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AMONG THE MAIN Mideast developments at this writing, it now appears that a
United Nations commission will not be traveling to Jenin, but Yasser Arafat
will be. The purpose of Arafat's Jenin visit is to draw public sympathy for
residents of the United Nations refugee camp there, where fierce fighting
occurred several weeks ago. For Americans, perhaps our attention should
focus more on underlying questions: Why is the United Nations running
refugee camps for people who claim to be living in their own land? How could
a refugee camp under U.N. auspices become a world center for recruiting and
training suicide bombers? And why is the United States essentially
bankrolling these camps when wealthy Arab oil sheikhdoms barely contribute?
According to U.N. records, the United States finances more than one-fourth
of the cost of operating the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for
Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). In 2000, for example, the
United States pledged $89,560,000 towards the $337,014,742 total that UNRWA
raised from all nations and sources in the world. By comparison, Saudi
Arabia pledged $2,500,000--less than 1 percent of the UNRWA total and a
minuscule fraction of the American contribution. Oil-rich Kuwait pledged $2
million. Syria pledged $37,209. Egypt pledged $10,000. Iraq and Libya
apparently had difficult years; they pledged nothing, although Iraq sends
bounties of $25,000 each to the families of suicide bombers.
The UNRWA is a subsidiary of the United Nations. Its commissioner-general,
appointed by the U.N. secretary general, is the only head of a United
Nations body authorized to report directly to the General Assembly. The
UNRWA was founded by Resolution 302(IV) of December 8, 1949, and to this
day remains unique within the world body as a relief agency assigned to
serve only one class of people. All the world's other refugees are served
by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). UNHCR serves
the needs of more than 21.8 million refugees in 120 countries ranging from
the Balkans, Colombia, West Africa, and Chechnya to Afghanistan, Sri Lanka,
Timor, and the Horn of Africa. Palestinian Arabs alone are under the aegis
of the UNRWA.
Locally recruited "Palestinian refugees" make up 99 percent of
UNRWA's staff in the 59 refugee camps that UNRWA operates in Jordan,
Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, and the disputed territories that Israelis call
"Judea and Samaria" and that the Arab world calls "the West
Bank." The majority of UNRWA camps and nearly 60 percent of their residents
are in the three Arab countries, the remainder in the areas administered by
Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority. According to the UNRWA, it is the
main provider of basic social services in all those camps.
The UNRWA's largest budget item is its school system, comprising half its
budget and two-thirds of its staff. In all, the UNRWA operates 266 schools
with 242,000 students in the area administered by the Palestinian
Authority. In the aftermath of Israel's military incursion into the UNRWA
refugee camp in Jenin, that agency has been under a microscope, partly
because it has schooled four generations of Jenin children. According to
the UNRWA, its schools use the same curricula and textbooks as do the host
government schools. Palestinian Authority textbooks incorporate maps of the
Middle East that omit Israel, and their texts delegitimize Israel, Judaism,
and Jews.
Under the UNRWA's auspices, the number of refugees it serves has grown from
914,000 in 1950 to more than 3.8 million today. Thus, the overwhelming
majority of its population are the children, grandchildren, or
great-grandchildren of those who first were placed in UNRWA camps in 1950.
Between 1947 and 1950, approximately 750,000 Jewish refugees were driven
from Arab countries in the Middle East. There was no United Nations agency
to serve their health, educational, and social needs. So they were absorbed
directly into the Israeli polity, and their offspring bear no indicia of
refugee status. For example, the president of Israel, Moshe Katsav, is the
child of Iranian Jewish refugees from that time.
Israel reports that approximately half the suicide bombers who have struck
over the past 19 months were residents of the Jenin UNRWA camp or
terrorists who were trained there. It also is odd that a "refugee
camp" under United Nations auspices has emerged as a terror center
where Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Tanzim, and Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade terrorists
ran wild, stocking arms, building bomb-making factories, and recruiting and
training children educated at UNRWA schools to detonate themselves. Perhaps
oddest of all is the American role as chief bankroller.
With Washington now scouring its outlays in the face of projected budget
deficits, it is remarkable that America continues to pump scores of
millions into a U.N. program that has institutionalized dependency among
four generations of Arabs--while the oil princes barely contribute. It is
remarkable, too, that the refugees and their descendants are still living
in squalor half a century after the helping hand first was extended.
This makes no sense. In a time when U.N. fact-finding commissions are all
the rage, here is a subject for congressional fact-finders to investigate:
Why are we throwing away all those tax dollars?
Dov B. Fischer is an attorney in Los Angeles.
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