Coincidence played a part in getting the truth out about UNRWA: Hard work made it available.

I happened to sit next to someone from Trump’s transition team in December 2016 at a conference in Jerusalemn and had no idea who she was..

When I found out AFTER the event, I called the official on her DC cell phone which worked in Jerusalem and asked if she would like to see the full UNRWA curriculum and selections of 30 years of investigations of UNRWA,posted unfailingly by Arutz Sheva, carried out by my team at Israel Resource Agency..
“Of course,” she said.
That curriculum wound up in the Oval office.
This enabled direct contact with the White House.

The background to this encounter speaks for itself

In January 2016, a senior official at the US State Department had called me a liar, to my face. He informed me that all the work that we had done on the Palestinian Authority textbooks used by UNRWA, using a professional Arabic translator, was one great fabrication,  that the US government had checked out the PA textbooks used by UNRWA, and that they met the highest standards of peace education.

Six months later, the White House issued a statement in a similar vein to a colleague in DC: “While there is still work to be done, the Palestinian government has made significant progress in reducing inflammatory rhetoric and revising official textbooks. Over the past few years, the PA has helped improve the Palestinian curriculum, including textbooks that discuss human rights and the Holocaust, which has contributed to a better education for young Palestinians.”

To respond to this, I asked my staff to purchase all PA textbooks used by UNRWA and to translate all the books, so that we could hand the results to theUS Congress and to the Israeli Knesset.

One of the ironies is that USAID in Ramallah wrote to us, saying that the US “never examines the PA textbooks used by UNRWA”…despite the fact that the US donates $400 million each year to UNRWA – one third of the UNRWA budget.

Now, the newly elected President  quoted  the  PA/UNRWA war indoctrination curriculum in his first meeting with the Prime minister of Israel and referred to it ever since as the basis of his policy of attack on UNRWA and the PA.
In  three trips to DC  since the President came into office, we made it our business to stay in touch with the right policy people.
Pushing the UNRWA issue made  enemies and oresented countless hurdles.

But we overcame them.
My mentor, Social Work Prof. Eliezer Jaffe z”l, encouraged me a few days before his death in May 2017, saying that the careful process we had  applied in our work would change US UNRWA policy and could even bring down UNRWA. He was correct.
Never ascribe success in Jerusalem to your own abilities.
Believe that  the blessings of Hashem for Am Yisrael in Eretz Yisrael will enable your success.
Eliezer z”l stressed, however, that a problem is a problem when someone makes it into a problem.
Unless other nations follow suit, the UNRWA curriculum motto of the “right of return by force of arms” will continue to pose a lethal threat to every Jew in Israel.

The post Bringing down UNRWA appeared first on Israel Behind the News.

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David Bedein
David Bedein

David Bedein is an MSW community organizer and an investigative journalist.   In 1987, Bedein established the Israel Resource News Agency at Beit Agron to accompany foreign journalists in their coverage of Israel, to balance the media lobbies established by the PLO and their allies.   Mr. Bedein has reported for news outlets such as CNN Radio, Makor Rishon, Philadelphia Inquirer, Los Angeles Times, BBC and The Jerusalem Post, For four years, Mr. Bedein acted as the Middle East correspondent for The Philadelphia Bulletin, writing 1,062 articles until the newspaper ceased operation in 2010. Bedein has covered breaking Middle East negotiations in Oslo, Ottawa, Shepherdstown, The Wye Plantation, Annapolis, Geneva, Nicosia, Washington, D.C., London, Bonn, and Vienna. Bedein has overseen investigative studies of the Palestinian Authority, the Expulsion Process from Gush Katif and Samaria, The Peres Center for Peace, Peace Now, The International Center for Economic Cooperation of Yossi Beilin, the ISM, Adalah, and the New Israel Fund.   Since 2005, Bedein has also served as Director of the Center for Near East Policy Research.   A focus of the center’s investigations is The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). In that context, Bedein authored Roadblock to Peace: How the UN Perpetuates the Arab-Israeli Conflict – UNRWA Policies Reconsidered, which caps Bedein’s 28 years of investigations of UNRWA. The Center for Near East Policy Research has been instrumental in reaching elected officials, decision makers and journalists, commissioning studies, reports, news stories and films. In 2009, the center began decided to produce short movies, in addition to monographs, to film every aspect of UNRWA education in a clear and cogent fashion.   The center has so far produced seven short documentary pieces n UNRWA which have received international acclaim and recognition, showing how which UNRWA promotes anti-Semitism and incitement to violence in their education’   In sum, Bedein has pioneered The UNRWA Reform Initiative, a strategy which calls for donor nations to insist on reasonable reforms of UNRWA. Bedein and his team of experts provide timely briefings to members to legislative bodies world wide, bringing the results of his investigations to donor nations, while demanding reforms based on transparency, refugee resettlement and the demand that terrorists be removed from the UNRWA schools and UNRWA payroll.   Bedein’s work can be found at:www.IsraelBehindTheNews.com and www.cfnepr.com. A new site,unrwa-monitor.com, will be launched very soon.

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