It's time to stop enabling and coddling the Palestinians.
It's time to stop enabling and coddling the Palestinians.
The international community only makes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict worse when it takes on the eternal responsibility of caring for the Palestinians.
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Something has gone terribly wrong in how the international community treats the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Hamas’ charter explicitly calls for the destruction of Israel and murder of Jews, but Israel is the one on trial at the World Court.
Some 10 percent of employees of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees in Gaza have ties to terror organizations, in addition to at least 12 employees who were involved in the October 7th terror onslaught in Israel.
The Palestinians inflicted the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust, and part of U.S. President Joe Biden’s solution includes an insistence on rewarding them with their own state.
How did this happen?
In one sentence: The Palestinians have been coddled and enabled for decades. Coddled means treated in an indulgent or overprotective way, and enabled in this sense means relationship patterns that support harmful or problematic behavior, making it easier for these behaviors to continue.
In other words, there are no real consequences for Palestinian indoctrination to hate Jews and Israel, to commit vicious terrorism against Israelis, and to continue their historic refusal to share the land with the Jews.
The fact that one in 10 employees of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in Gaza have ties to terror organizations is a microcosm for systemic issues in Palestinian society, yet no international actor wants to seriously confront them. Instead, every attempt at getting the Palestinians to ambiguously agree to so-called peace is a few cosmetic, quick-fix changes that have never lasted nor endured.
Furthermore, no one wants to hold the Palestinians accountable for their unbelievably corrupt leadership. During the 1990s, for instance, U.S. President Bill Clinton’s administration invited Yasser Arafat (a notorious terrorist) to the White House 13 times, more times than any other foreign visitor.
By then, Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, was profusely corrupt, using public funds for his own purposes, which ranged from financing an expensive lifestyle in Paris for his wife, to buying and retaining the support of Palestinian politicians, to funding 13 so-called “security” organizations — which Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon used to call “security-terror organizations.”
Clinton’s obsession with solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict only encouraged even more Palestinian corruption, while signaling to the Palestinians who were disgusted with public corruption that the Americans were neither interested in nor planning to hold Arafat accountable.
Meanwhile, the Palestinians scream and wail at every possible opportunity in order to manipulate the international community into continuing to fund them with billions of dollars, even though the Palestinians have nothing to show for it.
After at least 11 countries suspended funding to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) due to the involvement of its personnel in the October 7th massacre, the agency announced that it will not be able to continue its humanitarian activities in the Gaza Strip starting in March if the delay in its funding continues.
Yeah, that is what should happen when you do not police yourself. If 10 percent of your employees are terrorists, that is more than a few bad apples, and consequences must be steep, for they are the only way to effect change. If you remove the consequences, you remove any incentive to change, and any chance of a workable future for Israelis and Palestinians.
In Israel, no one was surprised to learn that this agency’s employees were involved in the October 7th massacre, as I am sure no one in Gaza or the Palestinian West Bank was surprised either. Years of Israel’s familiarity with the agency established the understanding that it is a body which often sponsors terrorist activities, and above all perpetuates in the Palestinian collective consciousness deep-seated feelings of hostility and revenge against Israel.
Yet for years, countries have continued to excessively fund it. The agency received more than a billion dollars in 2022, including $343 million from the United States, $202 million from Germany, and $114 million from the European Union.
I have my doubts that these countries have actually suspended their contributions — there are always work-arounds — since it would mean damage to the critical civilian aid that approximately 66 percent of Gaza’s residents receive from the agency.
But doing so is imperative if we are to truly pave a path toward Israel-Palestinian coexistence. The Palestinians must directly and persistently feel the pain of their leaders’ consequences in order to realize that the Palestinians’ fate is ultimately up to them and them alone.
And we must ignore anyone who comes to defend the Palestinians as if they constantly need to be helped and rehabilitated, as if they are unable to do anything without outside assistance from the gullible world. But this did not stop UN head Antonio Guterres from bitching about countries suspending their aid to UNRWA, which exists to perpetuate Palestinians as refugees and thus prolong the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Guterres and practically everyone else in the UN knew about UNRWA indoctrination and terrorism long before it was exposed. And Guterres and his colleagues should also be exposed for being pathetic Palestinian puppets which allow UNRWA schools to teach millions of Palestinians that the 1948 Israeli-Arab War is still not over, and that they have a “right of return” — which is code for dismantling and taking over Israel. In other words: genocide.
As Swiss Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis said in 2018, “UNRWA has become part of the problem. It supplies the ammunition to continue the conflict. By supporting UNRWA, we keep the conflict alive. It’s a perverse logic.”1
What’s more, UNRWA has become an unofficial arm of Hamas, with operatives on its payroll and involved in high-level decision-making. It is part of the terror group’s rampant manipulation of humanitarian organizations, which also includes raising funds via nonprofits in the name of Gazan civilians, and then actually funneling millions of dollars to itself — enabling it to evade international sanctions.2
But for some strange reasons, Biden continues to demonstrate a willingness to negotiate with terrorists — taking after his predecessor, Barack Obama — which only serves as an open invitation for more terrorism against Israel, the U.S. and the West.
It boggles my mind that, 116 days into this war, Biden either does not want to or cannot leverage Qatar to force Hamas to release the remaining abductees and then send the terror group into exile. The war would be over tomorrow, Palestinians in Gaza could return to their homes, and rebuilding the strip would start immediately.
The other option is to deal with terrorists the only way they should be dealt with, by unapologetically pounding them until they succumb, but the U.S. is forcing Israel to fight Hamas with the proverbial one arm behind its back, which elongates this war and adds to more Palestinian suffering in Gaza. (I thought the U.S. is obsessively trying to avoid Palestinian suffering, maybe I misunderstood.)
In conclusion, the international community only makes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict worse when it takes on the eternal responsibility of caring for the Palestinians, according to a fictional narrative that they suffered one of the most abhorrent historical injustices, therefore justifying the Palestinians to perpetuate some of the worst terrorism and repugnant hatred on Earth.
If the international community is actually interested in solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it starts with ending the coddling and enabling of Palestinians.
“Minister: ‘UN aid agency is part of the problem in the Middle East.’” Swiss Info.
“Israel Says Hamas Gets Online Donations Via Groups Posing as Gaza Charities.” Bloomberg.
Joshua,
I’ve been following your writing and agree with your findings. This particular post misses one detail; the political leaders of today empower Palestinian corruption for 2 basic reasons; maintaining power on the left and pure, undisguised antisemitism. Don’t try to rationalize it; the jealousy of the Jew is deeply embedded in most societies. Let Israel and the world’s Jewish population just continue the righteous path and stand up to the hate. Thanks.
"The fact that one in 10 employees of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in Gaza have ties to terror organizations" - do you have a source for this figure?