Palestinians Must Lead the Fight to Reform UNRWA

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) was founded in 1949 to provide humanitarian assistance to Arab refugees from Israel’s war of independence. It has since become a corrupt and bloated institution as well as an enabler of terrorism, and its foremost goal is to maintain its own existence by keeping the descendants of those refugees in poverty in its camps. The only way it can be fixed, argues Bassem Eid, is if Palestinians pressure the Western nations that fund it to demand its reform:

As a proud Palestinian, I must take responsibility for what will happen to our people. We can no longer deny our responsibility for the future of our people. UNRWA, to continue its operation, depends on death and the visual suffering of five million Palestinians who continue to wallow in and around UNRWA facilities. The more Palestinians suffer, the more power goes to UNRWA, which allows it to raise unchecked humanitarian funds and purchase munitions. . . . The only agency that can abolish UNRWA is the UN General Assembly, which has never had the interests of the Palestinian people at heart. After all, the UN rakes in more than $1.2 billion a year as an “incentive” to continue our status as refugees.

A Western defunding of UNRWA [suggested by some] would allow nations like Qatar to enter the vacuum, leaving the West with no leverage over UNRWA policy. The point is [instead] to influence donor nations to reform UNRWA and predicate future aid to UNRWA on reasonable conditions.

Read more at Jerusalem Post

More about: Palestinian refugees, Qatar, United Nations, UNRWA

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF