Criticism
From Israel and pro-Israel groups there has been extensive criticism of the statistics, data collection techniques, and definitions concerning Palestinian refugees by the UNRWA. It has been accused of hiring known militants, perpetuating Palestinian dependency, demonizing Israel, and funneling money from Western governments to line the pockets of the Palestinian Authority and purchasing arms for terrorists.
According to former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations Dore Gold:
Although education was one of the fields in which UNRWA was supposed to provide aid, the agency did nothing to alter Palestinian educational texts that glorified violence and continuing war against Israel.
In 2003, Israel released to newspapers what the New York Times called a "damning intelligence report". Citing interrogations of suspected militants, the document claims that UNRWA operations being used as cover for Palestinian terrorists, including smuggling arms in UN ambulances and hosting meetings of Tanzim in UN buildings. UN officials responded, according to the NY Times, by saying that it is Israel that has "lost its objectivity and begun regarding anyone who extends a hand to a Palestinian as an enemy."
In 2006, the UNRWA drew criticism from the US Congressmen Mark Kirk and Steven Rothman. Their letter, sent to the US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, stated in part: "After an exhaustive review of the UN's own audit, it is clear UNRWA is wrought by mismanagement, ineffective policies, and failure to secure its finances. We must upgrade UNRWA's financial controls, management and enforcement of US law that bars any taxpayer dollars from supporting terrorists." UNRWA responded by showing the results of its school students in Syria and Jordan, who outperform their peers in host-government schools. UNRWA also mentioned the difficult conditions in which it operates: its refugee load increased much faster than its budget, while the tightening of the closure regime since the Second Intifada deeply affected the humanitarian situation in the former Israeli-occupied territories.
It has been claimed by some that UNRWA is an example of a United Nations anti-Israel bias, and that the Palestine refugees should be treated equally to all others with refugee status around the world. Defenders of the UNRWA put forward the specific legal status of the Palestinians in 1948 who, because they were living under the British Mandate of Palestine, were stateless and therefore not eligible benefits under the common definition.
Critics of UNRWA say that the present definition give Palestine refugees a favored status when compared with other refugee groups, which the UNHCR defines in terms of nationality as opposed to a relatively short number of years of residency. For example, journalist Arlene Kushner stated that:
other refugees worldwide are tended to by the U.N. High Commission for Refugees, which works under the guidelines of the Convention on Refugees of 1951. Only UNRWA and its Palestinian Arab protégés stand apart from this: UNRWA is the only agency that is dedicated to a single group of refugees and establishes its own rules for them. The High Commission is mandated to help refugees get on with their lives as quickly as possible, and works to settle them rapidly, most frequently in countries other than those they fled. UNRWA policy, however, states that the Palestinian Arabs who fled from Israel in the course of the 1948 war–and their descendants!–are to be considered refugees until they return to the homes and villages they left more than half a century ago (which actually no longer exist).
United States Senator Mark Kirk (R-IL) created an amendment to the fiscal 2013 State Department and foreign operations appropriations bill that would require the State Department to report on how many of the millions of people currently supported by UNRWA are actually people who were physically displaced from their homes who lived in the area between June 1946 to May 1948 or fled, and how many are descendants of original refugees.
Critics of Israel say it should allow the refugees to return, which some say is stipulated in United Nations General Assembly Resolution 302 which Israel supported, which would make UNRWA redundant. Defenders of UNRWA respond that it is the stateless status of the Palestinians under British mandate in 1948 that made it necessary to create a definition of refugee based on criteria other than nationality. Historians, such as Martha Gellhorn and Dr. Walter Pinner, have also blamed UNRWA for distortion of statistics and even of sheer fraud. Pinner wrote in 1959 that the actual number of refugees then was only 367,000.
Although UNRWA's Mandate is only Relief and Works, the Wall Street Journal Europe edition, published an op-ed by Asaf Romirowsky and Alexander H. Joffe in April 2011 saying that despite UNRWA's "purported goal, it is hard to claim that the UNRWA has created any Palestinian institutions that foster a genuinely civil society. Ideally the UNRWA would be disbanded and Palestinians given the freedom – and the responsibility – to build their own society."
Read more about this topic: United Nations Relief And Works Agency For Palestine Refugees In The Near East
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