The UNRWA is the United Nations’ relief agency for Palestine, a huge agency since the 1948 war. Trump had cut off US funding for the UNRWA back in August of 2018 to the usual disapproval from the left:
“The United States will no longer commit further funding to this irredeemably flawed operation,” the US State Department said in a statement, adding it was not willing to “shoulder the very disproportionate share of the burden” for the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA)…
Friday’s state department statement complained of UNRWA’s “endlessly and exponentially expanding community of entitled beneficiaries”.
I believe that 2018 state department quote was a reference to the “entitled beneficiaries” on the Palestinian end; they are the only “refugees” whose children and children’s children earn that status from the UN. But it turns out that the US might just as well been referring to the UN bureaucrats who run the program when they said “entitled beneficiaries,” because both Switzerland and the Netherlands have now suspended funding awaiting an investigation in response to the revelation of what appears to be a major corruption scandal at UNRWA:
The 10-page confidential ethics report alleged that members of an “inner circle” at the top of the United Nations Relief Work Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East engaged in “abuse of authority for personal gain, to suppress legitimate dissent and to otherwise achieve their personal objectives,” according to Al Jazeera, which was the first to report on the revelation Monday.
Seems like bizarro world, if Al Jazeera is the one that broke the story. But that appears to be the case.
More:
The United Nations said in a statement that the accusations in the report were being investigated by its New York oversight committee and that it would not comment on the ethics report until the probe is completed.
“Everything circulating now, including in the media, is ‘allegations’ and not findings,” the statement by the agency’s spokeswoman Tamara Alrifai said.
The article doesn’t mention what is actually alleged to have happened. But you can find some of it here:
Arranging a private fundraising campaign outside of U.N. purview, the UNRWA chief apparently went around crying poor and collecting money for business-class trips with his mistress, whom he fast-tracked into a role he invented for her in 2015—that of his “senior adviser”—so that she could accompany him around the world in style. And all behind his wife’s back.
More here:
Citing information from some 25 current and past UNRWA directors and staff, the report said an “inner circle” comprising Krahenbuhl, his deputy Sandra Mitchell, Chief of Staff Hakam Shahwan and senior adviser Maria Mohammedi have bypassed normal decision-making processes and sidelined field and program directors and other senior staff…
The report said some former executive office staff reported that Krahenbuhl was away from UNRWA headquarters in Jerusalem for 28-29 days per month, claiming a daily allowance. It said he told a senior staff member in mid-November that he had made 52 trips up until that time in 2018…
Al Jazeera said Mitchell rejected all allegations, including that she abused her power to secure an appointment for her spouse, and resigned in late July. It said Shahwan left in early July…
The report claims the funding crisis [exacerbated by the US fund cutoff] “has served as an excuse for an extreme concentration of decision-making power in members of the ‘clique.'”
The cumulative effects of these developments, it claimed, have been an exodus of staff and “an organizational culture characterized by low morale, fear of retaliation — including through non-renewal of contracts — distrust, bullying, intimidation, and marginalization.”
The report concluded that “there is overwhelming prima facie evidence” the interconnected behavior of the four inner circle members amounts to “abuse of authority.”
But it has long been known that the organization is corrupt. Here’s a report from January of 2018, before Trump cut off US funding. The recent scandal has some juicy new details, but the basic corruption has been part and parcel of the agency for close to its entire existence, and certainly in recent decades.
Note the way the Irish Times covers the story. The article is framed in terms of the threat to the refugees, who number many millions:
Unrwa’s very existence is challenged by scandal at the top as the agency scrambles for international funding to distribute emergency cash and food baskets and maintain health, educational, and welfare services for 5.4 million Palestinian refugees.
Unrwa was established by the UN to help Palestinian refugees in the aftermath of the 1948 war surrounding the creation of Israel.
Without the agency, refugees in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza and host countries Lebanon, Syria and Jordan would be thrust into abject poverty and become intolerable burdens on countries where they dwell.
So, these three countries which themselves contribute a lot of refugees to the Western world, and with a combined total population of about 34 million people—all of the same religious and cultural (and even genetic, particularly in the case of Jordan) background as the Palestinians——can’t somehow absorb the 5 million?
Who are mostly the descendants of the original refugees, many of whom voluntarily fled the land that became Israel because they were promised by other Arab countries that they would launch a war to get the land back for them and drive the Israelis out? In fact (as the article in the Irish Times goes on to add), the original refugees numbered about 750,000, not millions, and I would imagine a great many of them are now dead. The entire idea of the refugee camps and their perpetual maintenance was to keep these people stateless and miserable, and to keep them from upsetting the Arab countries that might have absorbed them.
And that latter point was not an empty fear on the part of Lebanon and Jordan. See this for the history of the effort to destablize Jordan when they were taken in by that state, and the final civil war that drove them out in the early 1970s. And see this for the role the Palestinians played subsequently in the Lebanese Civil War that nearly wrecked the country.
Yes, a lot of people have excellent reasons for wanting to keep the Palestinians as refugees.
But back to the way the Irish Times describes the history [emphasis mine]:
For decades Israel has accused Unrwa of perpetuating the Palestinian- Israeli dispute by granting refugee status to descendants of the 750,000 Palestinians who fled or were driven from their homes during Israel’s 1948 war of establishment.
The Trump administration in the US has bought into this claim…
And yet these are just simple statements of fact. Whether you think the five million are entitled to this expanded UN refugee status—unprecedented among other displaced groups—is a separate issue from whether it occurred. It did occur, and it did “perpetuate the Palestinian-Israeli dispute.” And note also how the Irish Times refers to the 1948 war as “Israel’s war of establishment.” They don’t even mention that it was a UN partition that established Israel in the first place, as well as a Palestinian state, both carved from a former British territory, and that it was the Palestinians who would not accept their own state, wanted the whole thing, and started that so-called “Israel’s war” of establishment.
[NOTE: After the Irish Times article, there’s a little blurb where the paper tries to get you to subscribe by writing, “Truth matters. For news you can trust. Subscribe.”
Pretty ironic, in light of what they leave out of the article.]
