living in Morocco, Jews living in, not an Arab country, but Jews living in Iran, a Persian country.

And during that time, late 40s, early 50s, you have this huge influx of Jews from those countries coming to Israel. They are literally refugees because there were unbelievable anti-Semitic violent pogroms in those countries, and Jews either had to run for their lives and get out, or they were forcibly moved out. They had nowhere to go. So those Jews that were kicked out or had to flee from these Arab countries were refugees that landed in Israel. That's what you're talking about. Right.

Not a single one of them is a refugee today. And every single Palestinian who was made a refugee in 1948 is still a refugee today. You're saying not a single one of those Jews is a refugee because they have been integrated into Israel and they're now citizens of Israel. Absolutely. And some of them from North Africa went to France, and some of them from Egypt went to Britain. Most of them ended up in Israel for various interesting and important reasons, but even

those who didn't end up in Israel aren't refugees. There are no Jewish refugees anymore. And that is not because they weren't persecuted or expelled or their entire culture was destroyed and demolished and denied by the civilizations in which they lived. In 1950s, in different countries, it happened in different ways. In North Africa, it was part of, you know, when the North Africans kicked the French out, basically, the Jews are all made to flee as well. And so, that's already in the early 60s, late 50s. In Egypt, it happens after the 56 War. And the Egyptians say things like, you know, before Israel's founding, everyone in Egypt loved Jews. And then the 56 War was an unpleasant experience with the Israelis, and every last Jew had to

leave. Anti-Zionist Arab nationalist Jews who thought they were Arab nationalists all had to leave, every single one to the last man, woman, and child. You want to say that's Israel's fault? That's not your own country's and civilization's fault? There's never really been an Arab introspection. Incidentally, Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader, has written against Arab countries and the mass expulsion of Jews from those Arab countries, and basically said, just to paraphrase a little bit simplistically, if you hadn't been so vicious to your Jews, maybe we Palestinians

would have had a smaller problem. I have a little sympathy toward that view, but they were, so they have that problem of millions of Jews living in Israel. But the basic point here is that Jewish refugees and Palestinian refugees begin the same number. And very quickly, there are no Jewish refugees left. And Palestinian refugees multiply. And they multiply under Jordanian rule in the West Bank for 19 years. And they multiply under Egyptian rule in Gaza for 19 years. I'm talking about 1948 to 1967, when Israel doesn't control the West Bank in Gaza, but there are still Palestinian refugees inside Palestinian cities. What is that? How do you have a fourth generation refugee? There is no such thing except under UNRWA rules. And so UNRWA exists to perpetuate the Palestinian refugee problem

and to perpetuate the identity of these people, and not just the identity, to perpetuate the suffering. Because Arabs can say they're still refugees, therefore I Syria, I Jordan, I Lebanon. Jordan is a different case. Jordan did give citizenship to a great many Palestinians. But the basic rule holds. And the basic rule is I can keep thinking of them as refugees so that I can keep demanding that history reverse itself, that 1948 reverse itself. The Arab world, through this UNRWA definition, has kept the Palestinians suffering for the Arab world's own ideological resistance and recoiling from the idea of an Israel existing for generations. And UNRWA's definition is fundamental to that reality. And so there's a thing where UNRWA distributes all the aid in Gaza, fantastic.

UNRWA is also one of the great arguments that Palestinians should forever remain refugees until Israel is destroyed. What is that? Is that a pro-Palestinian position or is that keeping the Palestinians forever imprisoned in 1940s and 50s ideology? It's interesting. If you look at Syria, since the Syrian civil war that began in the previous decade, leaving aside just mass slaughter under Bashar Assad of Syrian Sunni Muslims, which is, depending on estimates, somewhere between 350,000 and 500,000 Arabs killed by Bashar Assad, the total pre-war population of Syria was around 21 million. And more than half of this population, according to the UK government, more than half this population is now displaced from their homes, either internally within Syria or as refugees abroad. So as of December 2022, there were around 6.8 million. I'm just reading here from a report. 6.8 million internally displaced people living in Syria. Around 80% of them have been displaced for at least five years. And then obviously there's this large number that have been scattered around the world. According

to the UNHCR, which is the UN Relief Agency, as you mentioned, or the UN Commissioner for Refugees, 5.3 million Syrian refugees and asylum seekers are registered globally. Over 5 million Syrians are now scattered around the world. So what is the, just to put a finer point on this, take those, because this is like a real-time refugee crisis, these Syrians who've been either slaughtered or chased out of Syria by Bashar Assad. So what is their status within the UN structure? They don't have a dedicated agency like you're describing that exists for the Palestinians. They fit into the macro global structure. And I just want you to put a fine point just as a case study in comparison. The UN has one great and beautiful mission with these people. Find them new homes. If the war settles down,

if they feel it's safe, if Syria actually is safe for them, go back. If not, find them new homes. In 10 years, there won't be any Syrian refugees. And it will be all about finding the new homes, finding them work, integrating them into economies, integrating them into other countries. And that is what the UN Refugee Agency does and has been doing, and has been doing since the founding of the UN. There's only one group of refugees whose numbers grow with each generation. And again, there are people who are well-known citizens of other nations, political leaders, generals in other armies who are technically refugees because they fall under UNRWA rules and not under everyone else on earth's rules.

And when you have a special rule for Palestinians, and it's also a source of tremendous Palestinian suffering in Syria, in Lebanon over the decades, it's not to help Palestinians. To Israelis, it seems blitheringly obvious that when there's a special rule and it's only to the other side of a... It's not even for Jews. If Jews fleeing Iraq had some way that they could still claim refugee status in some way from Baghdad, do you know how much of Baghdad's real estate the Jews are owed if we go back to 1948. I mean, at the time, something like a quarter. You know, it's this enormous debt if we start to relitigate all the refugee experiences of history. There were well over 100 million refugees in the 20th century, of which the Palestinians,

that original cohort of actual refugees, are 750,000 or so. So without minimizing at all from Palestinian suffering, the goal of UNRWA is not to solve the problem, it's to perpetuate the problem. And you know that because of the definition of refugee. And it's a definition that has served all the countries around us and the Arab cause generally to say, this is a refugee problem that only ends one way, and that way is the end of Israel and the restoration of this imagined pre-1948 Palestine, which was this perfect society and idyllic society until the evil Jews showed up and robbed everybody. And that narrative is what UNRWA serves.

And UNRWA serves it with a billion dollar a year budget, with a distribution network in Gaza that is, at any moment and to any extent that Hamas wants controlled by Hamas at any time, literally to the point where these trucks are being shepherded through Gaza by Hamas gunmen. We Israelis say, hey, they're robbing the aid, and UNRWA's like, no, no, no, they're just doing the distribution itself. They're protecting the aid, right? As if that's better. That's the story of UNRWA. There's the immediate on the ground problem and there's the deep generations long problem that is UNRWA's profound disservice to actual Palestinian well-being. How does this legal and economic structure shape Palestinian culture?

It's created by the UN, the structure. And I think what you're saying is it has actually had an instrumental role in shaping the Palestinian narrative. When Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya reporters over the last 100 days have asked Hamas officials on TV, live TV, in Arabic, to the Arab world, the Arab world has been watching obsessively, especially the Al Jazeera coverage, which is extremely pro-Hamas. And when they're asked by these anchors, you know, your people are all in these tunnels, so they're dying slowly. Palestinian civilians aren't in the tunnels. Why don't you let Palestinian civilians into the tunnels? Why don't you protect Palestinians? Hamas's response has been, and this really emphasizes the point about a guerrilla mentality that does not accept responsibility. Hamas's response has been, that's not my

responsibility to take care of Gazan civilians. Israel is the evil occupier. But there's also another group that Hamas keeps citing as the people responsible to protect Palestinians from a war Hamas started. And they said, that's the UN. And so in Hamas's view, and Hamas was trained to think this way by decades of the UN behaving this way. In Hamas's view, the UN is responsible for protecting Gazan civilians, feeding Gazan civilians, not as an emergency stopgap measure because there's a war on and there's terrible civilian suffering and it's a war in urban environments, etc., a muscle in 2016 to get rid of ISIS. Not that situation.

Permanently, as a structural reality of the Ghazan economy and Ghazan society. I don't want to talk about Palestinian culture so much being shaped by it, because culture is a big word and a complicated word and too easy to use for all kinds of tendentious kind of arguments. But if you want to talk about political culture, it is a kind of welfarism on steroids that has absolutely demolished the capacity of Palestinian political elites. By the way, it's not different among Fatah. Fatah also doesn't think it's responsible in a profound way for Palestinian well-being, the Palestinian economy, the Palestinian future. When a Palestinian official like Salam Fayyad, who is this Western-trained economist, and he's a little bit imposed on the Palestinians by the Americans and by international donors,

and he becomes prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, and he starts this massive project to root out corruption, which is rampant and massive, and double- double digit percentages of aid to Palestinians has disappeared in Ramallah to this corruption, and he starts to root it out, they immediately kick him out of office. Because it's the same kind of essentially parasitic politics. It is elites that live off of the aid spigot that is such a large part of the Palestinian economy, that it is the thing that these elites are focused around and prevents them from ever becoming seriously involved in building an actual coherent Palestinian economy, by the way, and a Palestinian democracy, the very idea. I don't mean democracy in some

shallow way. I mean, the simple idea that they are responsible to their people. They're not responsible to their people. They're not funded by the taxpayers of Palestine. They're basically funded by the rest of the world, by the aid money. And so there's been this warping thing happening with this aid money. It's true across the board. It is triply true with Hamas. With Hamas, it becomes actually dangerous because it's not simple corruption. It is the liberation of Hamas from responsibility for the lives of Gazans, and freeing these Hamas leaders, who are all, you know, whining and dining in Qatar and wherever, to just assume that some other people have responsibility for their people. And if Gazans are dying, that has nothing to do with their strategy. Even if it's focused on

Gazans dying, someone else has to save the Gazans from Hamas's own strategy. So no, I think it's had a profoundly corrupting influence on Palestinian political culture. And that's something that, to me as an Israeli, is obvious. By the way, you'd be amazed how many Palestinians I talk to who say the same thing. And Palestinian activists, and Palestinians who despise Israel, and Palestinians from all spectrum of Palestinian politics, who think about this aid money as perpetuating these political structures and political cultures that ultimately demolish Palestinian politics and Palestinian political capacity. Haviv, you mentioned Einat Wilf, who we're going to have on this podcast. She's been screaming from

the hilltops about this issue. Hillel Noor, who runs UN Watch, also a very important NGO that punches way above its weight, will link to Anat and will link to UN Watch in the show notes to Anat's book and Hillel's organization. They've been screaming from the hilltops about exactly what you're talking about for a long time. And not enough people have been listening. In Israel, the Israel government, I just find sometimes there are issues that are so obvious and so definitional to the problem that Israel has been dealing with long before October 7th.

And October 7th put a spotlight, obviously a massive spotlight on the problem that we're now starting to learn all these issues, like what is UNRWA? And then you realize UNRWA is not just an October 7th problem. UNRWA is core to the crisis that Israel has been confronting, core to the threat that Israel has been facing, core to the captivity of the Palestinian people for decades. So there's these voices been screaming about it. Nobody's been paying attention. Why?

Because I don't even, I feel like there are certain issues that are so obvious that Israel just throws its hands up and say, it's so obvious that if people don't get this, we just, I don't want to say we give up. That's not what they're saying. We don't give up,

but we're going to fight other fronts because people aren't hearing us on this one. Like the world should have been hearing Israel and these voices like Enad and Hillel and others. I'm citing them because I'm familiar with the work, but I'm sure there are many others. And it takes this moment and these 13 or whatever it was aid workers who are tied to Hamas and participated in October 7th to be the wake-up call. It shouldn't have taken this. I think that the beginning of talking about this seriously

has to do with the sense that there is some chance, everyone doubted it, everyone doubted it, many still doubt it, but there is some chance that the Israelis will actually see through this war and actually get rid of Hamas. And there is a discourse that's starting to be heard for a month now, not this week, by the Americans, by the Saudis, by the Emiratis, by Palestinian authority officials, by the Europeans, about the day after. And if we're starting to talk about the day after, we've already entered this pivot of history. You know, there's so much inertia in these kinds of structures. And then suddenly you reach a moment

where everything's kind of breaking down. And that's a, what did Rahm Emanuel say? Never waste a... Never allow a good crisis go to waste. If that is a moment we are now placed in, Joe Biden, Rishi Sunak, these world leaders, you know, they all have domestic political reasons for wanting to hear from Israel a political horizon. And we could talk about political horizons down the road. I think there's a criticism of the Israeli government, of Netanyahu. You know, I think a lot of the criticism of Netanyahu is very fair, as we discussed last week.

But Israel has a deep problem with coming up with a horizon. And it's not shallow, it's serious, and it won't be fixed by Netanyahu leaving the political scene. And so that's something worth talking about. But one of the reasons that they want that Israeli political horizon is just their own domestic politics. They want to be able to, as they support Israel, to turn to the left-wing politics and their own political parties, or just to even centrist politics and their political parties and just say, we're not just helping the Israelis destroy Hamas at massive civilian cost to Gaza, we're also building a horizon for Gaza and for the Palestinians that isn't Hamas, that is a future that is better than what the past was. So they

want that ability. But I think that a lot of the talk isn't just that internal political ability to say that internally in domestic American or British or French or whatever politics. I think that some of it is just the sense that this is a moment where all the old inertia has collapsed. And when the old inertia collapses, the old structures collapse, the old assumptions no longer are relevant, new things can be born. And so there is this new conversation, new willingness to have a conversation about how UNRWA in some ways is absolutely necessary on the ground. Israel itself supported maintaining UNRWA on the ground in Gaza for decades. Why? Who else is going to do

it? Who else is going to distribute the aid? Israel had this idea that it can deter and contain Hamas. But it had this idea because, A, the costs of removing Hamas were too catastrophic to imagine. Witness this war. B, Hamas stabilized Gaza. Hamas rules Gaza with an iron fist and actually gives us stability. When you don't think peace, prosperity, happiness, and joy are available to you, you settle for stability. And so Israel has allowed UNRWA, wanted UNRWA, even itself helped

prop up UNRWA to function in Gaza and be that major distribution channel. And now that we're talking about the possibility of building something new, different, better, better for Palestinians, because that is, better for Palestinians, because that is a better and more serious stabilizing force going forward. And of course, better for Israeli security. I think that's going to be something the Israelis don't compromise on going forward in the way they have in the past. UNRWA is suddenly called into question. That makes perfect sense. That's what happens at moments like these. All right, Haviv, thank you for that crash course in UNRWA and the UNRWA moment. And just another example of how October 7th is opening the world's eyes to something that was obvious to many, including you.

But now finally we're getting some necessary action. And hopefully, it's not just nine countries by the time this episode posts that are pulling back their funding of UNRWA and shaking up this program. Hopefully, it's a lot more. Until then, I will not only speak to you soon, but I will see you soon in Israel. I look forward to it. Thanks, Aviv. Me too. That's our show for today. To keep up with Aviv, you can find him on X, at Aviv Retigur, and also at The Times of Israel. Also, one housekeeping note, Aviv and I were recently in London, as we mentioned, and we did a couple of live conversations, one of which you can hear in the Israel Briefing podcast, which is the podcast of the Jewish

Chronicle, hosted by Jake Wallace Simons. Call Me Back is produced by Alam Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.