When helping becomes harmful

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Tuesday the 30th of January, 2024.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

First up: aid workers as terrorists?

As you just heard, members of the U.N. agency putatively responsible for Palestinian refugees have been linked to the October 7th Hamas attacks on Israel. That agency is UNRWA, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees.

U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric:

DUJARRIC: The Secretary-General has been briefed by the Commissioner-General of UNRWA Philippe Lazzarini regarding extremely serious allegations which implicate several UNRWA staff members in the terror attacks of October 7th in Israel. The Secretary-General is horrified by this news and asked Mr. Lazzarini to investigate this matter swiftly and to ensure that any UNRWA employee shown to have participated or embedded in what transpired on October 7th or in any other criminal activity, be terminated immediately and referred for potential criminal prosecution.

EICHER: The U.S. and eight other countries have suspended funding for UNRWA. National Security Council Spokesman John Kirby told reporters more may be coming.

KIRBY: We'll certainly consider additional, you know what, depending on the investigation, whether that requires any additional changes in the way we support UNRWA going forward.

REICHARD: Over in Congress today, a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee will hold a hearing to discuss what those changes might look like.

EICHER: Joining us now to talk about it is Richard Goldberg. He’s a Senior Advisor for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He was previously a National Security Council official and has submitted testimony to the House as part of today’s hearing.

Richard, good morning.

RICHARD GOLDBERG: Good morning.

EICHER: Let’s start with the basics. What was UNRWA created to do, and how does it work differently from other U.N. refugee agencies?

GOLDBERG: Yeah, really important question. There are two agencies in the world that deal with quote-unquote refugees. There's the main UN refugee agency, we call that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, that deals with 10s of millions of refugees with just, you know, 10,000-15,000 people, international aid workers that are working towards helping people who are fleeing a conflict, who are moving around internally in the conflict, get back to their lives as quickly as possible, whether that's repatriation return to their homes, some sort of post refugee, post IDP status.

Then there's this other organization, just for this group of people that are called in quotes, "Palestinian refugees," and it's called the UN Relief and Works Agency. It's not international. It has 30,000 people, all Palestinian, working for it. They're not refugees, they haven't been fleeing conflict. These are people who were part of a refugee population of 700,000 or so back in 1948-1949, when Israel was founded. Remember, there was about an equal number of Jewish refugees who were kicked out of Arab countries at the time, they were all absorbed into Israel and the United States. And yet this group of individuals were told don't go back to your home, don't go anywhere else. Stay in refugee status, because the Arab armies will be coming back to liberate you, will be coming back to fulfill the vision of destroying Israel. So this organization became a political manifestation of the Arab war against Israel going back to 1948 all the way until now.

So what do we have here? We have this one unique set of an organization separate from all other refugees in the world, where we pour billions of dollars, knowing that money is going to flow to potentially terrorist organizations, into schools that train, indoctrinate kids to grow up for conflict and not for peace, and keeping them in a refugee status instead of actually saying, how do we grow their economic and political potential. And what you hear today, this breaking news of these 12 individuals who there's now evidence participated in the October 7 massacre, that's a feature, not a bug.

REICHARD: You submitted testimony for today’s subcommittee hearing. I’ll quote from it: “UNRWA is one of the most reckless discretionary spending programs in history.” How do you mean?

GOLDBERG: Well, remember, when we give foreign assistance to an NGO, when USAID, the U.S. Agency for International Development, puts out some money for a contract for development work, we have to run all the people involved in that organization through our intelligence community to verify if there's any hits for potential terrorism. We don't require that of U.N. agencies. We certainly don't require that of UNRWA, even though it operates in an area where we know there's many, many, many terrorist organizations operating and therefore the risk is very high that your money will be flowing there.

But zoom back out. From an oversight of U.S. taxpayer dollars, I worked many, many years as a staff associate for the appropriations committee that works on all these foreign assistance programs. And your number one question is, where's the money? How's it being spent? What's the oversight? How do we know we're getting good value for our money? There's no board of directors that UNRWA has for us to weigh in on who its leader should be. This is an independent agency. They just say give us the money and go away. Between 1950 and 2018 when the Trump administration halted our funding for UNRWA, US taxpayers committed $6 billion to UNRWA. Do you know how much money we've committed since 2021, when the Biden administration restarted funding? A billion dollars in just three years. Because UNRWA says the sky is falling, they need cash immediately, the population has grown, the need is growing. That's not sustainable as a program on its merits. We have tried for 20 years to get an independent expenditure audit of UNRWA's books, they won't allow it. They say the U.N. has a single audit principle, only the U.N.'s board of auditors can look at the books. Well, that's a red alert.

So if you look at the efficiency of dollars, the lack of accountability, both governance-wise, financial auditing-wise, plus the terror finance problems, plus the education system, you know, raising people to hate, to commit something like October 7, do I need another example of why this is broken for the U.S. taxpayer? It just makes no sense. It is likely one of the worst programs we have ever funded in the US government history. And it has to stop.

10:11 EICHER: What do you think Congress can do about it?

GOLDBERG: Well, first of all, don't keep putting money into UNRWA. If we want to build up leverage to actually have change, we need to work with our allies to withhold funding and say that money is going to go into other organizations that can do true humanitarian work that we trust in other areas of the world. And we're going to set up metrics for success. Success is saying we've now raised this many people out of poverty. We've now given this many political rights to people who live in Palestinian areas.

It's not success to add another hundred thousand people to a refugee roll and say that the refugee problem has gotten worse, an imaginary refugee problem, because Israel is a problem. The Israeli forces are not anywhere near the camps that UNRWA runs in Lebanon. And yet for the last several months, there have been terror firefights going on between random Palestinian terror groups killing each other. Why is it anywhere UNRWA goes, terror infrastructure follows?

So we have a problem here. We have other trusted agencies and organizations we've worked with in other parts of the world that can do education, that can do health care delivery, and can do it in a way where you don't keep sending people into despair and poverty and hate, and instead give people the path to self sufficiency and self responsibility.

REICHARD: Richard Goldberg is a senior advisor for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Thank you for your expertise!

GOLDBERG: Anytime.

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