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Okay, on to our next question. Oh, this is one I get a lot. Why is the Israeli government refusing to work with unra? Unrwa, the major UN agency that works with Palestinians. I have been asked this question hundreds of times online, in person. People hear that the Israelis are very angry about it, very upset about it. Somebody maybe heard about Inat Wilf's work or read her book. And the question comes up again, again and again. This is an agency that delivers a tremendous amount of aid, provides thousands and thousands of teachers to schools, and, for example, in Gaza. What is so bad about it? What is so wrong about it? What's so difficult in working with it? The Israelis, by the way, have worked with every aid agency, every kind of aid agency. There's sometimes been clashes, sometimes been tensions, but the Israelis welcome most aid agencies. So what is wrong with unrwa? There are basically three problems with UNRWA from the Israeli perspective. And the ones that make all the news, that catch all the attention, they're not the important ones. For example, direct complicity with terrorism, Israeli intelligence has argued, has claimed, has found evidence for at least 12, and possibly the latest report was 19 UNRWA employees in Gaza who directly participated in the October 7th massacre. This is a terrible thing to discover, of course, that a UN aid agency employee took part in a literal massacre, and the UN's own oversight office actually fired nine of them because they found evidence that they may have been involved. So something about those Israeli claims is correct. I suspect everything about those Israeli claims is correct, if only because it's limited to 19 people. Half of them, the UN did actually agree. Green fire. Now, here's the thing. UNRWA has something like 13,000 employees in Gaza. So the argument that 19 of them might have taken part in this Hamas invasion of Israel, it's splashy. It's huge. It's dramatic. In terms of the media narrative, that's not the fundamental problem with unrwa. UNRWA could just say, we hate this. They're evil people. We're ashamed that they were on our staff. 19 out of 13,000, and just kick him out. There's a deeper problem with unrwa, and here's the second layer. Israeli intelligence actually argues that something like 1500 members of UNRWA's Gaza staff, 12% are active members of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. That UNRWA provides essentially a kind of financial backbone in literally paying 1500 salaries to Hamas members. Now, this is a much more significant involvement. Put it this way, it would be harder for UNRA to Claim it didn't know that 12% of its staffers are literal card carrying members of Hamas or Islamic Jihad. And here too, right, we have a lot of evidence for a lot of this being correct, but it's also less of an argument than you would think. It seems really damning. And if the Israelis have evidence, UNR has a big problem. But you know, in places that have a tyrannical sort of warlord cultural control over the, over the society, not just political control but the, the organization that rules because of religious reasons, because of social reasons, actually really runs the society in a place like that and it exists elsewhere. I mean you could see this in Somalia, you could see this in other places, not just Gaza, but in a place like that. 8 Organizations often get co opted in this way. It's a really simple point. Hamas doesn't literally control UNRWA on the ground in Gaza. But because Hamas controls the ground in Gaza, UNRWA can't operate except by Hamas's pleasure. And because Hamas can control the population of Gaza, nobody can be hired to an UNRWA position unless Hamas at least doesn't oppose it. So it's very simple for Hamas looking to pay salaries to its staffers to say, hey, there's an UNRWA job over there at that aid agency, at that school, at that clinic. My person's going to get that job. I need that salary for my person. Now they don't even have to go through unrwa. It's not like some office in Geneva or New York has to approve it. They just have to tell the person who gets the job to quit so that the person Hamas wants gets the job. And if they don't, they have a very serious problem with Hamas on the ground. And we've seen that Hamas has killed hundreds and hundreds of Palestinians at the very least in order to maintain its control of Gaza and its direct control of Gaza's population and the flow of aid and the flow of money. If it's just 12%, that's actually remarkably good because you would expect Hamas to use more of UNRWA's salaries on the ground to put its people in place. I suspect that's only the numbers that the Israeli intelligence services can prove can actually provide the names of can show that their names overlap to names on Hamas rosters that were captured in Gaza. And again, this in itself, it's a sign of deep collusion on the ground that is very nearly unavoidable for an aid organization that does more than just literally deliver the aid world Central kitchen doesn't have this problem because it brings in the food and then walks out. Brings in the food and walks out. But if you're going to run schools in Gaza and hire 13,000 people, most of those salaries are teachers. You're going to end up dealing with the powers that be on the ground. And so you're going to be deeply infiltrated by Hamas no matter what. That itself is not UNRWA's great crime. They don't care. They don't do anything about it. They're complicit in it in the sense that they pretend they don't know it. But that itself is not reason enough to explain why Israel has actually demolished UNRWA's headquarters and passed laws forbidding UNRWA from receiving utilities from Israeli authorities, municipalities, and has actually begun to systematically remove UNRWA from the ground from Gaza and from Israel. There's military infrastructure. The IDF has released evidence of Hamas tunnels and command centers located directly under UNRWA facilities throughout Gaza. One example was this amazing just Hamas data center that was under the Gaza City headquarters of unrwa. Gaza City headquarters of UNRWA is a major installation, right? It's a major piece of UNRWA's infrastructure. Gaza City was the biggest city in Gaza. So if you find a major Hamas data center under the UNRWA facility in Gaza City, and you find that the electrical cables providing electricity to that data center come out of UNRWA's own electrical system in the UNRWA headquarters, then you begin to understand that the connection is a tiny bit deeper. UNRWA could not not have known. Huge numbers of UNRWA people on the ground would have to have been part of building out that Hamas data center under the UNRWA facility. That's much more damning. It's still not unique. We see, for example, in south Lebanon with UNIFIL, which, based on the UN Security Council resolution in 2006 that ended the Second Lebanon War, was supposed to be overseeing Hezbollah's disarmament, was supposed to be confronting Hezbollah when it violated the UN resolution. And in fact, everywhere there was a UNIFIL facility in South Lebanon, Hezbollah simply built infrastructures, weapons caches, tunnel entrances adjacent or almost attached to the UNIFIL facility. UNIFIL never confronted Hezbollah. And the only people who could be actually hurt by confronting UNIFIL were the Israelis. The Israelis couldn't bomb a UNIFIL facility. So UNIFIL ended up becoming human shields to Hezbollah sites and facilities. And we saw this literally dozens of times in South Lebanon in that sense, UNRWA's facilities being used by Hamas, whether it's numerous instances of weapons storage in UNRWA schools and UNRWA facilities and clinics, rockets being fired from right against the wall of a school that did exist in Lebanon as well, that exists in other places. So all of these things, they're sexy, they're easy to get on the news. It's a dramatic news story if an UNRWA employee invaded Israel and murdered people. But it's not the fundamental problem with unrwa. The Israeli opposition to UNRWA isn't even that Hamas uses and abuses it. The Israeli problem with UNRWA goes deeper still. The first step in that deep dive has to do with not how those schools are used, who teaches in those schools, how Hamas might sometimes manipulate its way into receiving some of the budgets for the schools that UNRWA runs in Gaza, but in what's actually taught inside the schools. UNRWA teaches inside the schools. Textbooks and curricula and teachers and events and summer camps run by some schools that have explicit incitement to violence, explicit anti Semitism, I mean old school, European style Jews control the world, antisemitism. And those are in UNRA texts produced in UNRWA facilities and UNRWA schools by UNRWA paid teachers who, who sometimes upload this stuff to social media. And this is real, this is problematic. Is it every teacher in every school? No. How systemic Is it only in places where Hamas has some influence ideologically? Well, that's just about everywhere. Hamas spent a great deal of its efforts in the 17 years it ruled Gaza to inculcate its ideology and its understanding of history and its understanding of Islam and its understanding of Israel into the younger generation. And we see that in polls of Gazans, they are unbelievably radicalized. Radicalized to the point where they can barely make decisions that are healthy for them. Gaza has natural gas off the coast. Nobody can stop the war long enough from the Gazan side to just develop the natural gas and then get back to the war. There are no decisions, there is no cultural willingness to do anything that isn't Hamas's ideological war. We've seen opposition to Hamas in Gaza, but it has never reached the turning point where it's actually capable of either dominating Gazan conversation, pushing back against Hamas in a serious way. Hamas succeeded in the massive project of radicalizing Gaza through these schools. That's deeper. UNRWA is a platform in which Hamas and the most extreme ideologues of the Palestinian national movement trap Gazans it isn't just at the teachers at the bottom, family members of Hamas, people who Hamas wants to take care of, get a teaching job in some UNRWA school. It's much more important to know that Suhail Al Hindi, a leader of the UNRWA staff unions, was a high ranking member of Hamas. Political bureau leaders, top leaders that UN officials from Geneva and New York actually have to sit down with, are card carrying, high ranked, proud, publicly listed members of Hamas's top institutions. There's a lot of, a lot of sympathy, a lot of romanticized heroicizing of Hamas in the UNRWA ranks, right up to the un, right up to headquarters. Are you still with me? We're going deeper and now we're getting to the fundamental problem with unrwa. And it has nothing to do with what UNRWA says and has nothing to do with what UNRWA does on the ground. It has to do with why UNRWA exists. You didn't need to found a special refugee agency, the United Nations Relief Works Agency for Palestinians. You could have handled the Palestinian case file exactly the way you handled the Jewish refugee case file in those very years or every other refugee case file. 50, 60, 70 million refugees of the 20th century, all of them were handled by the same UN agency, UNHCR, the High Commissioner for Refugees, which is today called the UN Refugee Agency. Everyone, every kind, every conflict, every context were handled by unhcr. And UNHCR didn't fit the Palestinian case in the view of the officials who put together unrwa, because UNHCR defines a refugee as somebody kicked out of their country, who can't go back, and who has no citizenship and no permanent residence somewhere else and who needs help to bridge that gap from a place they can't go back to, to building a new life in a new place that's a refugee and that's what UNHCR is there to help with. Millions of Jews had that issue and were helped by unhcr, by unrra, by various agencies over the course of the post war period, but not unrwa. UNRWA is the only agency that exists especially for one tiny group of refugees and to provide those refugees not with services, because anybody could provide those services. A Great many other NGOs provide services on the ground in the West Bank, Gaza, among Palestinians in Jordan and Syria and Lebanon, Lebanon and elsewhere. But because of its definition of a refugee, UNRWA's definition of a refugee is radically different from UNHCR's. Under UNRWA rules written into UNRWA'S original founding charter. A Palestinian refugee is someone who was in Palestine between 47 and 49. In other words, over the course of the 48 war, this person was forced out, fled either one in the 48 war, and this person now has a status of refugee. I'll just be blunt. For all time. For all time. Even if they have the citizenship of another country, even if they have a permanent home in another country, even if they're born with citizenship or two citizenships in for example, Jordan and spent their professional lives in the United States and became great well known scientists and won the Nobel Prize for chemistry this year, they are still refugees under UNRWA rules. Why are they refugees? In what sense are they refugees? Why is it important to call them refugees? In fact, it's inherited. Your children have that status even if they were born in that other country. Even if your child was born in the United States and rose up to become President of the United States. Under UNRWA rules, it is possible to have a US President who is a refugee. What does the word mean under UNRWA rules? Your grandchildren can be refugees. It can go on for all time and forever. Why? And here we get to the crux. UNRWA was not created to help Palestinians. Everyone else can help Palestinians. A thousand NGOs help Palestinians every day. UNRWA was created to ensure that one group of refugees on this earth had a different definition of refugee from all other groups. And that definition was basically that the only way their refugee status ends is with the end of Israel. Mass, total, complete return of millions of descendants of 1948 refugees into Israel. That is the UNRWA definition of a refugee built to produce that outcome. That rule of UNRWA's refugee definition is actually the excuse why Lebanon and Syria have had Palestinians living in them for 77 years and refused to give them citizenship for generations. Lebanon refused to let them own land, own real estate, work in professions. There were rules in Lebanon, some of them still in place, against Palestinians in Lebanon who are three, four generations already born in Lebanon, that are basically the worst of the tsarist oppression rules against the Jews in Eastern Europe. And this is considered moral. This is considered good. UNRWA thinks this is a good thing. UNRWA is considered by the Israelis to be part of the problem because UNRWA is emphatically part of the problem. It is the heart of the campaign to argue that Israel should not, does not have the right to and cannot in the end exist. And therefore, in October of Last year of 2024, the Knesset passed laws barring UNRWA from operating in Israeli territory, prohibiting state officials from communicating with it. UNRWA was cut off from the Israeli state in December 2025. The legislation was passed to legally block electricity, water, banking to UNRWA facilities. The Israelis, as part of the Gaza operations, part of the removal of Hamas, have said the ideology and the international organization sustaining the ideology that Israel is destroyable and must be destroyed. Israel will stop cooperating with that. Here's the thing. If UNRWA changed that, dealing with refugees who are actually refugees and not with refugees who are the great grandchildren refugees kept that way because of unrwa. If UNRWA changes that and demands what UNHCR demands, which is that the world take in refugees, if UNRWA becomes an actual refugee agency rather than an agency whose ideological infrastructure is the destruction of a state, of a UN member state, all the rest is fixable. Everything about UNRWA is fixable except the heart and soul of it, the purpose of it. Israel's not at war with unrwa. UNRA is at war with Israel. Thanks for listening.