Professor Anne Bayefsky, the President of the Human Rights Voices human rights organization and Director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust, spoke to Arutz Sheva – Israel National News on Monday about the laws passed by the Knesset last week outlawing UNRWA’s activities in Israel in light of UNRWA’s documented connection to the Hamas terrorist organization.
Professor Bayefsky noted that the problems with UNRWA predate its recently-proven employment of terrorists who participated in the October 7 massacre. “First and foremost, UNRWA was invented so as to make a permanent peace between Palestinian Arabs and Israelis impossible. It entrenches what might be called ‘refugee-ism’ – inherited continuous refugee status until such time as a Jewish State is eradicated. The UN has one ‘refugee’ agency for Palestinians, and one refugee agency for all other actual refugees in the world. It is discrimination against the Jewish State and the Jewish people, who are characterized as permanent oppressors and persecutors by definition.”
“UNRWA has spent the decades of its existence raising generation after generation of Palestinian Arabs to hate their Jewish neighbors and to indoctrinate them to believe that Jews occupy their lands and that the Jewish people are not indigenous to the birthplace of Judaism,” she said.
According to Prof. Bayefsky, “Since UNRWA is literally anti-peace by design, it is no wonder that it is tied at the hip with Palestinian terrorists, including Hamas. Israel has found incontrovertible evidence that UNRWA employees took part in the October 7th atrocities, that a significant proportion of UNRWA employees are members of Palestinian terrorist organizations, that UNRWA facilities (including schools) have been used as Hamas command and control centers and weapons storage depots, that UNRWA’s Gaza headquarters powered a Hamas data center directly beneath it, that Hamas members shot at IDF troops from UNRWA clinics, that the head of Hamas’s Lebanon branch was the head of the UNRWA’s teachers union in Lebanon, and that UNRWA supplies have been taken by Hamas since the start of the war.”
“It is painfully obvious that UNRWA is a net force for harm to both Israelis and Palestinians who seek peaceful coexistence, and its elimination and replacement is long overdue,” she said of the Israeli legislature’s moves against UNRWA.
The bills banning UNRWA’s activities in Israel were approved in the Knesset last Monday with a historic majority of 92 out of 120 MKs. Only 10 MKs voted against the bills, with the opposition parties National Unity, Yisrael Beytenu, and Yesh Atid supporting it. The Democrats party abstained.
UNRWA, which has long been criticized for cooperating with Hamas, has come under increased scrutiny as its workers have been found to have been directly involved in Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
Israel revealed in January of this year that UNRWA staff participated in the October 7 Hamas attacks. It then presented a dossier showing that the UNRWA workers who participated in the Hamas massacre kidnapped a woman, handed out ammunition and actively took part in the massacre at Kibbutz Be’eri, where 97 people were murdered.
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