“The United Nations,” Eleanor Roosevelt said shortly after its founding, “is our greatest hope for future peace.” The UN was birthed from the most cataclysmic war in modern history—a war in which the genocide of world Jewry was an animating feature of the West’s enemies. But nearly eight decades later the UN is a collaborator in another attempted genocide of Jews.
Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that instead of bringing peace, the United Nations has brought murder and terror to the land of Israel. These are strong words, but the evidence bears them out.
On November 4, 2024, the Israeli Foreign Ministry informed the UN that it was withdrawing from the 1967 agreement recognizing the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA). The move came after the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, passed legislation to curtail the UNRWA’s operations in Israel, the West Bank (Judea and Samaria), and the Gaza Strip.
In a letter to the president of the UN General Assembly, the Foreign Ministry noted that “Israel will continue to work with international partners, including other United Nations agencies, to ensure the facilitation of humanitarian aid to civilians in Gaza in a way that does not undermine Israel’s security.”
Israel’s decision to sever ties with UNRWA did not happen in a vacuum. The UNRWA is part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Indeed, less than a week before Israel’s announcement, a former UNRWA employee admitted on video that Hamas, the Gaza-based, U.S.-designated terror group, uses the agency’s vehicles. The UNRWA itself has been implicated in the October 7, 2023 terrorist attack, in which Iranian proxies, led by Hamas, invaded Israel and perpetrated the largest massacre of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust. The evidence of the UNRWA’s involvement is overwhelming.
Of the approximately 13,000 UNRWA employees in Gaza, Israeli security documents reveal that no fewer than 440 are active members of Hamas, 2,000 are registered Hamas operatives, and another 7,000 have family members who belong to the terrorist organization. On October 7, Hamas used UNRWA vehicles and facilities to carry out the attack and UNRWA employees helped murder, maim, and kidnap innocents.
In August, faced with insurmountable evidence, the UN itself conceded that no fewer than nine of its employees may have taken part in the attack. But as Richard Goldberg and David May of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies noted, the UN’s admission was little more than a “whitewash” meant to “protect UNRWA’s funding” from members of Congress rightly outraged that American tax dollars are funding the mass murder of Israelis, Americans, and others. As Goldberg and May point out, “UNRWA is more than nine bad apples—it is rotten to the core.”
Nor is this the first documented instance of the UNRWA assisting Hamas. As the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA) noted in the Washington Post in 2018, UNRWA employees have been caught praising anti-Jewish violence, and, per a 2015 U.N. investigation, the organization’s facilities were used by terrorist groups to launch and store rockets during the 2014 Israel-Hamas War. For years, the UNRWA’s employee unions have been dominated by members of terrorist groups, including Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Fatah’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. This evidence—including video footage of terrorists using UNRWA buildings during wars against Israel—has long been in the public domain. When Israel recently killed Hamas leader Yayha Sinwar, an UNRWA teacher’s ID was found on the terror chieftain’s body.
The UNRWA does not recognize Hamas as a terrorist group—this despite Hamas’s charter that calls for the destruction of Israel and the genocide of Jews. And it doesn’t do so for a simple reason: UNRWA shares these objectives. The UN agency’s raison d’être is to dismantle and destroy the world’s sole Jewish state. Here too the evidence is clear.
The UNRWA was created in 1949. It is the only UN organization whose stated aim is to assist a specific group of refugees, Palestinian Arabs. All other refugee populations fall under the jurisdiction of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). UNRWA also has a peculiar definition of “refugee.” Unlike definitions used by the UNHCR, the term “refugee” as the UNRWA defines it includes people who are several generations removed from the conflict, people who are citizens of new states, and people who reside in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip—places that Palestinians themselves claim as part of a future Palestinian state.
Nor is the UNRWA’s politicized definition dependent on need. Absurdly, this means that a wealthy third-generation Jordanian is considered a “refugee.” The twenty-eight-year-old American fashion model Bella Hadid, born in Santa Barbara, California nearly half a century after the 1948 War, qualifies as a “refugee.” The UNRWA’s definition of what constitutes a refugee is different for a reason: instead of ending the decades-long conflict, the UNRWA explicitly seeks to perpetuate it.
Refugee agencies are meant to resettle refugees and to equip them for a better, and more peaceful, life. But the UNRWA is not about refugee resettlement; it is about perpetuating the victimhood of the descendants of Arab refugees from Palestine.
Estimates vary, but there were approximately 700,000 Arab refugees after the 1948 War, in which numerous Arab states tried and failed to destroy the fledgling Jewish nation at its rebirth. Now, the UNRWA counts more than 5 million “refugees” according to its own spurious definition. But as then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo revealed in 2021, fewer than “200,00 Arabs displaced in 1948 are still alive and most others are not refugees by any rational criteria.”
The UNRWA keeps the conflict alive in ways beyond manufacturing refugees—it manufactures hate too. UNRWA teaches that its “refugees”—that is more than 5 million of them—have a “right of return.” Instead of advocating for a separate Palestinian Arab state, the UNRWA, in its schools, literature, and official statements, teaches that millions of Palestinian Arabs have an incontrovertible “right” to “return” to a state that most haven’t seen, or aren’t from, and thus destroy the Jewish state. Israeli leaders of all political stripes have been clear that this demand is a non-starter, but the UNRWA has been unmoved. Indeed, the UNRWA teaches that this “right” can be won by “armed resistance”—a euphemism for the acts of terrorism and murder that many UNRWA schools have been caught celebrating.
For years, the UNRWA’s curriculum of hate has been documented by nonprofit organizations like Palestinian Media Watch, UN Watch, CAMERA, IMPACT-se, and others, and has been highlighted in testimonies before the U.S. Congress, the EU, and elsewhere. Yet, UNRWA has refused to change.
As Israel’s Foreign Minister Israel Katz recently said: “The UN was presented with endless evidence about Hamas operatives working at UNRWA and about the use of UNRWA facilities for terror purposes and nothing was done about it.” In fact, according to a recent UN Watch expose, in February 2017 the former head of UNRWA, Pierre Krahenbul, met with top operatives from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, telling them “we are one” and “no one can separate us.”
But the UN’s bias against Israel is nothing new. In his landmark Nov. 10, 1975 speech, the U.S. Ambassador to UN Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously condemned the UN’s decision to label Zionism—the belief in Jewish self-determination in the Jewish people’s ancestral homeland—“racism.” The UN’s decision was but echoing a Soviet propaganda campaign against Israel. Moynihan called it an “infamous act” and warned that “a great evil has been loosed upon the world.” That evil was antisemitism. And the UN has been, and continues to be, one of its foremost disseminators.