With the Gaza Strip in ruins and over a million displaced, should we be talking about defunding a United Nations organization catering to Palestinian refugees? Oddly, maybe so. And as we examine the beleaguered United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), we might also consider the more nuanced situation of the Red Cross. Humanitarians are rarely at their best when dealing with a mutation like Hamas.
UNRWA is reeling after revelations by Israel that a number of UNRWA staffers participated in the Oct. 7 invasion and massacre of 1,200 people in Israel. The United States—which provides about a third of its roughly $1 billion annual budget—and about a dozen other countries, from the United Kingdom to Japan, have suspended funding.
But the real problem with UNRWA is not that it lost control of a few of its 13,000 staff in Gaza. The problem is that it seems to be a willing enabler of Hamas, a group that is not dedicated to the Palestinian national cause but rather to scuttling any peace deal with Israel enroute to a jihadi Islamic caliphate.
UNRWA runs hundreds of schools in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the West Bank, and Gaza—wherever there are Palestinian refugees, who are almost in all cases the descendants of refugees from almost 80 years ago. It schools most of the kids in Gaza. Schools absorb the vast majority of its budget. As such, UNRWA has been fully complicit in educating generations of Palestinian children to glorify martyrdom and struggle.
"UNRWA has willfully chosen to teach millions of schoolchildren to embrace violence and jihad over peace and hope—but it is a path which we can no longer afford to walk down," says Marcus Sheff, who heads IMPACT-SE, an NGO that advocates for education reform in the region.
The group's November 2023 report, entitled "Textbooks and Terror," makes for grisly reading. It identifies scores of UNRWA teachers who promote hate and violence on social media and finds "a systematic insertion of violence, martyrdom, overt antisemitism, and jihad across all grades and subjects, with the proliferation of extreme nationalism and Islamist ideologies throughout the curriculum, including science and math textbooks."
To be fair, the materials in question are not UNRWA's—they originate with the West-Bank based autonomy government known as the Palestinian Authority. While I favor returning the PA to power in the seaside strip of Gaza—from which Hamas expelled it in 2007—there is a reason why people speak of a need for massive reform. That Hamas accepts the PA's curriculum tells you much about the degree to which the "moderate" PA's syllabus encourages peaceful coexistence.
Examples from the report: Teachers teach Grade 6 students that "The Zionists are the terrorists of the modern age, and they are fated to disappear." The perpetrator of a 1978 attack inside Israel that killed 35 people including 9 children is hailed as "immortal" in the "hearts and minds" of Palestinians. Reading comprehension is taught through a violent story promoting suicide bombings by those who "wore explosive belts, thus turning their bodies into fire" whereupon Israeli body parts "become food for wild animals on land and birds of prey in the sky." Palestinian girls are encouraged to kill, be killed, and send their children to die. And so on.
UNRWA's sin is one of omission—but boy, is it a doozy. It has refused to deploy its status and leverage to insist on changes—as would befit its lofty mission statements and the founding principles of the UN. Not only does it have the right to ask for such changes, but one might see it as required under its "duty of care"—a notion stipulating that UNRWA staff are expected to act in accordance with humanitarian principles and uphold the highest standards of professionalism and integrity.
Instead, there are persistent, credible reports that Hamas was able to stash weapons in UNRWA facilities. One released hostage reported being held by a UNRWA teacher. Israel released intel claiming a tenth of UNRWA staff had ties to terror groups. And so on. It adds up to a devastating indictment, and the European Union has called on the organization to investigate all Gaza staff.
I understand if UNRWA officials felt they had to bow before a homicidal mafia, leave the curriculum as is, and hire aspiring terrorists. It isn't easy. But there is a limit past which one loses legitimacy as a humanitarian. At the very least, there must be a top-to-bottom overhaul.
"If we want to prevent the next massacre—if we ever want to dream of peace—then UNRWA can play no further part in Palestinian education," Sheff told me, on his way to testify before a congressional committee.
Meanwhile, it's almost four months that some 130 hostages abducted by Hamas have been languishing in captivity, presumably in tunnels and serving as human shields. The Red Cross, the 160-year-old organization whose job it is to ensure they are treated humanely, has yet to visit them. Hamas won't allow it.
Hamas, which is basically the government of Gaza, is not a member of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, nor did it accede to the Geneva Conventions. So the group is not exactly breaking any promises when it refuses access to its hostages, fails to provide signs of life, or behaves in uncivilized fashion.
So Hamas releases information about who is alive stingily, happy to torture the Israeli families as well as those who live in 20-odd other countries that have nationals among the captives.
Sarah Davies, the Red Cross spokesperson for the region, was kind enough to give me a comprehensive list of calls by ICRC officials for the release of hostages. But these fell short of genuine pressure or unbearable condemnation.
Davies pointed out that talks exist "on multiple public channels, as well as in direct discussion with Hamas, Israel, and other authorities ... (But) the concept of leverage is very political, and this is not how we operate. We cannot force parties to certain decisions, in any conflict. Very rarely, if ever, do we publicly condemn parties to a conflict. We remain neutral, as we have been. Our language during this conflict is no different."
The ICRC's President Mirjana Spoljaric Egger visited Israel last month—for the first time since the outbreak of the war—and told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that "the more public pressure we seemingly would do, the more they will shut the door." That gave Netanyahu an extremely rare occasion to be the reasonable one in the room: "I'm not sure about that. Why don't you try?" was his reply.
I understand all this neutrality. It has occasionally embroiled the ICRC in hot water over hypocrisy and double standards, but the group has also done good and vital work. The excuse of neutrality is not without validity—but is it without limits?
In theory, at least, the Red Cross could kick up a maximal fuss. It has the option of pressuring Qatar—the main patron of Hamas, but also a country that wants a place among the civilized nations—to demand it. Qatar is a member of the Red Cross ecosystem—as is Israel. A public tar-and-feathering might move the needle. If that fails, the ICRC can say they will not see one more Gazan civilian without also seeing the hostages. You're not in Switzerland anymore.
In general, I'd argue that the Middle East could use a little less neutrality.
It goes both ways. Israel plays games in the West Bank, where the Palestinians' situation is unacceptable, and this should be called out. Many careful news consumers know about the scandalous situation whereby Jewish settlers have full democratic rights and their Palestinian neighbors do not. Israel should know the world has noticed.
But very few know about the outrages committed by Israel's enemies. For example, that only in Jordan were Palestinian refugees granted citizenship. In Lebanon, for example, where they are not, and Palestinians lack basic health and other social services. What's up with that?
This entire bizarre hereditary refugee status should be blown up. They are not moving to Israel any more than half of Pakistan is returning to India, masses of Germans are returning to the Sudetenland, or Jews who fled Baghdad are returning to Iraq.
UNRWA is part of the global bureaucracy that has put up with this narrative and normalized such nonsense. It has become a self-perpetuating bureaucracy with an interest in maintaining the dangerous fiction that there are many millions of Palestinian "refugees"—instead of pawns being denied basic rights by the countries of their birth, whose language they naturally speak and whose customs they fully share.
Israel has a lot to answer for because of its oppressions of Palestinians in the West Bank. But this is not the only thing that must change, once Hamas is removed from Gaza and the region turns over a new leaf.
The other thing that must change is the unbearable ease with which Israel is demonized. The subtext has been that fanaticism is somehow acceptable if the context is fighting Israel. That's why the discourse so quickly jumps to how Israel has no right to exist and the Jews should "return" to some other country.
It is not just UNRWA that needs reforming—it is this fundamental mindset. I am sensing, even amid the darkness, that such a change is underway.
Dan Perry is managing partner of the New York-based communications firm Thunder11. He is the former Cairo-based Middle East editor and London-based Europe/Africa editor of the Associated Press. Follow him at danperry.substack.com.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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