Arab Support for UNRWA Is Down 90%, But Western Donors Hold Steady

UNRWA, that most corrupt and corrupting of international aid agencies, is financially on its uppers. The organization’s media advisor, Adnan Abu Hasna, has warned of the possibility of UNRWA being forced to stop services in September with its budget projected to run out by that time. It wouldn’t be able to pay salaries or other expenses unless donors pony up more spondulicks, as they are apparently reluctant to do. 

Of course, just like the Palestinian Authority, UNRWA is always poor-mouthing, hoping thereby – and until recently succeeding – in getting ever more money for its constantly expanding roll of beneficiaries. But this time it really is in dire straits. The list of Palestinian refugees succored by UNRWA does not stop with the first generation of refugees – those Arabs who left Mandatory Palestine and then Israel, between November 1947 and 1949 — but includes all of their progeny: children, grandchildren, and so on, world without end. All other refugees in the world are defined as including only the first, original refugees. Thus Henry Kissinger is a German Jewish refugee. But his son David, born in New York City, is not. Vladimir Nabokov was a Russian refugee. His son Dmitri, born in Berlin, was not. But the grandson of someone we may call Ahmad A. (who left Israel, let’s say, in June 1948), born in Damascus in 1980 of a father born in Beirut in 1955, remains on UNRWA’s rolls as a “refugee,” and thus is offered all kinds of support. And the same thing will happen to that grandson’s children: they, too will be “Palestinian refugees.” What’s more, any spouse of a “Palestinian refugee” is considered by UNRWA to be a refugee as well, and entitled to full benefits from the agency even after a divorce. No wonder the agency is always running out of money: there are many more people to support every year. Did I mention that when these “refugees” die, their deaths are seldom reported, and as they remain on the rolls, UNRWA money continues to be sent to the families of the deceased? More on this decline in Arab support for UNRWA can be found here: “Arab support for UNRWA is down 90%,” Elder of Ziyon, July 16, 2023:

…UNRWA has a financial deficit this year of about $200 million.

Abu Hasna noted that the support provided to UNRWA by Arab nations was $200 million in 2018, but it has evaporated to only $20 million dollars last year, a 90 percent reduction….

Either way, the amount of aid to UNRWA from the Arab states is ridiculously low compared to the amount that the West provides – Canada itself gives $20 million a year, and individual EU states gives tens of millions on top of the $100 million from the EU itself….

So Canada alone gives as much to UNRWA as do all the Arab states put together. And the U.S. gave UNRWA $344 million in 2022, with even more expected in 2023 – that is, seventeen times as much as all of the Arab states.

If the Arab world itself doesn’t care about their own, why should the West?

Good question. Why does the West continue to contribute to UNRWA, and allow it to continue its farcical practice of always expanding its rolls with each new generation? It’s been 74 years since UNRWA was founded. The original refugees – that is, the real refugees — who are still alive now — number less than 25,000. But UNRWA provides aid for 5.9 million pseudo-refugees who are their descendants. The Arabs are tired of funding, every year, more and more of them. They know how few of those “refugees” are the real thing and have slashed their payments accordingly. Shouldn’t the West follow suit?

What has managed to convince the peoples of the Western world, that they have some kind of duty to admit into their midst millions of Muslims who have been taught to despise them as the “most vile of created beings”? What will it take for this suicidal madness, without parallel in human history, of taking in, and then supporting, a sworn enemy, to end, long after the baleful results of that Muslim immigration have become obvious? Similarly, why have we in the West been snookered into believing that among the hundreds of millions of refugees created since World War II by persecutions and wars, it makes sense that the Palestinians alone are allowed to count as “refugees” not just those who left Mandatory Palestine and then Israel between late 1947 and 1949, but all of their progeny since, so that instead of a constantly declining number of real refugees being supported, UNRWA now provides aid for 5.9 million “refugees”? And why should the countries of Western Europe, which are now paying exorbitant sums to provide every conceivable kind of benefit to Muslim economic migrants, on top of that be expected to pay hundreds of millions of dollars annually to UNRWA? If some Muslim Arab states want to support the 25,000 real refugees, outside the confines of UNRWA, that’s their business. We in the West should have nothing more to do with UNRWA except to call for its closure.