The thing I find most absurd — to the point of unethical — about the role of UNRWA within the Middle East conflict is the way it embodies an ultimately exclusive perspective thereof.
If there can be any justification for the UN in today's world of nations, it is as a platform for the application of multilateral thoughts and actions, cutting across perilous polarities.
As an institution UNRWA was perverted at the stage of its foundation by outside interference in its charter. Even so, under its initial leadership, facing considerable, open hostility from the Arabs, attempts were indeed made to follow the standard playbook, rehousing and rehabilitating the displaced peoples of the 1948 war.
Yet these efforts were actively resisted by the Arab League as likely to lead to acceptance of some of the humiliation of defeat in the war they had started.
So already in the 1950s a single clear political goal (the eradication of the Jewish state) was prioritised over the living conditions and overall wellbeing of hundreds of thousands (now millions) of Arabs. Remember that the next time you see or hear the term "refugee camp" in a mainstream media report.
And now, decades after UNRWA's efforts to resolve the initial problem were stymied, the organisation has become fully politicised and Palestinianised, perpetuating, not just though obstinacy, but actively through education as well, the need for its charges to subsist on aid provided by foreign taxpayers — backed by the utterly partisan rationale that this situation manifests to the world a dogged refusal to ever accept Jews as political equals, and a forever rejection of the international imposition of partition in the twentieth century. The latter represented what the UN was set up to do. Discover and manage compromises. UNRWA absolutely does not.
We are collectively being made to pay, indefinitely, via one of our own international bodies, for the westernised wickedness of imagining a trade-off.
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