39 Republicans Sponsor Bill To Cut Off Funding of UNRWA

The Taylor Force Act, passed by Congress unanimously in 2018, was designed to cut off all economic aid to the Palestinian Authority as long as the PA’s “Pay-For-Slay” program remained in operation. That is the program according to which the PA provides generous subsidies for imprisoned terrorists and for the families of terrorists who died while engaged in terrorist attacks. The Bidenites have been dead set on renewing aid to the Palestinians, and knowing that Mahmoud Abbas will never stop funding the “Pay-For-Slay” program, they decided on a work-around: they would provide funding not to the PA directly, but to UNRWA, which is not mentioned in the Taylor Force Act. Some of that money could be used by UNRWA to pay for schools and hospitals that the PA would otherwise have to pay for; funds given to UNRWA could even be transferred by UNRWA directly to the PA. Congressional Republicans are determined to end this violation of the spirit, if not the letter, of the Taylor Force Act, and now 39 0f them, from both Houses of Congress, have introduced a bill to drastically cut down on American aid to UNRWA. More on this proposed legislation is here.

An external audit of UNRWA is called for because some of  UNRWA’s most senior executives, including a recent Commissioner-General, have  been involved in scandalous behavior, involving money and sex, which ended in a half-dozen being forced to resign. The allegations against them included “sexual misconduct, nepotism, retaliation…and other abuses of authority” which led to an “exodus of senior and other staff” and a toxic and dysfunctional work environment.”

One of those made to resign in 2019 was UNRWA’s Director-General, Pierre Krähenbühl, who was accused of a multitude of serious infractions. The allegations against him included:

• Conducting a romantic affair with UNRWA employee Maria Mohammedi.
• Fast-tracking the appointment of Mohammedi to the newly-created role of Senior Advisor to the Commissioner-General, so the two could be closer.
• As a result of the inappropriate personal relationship with Mohammedi, creating a toxic environment for colleagues and embarrassment with donors.
• Bringing Mohammedi on the majority of his business trips.
• Misusing his authority to obtain waivers for Mohammedi to travel business class while most other management traveled economy class.
• Being away from his duty station in Jerusalem and at Mohammedi’s duty station in Amman for 28-29 days per month, claiming a daily subsistence allowance for those days.

This Congressional legislation will require an outside audit of UNRWA before any American aid to the agency will be released.

Americans must wonder why they should be expected to continue to give more than 20 times as much to UNRWA as any of the Arab states. If those states – many of them the fabulously rich oil states of the Gulf – don’t care to support their Palestinian Arab brothers, why should Americans take up the slack and provide twenty times as much for them? We have, after all, a lot on our plate: since the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, the Biden administration and the U.S. Congress have directed nearly more than $75 billion in assistance to Ukraine, which includes humanitarian, financial, and military support, according to the Kiel Institute. It makes sense, in our straitened circumstances, for the US contributions to UNRWA to be no greater “than the highest contribution made by a member of the League of Arab states.” Assuming Qatar doesn’t increase its current contribution, that clause in the legislation will decrease Washington’s aid to UNRWA by a factor of twenty.

UNRWA also continues to use schoolbooks dripping with antisemitic venom, even though it has repeatedly promised in the past to get rid of all such material. Its educational materials also glorify individual terrorists, suggesting to Palestinian young people that these terrorists are worthy of emulation. Unless and until all such materials promoting antisemitism and terrorism against the Zionists are removed, this bill would prohibit all American aid to UNRWA.

The praise in UNRWA schoolbooks of the Palestinians who “sacrifice their blood to liberate Jerusalem,” and calling on the entire umma, or Muslim nation, not to be negligent in “protecting al-Aqsa” from “the Jews” who would “defile” it by their very presence, clearly promote both antisemitism and violence. If this bill passes, UNRWA will have to decide: will it clean up its schoolbooks and other educational materials, or will it forego the hundreds of millions of dollars the Bidenites have been sending it each year ($940 million in the Biden Administration’s first two years)?  

Meanwhile, for nearly two decades, Hamas has been using UNRWA schools and hospitals in Gaza to hide weapons, rocket launchers, ammunition,  and fighters. UNRWA has pretended not to know about this use of its buildings as hideouts and storehouses for the terror group’s weapons and fighters, but it knows perfectly well what is going on. Far from complaining, UNRWA approves of this use of its facilities by Hamas in Gaza to hide both men and weapons. Indeed, UNRWA has among its 30,000 employees  many Hamas and PIJ members, as former PLO spokesman and Hamas apologist Rashid Khalidi has revealed. And the aid given to UNRWA allows it to fulfill tasks – such as housing, education, medical care, financial support for the poor – that otherwise would be the responsibility of Hamas alone, as the ruler of Gaza. Money is fungible; what is given to UNRWA to spend  in Gaza is money that Hamas itself need not spend.

This bill deserves to be supported. It puts the Bidenites on the spot. They will have to guarantee to Congress that UNRWA is free of financial scandal, which the agency has seldom been in the past. They will have to ensure that UNRWA removes all of the antisemitism and violence in its schoolbooks, which UNRWA for years has promised, but never has managed, to do. There is little reason to think that it will be able to do so now. And the Risch-Roy bill caps American financial aid to UNRWA, which cannot exceed the amount of aid given to UNRWA by any Arab state.

This legislation closes the “UNRWA loophole” that allowed the Bidenites to get around the provisions of the Taylor Force Act, that applied only to American aid to the PA. Now aid to UNRWA, too, will be subject to all sorts of scrutiny and disabling provisions that will either put UNRWA on the straight and narrow, or deprive it of nearly $500 million annually in aid from the Bidenites who, because of this legislation, will no longer be able to violate the spirit of the Taylor Force Act by lavishing such largesse on an unsupervised UNRWA.