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.

Analyzing the recent direct Iranian attack on Israel, and Israel’s security situation more generally, Michael Oren looks to the 2015 agreement to restrain Iran’s nuclear program. That, and President Biden’s efforts to resurrect the deal after Donald Trump left it, are in his view the source of the current crisis:

Of the original motivations for the deal—blocking Iran’s path to the bomb and transforming Iran into a peaceful nation—neither remained. All Biden was left with was the ability to kick the can down the road and to uphold Barack Obama’s singular foreign-policy achievement.

In order to achieve that result, the administration has repeatedly refused to punish Iran for its malign actions:

Historians will survey this inexplicable record and wonder how the United States not only allowed Iran repeatedly to assault its citizens, soldiers, and allies but consistently rewarded it for doing so. They may well conclude that in a desperate effort to avoid getting dragged into a regional Middle Eastern war, the U.S. might well have precipitated one.

While America’s friends in the Middle East, especially Israel, have every reason to feel grateful for the vital assistance they received in intercepting Iran’s missile and drone onslaught, they might also ask what the U.S. can now do differently to deter Iran from further aggression. . . . Tehran will see this weekend’s direct attack on Israel as a victory—their own—for their ability to continue threatening Israel and destabilizing the Middle East with impunity.

Israel, of course, must respond differently. Our target cannot simply be the Iranian proxies that surround our country and that have waged war on us since October 7, but, as the Saudis call it, “the head of the snake.”