Why UNRWA’s Nobel Peace Prize nomination is a disgrace for Israel - opinion

As an organization dedicated to refugees, UNRWA is a spectacular failure. And if that sounds oxymoronic, consider its moronic nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize. Particularly this year.

Although ultimately last Friday it was announced that the prize would be awarded to Japanese anti-nuclear group Nihon Hidankyo, the fact that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East made it to the (unofficial) shortlist added insult to injury for Israelis – salt on an open, unbearably painful wound.

Even in a normal year, UNRWA’s nomination would be jarring, but this is not a normal year. This is one year since October 7, 2023. On that terrible day, terrorists from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad invaded Israel and carried out a mega-atrocity, slaughtering, raping, mutilating, and setting fire to southern Israeli communities. Some 1,200 were murdered that Saturday – which coincided with the joyous Jewish religious holiday of Simchat Torah – and some 250 were abducted to Gaza, where 101 remain, dead or alive.

They are not Hamas’s only hostages. The terrorist organization has been allowed to hijack UNRWA and exploit it for its own nefarious purposes. Evidence continues to mount regarding the extent of collusion by UNRWA staff in the invasion and massacre, as well as complicity in holding the hostages, facilitating the storage and transfer of weapons, the theft of humanitarian aid on a tremendous scale, and the incitement within the UNRWA educational system.

In a poignant opinion piece in Haaretz last week under the headline, “Who Deserves the Nobel Peace Prize? I Know Who Doesn’t,” Neta Heiman noted that her mother, Ditza Heiman, abducted from Kibbutz Nir Oz, was held captive for nearly 50 days in the home of an UNRWA teacher.

Who doesn't deserve the prize?

After her release in last November’s hostage-prisoner release deal, Ditza said she had been kept “in poor sanitary conditions, without running water, without medicine, and with very little food. There was a stack of notebooks with the UNRWA logo in his home, and occasionally she was given snacks labeled ‘Not for sale – intended for UNRWA children.’”

Neta is an activist in Women Wage Peace, another organization that was nominated for the Nobel prize. It’s understandable that those who seek peace, however they approach it politically, would not be honored to be considered in the same category as UNRWA.

The family of Yonatan Samerano also spoke out against the nomination. Yonatan, 21, was murdered while trying to escape from the Supernova music festival last October 7. An UNRWA social worker was documented using a UN vehicle to abduct his body from Kibbutz Be’eri and drive it to Gaza where it remains – a pawn in Hamas’s ghoulish psychological and physical war.

Some reports indicate that around 1,200 UNRWA staffers, close to 10% of its payroll in Gaza, are affiliated with Hamas and Islamic Jihad. International taxpayers fund that payroll – and pay the price of fostering jihadist ideology.

Hamas deliberately uses its own population as human shields. In February, the IDF uncovered a Hamas command center underneath an UNRWA headquarters in Gaza, using the UNRWA infrastructure for electrical supplies. It was just one of many UNRWA facilities being used by Hamas.

It is impossible that the hundreds of kilometers of subterranean warren of tunnels excavated under Gaza could have been constructed without UNRWA officials turning a blind eye – or blocking out the sound of the drilling.

Founded in 1949, ostensibly to help the Palestinians until the refugee problem would be solved, UNRWA has contributed to the problem. The real hurdle is the Palestinian insistence on the “right to return,” a dream to flood Israel with the millions who claim refugee status.

Not only are there still “Palestinian refugees” seven and a half decades later but the numbers have ballooned from some 700,000 in 1948 to a reported six million today. That’s because of the unique definition of refugee pertaining to the Palestinians alone that enables them to pass on their refugee status through the generations. The Palestinians’ “perpetual refugee status” has preserved their plight (and Israel’s).

The approximately 850,000 Jews who left or fled Arab countries for Israel since 1948 do not, of course, get UNRWA benefits. Perhaps UNRWA should be persuaded to help the approximately 80,000 Israelis who have been displaced since last October. I’m kidding. UNRWA is a bad joke and the joke is at Israel’s expense.

All other refugees in the world, a heartbreaking figure of more than 31 million in 2023, are handled by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). According to the UNHCR site, the conflict that broke out in Sudan in April 2023, has caused “one of the largest humanitarian and displacement crises in the world. More than 6 million people were displaced within the country, with a further 1.2 million fleeing to neighboring countries.” But if you can’t blame the Jews, it’s not prime news.

Beyond the oxymorons, there is also a paradox: the Palestinians are the only people who can claim to have their own state and to be refugees in it – and be funded for it. Another spectacular failure, by the way, is the alleged genocide by Israel. The absurdity of accusing Israel of genocide by wiping out a population that has grown by millions seems to be lost on those holding violent demonstrations around the globe and calling for an end to Israel.

UN's role in terror

UNRWA WAS not the only peculiar nomination for the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize. Among the contenders was UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Guterres, like the organization he heads, is another spectacular failure. When he took office in 2017, the world was not a peaceful place but on his watch war broke out in many spots, including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the disastrous conflicts in Ethiopia, Myanmar, and Sudan.

Israel’s foreign minister last month took the unusual step of declaring Guterres persona non grata for, among other things, failing to condemn Iran’s massive rocket barrage on Israel and stating that the Hamas atrocities of October 7 “didn’t happen in a vacuum.” Indeed they didn’t. The UN itself had been preparing the ground for decades.

Last week, the Israel Land Authority (ILA) announced that UNRWA’s Jerusalem complex, located in the Ma’alot Dafna neighborhood, will be turned into an apartment complex. The organization had been using the premises, part of it built illegally, rent-free and unwilling to pay Israeli authorities.

Symbolically, on October 7, the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, chaired by MK Yuli Edelstein (Likud), voted to approve for second and third readings two bills “aimed at curbing the activity in Israel of UNRWA.” Notably, despite the huge political rifts in the Knesset, the bills were presented by MKs from the coalition and the opposition.

UNRWA’s impact is felt throughout the region. Last month, UN Watch, a Geneva-based NGO monitoring the universal body, noted that following the IDF elimination of Fathi al-Sharif, director of an UNRWA secondary school and head of the UNRWA Teachers Union in Lebanon, Hamas publicly acknowledged that he was a Hamas leader in Lebanon.

It’s important not to lose sight of the way that Hamas is operating alongside Hezbollah in Lebanon – part of the overall Iranian plan to crush Israel from the north, south, and east.

UNIFIL (the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon) has not only failed to prevent Hezbollah (courtesy of Iran) from building up its weapons, constructing terror tunnels, and launching thousands of rockets and drones on Israel, it seems to have sometimes been complicit, turning their blue-helmeted heads to look the other way.

As columnist Neville Teller wrote in The Jerusalem Post this week, “... irony on irony, the one thing the interim force has failed to do throughout its 46 years is keep the peace.”

The most dishonorable Nobel recipient is PLO head Yasser Arafat. In 1974, Arafat infamously declared from the UN podium: “Today I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.”

Who says threats won’t get you anywhere? Twenty years later, Arafat received the Nobel prize, along with Israeli prime minister and foreign minister Yitzhak Rabin, and Shimon Peres for their roles in the Oslo Accords, which were already literally blowing up.

The UN can’t admit it has a problem that its personnel and facilities are being exploited by terrorist organizations. It doesn’t even define Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist entities. It is in its own ignoble category.