“…UNRWA’s original mandate was to care for the displaced Arabs of 1948 and it is fair to say that it has pretty much accomplished that mission. Nearly all of the 1948 refugees spent the last half century of their lives in UNRWA camps (which grew into permanent neighborhoods and sprawling villages) in Jordan, where they received citizenship, Syria, Lebanon and Gaza. It wasn’t a great existence, but the UNRWA provided a place to live, ample food, free medical care and schooling.
Those refugees are mostly gone now; only a few tens of thousands are still alive. But bureaucracies do not disappear just because their mission is complete. And so UNRWA found itself a new mission. It became a perpetual refugee-making machine, registering the children, grand-children and great-grand-children as bona fide refugees. The number ballooned to 5.4 million today from 700,000 in 1948. The U.S. provides about a quarter the agency’s annual budget.
UNRWA did nothing to help resettle these second, third and fourth generation refugees. It allowed its camps to be become a staging ground for terrorism. Worst of all, it educated students to believe that justice demanded armed liberation of their ancestral lands from the Zionist usurpers. Propagating the doctrine has been self-destructive, both to UNRWA and the people it supposedly serves…”