The United Nations Relief and Works Agency, founded in 1949 to support Palestinian refugees, is no stranger to controversy. Its own staff warned in 1951 that Arab refusal to resettle refugees as Israel had done with Jewish refugees risked perpetuating conflict and recommended that the agency dissolve itself. That warning was prescient but unheeded. Instead, rejectionist Arab states hijacked the UNRWA as a lever against peace and reconciliation.
The UNRWA’s unique definition of refugee is a case in point. Whereas the U.N. definition of refugees focuses upon those forced across borders by threat of violence, such status ends when refugees naturalize or integrate elsewhere. The UNRWA, however, defines a refugee as not only anyone who resided in Mandatory Palestine between June 1, 1946, and May 15, 1948, and lost their home and means of livelihood when war erupted as Arab states invaded Israel, but also their descendants.
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Rather than solve a finite problem, the UNRWA exists to perpetrate it. As generations pass, the refugees it counts only grow. This year, UNRWA counts nearly 6 million Palestinian refugees, almost an order of magnitude higher than those displaced in 1948. Put another way, if the U.N. applied the UNRWA statistics to the Partition of India, there might be 300 million additional refugees split between India and Pakistan today, instead of zero.
If the UNRWA’s preservation of its existence at the expense of Palestinian welfare was bad, its subsequent negligence only made matters worse. For decades, the UNRWA allowed its schools to be centers for incitement and warehouses for weapons and its ambulances to transport fighters, incidents caught on video. Too often, its officials rationalized or dismissed such evidence, guaranteeing further abuses. In 2009, James Lindsay, former UNRWA general counsel, acknowledged Hamas could infiltrate the UNRWA for the simple reason that the agency never implemented a policy to forbid hiring Hamas members.
Hamas's extensive network of tunnels and hospital headquarters, all constructed in the UNRWA’s presence, often with diverted humanitarian supplies, show the UNRWA's negligence if not complicity. This alone should be enough to force resignations across the U.N. to include the management and leadership not only of the UNRWA but also of the U.N., up to and including Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who has neglected management and oversight in order to pursue perks and pontificate.
Now, word emerges that, as Hamas disbursed Jewish civilian hostages across Gaza to use as human shields, it reportedly gave one to a UNRWA employee, who kept the hostage locked in his attic. If this is true, thenthe UNRWA has two choices: First, it could stand on principle and not only fire the employee but also deliver him to Israeli authorities to face kidnapping and torture charges. Or, second, it could try to obfuscate and protect, an action that would effectively make it an accessory.
If the UNRWA signals that it will accept terrorists using its employment as cover, then it is an accessory to hostage-taking. To go down this route would make the UNRWA institutionally in violation of international law and the laws of war; simply being a U.N. employee or agency does not supplant international law. U.N. officials cannot steal, rape, and murder (though they have), nor can they engage in collective punishment (though they have).
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Just as doctors who don uniforms and act as combatants forfeit immunity, so do U.N. personnel who use ambulances for terror transport and hold civilians hostage. If the UNRWA no longer has immunity, then those fighting terror should consider it a legitimate target.
It is time for Guterres to decide: Will he root out the UNRWA’s rot administratively, or will others do so via military force?
Michael Rubin (@mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.