Since 1949, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, a body supported by the international community, has spent billions of dollars tending to the humanitarian needs of more than one million Palestinian refugees in the Middle East. The refugees, having been displaced from their homes in 1948 and 1967, certainly require assistance.
But should the UN be doling out money to UNRWA-supported schools that promote the “right of return,” a philosophy that flagrantly negates Israel’s right to exist and rejects a two-state solution?
Of course not.
UNRWA reportedly spends about $500 million, roughly half its annual budget, to finance a network of schools in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and eastern Jerusalem. These schools employ approximately 10,000 teachers and support staff and use textbooks supplied by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, which respectively control and administer the West Bank and the Gaza Strip . They also teach their pupils that the “right of return” — a concept that would enable the refugees to return their former homes in what is now Israel — is a sacrosanct objective of the Palestinian national movement.
In David Bedein’s revealing documentary, Inside the UNRWA Classroom, which can be found on the Internet, teachers openly acknowledge that the “right of return” is a major focus of the curriculum in such schools.
One teacher, looking at a map of Palestine, refers to Tel Aviv and Jaffa as “Palestinian cities.” Another teacher asserts that Jews have no historic rights in Israel, claims that “the Jews took our land” and says that the refugees will soon go back to their ancestral homeland.
Students, some barely out of their diapers, are no less committed to the principle of the “right of return.” They shout, “Glory to a liberated Palestine.” More menacingly, they equate the “right of return” with armed struggle and the murder of Jews.
As one Israeli scholar who has studied the subject for many years points out, Palestinian textbooks create “a curriculum for war” rather than peace. And obviously, Palestinian teachers employed in UNRWA schools are the incubators and conveyers of these ideas. It’s hardly surprising that Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the late Hamas leader, was on UNRWA’s payroll as a teacher before he turned to politics and terrorism.
Nor it is surprising that 41 suicide bombers, credited with killing 83 people in Israel, studied at UNRWA schools, which during the recent war in Gaza were commandeered by Hamas as storage facilities for its rockets.
UNRWA denies that its school are being grossly misused, but the denial is belied by Bedein’s film and by surveys suggesting that a large number of Palestinians subscribe to the “right of return.”
The two-state solution is endorsed by the UN and the vast majority of its member states, yet UNRWA schools are marching to a different drummer by harping on the “right of return” and thereby supporting a one-state solution.
It strains credulity to believe that the UN is really unaware of the Palestinians’ agenda. So what now? It’s incumbent on UNRWA to clean up its schools so that a peaceful and equitable resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict will remain a realistic possibility.
http://youtu.be/YGJajyjMCbs