Why Is Tonight Different From All Other UN Defaults on Israel?

The United Nations has a habit of inflicting diplomatic plagues on Israel during major Jewish holidays. So why would tonight be different from all others? A report casting doubt on Israel’s documentation of Hamas’ infiltration of Turtle Bay’s top Gaza organ, the UN Relief and Works Agency, is issued as Israelis sit down at the Seder table. The 49-page report was cooked up to ensure that Unrwa’s funding would resume. Secretary-General Guterres named a long-time Unrwa supporter, Catherine Colonna, a former French foreign minister, to address a brewing crisis when Israel documented that 12 Unrwa employees participated in Hamas’s October 7 atrocities. According to an Israel Defense Force analysis, 2,135 Unrwa employees, or 17 percent of its staff, are Hamas members. “However,” the Colonna report now claims, “Israel has yet to provide supporting evidence of this.” At the Quai D’Orsay, Ms. Colonna was a major cheerleader for Unrwa. She eagerly promoted France’s role as one of the world’s top fund contributors to the agency. No wonder Mr. Guterres picked her and three sympathetic Scandinavian charities to issue an “independent” review of Unrwa. No wonder her report makes the fantastic claim that Unrwa has a “more developed approach to neutrality than other similar UN or NGO entities.”Sure, there are “problems,” Ms. Colonna admits, and proposes bureaucratic measures to address them. Mr. Guterres dutifully leaped to announce he would act on the recommendations. The whole exercise was designed to give world governments a fig leaf to renew funds that were suspended after IDF troops in Gaza discovered how deeply Hamas managed to infiltrate the agency. America, the largest donor, suspended Unrwa funding in January.By March, Congress barred all American funding to Unrwa for a year. President Biden signed the law, even though it was he who had resumed Unrwa funding after President Trump cut it in 2018. Even prior to the Colonna report, the Department of State quietly urged allies to resume support. The European Union, Canada, Australia, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Germany, France, and Japan have resumed funding. Expect a flood of new donations now. Founded in 1949, Unrwa is unique. Unlike the global UN refugee agency, it deals exclusively with Arabs displaced during Israel’s war of independence. It perpetuates their refugee status, which by now is conferred on millions of fifth-generation stateless people who cultivate the dream that Israel would be gone. Then, as Unrwa school teachers instruct, they could return to a past, imagined Shanghai-la where no Jew ever molested an Arab land. For decades Israelis were torn about Unrwa, fearing humanitarian catastrophe without it. Yet, as a former Knesset member who has extensively advocated the dismantling of Unrwa, Einat Wilf, tells our Mary Julia Koch, the agency was created “to funnel UN legitimacy and Western money to the ongoing effort to undo the Jewish state.” Discovering the depths of the genocidal Hamas’s dominance over Unrwa, Jerusalem no longer coddles it. All UN agencies operate courtesy of local governments. Since 2007 Hamas has been the absolute power in Gaza. How credible, then, is Ms. Colonna’s push for a bit more “neutrality” under the Hamas guns? No tweaking of the bureaucracy’s structure would do. As long as Hamas survives, no charity organization — let alone one as tainted as Unrwa — can resolve Gaza’s crises. The only way they end is when Hamas is no more. Could the UN advocate that?

Why Is Tonight Different From All Other UN Defaults on Israel?

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