A bill to outlaw any dealing with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) is supposed to come up for a vote in the Knesset at the end of the month. International pressure spearheaded by the Biden administration to take it off the agenda is mounting.
This is, of course, part of the effort to resurrect the so-called “two-state solution” out of the ashes of Oct. 7. The effort depends on preserving the illusion that there are viable, meaningful forces in Palestinian society capable of contributing to constructive nation-building, pragmatic civil administration and, eventually, peace.
Isn’t UNRWA such a force? Is it not a human-rights organization bent on alleviating the suffering of the poor and oppressed?
Well, the answer is emphatically no. UNRWA is a travesty—the epitome of the international community’s hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy.
UNRWA was created originally—one should also add allegedly—to alleviate the plight of the Palestinian refugees of 1948. But it was born in sin.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, it metastasized into a malignant growth that exacerbates, rather than relieves, the problem it was supposedly created to solve. We just received an ironic reminder of what the agency really is when we learned that one of the bodyguards who died along with Yahya Sinwar on Oct. 16 carried a passport that said he was an “UNRWA teacher.”
The United Nations has a general agency for refugees (UNHCR), but the Palestinians have a specialized, separate refugee organization. The Arab enemies of Israel insisted on creating it in order to ensure the problem would not be solved, so it could fester like a thorn in Zionism’s side, poised to bring its eventual ruin.
That result could be brought about by a combination of demography (UNRWA schools keep indoctrinating children to believe they have a “right of return” into Israel proper) and violence (UNRWA schools also indoctrinate children to aspire to “martyrdom.”)
Like a cancerous growth attaching blood vessels to itself at the expense of healthy organs, UNRWA sucks in aid money that is supposed to help Gazans and funnels it into the perpetuation of the war that ensures their continued misery.
That is how the agency gradually turned into a terror-supporting organization, and eventually the handmaiden of Hamas. The sadistic, savage perpetrators of the Oct. 7 massacre were brought up in UNRWA schools and kindergartens, where instilling bloodlust and wild racial and religious antisemitism is the perennial aim of the curricula.
But UNRWA is not only in the business of indoctrinating future terrorists. It is a central pillar of Hamas rule and ultimately, at least in Gaza, indistinguishable from it.
First there is the money. UNRWA budgets, which are channeled into civil administration, free Hamas to dedicate its own resources to terrorism. This “civil” use of budgets by UNRWA is also, of course, not exactly civil. It allows weapons depots in its facilities, schools and kindergartens, thus taking an active part in the strategy of using civilians as human shields.
In fact, the alleged organizational separation between UNRWA and Hamas is more fiction than reality. Out of 12,790 UNRWA employees in Gaza, more than 12,000 are either Hamas members or spouses of Hamas members.
The international scandal that erupted when it was discovered that 12 UNRWA employees took an active part in the Oct. 7 massacre was quickly submerged in the hectic wartime news cycle. But we now know that there were dozens, not just a single dozen, such UNRWA rapists and murderers on that fateful day
And there’s more. There are hundreds of men on the UNRWA payroll who are actual active Hamas soldiers. And it is worth noting that in Judea and Samaria, too, there are about 4,000 UNRWA employees serving similar causes, while enjoying UNRWA’s diplomatic immunity.
Israel has long turned a blind eye to all of this. The Israel Defense Forces has developed a kind of addiction to UNRWA over the years, buying short-term calm at the price of long-term negligence.
Politicians in Israel have traditionally had an almost mystical reverence for people speaking in the name of the “security establishment,” and so they accepted IDF and Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) complacency as reasonable policy.
But Oct. 7, 2023 broke that spell, at least for some. Thus, despite Israel’s previous international commitments, a number of Knesset members sponsored a bill to outlaw UNRWA and forbid all state institutions from working with it.
This would mean that the Israeli Foreign Ministry would no longer be able to grant UNRWA employees diplomatic visas; that they will no longer enjoy immunity from legal proceedings inside Israel; that the customs service would not be able to issue their usual customs waivers; that the IDF would not be able to coordinate the passage of supply trucks with UNRWA; and that the Jerusalem Municipality would not be able to supply UNRWA’s offices with water (there is an illegal UNRWA compound in eastern Jerusalem).
The bill was being prepared for a vote at the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, when the committee members noticed a clause inserted by the Foreign Ministry’s legal advisers and representatives of the Justice Ministry. According to the clause in question: “The provisions of this law do not derogate from Israel’s obligations undertaken in treaties Israel has ratified.”
Put simply, this provision nullifies everything in the bill. So committed are our legal advisers to currying favor with international tribunals and other international institutions—many of them openly antisemitic—that they have lost sight of Israel’s existential interests, and with them the very concept of national sovereignty.
Here’s what our jurists should have done. They should have advised the committee that Israel should invoke article 62(1)a of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, which specifies what changes of circumstances constitute legitimate grounds for withdrawing from an international treaty.
The circumstances clearly merit that. UNRWA was officially created in the name of human rights for the relief of the plight of refugees, but it has turned into a terror-sponsoring organization.
They should have also reminded our politicians that this, like any legal advice, was just that—advice—and that it is ultimately a political decision whether UNRWA should or should not be outlawed. It is the job of legal advisers to help politicians make the legal case for the course of action on which the politicians have decided, as well as to advise them regarding what the legal consequences of ignoring the law may be. But they should not presume, as Israel’s jurists do, to have veto power over policy.
In the event, MK Amit Halevi (Likud), who sits on the committee, demanded the removal of this clause and its replacement with a clause that says the exact opposite: That none of the obligations undertaken by the State of Israel will abrogate the provisions of this law. Halevi’s language cited the fact that the fundamental change of circumstances since UNRWA’s establishment justifies the termination of these obligations.
Halevi achieved partial success. The clause was struck down, but his alternative was not adopted, thus leaving the bill more open than it would have otherwise been to further meddling by judges and legal advisers. The bill is up for a Knesset vote later this month, where Halevi’s amendment may still be adopted.
That the matter is ultimately political rather than legal was underscored by the fact that the Biden administration is threatening to punish Israel if the bill passes in the Knesset. This is one more way in which the United States is trying to prevent Israeli victory in this war, and it should be resisted, either directly or in less conspicuous ways.
From the outset of the war, Israeli policy involved a delicate dance of defying American dictums just enough to wage effective war and to signal to our enemies that we would not be deterred, while not leading to an open breach with the U.S.
But there’s a context to this affair that goes beyond relations with the Biden administration, and even beyond the war itself. It should also be understood as one more skirmish in the ideological struggle that the Hudson Institute’s John Fonte identified at the dawn of the 21st century—the struggle between democratic sovereignty, on the one hand, and transnational progressivism, on the other.
The first invests full sovereignty in the nation state, while the latter seeks to subordinate nation states to a higher, and unaccountable, international authority.
This is not a zero-sum game. One can make a plausible argument for international law as an agreement between states that protects their sovereignty. But increasingly we hear about “aggregated” or “parceled” sovereignty, and we see more and more international institutions encroaching on state sovereignty in various ways, including by presuming to have authority over issues that international treaties did not cover.
The problem often is—all over the West—that jurists within nation states are beginning to confuse their own roles within their states with a view of themselves as emissaries of an allegedly higher authority outside the state. And that higher authority neither draws its legitimacy from the consent of the governed nor, increasingly, from the consent of sovereign states, as the convoluted logic of the two courts at the Hague—the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court—have recently demonstrated.
What the danger of this trend might be we can now clearly see: Drawing as it does on progressive woke views, the commitment to an allegedly higher authority has replaced morality with the double standards of woke elites. The beneficiaries of this trend are barbaric terrorists, who can watch with satisfaction how their victims are blamed for crimes of the terrorists—in this case, genocide.
And by this topsy-turvy logic we are supposed to cooperate with our own enemies, because human rights and international law bind our hands in just wars against them, while freeing theirs to commit the most unthinkable atrocities against us.
UNRWA is a uniquely grotesque example of this perverse logic: terrorists and their auxiliaries masquerading as human-rights activists. Remember Sinwar’s “UNRWA teacher” bodyguard.
Israel cannot by itself overthrow this growing regime of transnational progressivism, though it should always be aware that within its rules the Jewish state cannot win. It will always be the case that while we are asked to play by the rules of chess, the other side is allowed to beat us with a club.
That’s not a situation to which we can acquiesce, and indeed we don’t. We defy this regime in different ways, depending on the circumstances.
Israel can and should defy the United States with regard to UNRWA and refuse to accept the legitimacy of the ICJ proceedings on the malicious accusations of genocide. But in the case of UNIFIL, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, it seems better to work around them rather than risk a direct hit on this corrupt U.N. force, despite the fact that it is shielding Hezbollah.
One other thing we can do—as difficult as it is to imagine after the defeat of last year’s judicial reform attempts—is to rein in our own jurists and remind them that final decisions in democratic states are taken by the legally elected government, not by civil-service jurists who treat international law—and international tribunals and agencies—as if it were some objective set of rules based on objective values, and not the political arena that it is. They should be our foot soldiers in the fight to protect our sovereignty against the rising transnational progressive regime, not the enforcers of that regime in our midst.
If we want to withstand international pressure, we need our own ducks in a row. We need to wage lawfare effectively in a hostile international environment. Some smart Jewish lawyers who aim to resist, not serve, the transnational progressive regime would be very useful at this particular junction.