To Facilitate Peace, President Trump Should Shut Down UNRWA

Founded in 1949, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) was tasked with the admirable mission of providing humanitarian assistance for some 700,000 Palestinians displaced by Israel’s War of Independence. The organization now serves the millions of descendants of these refugees, prevents their successful integration into the lands in which they now live, and educates their children to hate Israel and yearn for return to “Palestine.” Noting that the question of these refugees and their “right of return” is now regarded as the biggest impediment to a two-state solution, Sol Stern calls on Donald Trump to defund UNRWA:

Less than 5 percent of UNRWA’s clients ever lived in Israel, but the agency’s regulations state that all patrilineal descendants of the original displaced persons shall retain their refugee rights in perpetuity. Nor does UNRWA seem to be troubled by the fact that 40 percent of its camp residents are citizens of Jordan and Lebanon, and shouldn’t even be considered refugees under accepted international law and practice.

The unchecked growth of UNRWA is a classic case in international politics of the economic principle of “moral hazard.” By providing a social-welfare safety net, the UN enables the Palestinian leadership to undermine efforts to solve the underlying conditions that created the refugee problem in the first place. Palestinian rejectionism is thus rendered risk-free. In turn, UNRWA nurtures Palestinian extremism, yet never is held accountable by the agency’s donor nations, including the United States. . . .

As president, Trump can do a big favor for the Palestinians by disabusing them of their fantasy of return. He should begin by immediately cutting off all American funding of UNRWA. (This will be quite easy to do, because UNRWA isn’t financed out of the UN budget, but rather through voluntary contributions from many member states.) Instead, the president can announce that the $400 million that usually goes directly to UNRWA will be set aside for a fund available for permanent resettlement of the Palestinian residents of the refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza. Trump should also lobby the other nations funding UNRWA (mostly our European allies) that it’s time to end this destructive 66-year venture that breeds hate and violence.

Finally, Trump should read the Palestinian president the riot act. He should tell Mahmoud Abbas that it’s time to end the 1948 war and let the 5.6-million alleged Palestinian refugees know that they are never going back to Israel. If Abbas is agreeable to this new path to peace, President Trump can assure the Palestinian leader that the U.S. will do everything it can to facilitate negotiations for a two-state solution. If Abbas refuses to renounce the right of return, Trump should warn him that the U.S. will end all aid programs to the Palestinians.

Read more at City Journal

More about: Donald Trump, Israel & Zionism, Palestinian refugees, U.S. Foreign policy, UNRWA

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society