When helping becomes harmful [Biden Shoveled TONS of $$ to Anti-Semites]

As you just heard, members of the U.N. agency putatively responsible for Palestinian refugees have been linked to the October 7th Hamas attacks on Israel. That agency is UNRWA, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees...

EICHER: Joining us now to talk about it is Richard Goldberg. He’s a Senior Advisor for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He was previously a National Security Council official and has submitted testimony to the House as part of today’s hearing...

EICHER: Let’s start with the basics. What was UNRWA created to do, and how does it work differently from other U.N. refugee agencies?

GOLDBERG: Yeah, really important question. There are two agencies in the world that deal with quote-unquote refugees. There's the main UN refugee agency, we call that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, that deals with 10s of millions of refugees with just, you know, 10,000-15,000 people, international aid workers that are working towards helping people who are fleeing a conflict, who are moving around internally in the conflict, get back to their lives as quickly as possible, whether that's repatriation return to their homes, some sort of post refugee, post IDP status.

Then there's this other organization, just for this group of people that are called in quotes, "Palestinian refugees," and it's called the UN Relief and Works Agency. It's not international. It has 30,000 people, all Palestinian, working for it. They're not refugees, they haven't been fleeing conflict. These are people who were part of a refugee population of 700,000 or so back in 1948-1949, when Israel was founded. Remember, there was about an equal number of Jewish refugees who were kicked out of Arab countries at the time, they were all absorbed into Israel and the United States. And yet this group of individuals were told don't go back to your home, don't go anywhere else. Stay in refugee status, because the Arab armies will be coming back to liberate you, will be coming back to fulfill the vision of destroying Israel. So this organization became a political manifestation of the Arab war against Israel going back to 1948 all the way until now.

So what do we have here? We have this one unique set of an organization separate from all other refugees in the world, where we pour billions of dollars, knowing that money is going to flow to potentially terrorist organizations, into schools that train, indoctrinate kids to grow up for conflict and not for peace, and keeping them in a refugee status instead of actually saying, how do we grow their economic and political potential. And what you hear today, this breaking news of these 12 individuals who there's now evidence participated in the October 7 massacre, that's a feature, not a bug.

REICHARD: You submitted testimony for today’s subcommittee hearing. I’ll quote from it: “UNRWA is one of the most reckless discretionary spending programs in history.” How do you mean?

GOLDBERG: Well, remember, when we give foreign assistance to an NGO, when USAID, the U.S. Agency for International Development, puts out some money for a contract for development work, we have to run all the people involved in that organization through our intelligence community to verify if there's any hits for potential terrorism. We don't require that of U.N. agencies. We certainly don't require that of UNRWA, even though it operates in an area where we know there's many, many, many terrorist organizations operating and therefore the risk is very high that your money will be flowing there.

But zoom back out. From an oversight of U.S. taxpayer dollars, I worked many, many years as a staff associate for the appropriations committee that works on all these foreign assistance programs. And your number one question is, where's the money? How's it being spent? What's the oversight? How do we know we're getting good value for our money? There's no board of directors that UNRWA has for us to weigh in on who its leader should be. This is an independent agency. They just say give us the money and go away. Between 1950 and 2018 when the Trump administration halted our funding for UNRWA, US taxpayers committed $6 billion to UNRWA. Do you know how much money we've committed since 2021, when the Biden administration restarted funding? A billion dollars in just three years. Because UNRWA says the sky is falling, they need cash immediately, the population has grown, the need is growing. That's not sustainable as a program on its merits. We have tried for 20 years to get an independent expenditure audit of UNRWA's books, they won't allow it. They say the U.N. has a single audit principle, only the U.N.'s board of auditors can look at the books. Well, that's a red alert.

So if you look at the efficiency of dollars, the lack of accountability, both governance-wise, financial auditing-wise, plus the terror finance problems, plus the education system, you know, raising people to hate, to commit something like October 7, do I need another example of why this is broken for the U.S. taxpayer? It just makes no sense. It is likely one of the worst programs we have ever funded in the US government history. And it has to stop.

GOLDBERG: Well, first of all, don't keep putting money into UNRWA. If we want to build up leverage to actually have change, we need to work with our allies to withhold funding and say that money is going to go into other organizations that can do true humanitarian work that we trust in other areas of the world. And we're going to set up metrics for success. Success is saying we've now raised this many people out of poverty. We've now given this many political rights to people who live in Palestinian areas.

It's not success to add another hundred thousand people to a refugee roll and say that the refugee problem has gotten worse, an imaginary refugee problem, because Israel is a problem. The Israeli forces are not anywhere near the camps that UNRWA runs in Lebanon. And yet for the last several months, there have been terror firefights going on between random Palestinian terror groups killing each other. Why is it anywhere UNRWA goes, terror infrastructure follows?

So we have a problem here. We have other trusted agencies and organizations we've worked with in other parts of the world that can do education, that can do health care delivery, and can do it in a way where you don't keep sending people into despair and poverty and hate, and instead give people the path to self sufficiency and self responsibility.

REICHARD: Richard Goldberg is a senior advisor for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Thank you for your expertise!

I had NO IDEA this UNWRA has been around for decades--all because the people in Gaza won't assimilate anywhere

As the interview explains, UNWRA is a unique organization. It exists only for the Palestinians. All other refugees from every other conflict zone has one UN agency, the Palestinians get their own special agency. The agency for (other) refugees only help resettle the generation of people who were displaced. If you are a child or grandchild of a displaced person born after the conflict they will not recognize you, as an adult, as a refugee. They expect you will be resettled. But UNRWA recognizes Palestinians as refugees even after many generations. There are 5th and maybe 6th generations in Gaza who are considered refugees even though they were born there, have a home there, and their great grandparents there. They consider it their home, nobody else claims the land, and yet they are considered "refugees" because of UNRWA's special rules.

Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are assimilated. Gaza was inhabited mainly by Arabs of Palestine since at least the Ottoman empire. It was previously Ottoman, then part of the British Mandate, and then taken by Egypt after the 1948 war up until the peace deal with Israel in 1979. Egypt took back the Sinai peninsula, but refused to take back Gaza. The people of Gaza, at least anyone more than 75 years old, are not refugees. They have been settled in Gaza. There may be some who fled into Gaza in the war of 1948 who are still alive but that number is very small, and they have established their home in Gaza since then.

UNRWA exists to perpetuate the victim status of Palestinians as "refugees" from "colonialist Zionism". Really, they had the opportunity to accept the partition plan in 1948, or to declare their independence after 1979, or in 1999 under Oslo, or in 2004. They - or at least their leaders - do not want to declare themselves independent and become responsible members of the world community. The Hamas and Islamic Jihad types are remnants of the Pan-Islamic ideology that essentially claims any land that was once ruled by Islamic people must stay Islamic. The "moderates" have a slightly different ideology called Pan-Arabism. They say that any land that was once ruled by Arabs must stay ruled by Arabs. So they reject Israel as a homeland ruled by Jewish people as a matter of ideology. They accept loads of cash and in-kind donations from sympathizers and groups inclined against Israel or who believe the Palestinian myths. The Palestinians exaggerate their claims of victimhood (and to some degree it has been working) but every once in a while they have to go over the top and blow up a disco or bus or hijack an airplane or shoot up an Olympics or launch an Oct 7th attach to get headlines and elicit a disproportionate response, and then cry that they are victim. They have many problems, but most of them are of their own making based on their own ideologies; and a refusal (or inability) of the people to take control of their own destiny as a people.

UNRWA needs to be disbanded. The Palestinians need to be forced to make the hard choice to become responsible to themselves and good partners in the world of civilizations. It won't be easy, though, because there are Palestinians in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon and even Israel. While in Israel they are given citizenship (or, if they refuse it, green cards) and in Jordan but the biggest problem with UNRWA is that it allows Lebanon and Syria to refuse to integrate their Palestinian residents. In Lebanon the Palestinians are denied citizenship, and denied higher education. They are expected to be "resettled" somewhere else, but where? They have lived in Lebanon at least for 75 years and many generations but are not even citizens or allowed government jobs. There is no room for them in Gaza and the people of the West Bank don't want them to flood in either. The people of the West Bank don't really want a unity state and free flow of people between Gaza, either. The West Bank is perhaps the more affluent of the three areas Palestinians live. They have the same social anxiety many countries do at the prospect of a million under-educated, under-skilled people coming into their neighborhoods. So underneath all the top line commentary we hear from pundits and politicians, there is a real fundamental problem with the structure of Palestinian society. Biden can talk all day about a "Palestinian State" but unless these issues are addressed it's probably impossible. Trump and Kushner tried to get something going, where something like $50 billion would have been spent to economically develop the area, lease land from Egypt, and possibly to help integrate Palestinians in Lebanese society the way they are inside Israel and Jordan but it only went so far as to produce the Abraham accords. Which was a great accomplishment on its own merits but perhaps also what caused the Palestinian militant groups to lash out. They are not capable of declaring their own independence because then they will be expected to be responsible for their own people - but they cannot, and will not for many ideological and socio-economic reasons. The status quo suits them even though it is obviously unsustainable and leads to horrors.

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