POETRY, PROSE, AND POLITICS

Fiction, serious reality, and at times their interaction.

UNRWA, A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW AND OPINION

UNRWA = United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East

From UNRWA website: UNRWA has over 30,000 employees, most of them Palestine refugees and a small number of international staff, in two headquarter offices (Gaza and Amman), five field offices (Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and West Bank), and in four Representative/Liaison Offices (New York, Geneva, Brussels and Cairo).

From the Times of Israel: The European Parliament has adopted a resolution condemning educational material produced by the Palestinian Authority and by the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees for its role in inciting hatred against Israelis.

From Google: The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is a United Nations agency mandated to aid and protect refugeesforcibly displaced communities, and stateless people, and to assist in their voluntary repatriation, local integration or resettlement to a third country. It is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, with over 18,879 staff working in 138 countries as of 2020.

My impression: UNHCR has the purpose of helping any refugees wherever and whenever that help is needed anywhere in the world. When the problem of a particular group of refugees is solved, that ends UNHCR’s participation in that problem, and it goes on to other problems. UNRWA’s only purpose is to represent Arab Palestinian refugees, and most of its employees are Arab Palestinians. If the problems were solved and the Arab Palestinians were no longer designated as refugees, UNRWA would no longer exist. That sheds some light on why some UNRWA employees participated in the cruel and barbaric attack on Israel that killed, raped, mutilated, and took hostage more than a thousand Israelis, and began the present war in Gaza. A two-state solution in the form of a confederation of the State of Israel and a State of Palestine moderated by the Supreme Court of Israel (or a panel of judges appointed by the Supreme Court of Israel) would make the Arab Palestinians citizens of their own state and not refugees, which would make UNRWA irrelevant. The 30,000 Palestinians on the UNRWA payroll would have to seek different employment.