Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, August 2002, pages 43, 58

United Nations Report

 

In Advance of Jenin Report, Lantos, AIPAC Wage Campaign Against UNRWA

 

By Ian Williams

At the time of the Jenin report, UNRWA director Peter Hansen was attacked for his temerity in agreeing with the rest of the world that the IDF had violated international law during its attacks on the West Bank. Honesty has its price. Not content merely with blaming the victims, the Israel lobby supporters now would like to punish them as well. If they have their way, UNRWA, the main source of education, health and food for millions of Palestinian refugees, will lose the American funding that represents one-third of its expenditures.

In May Rep. Tom Lantos (D-CA) called for congressional hearings on the refugee organization. On May 13 he wrote to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, saying, “My concern is that, for too long, UNRWA has been part of the problem, rather than the solution, in the Middle East. However initially well-intentioned, UNRWA camps have fostered a culture of anger and dependency that undermines both regional peace and the well-being of the camps’ inhabitants.”

Lantos implied that the U.N. was responsible for policing the camps, thereby aiding and abetting terrorist activities in them, and asked why UNRWA should not be taken over by the UNHCR, the refugee agency.

While Lantos and his fellow travelers appear to be behaving in what can only be called an irrational and, indeed, silly way, the threat they pose is real. In June, in fact, Karine Abu-Zayd, UNRWA’s deputy commissioner-general, consulted Arab League Secretary-General Amr Mousa on what she called “a campaign against UNRWA, notably in Washington,” and has called for Arab League support to guarantee that “we will continue to obtain the funds that we need” from the U.S.

Abu-Zayd had spoken to briefings called by Lantos for congressional aides on May 23, and clearly had found a depth of hostility whipped up by “Briefing Papers,” from AIPAC, the Israel lobby, which had presented UNRWA almost as if it were a wing of Islamic Jihad.

Hoping to contain the situation, the U.N. initially kept Annan’s and Hansen’s letters private. With irrationality of such an epidemic scale, however, they decided they had to make the replies public. Annan’s, somewhat cheekily, reminded Lantos that, although security and policing were not part of UNRWA’s functions, he had “proposed in the Security Council in April that a multinational force be established in the area. I agree that an international security role is required, but such a role cannot be carried out by the U.N.’s humanitarian agencies, whether UNRWA, UNICEF, WHO or others present on the ground. I believe that a multinational force would help stabilize the security situation, which in turn would contribute to creating conditions conducive for advancing the political process. However, as you may be aware, the Government of Israel has so far rejected this proposal, making clear that it does not wish to see an international security presence.”

 

AIPAC “Briefing Papers” presented UNRWA almost as if it were a wing of Islamic Jihad.

Without belaboring the point, Annan also suggested that there were fundamental differences between UNHCR and UNRWA. “For example, UNHCR’s mandate encompasses both protection and repatriation of refugees, while UNRWA’s is strictly limited to the provision of basic humanitarian and social services.”

The secretary-general left it to Lantos himself to draw the conclusion that Israel may not truly and deeply appreciate UNHCR trying to repatriate Palestinian refugees.

Hansen was even stronger in his reply. “Throughout its history,” he told the congressman, “UNRWA has never been given any mandate to administer, supervise, or police the refugee camps or to have any jurisdiction or legislative power over the refugees or the areas where they lived…This responsibility has always remained with the host authorities and Israel, who maintained law and order, including within refugee camps, themselves.”

In the face of wild accusations from Lantos and AIPAC, Hansen pointed out, “It is important to record that from 1967 to date, we have not received from the Government of Israel any complaint related to the misuse of any of our installations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip…and since October 2000 to date, and even though hundreds of UNRWA staff have been detained and subsequently released, the Israeli authorities have never provided any information or lodged any complaint with UNRWA concerning the official or private activities of any UNRWA staff member.”

Hansen was equally dry when he pointed out that, at a recent U.N. meeting, Israel’ representative Mr. Moshe Benzioni said, “Israel supports the humanitarian work of UNRWA on behalf of Arab refugees and we wish to formally record our appreciation for the efforts of UNRWA in providing important services, especially in the fields of health care and education.”

Hansen concluded by inviting Lantos to visit the refugee camps—which are, of course, very rarely visited by American politicians on their almost compulsory trips to Israel.

There is a real fear that the Israel-first cabal may personalize the matter and attack Hansen’s position, making continuing funding conditional on his departure. On the other hand, it is possible that—insofar as there is any rationality about the campaign at all—it is intended to “soften up” the U.N. before publication of its report on Jenin, which was commissioned by the Emergency General Assembly after Israel refused entry to Annan’s fact-finding mission. Judging by the words of Israel’s vociferous defenders, one would never guess that it was Defense Minister Shimon Peres who had suggested the U.N. fact-finding mission to Jenin in the first place.

 

A Textbook Case

In any case, the anti-UNRWA campaign is a textbook example on how a few bigots can exercise leverage, first on the pro-Israel organizations and the media, and then on the strange Christian Right/Likud coalition in Congress. Within one month of becoming president of the Council of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Mortimer Zuckerman was almost frothing at the mouth in his U.S. News and World Report. Annan, he wrote, “attacks Israel’s presence on the West Bank as ‘illegal,’ ignoring the U.N.’s own resolution that calls for a territorial compromise. He draws an unfounded equivalency between the terrorism carried out against a democratic country, Israel, with the purpose of maximizing civilian casualties, and the response of the Israeli government to protect its citizens with the purpose of minimizing civilian casualties.”

Zuckerman went on to attack Hansen and UNRWA, declaring, “these camps have become hotbeds of terrorists and bases for suicide murderers. UNRWA is the godfather to all terrorist training schools, notably in Jenin, the so-called suicide capital of the Palestinians from which 28 terrorist attacks have been launched, killing and wounding hundreds of Israelis.”

One would never guess that Israel had any part in the creation of the camps—or, indeed, in running them for all those decades of open occupation.

Almost immediately, AIPAC itself joined in with a press release headed “Camps of Terror,” alleging that “for more than 50 years, Palestinian terrorist infrastructures have been developed in U.N.-sponsored refugee camps throughout the West Bank and Gaza.”

AIPAC alleged that “as the sole agency mandated to manage the Palestinian refugee camps, UNRWA has effectively turned a blind eye toward terror activities within the camps. This has enabled terrorist groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad to develop vast terrorist infrastructures in the camps of the West Bank and Gaza…Inside the camps, where 99 percent of UNRWA’s staff is comprised of locally recruited Palestinian refugees, food storage facilities and warehouses have become depots for ammunition and explosives to be used in terror attacks against Israelis.”

Hansen’s point, being factual, is of course of no interest to the Lobby.

Reluctant to be left out of such hysteria, so conducive to fund-raising appeals, the pro-Likud Zionist Organization of America incited its members to “Tell your representative and senators that you want that money diverted to responsible non-governmental organizations that will improve the conditions of Palestinians instead of using them as a political tool against Israel.”

Of course, astute readers may notice some similarity between the contents of the Lantos accusations and these. Slower off the mark, on June 5, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), chairman of the “Congressional Task Force on Terrorism,” echoed in with a position paper declaring that UNRWA has allowed refugee camps “under its control” to “become launching pads for terrorist activity against civilian populations.” Derivatively, he also demanded that “If terrorist activity is thriving under UNRWA’s control, all U.S. funding from that organization must be withdrawn.”

At present the State Department, as the Bush administration’s seemingly last outpost of sanity, is working with UNRWA behind the scenes to head off the hearings that Lantos has threatened. Until now, no date has been fixed, so no one is sure whether the congressman has learned to mistrust AIPAC briefings, or is just drawing breath. Sadly, there is little room for optimism: there are few limits to the impassioned incoherence of legislators when impelled by AIPAC.

Ian Williams is a free-lance journalist based at the United Nations.

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