Since the U.S. government cut its annual funding to UNRWA—the UN agency tasked with caring for Palestinian refugees and their descendants—to $60 million, the organization has been complaining of a financial crisis. While this is surely an exaggeration, Evelyn Gordon hopes the shortfall will encourage UNRWA to drop its insistence that Palestinian “refugees” in Jordan, the West Bank, and Gaza be treated as second-class citizens:

First, UNRWA should stop financing Jordan’s outrageous apartheid system, under which two million Palestinians registered with the agency receive no services from the Jordanian government, even though most (as UNRWA itself admits) are Jordanian citizens. Instead of using Jordan’s health and education systems, they attend special UNRWA schools and health clinics; many even live in ten designated refugee camps.

Clearly, people with citizenship in another country shouldn’t be considered refugees at all. Under the UN High Commissioner for Refugees’ definition, which applies to everyone except Palestinians, anyone who obtains citizenship in another country automatically loses his or her refugee status.

But the situation is also unfair to the Palestinians themselves because they are denied the possibility of integrating into the country where they hold citizenship. Nobody can integrate if forced to live in special camps and attend special schools and clinics. . . . [B]eginning a gradual handover of these services to Jordan would save UNRWA money while also helping two million people. . . .

Second, [much] like Jordan, the Palestinian Authority (PA) refuses to provide services to either the 800,000 registered refugees in the West Bank or the 1.3 million in Gaza. In other words, based on the PA’s self-reported population of 4.9 million, it’s refusing to provide services to a whopping 43 percent of the residents of its putative state. These 2.1 million “refugees” live in 27 designated camps. They attend special UNRWA schools and health clinics, instead of the regular Palestinian ones. And senior PA officials have said explicitly that they are not and never will be entitled to citizenship in the Palestinian state.

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.