Political Cynic scoffs!

Headline: Abolish the U.N.’s Palestinian Refugee Agency

Is it predictable that three New York Times Public Intellectual’s Friedman/Brooks/Stephens should all be parties to the Gaza Genocide, and the Famine that is unfolding now? The first paragraphs of Stephens’ would be ‘bill of attainder’.

United Nations agencies and officials are no strangers to scandal and infamy.

U.N. peacekeepers caused a cholera epidemic in Haiti and committed horrific sexual abuses in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The U.N.’s oil-for-food program for Iraq became a multibillion-dollar kickback scheme through which Saddam Hussein all but bribed his way out of international sanctions. In the 1980s, Kurt Waldheim, a former U.N. secretary general, was unmasked as a former Nazi. He was the same secretary general who denounced Israel’s 1976 rescue of Jewish hostages in Entebbe as “a serious violation” of Uganda’s national sovereignty.

Now comes the latest scandal of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, better known as UNRWA.

Last Friday, Israeli officials presented the U.S. government with an intelligence dossier detailing the involvement of 12 UNRWA employees, seven of them schoolteachers, in the massacre of Oct. 7. As reported by The Times’s Ronen Bergman and Patrick Kingsley, the charges range from kidnapping an Israeli woman to storing rocket-propelled grenades to murdering civilians in a kibbutz.

Awful enough — and the U.N. rightly moved swiftly to terminate the employment of nine of those identified by the dossier. But that may be the least of it. “Intelligence estimates shared with the U.S. conclude that around 1,200 of UNRWA’s roughly 12,000 employees in Gaza have links to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and about half have close relatives who belong to the Islamist militant groups,” The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.

…

‘Scandal and Infamy’ reeks of high dungeon. Yet Mr. Stephens like the Neo-Conservative he is, seeks to offer a Crime, that does not quite match the Zionist Crime of Genocide and Famine: though if true merits attention, and remedial legal action.

The Neo-Conservatives seeks to muddy the water of debate about crime, via mis-direction. Leo Strauss attempted to re-write the History of Philosophy, self-presenting as the holder of the vital interpretive key, that lay unnoticed for millennia? Zionist Loyalist Bret Stephens, in the present, offers himself as that indispensable political actor?

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Defenders of UNRWA insist that without it, Palestinian civilians will suffer even more. But there is no reason other international agencies can’t shoulder the burden of the immediate relief effort for Gazans. In the meantime, the Biden administration and other governments need to ask hard questions of UNRWA’s senior officials, starting with Commissioner General Philippe Lazzarini.

To wit: If Lazzarini and his deputies didn’t know that UNRWA in Gaza was employing potentially hundreds of Hamas members or sympathizers, what sort of oversight were they exercising? And if they did know, are they not responsible? In either case — gross negligence or quiet complicity — they need to resign now.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict should not be insoluble. But it can’t be solved so long as millions of Palestinians have been turned into the world’s only permanent refugees. By doing that, UNRWA makes itself an obstacle to peace — reason enough for it to finally go away.

Political Cynic