UNRWA, the Greatest Welfare Scam Ever

The Israeli Army in the Gaza Strip slaying thousands of Muslim Brotherhood brothers (Hamas) came upon evidence of UNRWA employees participating in the satanic events of October 7, which should not surprise because UNRWA has been a major player in the antisemitic fantasy of a “Palestinian people” whose homeland was allegedly stolen from them by the Jews, the lie that justifies the very existence of UNRWA in support of the “victims of Zionism.”

UNRWA’s brief for 75 years has been supporting millions of “Palestinian refugees” when, truth be told, there is nothing Palestinian about these people. And neither are they refugees.

The historical record is clear: There never was in the Promised Land a people calling themselves “Palestinians” and were called that by others. A Biblical generation prior to the first Zionist Congress in 1897, American novelist Herman Melville in 1857 made a pilgrimage to the Land, then under Muslim rule for twelve of the previous fourteen centuries, that he described as “a caked, depopulated Hell.”

A decade later, that other American writer Mark Twain made his pilgrimage and likewise reported the land “sits in sack cloth and ashes.” Neither in writing of his pilgrimage mentioned running into any “Palestinians.”

Prior to the Zionist movement under the Turks, there was no such living political entity called Palestine. Jerusalem no less was a neglected shamble. It never meant anything to Muslims except for a miracle story about Mohammad flying in one night on a flying horse. Under the Muslims, prior to the Zionist renascence, the condition of the Holy City was a ramshackle slum, a rat-infested, unsanitary medieval relic that literally stank for the indifferent sanitation.

Today, Jerusalem is Israel’s capital and home to almost a million people, a city whose resurrection has been an exclusively Jewish enterprise. No “Palestinian” municipality ever installed a stop sign, let alone sewers and other public works.

The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 produced several mandates. The UK and France created states where the collapsed Ottoman Caliphate had ruled for four centuries. France drew the boundaries of modern Syria and invented Lebanon, named for no nationality but a mountain.

The British invented Iraq and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, also named for no nation but a river, while the Palestine Mandate of the League of Nations “recognized the historical connection of the Jewish people” to Palestine and created it explicitly for Jews, versus the leader of the Arabs at the time, the Grand Mufti in Jerusalem who murderously resisted by insisting there never was such a country in Islamic history and he was right.

Unlike the mostly illiterate Muslims in these new states created for them by European imperialists, the Jews had to fight and die for their independence, declared on May 14, 1948, which was instantaneously bombed and invaded by a half-dozen Arab armies that opposed the Zionist movement as an insult to Islam. Their opposition had nothing to do with defending “Palestine” and everything to do with Islam’s hostility to Jewish independence after fourteen centuries of Koranically-commanded “oppression and humiliation” of them as dhimmi (tolerated infidels).

Zionism in Muslim eyes has been the intifada of the Jews.

In the 1920s and 30s, as Mandatory Palestine came to life thanks to Zionist immigration, sacrifice and investment, Arabs from all over the Middle East streamed in looking for work. And when the Arab armies attacked the infant Jewish state on its first day, these thousands of migrant laborers, not wanting to be caught in the middle of a war, ran, like those in the south who sought shelter behind the Egyptian force that had come up the coast bent on conquering Tel-Aviv but was stopped by the heroics of the Jews at Kibbutz Mordechai.

In history, so-called Gaza City until 1948 had never been a city as civilized peoples know them. It was an overgrown caravansary when suddenly invaded by 200,000 foreign workers arriving in expectation that soon the Egyptians and other Arab armies would kill all the Jews, and they could return to loot what the Jews had built.

Following the war, the Arab Muslim states who launched it refused to take any responsibility for these now homeless co-religionists. Their position was that the war was the responsibility of the United Nations that had licensed the Jews to live free of Muslim domination as they had for fourteen centuries, and in the wake of their refusal, the UN established UNRWA to look after these migrant workers whom everyone in the world, including all Muslims and Arabs, called “the Arab refugees” and would for the next decade and beyond. Nobody called them “Palestinian refugees” because there was nothing Palestinian about them having come from Morocco, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, etc.

The morphing of them into the putatively primeval “Palestinians,” whose spawn in UNRWA schools today are taught their “ancestors” have been living in Palestine for five thousand years, began on March 29, 1959 in Cairo where Gamal Abdel Nasser, also head of the Arab League of States, announced in a League meeting his idea of creating a Kiyan al-Filastini/ “Palestinian entity” out of these “Arab refugees” on the model of the situation in Algeria then in its fifth year of anti-colonial terrorist rebellion. In 1954, Muslims there erupted in random, brutal violence to drive out the French, and Nasser supported them by letting the FLN use Egyptian radio facilities in Cairo to broadcast propaganda and instructions to their comrades back home; he also allowed them to smuggle weapons and explosives to them across the Sahara Desert.

Algeria’s Muslim rebels also understood that to win support in France, they had to rebrand their cause as not religious – among themselves in Arabic they were mujahidin/holy warriors — but to the world they would be political, anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist “freedom-fighters.”

Nasser also thought that rebranding the “Arab refugees” from the war against the Jews as a “nation” was the way to go. Although many believe the KGB created the “Palestinian national identity,” it was Nasser. Muslims like him needed no lessons in Jew-hatred from the Russians. The Koran is an antisemitic tract.

Then seven months later, the 25-year-old son of the leader of the clandestine Muslim Brotherhood cell in Mandatory Palestine, Rahman al-Qidwa, who would adopt the nom de guerre of “Yasir Arafat,” a religiously significant name after Mt. Arafat, a hill in Mecca, with seven other former members of the Muslim Brotherhood youth organization came together to create Fatah, the name of the forty-eighth sura in the Koran which means “conquest” and in context “of the infidel.” Even Thomas Friedman in his book wrote that Arafat was a practicing Muslim years before he rebranded himself a political revolutionary and remained one his whole life.

In 1965, Fatah’s men took their first steps in sabotage inside Israel and eventually graduated to gruesome terrorist horrors, and in their bloody footsteps, other Arabs created other groups. At its peak, the Palestine Liberation Organization counted eighteen separate terror fraternities. What triggered their emergence was the humiliating defeat of the Arab armies in 1967. The newborn “Palestinians” would then do to the Jews what the Algerians did to win independence in 1962 via their terror war of the random murder of the French community in that country.

Fatah and other terror cells planted bombs in Europe in El AL Israeli airline offices, shot up El Al counters in airports, planted bombs at Israeli consulates, in Jewish restaurants and all in the name of “Palestine.” The PFLP in particular specialized in skyjacking, basically kidnapping innocent airline passengers in midair to demand freedom for “Palestinians” in Israeli prisons. The same motivation as Hamas on 10/7.

Fatah, following its terrorism debut in 1965, grew in strength as would the other Muslim terror fraternities. Still, not since the founding of the UN in 1945 had there been one resolution, amid hundreds on the interminable violence, referring to a “Palestinian people” as a party to what otherwise was known as the Arab-Israeli conflict.  Not until GA Resolution 2628 of December 8, 1970 did the General Assembly produce its first document referring to a “Palestinian people.”

And the rest is history. In the decade of the 70s, PLO Arabs so “mugged” Europe with their terror attacks, in 1980 the European Community (precursor to the EU) submitted to their demand for recognition as not criminal terrorists but political activists in a legitimate war of national liberation. It was called the “Venice Declaration.”

And as for UNRWA, many of its sixty-seven donor nations support it in fear of these “Palestinians” if they do not. For others, it has never been anything but a false front for peoples with histories of atrocious hostility and persecution of Jews who have supported the gangs in Gaza, Judea and Samaria with billions of dollars. Post-Holocaust, with antisemitism out of fashion, “Palestinian nationalism” became the new, “legitimate” way of reviling Jews and accusing them of crimes against humanity. UNRWA has been the conduit for maintaining more than a million people on its welfare rolls. And why? To give the Jews no peace. For such nations, UNRWA is ostensibly about charity for the “Palestinian refugees” that cloaks a timeless hatred of Jews.

There is nothing “Palestinian” about these people, and they certainly are not refugees. Their great-grandparents were, but unlike other war refugees in history, they were never helped to restart their lives in a new country of asylum. The PLO terrorists got the UN to recognize that the status of “Palestinian refugee” passes to their children and grandchildren, etc. until they can all “return home.” It is the only war-refugee population in history that has not dissolved over time via resettlement and the inexorable reality of actuarial tables but ballooned exponentially. The original 200,000 refugee migrant workers suddenly in Gaza in 1949 produced between one and two million of the Arabs in the Strip today, all of them recognized by the world as “Palestinian refugees” when they never in their lives sought refuge anywhere.

In the last week in January, UNRWA made headlines when the IDF revealed evidence of some dozen employees participating in the satanic Jew-killing, Jew-raping, Jew-mutilating, and Jew-kidnapping, sadistic murder orgy of October 7. At first, UNRWA protested they were a few bad apples and unrepresentative of the organization. But IDF soldiers in Gaza have been astonished to find Hamas propaganda, weapons and ammunition in home after home. Thousands worked for UNRWA/Hamas. These IDF veterans of Gaza have come to believe that everyone in Gaza is Hamas.

And that is why all the recipients of UNRWA handouts in Gaza, that is, 70% of the population, must be relocated away from Israel, which should be no problem since there are 56 officially Muslim states, 21 of them officially Arab as well, so surely Believers in the One True Faith will want to care for their co-religionists by taking them in and helping restart their lives.

Sha’i ben-Tekoa’s PHANTOM NATION: Inventing the “Palestinians” as the Obstacle to Peace is available at Amazon.com in hard cover or a Kindle ebook. His podcasts can be heard on www.phantom-nation.com.