BTW, about that UNRWA posting of anti-Semitic cartoons inciting murder of Jews?

...at a time when UNRWA claims to be in crisis, it is shameful that an UNRWA facility featured on a UN video asking for help for victims in Syria would be the same one engaged in incitement to racism, terrorism and murder. All of this follows the April report of your board of inquiry which found that UNRWA effectively turned a blind eye to Hamas rockets and other terrorist weapons being stored in its facilities. The UN cannot demand more and more funding for UNRWA from the U.S. and others while this agency aids, abets and incites to terrorism, murder and anti-Semitism.

Hillel Neuer..
UN Watch..
23 August '15...








His Excellency Mr. Ban Ki-moon
The Secretary-General
The United Nations
New York, NY 10017

23 August 2015

Dear Mr. Secretary-General,

UN Watch is gravely concerned that the UN’s special relief agency for Palestinians, which received some $400 million from the U.S. last year in exchange for its signed promise to refrain from supporting terrorism and to uphold neutrality, is nevertheless disseminating crude, anti-Semitic caricatures on the Internet that incite to the murder of Jews. We respectfully demand that you take action immediately to remove the images, apply accountability to the highest levels of UNRWA, and apologize.

We call your attention to two of the ten first items appearing on the UNRWA Facebook page of the Rameh school, based in the Jaramaneh camp outside Damascus, which are cartoons celebrating Palestinian car attacks against Israeli Jewish civilians.

One of the cartoons posted by UNRWA resorts to classic anti-Semitic imagery, depicting a hook-nosed ultra-Orthodox Jew dressed in black, with a Star of David marked on his black hat:

Another of UNRWA’s images shows cars attacking people, with the caption that translates to “Cars intifada Daes,” using the Ara­bic term “Daes” (Run-over), a play on the Ara­bic word for “Daesh” (ISIS):

In these postings, UNRWA joins the terror-inciting social media campaign that praise the Palestinian car attacks such as the one in Jerusalem on 22 October 2014, which killed 3-month-old baby Chaya Zissel Braun, and 22-year-old Karen Jemima Mosquera of Ecuador, and wounded eight others.

This vile cam­paign prais­es car attacks as a form of “resis­tance,” and incites oth­ers to per­pe­trate sim­i­lar attacks and, as documented by the Anti-Defamation League, fea­tures vio­lent expres­sions of anti-Semitism.

Truly better off without UNRWA

...There’s no other UN organ in which so many layers of unabashed hypocrisy overlap and contribute so cynically to the perpetuation of misery instead of assisting the cause of peace and prosperity. It’s time to regard UNRWA as a problem in and of itself. It’s time to cease shelling out millions that only impede peace and artificially sustain an insidious travesty. This region would be better off without UNRWA. It’s time to transfer its responsibilities to UNHCR.

Sarah Honig..
Another Tack..
08 June '15..

Staging another of its surreal spectacles, the UN last week marked the 65th birthday of one of its most deformed misbegotten offspring – the United Nations Relief and Works Agency.

UNRWA was established in 1949 to cater exclusively to those deemed to be Palestinian refugees. All other refugees, regardless of degree of plight and objective hardship, are looked after by the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), while the privileged Palestinian category is singularly aided by UNRWA.

The defect was already implanted in UNRWA’s genome. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon admitted that UNRWA was never meant to live this long but he contended that “it exists because of political failure.” Doubtless, as per the UN’s dishonorable tradition, Israel is blamed for this failure. The Jewish State is habitually painted as the villain of any piece and its bogus villainy is exasperatingly accepted as an axiomatic premise.

UNRWA Commissioner-General Pierre Krahenbuhl plaintively bewails refugee statistics, which he characteristically presents as unassailable facts – even though there is plenty to assail. According to Krahenbuhl, there are over 5 million Palestinian refugees in today’s Mideast because that is the number registered with UNRWA, never mind the fact that there may be personal incentives to register and political profit in inflating refugee rolls.

UNRWA’s own self-serving interests rule out neutrality and fairness to begin with, lest these actually lead to improvements that might obviate the sham pretext for keeping UNRWA around. Perversely, UNRWA’s continued existence hinges on never alleviating this region’s woes.

Put differently, it’s in UNRWA’s distinct interest to keep the flames of conflict burning high.

UNRWA isn't Hamas' human shield. The UNRWA is Hamas.

...Hamas use of the UNRWA as its public face is a war crime, but terrorists commit war crimes without a second thought. But the UN and the UNRWA are complicit in the war crime by allowing Hamas to go on exploiting the UN brand. It's unfortunately commonplace for humanitarian organizations in war zones to collaborate with terrorists and guerrillas in one form or another. But the UNRWA isn't just paying money to Hamas in exchange for being allowed to operate, the way that many groups in war zones do, it has allowed Hamas to turn its operations in Gaza into an extension of the terrorist group.

Daniel Greenfield..
Sultan Knish..
05 August '14..

The UNRWA is on the front lines of the Hamas War in Gaza. In the headlines, its schools are forever being fired on or found to be stockpiling rockets. If individual Gazans are being used as human shields, the UNRWA often seems as if it is one big organizational human shield.

But the UNRWA isn't Hamas' human shield. The UNRWA is Hamas.

The "UN" part of the UNRWA, the blue logos and symbols, fool us into thinking of it as an international humanitarian organization. But the UNRWA in Gaza functions as a large Palestinian Arab organization with a smattering of foreign supervisory staff.

And those foreign staffers often tend to leave during a conflict.

The UNRWA is not an international organization operating in the Middle East. Effectively it's a local Arab Muslim organization funded and regulated internationally. Since the UNRWA classifies 80% of Gazans as "refugees", it administers the biggest welfare state in the world on their behalf. Like the Palestinian Authority, the UNRWA's welfare state is run locally and funded internationally.

(Continue)

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Time to end UNRWA’s involvement with both terrorism and the use of human shields

...The fact that a UN agency would so actively collaborate with terrorist organizations is appalling, but there is a still more sickening point to be considered here. Not only does it now seem clear that UNRWA has assisted militants who target Israeli civilians, but by permitting schools and medical sites to be used for any kind of military purpose, they have apparently joined with Hamas in its vile strategy of using human shields to protect its weapons and tunnels. Not only is this the most appalling breach of UNRWA’s primary duty to see to the welfare of civilians in Gaza, but it is also illegal as a war crime under international law.

Tom Wilson..
Commentary Magazine..
31 July '14..

Yesterday three young Israeli soldiers, all in their early twenties, were killed by an explosion in one of Hamas’s many booby-trapped tunnels. This is just one example of the terrible price Israelis are paying as part of their efforts to keep their families safe from Islamist terrorism. But there is more to yesterday’s tragedy.

The booby-trapped tunnel in question had its opening situated in a small health clinic run by UNRWA, the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees. That fact alone should be shocking enough. But it comes just days after a cache of rockets was discovered at one of UNRWA’s schools. Worse still, this was the third such discovery since Israel’s operation Protective Edge began. The UN’s personnel in Gaza can no longer plead negligence; anyone considering the facts must inevitably conclude that UNRWA is actively collaborating with Hamas.

As Evelyn Gordon noted, in the case of the first stockpile of rockets, the United Nations staff simply handed the rockets over to the “Gaza authorities”—read: Hamas. In the case of the second stockpile we were told that the rockets “went missing.” They had vanished as mysteriously as they had appeared, and supposedly the UNRWA staff knew nothing about what had happened in either case. Of course the UN’s secretary-general Ban Ki-moon expressed his deepest concerns. But who knows where any of these rockets ended up? For all we know they could have already been fired at civilians in Israel by now.

Israel has long accused UNRWA of being mixed up in Palestinian extremism, that UNRWA projects are used for the purposes of incitement and radicalization against Israel. But it has been during the course of this latest explosion of violence that the extent of UNRWA’s complicity with terrorism has been exposed. And of course, it is quite possible that we have not yet seen the full extent of UNRWA’s entanglement with Hamas’s terror infrastructure. These four recent examples of UN sites being used for terrorist purposes could well prove to only be the tip of the iceberg.

A Mads Maoist in Gaza

...As tempting as it is to dismiss Gilbert as a crazy Norwegian Maoist in Gaza, the reality is that he is using his media appearances to stoke the libel of the century: namely, that Israel, in the words of the Palestinian Authority’s foreign minister Riyad al-Maliki, is engaged in “a genocide against the Palestinian people in all territories.”

Ben Cohen..
Commentary Magazine..
15 July '14..

Despite the flurry of reports from Gaza today, very few news outlets picked up on Hamas’s declaration that it had closed the Erez border crossing into Israel, citing “Israeli shelling” as the reason for doing so. The move, reported AFP, left stranded a group of Palestinians who had arrived at Erez early in the morning, “some of whom were scheduled to enter Israel for cancer treatment.”

Sadly, these patients may have to wait a while before attempting the journey again, as Hamas subsequently announced that the border crossing will remain closed until it receives an “international guarantee that the crossing, and the route between the two sides of the crossing, will not be bombed by Israel.” In the interim, their other option is to ascertain whether Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian doctor currently in Gaza City, is willing to take time out of his busy media schedule to assist them.

Over the last couple of days, Gilbert has become an unofficial spokesman for the Hamas regime, giving interviews like this one in which he accused Israel of “deliberately” targeting civilians, “particularly women and children.” Pro-Palestinian activists on social media platforms have been eagerly reporting Gilbert’s every move, lauding him with such terms as “hero” and “great humanitarian.” Among Gilbert’s admirers is Chris Gunness, the spokesman for UNRWA, the UN agency devoted exclusively to Palestinian refugees, who repeatedly tweeted the doctor’s email address and cell phone number, describing him as a “brilliant interviewee” on the “impact of the conflict on civilians.”

One does not, however, have to dig very deep to discover that the halo effect around Gilbert masks some very disturbing affiliations. To begin with, Gilbert is an active member of Norway’s Red Party, a Maoist organization formed in 2007, which begs the question as to how someone who perpetuates the ideology of a tyrant who murdered 45 million of his own people over four years can be described as a “humanitarian.” Nor does Gilbert have a track record of helping anyone other than the Palestinians; as the journalist Benjamin Weinthal revealed on Twitter, his emails and phone calls to Gilbert asking the doctor why he wasn’t treating victims of the slaughter in Syria were met with silence.

Gilbert’s reputation is derived not from his medical work, but from his frequent verbal assaults on Israel and the United States, which stretch back to the early 1980s, when he became active in Palestinian solidarity work. As the Israeli watchdog NGO Monitor pointed out in a statement urging media organizations to treat Gilbert’s comments on Gaza with extreme caution, a few days after the al-Qaeda atrocities of September 11, 2001, Gilbert gave an interview to the Norwegian daily Dagbladet in which he stated, “The oppressed also have a moral right to attack the USA with any weapon they can come up with.” Chairman Mao himself couldn’t have put it better.

The disingenuous Gaza numbers game

...Zero – The number of civilians in this and future conflicts that will be protected as a result of the immoral and tendentious statements issued by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, OHCHR, Oxfam, Gisha and other NGOs.

Anne Herzberg..
Op-Ed Contributor/JPost..
14 July '14..

Five days into Operation Protective Edge, the out-going UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, issued a statement that the number of casualties in Gaza raises “serious doubt about whether the Israeli strikes have been in accordance with international humanitarian law and international human rights law.”

In a similar vein, UNWRA Spokesperson Chris Gunness has a running commentary of casualties on his Twitter feed, including the plea to “Imagine being a 5 year old in #Gaza This is the 3rd terrifying bombardment in your short life. Where else have 5 year olds suffered thus?” These numbers and emotional appeals, however, are seriously misplaced.

If many civilians are being killed in Gaza, it is because Hamas is storing and launching deadly missiles from within populated areas and exploiting the population there as a human shield. Conversely, if even one civilian were to be illegitimately targeted, that single killing would be illegal.

Thus, the UN officials’ emotive statements are entirely disconnected from the legal and moral implications of Israel’s actions.

Similarly, many highly politicized non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have issued overwrought statements on Gaza casualties, making unverifiable claims that the vast majority are civilians and blaming Israel again. These comments stand in stark contrast to the sterile, pro-forma and brief mentions of Hamas rocket attacks on Israeli civilians, to the extent they are mentioned at all.

Amnesty International, for example, stated, “Since Israel launched Operation Protective Edge in the early morning of 8 July, more than 100 Palestinians have been killed in the Gaza Strip, most of them civilians who were not directly participating in hostilities.”

Ken Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, tweeted, “My daughter’s head here, my son’s arm there: Life for a #Gaza family under #Israel attack. Six children killed,” linking to a tendentious article out of the UAE.

Oxfam’s statement highlighted “civilians in Gaza, who are already impoverished by the ongoing Israeli blockade and account for the vast majority of those injured and killed in the violence.”

As in the past, media outlets have uncritically adopted these memes, focusing extensive coverage on the Gaza casualties, as if the real-time consequences of war were simply points in a video game.

Seeing increasing casualties, undoubtedly with women and children hurt alongside the Hamas fighters, pulls at heartstrings and makes for good headlines.

It is also an effective way for NGOs to maximize anguish and drive up influence and thus, donations.

Changing the UN’s Refugee Policy, a First Step to Peace

...While it might be asking too much of a United Nations that is still rife with corruption and anti-Semitism to do the right thing on this issue, it is vital that the effort be made to change UNRWA before its actions help create more generations of angry refugees bent on destroying Israel. As much as the Israelis, the Palestinians would benefit from such a reform.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
19 May '14..

As the United States tries again to revive peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, one of the key sticking points in any such negotiation is getting some much-needed scrutiny in a United Nations forum this week. As Israel Hayom reports, a UN panel will discuss an effort to revise the rules under which the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) operates. The pending debate is the result of an initiative pushed by the American Association of Jewish Lawyers and Judges and seeks to redefine who can be considered a Palestinian refugee and therefore a recipient of UNRWA’s largesse. While those made homeless by other conflicts are only considered refugees if they personally lost their homes, under current rules anyone descended from someone who fled the British Mandate of Palestine or the territory of the newborn State of Israel during the Jewish state’s War of Independence is eligible for refugee status. Thus, while the refugees of every other conflict or dislocation have ultimately all been resettled, only the Palestinians remain homeless, a tactic endorsed by their leaders and the rest of the Arab and Muslim world in order to keep the war against Israel alive.

While the chances that the UN will act on this issue are virtually non-existent, this discussion not only calls attention to UNRWA’s misguided policies but also highlights an issue that is one of the chief obstacles to peace. Though UNRWA is tasked with helping the Palestinians and is, for lack of a Palestinian government or groups dedicated to providing their people with a path to a better life, their primary source of sustenance, it actually plays a central role in their continued victimization.

The Palestinians have a unique status in the world of the UN. While all other refugees are handled by a single organization, the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), the Palestinians have their own UN agency in UNRWA. But unlike the UNHCR, UNRWA’s goal is not to resettle the refugees and help them build new lives. UNRWA’s purpose has always been to keep them in place, living in squalid camps that long ago were transformed in concrete cities where they remain waiting for the day when they will “go home” to a Palestine that hasn’t existed for 66 years. Thus, rather than help the refugees to adjust to reality, UNRWA’s policies have dovetailed nicely with a Palestinian political identity that regards accommodation to Israel’s existence as tantamount to treason. The Palestinian belief in a “right of return” for not just the original Arabs who totaled a few hundred thousand but for the millions who claim to be their descendants is only made possible by UNRWA’s willingness to go on counting second, third, fourth, and now even fifth generations of Palestinians as refugees.

"Palestine" is where the dysfunction begins.

Malcolm Lowe..
Gatestone Institute..
28 January '13..

The phenomenon of "Palestine" is becoming a misfortune for any international institution in which it crops up. This is because those institutions are governed by councils whose members are states. Whenever "Palestine" is on the agenda, these states vote according to the policies of their respective governments, regardless of any principles that are supposed to guide the institution in question.

The oldest example is of course UNWRA. Whereas all other refugee problems in the world are dealt with by UNHCR, which seeks to reduce the numbers of refugees, Palestinian refugees are in the hands of UNWRA, whose function is to multiply their numbers.

The most recent example is the recognition of "Palestine" as a non-member state by the General Assembly of the United Nations. In reality, there is an independent state of Hamasistan in Gaza and a semi-independent fiefdom of Abbasistan (aka the Palestinian Authority, PA) in the West Bank. For years they have had nothing in common, apart from the distant aspiration of destroying Israel.

According to Palestinian reports, the latest attempted reconciliation between the respective leaders was also ineffective: "Each side… is happy with the status quo." To call Gaza and the West Bank collectively "Palestine" is an anachronism. This is why "Palestine" will be written here in inverted commas.

Yes, both Gaza and the West Bank contain people who call themselves "Palestinians," but by "Palestine" they mean the whole area, including Israel. So the continuing babble about a "two-state solution," Israel and Palestine, when the three-state solution has already arrived, is simply befuddling minds worldwide.

Ceren - More U.N. Officials Step Up to Push Anti-Israel Smears and Pro-Hamas Propaganda

Omri Ceren..
Commentary/Contentions..
15 March '12..

UNRWA’s Chris Gunness has personally stepped up to fulfill his organization’s traditional role as a wartime propaganda outlet for Hamas, describing Israel’s self-defense operations as “sick sick sick.” The UN group routinely peddles anti-Israel falsehoods even during relatively quiet periods – e.g. their scapegoating Israel for UNRWA’s terror-promoting schools – but during conflicts their media manipulation becomes particularly shameless.

Now even non-UNRWA UN officials have taken to broadcasting false anti-Israel smears, per new information about a tweet that Alana first covered earlier this week. You’ll remember that Khulood Badawi tweeted a picture of an injured Palestinian girl, with a caption asserting that the girl had been hit in an Israeli air strike. The photo spread like wildfire, garnering 300 retweets and becoming the day’s top “#Gaza” tweet.

The entire thing was a fabrication. The photo wasn’t taken this week and the girl wasn’t hurt by Israeli munitions. The picture was actually snapped by Reuters in 2006, and the girl had fallen off a swing. Honest Reporting ran down the original.

Navon - The EU is an Obstacle to Peace

Emmanuel Navon..
For the Sake of Zion..
29 January '12..

The claim that Israeli “settlements” constitute “an obstacle to peace” has become a self-evident European dogma. The truth, of course, is that there was no peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors when none of those “settlements” existed (between 1949 and 1967); that the Palestinian leadership rejected twice Israel’s offer to dismantle most of its settlements (by Ehud Barak in July 2000 and by Ehud Olmert in September 2008); and that when Israel unilaterally dismantled all its settlements in Gaza in 2005, it was “rewarded” by thousands of rockets.

Rather than settlements, one of the major obstacles to peace between Israel and the Palestinians is the so-called “right of return.” By this euphemism, the Palestinians want to flood Israel with about 7 million immigrants who are the descendants, or alleged descendants, of the 600,000 Arabs who left their homes during Israel’s War of Independence. This would turn Israel into a bi-national state with an Arab majority. Except for a minority of post and anti-Zionist Israelis, even the most dovish members of the Israeli Left consider the “right of return” a non-starter.

While the Zionist Left generally pooh-poohs the “right of return” as a mere rhetorical tool in which the Palestinians themselves don’t actually believe, the fact is that the Palestinian refusal to give in on that issue is what caused the rejection of Barak and Olmert’s peace proposals. Moreover, neither Arafat nor Abbas ever tried to educate their people into admitting that the “right of return” is unrealistic; on the contrary: both leaders have made the “right of return” a central tenet of Palestinian nationalism and an issue whose abandonment is an act of high treason.

Bedein - Why Do UNRWA & Reuters Call Munitions Tunnels An Economic Boom

Noam Bedein
Sderot Media Center
04 January '12

On December 7th, 2011, UNRWA [United Nations Relief and Works Agency] issued an extensive report which lauded the vast amount of cement smuggled through the Gaza's tunnels. The report attributed recent economic growth and improvement of humanitarian conditions in Gaza to the operation of smuggling tunnels from Egypt, which UNRWA claimed have increased employment in Gaza by causing construction jobs to grow by more than 9, 400, an increase of 3.5 times relative to the first half of 2010, according to an UNWRA press release.

http://www.unrwa.org/etemplate.php?id=1176

On December 24th, 2011, Reuters wire echoed the UNRWA press release, published in hundreds of media outlets throughout the world, portraying Gaza residents whose economic well being had been greatly improved by uninhibited smuggling of cement through the tunnels.

Reuters reported that the tunnels were causing an "an economic boom."

http://au.news.yahoo.com/world/a/-/world/12453920/gaza-s-thriving-tunnel-imports-unleash-building-boom/

http://www.euronews.net/newswires/1294237-gazas-thriving-tunnel-imports-unleash-building-boom/

The Reuters wire mentioned in the fourth paragraph of its release that there was an Israeli “claim that these tunnels were used by the Hamas regime in Gaza to carry out “sporadic” attacks.

The UNRWA report and the Reuters wire ignored the assessment of intelligence agencies which confirm that these tunnels have transformed Gaza into a vast arsenal of munitions for missile launchers that can reach every part of southern and central Israel.

Hamas's Web School for Suicide Bombers

Yohanan Manor and Ido Mizrahi
Middle East Quarterly
Spring 2010, pp. 31-40

All states use education as a medium to encourage responsible behavior in their children, at least in part to develop a law-abiding, civic-minded citizenry. Authoritarian regimes have a history of distorting this trust, often turning schools into places of indoctrination for a state or religious ideology. The Palestinians have, for some time now, created an educational system exemplifying this indoctrinational approach: Their textbooks deny Jewish and Israeli legitimacy within historic Palestine, demonize Jews and Israelis, discourage compromise or negotiated peace, and glorify violent struggle to achieve what are often termed "Palestinian aspirations." Since coming to power through elections in early 2006 and following its military coup in Gaza in June 2007, Hamas has continued this path of indoctrination, utilizing its popular children's website, Al-Fateh.

Related: FreeMiddleEast — June 22, 2010 — Imagine if the Hamas Charter, instead of preaching the destruction of Israel, stood for dignity, respect and tolerance.

For more information visit: www.FreeMiddleEast.com

Formal Education in Gaza

After a series of clashes, predating Hamas's parliamentary win in 2006 but intensifying thereafter, Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip in a swift but brutal campaign, which lasted little more than a week (June 7-15, 2007).[1] Hamas now controls the Gaza Strip, and the Palestinian Authority (PA) retains almost no standing, except perhaps in the field of education: All the schools in the strip—the very small number of private schools, the public schools, and those run by the United Nations Works and Refugee Agency (UNRWA)—follow the official PA school curriculum and use the corresponding textbooks.

This may be surprising in view of the cardinal importance Hamas attributes to the education of children and youth as a means of achieving its ideological and political goals. Article 15 of the Hamas charter states:

It is necessary that scientists, educators, and teachers, information and media people, as well as the educated masses, especially the youth and sheikhs of the Islamic movements, should take part in the operation of awakening. It is important that basic changes be made in school curriculum to cleanse it of the traces of ideological invasion that affected it as a result of the Orientalists and missionaries who infiltrated the region following the defeat of the Crusaders at the hands of Salah al Din (Saladin).[2]

Despite this, Hamas has yet to introduce its own school curriculum. Perhaps this is due in part to a concern for Palestinian unity; perhaps it is merely a desire to avoid the heavy expense such revisions would necessitate. Most likely this results from Hamas's recognition that continued implementation of the official PA curriculum is the only way currently that allows internationally recognized matriculation examinations to proceed and for diplomas to be awarded. In 2009 for example, practical steps were taken by Hamas to ensure that the examinations would take place at exactly the same time in both Gaza and the West Bank.[3]

(Read full article)

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Was Gaza in urgent need of food aid in the first place?

Stephanie Gutmann
Telegraph.co.uk
02 June '10

(In the midst of everything else happening, this one slipped by. Y)

While we try to figure out who did what to whom aboard the Mavi Mara “Freedom Flotilla” ship there is another part of the narrative that remains inviolate, unchallenged. This is the idea that Gazans are in the middle of a humanitarian crisis, in urgent need of the 10,000 tonnes of food aid being rushed to them. I don’t buy that part of the canon anymore than I’m ready to call the guys aboard the top deck of the Mavi “peace activists”. (NB: I do make a distinction between the ambush brigade on the top deck and the Birkenstock ladies who cowered below. )

I let this belief slip in my last post by putting the qualifier “unneeded” before “food aid”, and a few Telegraph Blogs readers went ballistic. I can’t blame them too much – they’re only parroting what they’ve heard from the international aid brigade. What I’d like these folks to consider is that aid workers have jobs which are dependent on there being a crisis in Gaza. Take away the crisis, no more photos to put on the stationary, no more NGO. The oldest of these poverty pimps, is, of course, UNWRA, the arm of the UN created in 1948 to supply homes, food, medical care, even education to the Arab Palestinians (prior to 1948 Jews were referred to as “Palestinians” as well) who fled Palestine during the ‘48 Israel/Arab Legion war. Like many aid programs UNWRA was originally supposed to be temporary but because it had so much largesse to distribute and because its programs are eligible to those defining themselves as descendants of 1948 refugees, its rolls increase exponentially every year and the initiative shows no signs of ever shutting down.

Certain politicians also huff and puff about “Warsaw Ghetto-like” conditions in the Strip. Apparently they get a good deal of satisfaction out of having discovered this supposed moral equivalency. But these are politicians who have generally been whisked down for a few hours between EU conferences and and taken on sort of reverse Potemkin Village-style tours. (If the original Potemkin Village was meant to show happy villagers, these are meant to prove misery.) In my experience reporting in the region, visiting politicians generally ask few questions about the their tour guides. So, almost without exception, they end up trailing sheep-like and agog after officials of which ever oligarchy is in charge at the moment, whether it is Hamas or Fatah.

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The Myth of the Siege of Gaza

Jonathan D. Halevi
Institute for Contemporary Affairs (ICA)
JCPA
June '10

Since 2007, Israel has maintained a legal maritime blockade around Gaza whose purpose is to keep rockets and other weapons out of the hands of Hamas, while letting food and other humanitarian aid in. Yet there have been a wide variety of officials and commentators who insist that Gaza is starving, setting the stage for the repeated efforts of "humanitarian" ships to break the Gaza blockade

Gaza is not cut off from the outside world. In the last year, the markets of Gaza have been flooded with produce and merchandise. In fact, in 2009, a total of 7,233 truckloads of humanitarian aid from the international community passed from Israel into Gaza. From June 2007 (the date of the Hamas military takeover of Gaza), overall monetary transfers to Gaza have totaled over $5 billion from governmental and extragovernmental sources. The governor of the Central Bank of the Palestinian Authority, Jihad al-Wazir, confirmed that 56 percent of the PA budget is designated for Gaza. Gaza receives additional aid funds directly from Iran and the Arab countries.

There is also an established economic system of Palestinian imports from Egypt via hundreds of tunnels operating under the control of a Hamas government that grants approval for operating them and collects taxes from their owners. The tunnel network has increased imports from Egypt to Gaza from $30 million annually during the years 1994-2006 to more than $650 million annually. Given the abundance of supply, the price of diesel fuel and gasoline, delivered to Gaza through pipes from Egypt, is half that of the price in Israel.

Farid Zakout, director of the Gaza Construction Association, told the Palestinian newspaper Al-Ayyam that the price of a ton of cement now stands at NIS 800 as opposed to NIS 1,200 two months ago, and over NIS 3,000 more than a year ago. Cement prices fell after some 80 percent of tunnel owners began to import cement. The renewed surge in construction activity has fostered a rise of 25 percent in the number of those employed in the industry.

Since 2007, Israel has maintained a legal maritime blockade around Gaza whose purpose is to keep rockets and other weapons out of the hands of Hamas, while letting food and other humanitarian aid in. Yet there have been a wide variety of officials and commentators who insist that Gaza is starving, setting the stage for the repeated efforts of "humanitarian" ships to break the Gaza blockade.

For example, John Ging, the director of operations for UNRWA, told the New York Times in early 2009 that Israel's blockade was choking off basic humanitarian supplies like medicine, clothing and blankets, as well as food supplies.1 The UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Occupied Palestinian Territory released a report in August 2009 arguing that "the blockade has ‘locked in' 1.l5 million people."2 The same report asserted that 75 percent of Gaza's population is "food insecure." Recently, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) told Don Imus on the Fox Business Channel that Israel was "preventing food and medicine from going into Gaza." He said there are "people that are starving," and closed with a vile suggestion that the situation of the Gazans was "almost like in concentration camps."3

Are the Gates of Gaza Closed?

The truth is far different from these assessments. Indeed, the repeated claims of a hermetic blockade of Gaza are inconsistent with the figures that emerge from Israeli and Palestinian sources alike. Gaza under Hamas control continues to receive supplies of goods via the border crossings with Israel and the network of tunnels with Egypt, which have become an established import channel on a scale of hundreds of millions of dollars per year.

(Read full report)

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Debunking the Gaza Seige Myth

Jacob Shrybman
Huffington Post
03 May '10

This May, thousands of activists on a convoy of ships, one of which is named after the extreme left-wing American activist, Rachel Corrie, killed in the Gaza Strip in 2003, plan to sail to the coastal territory in the context of breaking the widely popularized myth of the Gaza siege.

On March 18th, just three days after a man was killed by a Gaza rocket in the Negev, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon visited the Gaza Strip and told the people of Gaza: "We stand with you." Ban called for an end to the so-called Israeli siege of the terrorist-controlled territory, saying it was causing "unacceptable suffering of human beings."

Without questioning the apparent Gaza suffering, one has to ask what siege Ban is referring to, when, in 2009 the IDF Spokesperson reported that 738,576 tons of humanitarian aid was transferred into the Strip.

The UN claims there is a siege when it has given $200 million to Gaza following a military operation that left 1,300 dead and wounded among a population of less than 1.5 million, and yet has only given $10 million to Haiti after the natural disaster there claimed the lives of an estimated 230,000. Of course, that is without noting that Haitians have not been attacking an innocent nearby civilian population for nine years.

International humanitarian aid has been flowing freely into the Strip for years, and in no way stopped after Operation Cast Lead, as 30,576 aid trucks entered the territory in 2009 while in the same period, 4,883 tons of medical equipment was also transferred to it. This past month during the week of April 11-17th 500 trucks of over 17,000 tons of humanitarian aid entered the Gaza Strip.

(Read full article)

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Speaking Truth to the “Life Lie”

Rick Richman
Contentions/ Commentary
24 April '10

Former Norwegian diplomat Sven Olaf Eid e-mailed a response to my April 20 post about Israel’s Independence Day (“There Could Have Been Two Independence Days”). The post quoted Abba Eban’s 1958 speech to the UN laying responsibility for the Arab refugees on the Arab leaders who had rejected the UN two-state solution in 1947 — and the five Arab countries that sent their armies to destroy the sliver of a Jewish state on the day it declared its independence in 1948.

Mr. Eid wrote that he agreed with the post but wanted to add an important point made in his August 17, 2006, Wall Street Journal letter, which read as follows:

Based on my experience from service with the United Nations in Egypt, the Palestinian territories and Lebanon in the 1950s and ’60s, along with several later visits to the region and lifelong studies of its history, I present the following comments regarding [Lebanon’s] suffering.

The U.N.’s partition of Palestine in 1947 was the only possible, realistic situation. The partition would have come about anyhow due to the situation on the ground. But especially since the U.N. Relief and Works Agency took responsibility for the Arab refugee problem in 1949, the U.N. has represented a hindrance to the peaceful settlement of the partition conflict by taking the responsibility for the refugees from the responsible Arab countries: Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is only one of many in the region, but it has since served as the bouc emissaire for all the religious and political problems in the Islamic world.

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Blast from the Past: Power

Jon
Divest This!
12 April '10

As we await what comes next at UC Berkeley, I thought I'd dredge out some real old stuff, things I wrote years ago when divestment came-a-calling at Somerville, Massachusetts. It's interesting to note that now that BDS is attempting to use the paddles of life to resurrect itself, how little their arguments (or required rebuttals) have actually changed...

Does anyone ever wonder why the Palestinians, alone among peoples without a state, have their own seat at the UN (an organization that spends almost a quarter of its time fighting on their behalf)?

Why does the Palestinian refugee problem have its own international organization (UNWRA) with annual budget of $350 million, while every other refugee in the world (almost twenty million at last count) are lumped together in the "other" category, supported by the United Nationals High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR)?

Why is Palestinian statehood one of the planet's top foreign policy goals, yet independence of for Kurds, Tibetans and Basques has been permanently removed from the international agenda? Why is Palestinian suffering on the West Bank being debated in universities, cities, towns and churches unendingly as Sudanese bury two million people unlamented?

(Read full article)
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Canada pulls the plug on UNWRA

Bataween
Point of No Return
29 January '10
Posted before Shabbat

This week, the most momentous news to come out of the Middle East in a long time slipped out, virtually unnoticed: Canada's decision to stop funding the Palestinian refugee agency UNWRA. If other western nations follow suit and UNWRA is forced to cease operating, Arab states will be forced to sette the Palestinian refugee problem one way or the other - either by jihad or resettlement. Hopefully it will be the latter, and the Jewish refugee issue will be thrust to the fore as a model of integration. Jonathon Narvey blogs at the National Post:

We learned this week that Canada is the first Western nation to pull the plug on UNRWA, the United Nations-run relief operation for Palestinian refugees of the West Bank and Gaza. The government has been quick to clarify that relief is still on the way. It will now be dedicated to specific projects like food aid; hopefully with enough oversight to prevent mismanagement and inadvertent support to a terrorist organization.

(Read full article)
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Help, not hate

National Post (Canada)
25 January '10

(Note:UNWRA and UNRWA are used interchangeably)

Since last fall, the federal Conservative government has been withdrawing taxpayer funding from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that use their grants to take sides against Israel in the Middle East conflict. Now comes word that last week, Ottawa told the United Nations it would no longer fund the world body's Palestinian refugee agency. From now on, Canadian aid to Palestinians will be directed to specific projects. We will no longer give lump-sum aid to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNWRA), since most of that money simply goes straight into the Palestinian Authority's (PA) general treasury, where it might be used for humanitarian projects or might be used to arm and train terrorists.

This is a bold move for Ottawa, which is the first Western government to cut off funding for UNWRA.

Although UNWRA has long been a biased player in the Arab-Israeli conflict, it is seldom criticized for its incitement of anti-Israeli hatred and violence by Palestinians. It has funded textbooks that deny the right of Israel to exist and paid teachers who call on Palestinian children to push the Jewish state into the sea. It harbours radical Islamists and anti-Semites on its payroll and was even caught in 2004 using its own ambulances to ferry terrorists away from Israeli sites they had just attacked.

(Read full article)
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The Palestinian Issue – A New Paradigm: Focusing on the Humanitarian rather than the Political

Dr. Martin Sherman
Jerusalem Summit

A. Assessment

1. The conventional-wisdom paradigm for the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has failed woefully, bringing nothing but misery and despair to both sides – but particularly to the Palestinians as individual human beings.

2. This conventional paradigm has attempted to solve the conflict by means of a Political Approach involving the establishment of a self governing Palestinian entity on territories in Judea Samaria and Gaza which have been under Israeli control since 1967 i.e. on the basis of a "Land for Peace" approach.

3. Dispassionate assessment of the history of the conflict and its current development will strongly suggest that persisting with attempts to attain a political solution on the basis the conventional paradigm are at best futile - and at worse harmful. Accordingly, alternative modes of resolution must be pursued.

B. Analysis

1. Analysis of Palestinian deeds and declarations over the years make it difficult to avoid the conclusion that they are in effect both unwilling and incapable of achieving and maintaining statehood.

(a) Palestinian Unwillingness: This is reflected in the fact that the Palestinians have rejected every single viable proposal which would have afforded them a state - from the 1947 partition plan to the 2000 Barak proposals.

(b) Palestinian Incapability: The Palestinian national movement has enjoyed conditions far more favorable than almost any other national independence movement since WW-II - widespread international endorsement of their cause, unmitigated support of a superpower in the decades of the Cold War, highly sympathetic coverage by the major media organizations, and over a decade of Israeli administrations who have acknowledged (and at times even identified with) the Palestinians declared national aspiration. In spite of this, the achievements of Palestinian national movement have been more miserable than almost any other national independence movement – bringing nothing but privation and penury to its people.

(Read full synopsis)
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