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Last year, New Zealand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade took the extraordinary step of briefing the Minister of Foreign Affairs about hate and incitement to violence being taught in United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) schools partly funded by New Zealand. MFAT waved away the issue, telling the minister, “We are satisfied that these issues are not systemic within UNRWA”.
Their Australian counterparts are not so sanguine.
The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade is investigating revelations the UN’s top Palestinian aid agency — to which Australia contributes $10m a year — has been publishing violent, anti-Semitic materials in Gaza Strip and West Bank classrooms.
The material that has DFAT concerned is much the same stuff that MFAT glossed over.
Maths equations counting the number of “martyrs” in the First Intifada between Israel and Palestine claim Israel is dumping toxic waste into the West Bank, and multiple mentions of “jihad” have been found in school materials given to students in Palestinian areas.
The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees in the Near East has apologised for the school materials, claiming they were quickly produced by teachers when the Palestinian Territories went into various COVID-19 lockdowns last year.
Well, they must have worked with lightning speed. The earliest lockdowns in the Palestinian Territories were imposed at the end of the first week of March, 2020. MFAT briefed the minister on the hate material in Palestinian textbooks less than two weeks later.
More tellingly, the MFAT briefing relies on the findings of an investigation by the UN Secretary-General, ordered in July 2019 and completed in November 2019.
Australia has already taken steps to see that Australian taxpayers’ money, at least, is not spent funding anti-Semitic hate.
Australia has already slashed its contributions to the troubled UN agency in the past year, and a DFAT spokesman said it warned UNRWA it had a responsibility to remain impartial in the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“DFAT is making further inquiries into this matter,” the spokesman told The Australian.
A report from an Israeli NGO also blows holes in the UNRWA’s excuses.
A report from Israeli group The Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education said the school materials circulated by UNRWA in March and October last year contained multiple anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic references.
Textbooks said Israel wanted to take Palestinian lands for strategic value, made comparisons between Israeli prisons and the Spanish Inquisition, and referred to Israel as “The Occupation”, “The Zionists” and “The Enemy”.
A UNRWA spokesman has said in a statement that the materials should never have been published and they got into the hands of children as a result of coronavirus lockdown transitions.
“As soon as the issue was identified, the agency conducted a thorough review of the material that UNRWA developed and took steps to address it,” he said.
As the timeline shows, that excuse just doesn’t hold up.
The anti-Semitic material was known about and officially reported between the middle and the end of 2019. Lockdowns were not imposed in the Palestinian territories until March 2020.
Either the UNRWA is telling porkies or the Palestinian teachers are falling over themselves to churn out anti-Semitic material every time they can get away with it.
Whichever is the case, New Zealanders might well ask their government why their taxes are paying for it.
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