Jan Jekielek: Asaf Romirowsky, It's such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Asaf Romirowsky: Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.
Mr. Jekielek: Recently, we were made aware of this little-known, very well-funded U.N. agency, UNRWA [United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East]. Recent hearings on Capitol Hill discussed a Telegram group of around 3,000 Palestinian teachers that were associated with UNRWA. The group had leading people praising the October 7th massacre. Please explain to us what's going on here.
Mr. Romirowsky: Sure. UNRWA is the number one service provider of education and medical services to the Palestinian people. UNRWA is the acronym for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. Over the past 75 years, UNRWA has basically transformed itself into an advocacy organization for the Palestinian people. UNRWA is a very important agency for the Palestinian people.
It is considered to be a case study of how a client can hijack a service provider. You have an agency which has the imprimatur of the United Nations, and so it gives the illusion of neutrality and integrity. It has become a political advocacy wing for predominantly serving the Palestinian people when it comes to clinics, education, and social services.
When you talk about the teachers in the memo that you were referring to, UNRWA is the largest employer of Palestinians. Many are teachers, and the majority of Palestinian society are alums of the UNRWA school system. We've learned that a few hundred were involved in the barbaric act of October 7th.
Mr. Jekielek: I've had interactions with the U.N. Commission for Refugees, the global U.N. body dealing with refugees. I wasn't even aware of UNRWA until recently, but it seems to be solely for Palestinians. How did that come about?
Mr. Romirowsky: That's exactly correct. UNRWA is an anomaly within the larger map of refugee organizations. There are two, as you mentioned. One is UNRWA, and the sister organization is UNHCR [U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees]. What's critical to understand is that UNRWA is a U.N. agency solely devoted to the existence and maintenance of Arab-Palestinian refugees. The sister organization, UNHCR, is devoted to other refugees worldwide.
Due to the uniqueness of the fact Arab-Palestinians have their own U.N. agency, they have worked hard to maintain this status. UNRWA's mandate is solely focused on Arab-Palestinian refugees and they define a refugee as anybody who was in mandatory Palestine between 1946 and 1948. UNHCR, which comes in about 1950, basically says you're only a refugee for one generation.
To your point, there have been millions of refugees since World War II that have been assimilated by UNHCR. They have all been re-assimilated after one generation, with the exception of the Arab-Palestinians as a result of UNRWA. The other part of the anomaly is, by its own definition, UNRWA was created as a temporary organization, but it's a temporary that has no end. UNRWA's entire raison d'etre is the so-called existence of the Arab-Palestinian refugees and the belief that there will be a right of return to land that no longer exists, or land that never existed to begin with.
UNRWA basically maintains and sustains Arab-Palestinian refugees in this stasis from generation to generation, which is part of the inheritance and the lineage aspect that aligns with UNRWA's books. At the end of 1948 there were between 625 to 700,000 refugees that were created as a result of the war itself. Israel, before the war began, said to the Arabs, "Don't wage war on us. Let's have peace. Let's work on coexistence. Those Arab Israelis who stayed and did not flee are the citizens. This Arab Israeli population is counted within UNRWA's definition.
Mr. Jekielek: What do they think about that?
Mr. Romirowsky: They know that UNRWA exists. They know that they're better off inside of Israel because of the rights and the freedoms that they get.
Mr. Jekielek: It's particularly interesting to me that Israeli citizens are also considered Palestinian refugees under these refugee rules. But if you become a citizen of a state, you're no longer a refugee.
Mr. Romirowsky: Yes. This is part of the anomaly of UNRWA. Arab Israelis who are Israeli citizens, and who became naturalized citizens post-1948, enjoy all the rights of being a citizen of the State of Israel. They are represented in the Israeli parliament. They have judges, they vote, and they're part of the Israeli democracy. However, UNRWA still considers them to be refugees. The entire numbers game that UNRWA plays is based on the existence of Arab-Palestinian refugees. They will do anything to expand the numbers.
Mr. Jekielek: The Palestinians that left the territory and went to Syria, Jordan, or Lebanon, what portion are they of the population? There are also small pockets around the world.
Mr. Romirowsky: The largest Palestinian population in the United States is Jacksonville, Florida, and Dearborn, Michigan. Jordan is close to 80 percent Palestinian. There are arguments that Jordan is Palestine. Queen Rania herself is of Palestinian descent. There is a fragmentation. West Bankers are Jordanians. Gazans are Egyptian. There's no exchange of populations, because they don't like each other. There's no intermarriage between the two, but they are Palestinian.
Before, it was kind of clannish and they were part of large families. The Khaladis and the Nashashibis all had tribal royalty. Wherever they were settled, that was the rule of the land. But there was no Palestinian cohesiveness. Arafat was the only one who basically spoke about Palestinian society and he represented both the West Bank and Gaza. But there was no cohesiveness.
Mr. Jekielek: Now, there is a war, so are more refugees created?
Mr. Romirowsky: No. Palestinian society at large, by UNRWA's account, is considered to be a refugee population. They are refugees, but not of the current war, according to their definition. They are refugees from pre-1948. Because UNRWA's definition of a refugee is anybody, even if you were a temporary worker, who was in Palestine from 1946 to 1948.
What has happened over the years is that there has been a lineage component. Palestinian lineage is patriarchal. In the 1960s and 70s, they made it matriarchal, to double the numbers. You can inherit Palestinian refugee status, so that has caused the ongoing growth of numbers. Since October 7th in this current war, Hamas, the Islamist group group that is governing Gaza, is already a refugee group, according to UNRWA's accounts.
But their numbers are not expanding more than they already were expanding as a result of the war. What happens the day after tomorrow as far as where are all these people going? One of the reasons that the Egyptians and the Jordanians are not opening up their border is because they understand the threat of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is Hamas.
Remember, the Muslim Brotherhood was ruling Egypt and they kicked the Brotherhood out of Egypt. They have no incentive and no desire whatsoever at all to bring Hamas members into Egypt. However, Egypt is not innocent in this regard because much of the smuggling that you saw going in and out over all these years has been through the tunnels that go into Sinai and Egypt.
The question is where are they going from here? The Palestinian Authority is weak and corrupt. You're talking about Mahmoud Abbas who is serving his 20th year of a four-year term. They're also not an alternative to the governance of Hamas. This is the question that you're seeing play out.
Mr. Jekielek: There is an attempt to maintain this refugee status in perpetuity, unless the Israelis leave or are eliminated. How then do you achieve peace?
Mr. Romirowsky: Let me also contextualize that as well. If you look at the history of the peace process, there have been three issues that have come about regarding what a two-state solution would look like. Within that construct, it has been about a shared capital with Jerusalem. It's been about the 67 borders as far as the disputed lands. It's been about the so-called right of return.
The right of return relates to all those who are defined as refugees by UNRWA. UNRWA identifies between six to seven million refugees worldwide, and that number has been expanding by generational lineage. Anybody who has a citizenship elsewhere is also an Arab Palestinian refugee. They have been able to resurrect the dead, double count, and expand the numbers. We have a long history of problems that exist in this regard.
Every time UNRWA asks for more money, it asks for more money based on the number of refugees. There is a direct correlation between the funding and the number of refugees, so UNRWA creates this narrative and expands the number of refugees, because that's how they stay in business. There is a very clear mathematical connection between the two.
If the conflict was solely a territorial conflict, we would have seen resolution many years ago, but it's not only a territorial conflict. This is where identity plays into this narrative. The right of return is perceived to be as a divine right, and no Arab leader has the ability to give up what is seen as divine by God. This belief continues to grow and fester and metastasize. Arab Palestinian refugees are refugees in perpetuity and continue to grow. That has been part of the architecture.
Historically speaking, there have been percentages that Israel has agreed to accept. Through declassified documents, we know this. If you're looking at the end of 1948, you're talking about no more than 30,000 individuals for a full right of return, call it a day, no problem. Israel has agreed to accept more. But here refugee is a fictitious status. We're saying that people should receive aid based on necessity, not based on a fictitious status.
That's exactly what is happening now with this designation of refugee, because basically you can receive money in perpetuity. Peace can only come when you end the right of return. Mutual recognition has to be the number one issue. Everything else can then fall into place.
In the 1950s and the 1960s when these agencies came about, American foreign policy was devoted to three issues concerning refugee populations; resettlement, reintegration, and repatriation. On all three issues, UNRWA has failed. UNRWA tried to stay true to its mandate, becoming a neutral party, working on resettlement and reintegration.
However, because UNRWA was created as an Article 22 of the United Nations General Assembly, it's based on voluntary contributions. The Arab world basically told UNRWA, "If you want to stay in business, we'll give you money so long as you maintain the Arab Palestinian refugees as refugees. That is the sole reason why no Arab country, with the exception of Jordan, has ever offered the Arab Palestinians citizenship. It was in order to prevent resettlement and in order to give the impression or give the hope that Israel would indeed become Palestine.
That's been the by-design goal of UNRWA at large. If you ask UNRWA when they will get out of business, they will say when there is resolution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. At the same time they are the gatekeeper for the one single issue that ensures the conflict will never end. UNRWA has gone against resettlement.
Mr. Jekielek: The assumption among many people is that Israel took people's land away. This is the narrative that has caused all the problems. How do you respond to that?
Mr. Romirowsky: The assumption that Israel stole the land or removed people indigenous to the land is not true. There was already a state in the making in the 1930s. Historically speaking, there has always been a Jewish presence in the land. You can look at the proposals about dividing up the land that took place leading up to the War of Independence in 1940. Even prior to that, going back to the earliest part of the 20th century, at every juncture, the Jewish community accepted dividing up the land. But the Arabs refused to do this, going up to the partition of 1947 where there was a clear rejectionist ideology that said that there could be no coexistence.
In effect, the historical trend to this very day in the Arab Palestinian narrative is that rejectionism has always trumped statehood at every juncture, and at every opportunity for conversation about a peace process, pre-state and post-state. That was the ultimate motivator for the Arab-Israeli wars.
The argument has been, and this is also important for your viewers to understand, that any land that was Muslim is Muslim in perpetuity. If the current state of Israel was Muslim land under the time of the Muslim expansion, the perception from the Arab Palestinian perspective is that Jews are occupying, "Land that is Muslim land."
The occupational narrative has been the driving force within Palestinian society and is predominantly psychological. If you do a deeper dive into Palestinian identity, I would argue that 90 percent, if not more, of Arab Palestinian identity is rooted in anti-Semitism. There is no independent identity that is disentangled from that and that will allow for coexistence.
Mr. Jekielek: Does UNRWA take care of all the education for Palestinians?
Mr. Romirowsky: Primary education.
Mr. Jekielek: What was astonishing about the messages in that Telegram group is that many people were supporting the events of October 7. How do you explain that?
Mr. Romirowsky: UNRWA makes no distinctions in their hiring processes or in their background checks. If you're a Hamas member by night and you're an UNRWA teacher by day, the kind of education that you're teaching is Hamas education. There have been ongoing U.S. congressional investigations to analyze what is being disseminated in Arab Palestinian textbooks. We find the constant glorification of martyrology.
We find the fact that Jews are the sons of pigs and monkeys. Maps of Israel don't exist. There is the idea of from the river to the sea and of annihilating Jews and it should be all Palestinian. Coexistence does not play into this at all. Back in the 1990s, for example, during the Oslo Peace Accords, there was a demand that Israel and the Palestinian society should change their textbooks.
Israeli textbooks were already pro-peace, but Palestinian textbooks had none of that. There was no discussion about coexistence at large. This is exactly what we've been fighting for the past 22 years. Here in the States and in Europe, we've observed there is a disconnect about the reality on the ground and what it would take to create peace. To your point, peace should be the goal.
But there has to be mutual recognition. There has been a refusal to accept Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state. Arab Palestinian propaganda, and Palestinian propaganda at large, has hijacked any conversation about actual scholarship and discussion about the history of Israel, how Israel came about, and the history of the Arab-Israeli wars.
The argument is simplistically put and watered down to a victim-victimizer mentality. It tries to portray the Arab-Israeli conflict as a binary issue. As a historian, I find that to be disingenuous and an anathema to the region at large, which is rich historically, theologically, culturally, and all intertwined. One needs to understand who the players in the region are, what they've been trying to achieve, and what is actually happening on the ground.
Case in point, when the Abraham Accords came about a few years ago, you started to see normalization between Israel and its Arab neighbors, however significant that was. It made no difference to the discussion on American college campuses, which are solely committed to viewing the Arab-Israeli conflict and Israeli-Palestinian relations through the lens of the boycott movement. That is the only lens by which they can understand the issue, and that is disingenuous. Not all roads need to go through Ramallah.
When you're talking about the Gulf states in particular, Israel told their Palestinian brethren, "Look, we don't always agree, but we can have peace and we can have an understanding through economics and exchanges and ideas and collaborate and work together." They actually recommended to their Palestinian brethren, "Maybe you should try this." But of course, that was flatly rejected.
In Clinton's memoirs, towards the end of the Clinton administration, there was an exchange between Yasser Arafat and Bill Clinton. Clinton would argue that he devoted eight years of his presidency to trying to achieve peace between the Israelis and Palestinians. What took place, and I'm paraphrasing, Arafat said to Clinton, "Mr. President, you're the greatest president the world has ever seen." Clinton's response was, "No, I'm a failure and you made me a failure."
It was because at every juncture, according to the famous quote, "The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity." Palestinians have flat out been afraid to follow through. They knew that would take away from their centrality. UNRWA needs to maintain the symbolism of Palestinian society that is stateless.
As long as the world can believe that Palestinians are refugees in perpetuity and are stateless in perpetuity because of a so-called colonial empire that has been thrust upon them by the Jews, then they have the sympathy of the world. That has been their success story. I don't think UNRWA can be reformed. UNRWA needs to be disbanded. You have to wean Palestinian society off of UNRWA.
UNRWA acts as a shadow government. UNRWA is a big black hole over all educational, medical, social services and other kinds of needs. We need to break that monopoly to get any kind of accountability and transparency as to where our monies are going. Up until the Trump administration froze the money, we were talking about $400 million in U.S. taxpayer dollars.
There are other alternatives. I would start with looking at the World Food Program, UNICEF, WHO, or other agencies within the U.N. architecture to try to break the monopoly. You have to do a needs assessment. UNRWA does not only operate in Gaza. UNRWA also operates in Lebanon, Jordan, and the Palestinian areas within Judea and Samaria, West Bank. There are many functions that UNRWA provides.
After this needs assessment, then you could actually get to a point of saying, "Here are the needs. Here's what has to happen." Due to the fact that they had Hamas operations under UNRWA headquarters, and the fact that they had individuals who were part of the attacks on October 7th, UNRWA is no longer a legitimate organization. In my mind, they have never been legitimate. It is an obstacle to peace rather than a solution to peace.
Mr. Jekielek: The Palestinian leadership is getting more per capita than European leaders received under the Marshall Plan. That is astonishing.
Mr. Romirowsky: I'm not surprised. The Palestinian Authority gets double dips as far as money. They get money from USAID, from UNRWA, and from contributions. Going back to Yasser Arafat, his goal was to make the Palestinian cause the cause celeb of the Arab world at large. This is what he sold in all his meetings with the Arab League, that finally created the famous Khartoum Resolution; no negotiation, no compromise, and no peace with Israel.
The idea was that until the Palestinian issue is resolved, nobody in the Arab world should rest or should have peace with the Israelis. Now, that architecture started to break after Israel had peace with Egypt. The centrality of the Palestinian narrative slowly started to diminish. Arafat and the succeeding leadership have been focused on ensuring the centrality of Palestinianism in the eyes of the Arab world and the world at large. When they need attention, part of the way to get attention is to start a war, which is what we saw on October 7th.
Mr. Jekielek: There has been discussion about aid not getting to the Palestinians. UNRWA is the entity responsible for education, health, and distribution of aid. How is that playing out?
Mr. Romirowsky: As you can see, you have Israel with tons of trucks that are coming in with aid and are about to come into Gaza. When they get to Gaza that aid is being stolen by Hamas and is being marked up. Of course, the Palestinians are basically being used as pawns as always.
UNRWA itself is not delivering the aid, so the aid is not getting to the right people. It's not getting to the people who need the stuff. UNRWA supplies are basically on hold. The blame game is that Israel is not getting the aid to the Palestinian people because somehow they're obstructing the aid, which is not the case.
Actually UNRWA and Hamas themselves are using the aid trucks and the vehicles to smuggle in and out of Gaza. The concern is not only about the aid, but also about the integrity of the aid and the safety vis-a-vis the terrorism element that's playing into all of this. What's happening now is there is a desire by Hamas to show to the world starvation and famine. If the aid doesn't get to the population, then they could project that image to the world itself. But what they do is steal the aid. They will try to overcharge Palestinians, which they do.
Because many of them are UNRWA workers, they're part of that entire process. Gaza is densely populated and it is a challenge for the Israeli Defense Forces [IDF] to disentangle the combatants of Hamas from the civilian population.
In contrast to the Israeli Defense Forces, Hamas embeds itself within Palestinian society and uses the infrastructure. They use women and babies as human shields. They rape, they maim, and they behead. These are the kinds of tactics they have been using. There are indeed a lot of problems in Gaza.
But no other military has fought a war the way Israel has in this urban setting. It is a risk to the Israelis themselves because they have to go into a densely populated area. For the past 20 years, Hamas has been building underground facilities in lower Gaza. You've got an entire metro five stories down. We found that even 20 stories down there is an entire network that is longer than the tube in London. An entire underground maze has been built in lower Gaza.
With the recent attack at al-Shifa hospital, we found there were hundreds of known terrorists and leaders of Hamas camped in these places. They have been using them as shields from the Israelis and that has been the challenge.
This is exactly the standoff between the United States and Israel as it relates to the last stronghold in Rafah, which is the southern city that borders Egypt. Nobody has exact numbers about the amount of casualties because they are coming out of the Ministry of Health of Gaza, which is basically Hamas. They have an understanding that the more so-called casualties that exist, there will be more pressure on Israel to stop the military campaign.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cannot look himself in the mirror or in the eyes of the hostages' families without having some way of winning this war and safely bringing back as many hostages as possible. That has been the ongoing challenge of dealing with this war. Palestinian society is stuck in this stasis, partially because of its leadership, which has been corrupt.
They are using the fallacious imagery of statelessness in order to create worldwide sympathy. You can see Palestinian leaders going to the UN and saying, "We want you to parachute a state into this area." without doing the hard work of having a conversation of who you're having peace with. They want a state in lieu of the state of Israel. That's how they understand the reality, so any conversation doesn't go anywhere.
The Palestinian Authority needs to be reformed. Terrorist wars and terrorist organizations and Islamist organizations like Hamas have no room around the negotiating table. Above all, we need to end the right of return and end UNRWA. That is a non-starter. Because if UNRWA is still in business, in 10 or 15 years down the road, it's not going to be six or seven million refugees, it's going to be 20 million. That's a non-starter.
If these individuals want to be citizens of a Palestinian state, great. But they cannot be refugees because this is taking the American taxpayer dollar. It's not moving the needle anywhere closer to the peace process, which is why UNRWA is an obstacle towards peace.
Mr. Jekielek: Asaf Romirowsky, such a pleasure to have you on the show.
Mr. Romirowsky: Thank you.
Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Asaf Romirowsky and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.