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Public funds in Western democracies could not be used to pay for teachers calling for violence and terrorism, lauding Nazi leaders, or promoting antisemitism at home. And yet, they are currently being used toward exactly that end in schools run by an agency of the United Nations. Donor countries must demand accountability—or stop paying up.
For more than 70 years, whenever people have faced mass displacement across international boundaries because of war or crisis, the UN has stepped in to provide emergency relief and rapid rehabilitation or resettlement through its refugee agency, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The UNHCR has a mandate to deal with every international refugee situation except for one, that of Palestinian refugees from the 1948 Arab-Israeli war (and their descendants). For this group of refugees—and for them alone—a separate UN agency, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), exists with separate funding and a separate mandate.
Among the many ways UNRWA is unique is that it operates its own governmental services, including health and education. Of its 30,000 employees—60 percent more than the total number of UN employees for all other refugee crises combined—the vast majority are employed in education.
UNRWA regularly claims that its schools teach Palestinian children about peace, tolerance, and human rights. But as shown by a recent report jointly produced by two monitoring groups, United Nations Watch and IMPACT-se, this is far from the case. UNRWA school materials regularly promote antisemitism, violence, and rejection of Israel. And UNRWA routinely hires as teachers men and women whose social media feeds are full of support for terrorism.
UNRWA knows it has a problem, and its method of dealing with the problem not only doesn't solve it, but it reveals how deep the rot is. In response to a previous report in 2022, UNRWA's response was a brief suspension of six teachers and no subsequent action.
In 2018, following an earlier report on the violent and bigoted online activity of UNRWA's teachers, the organization put out a fact sheet, "UNRWA and Neutrality," touting its new social media policies and training. But as our new report shows, that training focused on encouraging staff to "limit online exposure" by "taking advantage of privacy and other settings."
In other words, antisemitism and support for terrorism don't disqualify a teacher from working at an UNRWA school, but teachers are taught how to avoid getting caught for it.
And not even taught well. From what we were able to turn up for our report, the picture is dire indeed.
Among UNRWA teachers we can find Riad Nimer in Lebanon liking a post praising a gruesome mass murder in a synagogue and Arwa al-Najjar Umm Islam, a math teacher at a West Bank UNRWA school praising a teenager who, with his brother, went on a stabbing rampage in Jerusalem. Another West Bank UNRWA teacher, Nizar Khalil Abu Shaheen, shares a complex antisemitic conspiracy theory about wealthy Jews controlling the United Arab Emirates. An UNRWA employee in Syria, Labibeh Iskandarani, calls on Hitler to "wake up" because "there are still some people you need to burn."
Though UNRWA angrily dismissed the latest report as "an attempt to sensationalize" and "overstate" the problem, the organization did suspend Nimer—only to then quickly reinstate him after news of the suspension led to a teacher walkout in its Lebanese facilities. There were no confirmed reports of any other actions against other teachers mentioned in the report. Iskandarani deleted pictures of Hitler from her Facebook profile and one other teacher adjusted his privacy settings to hide his inflammatory posts.
But the problem isn't just online. UNRWA routinely deflects criticism of antisemitism in its educational materials with the excuse that it is only using material from its "host countries," specifically the approved textbooks of Jordan, Lebanon, and the Palestinian Authority. It's a wholly inadequate excuse for an organization that derives all its funding from donor countries like the United States, Canada, and the European Commission, and it's not even true.
A 2021 study showed that UNRWA's own material used during the coronavirus pandemic was rife with bigotry and glorification of terrorists, including the infamous Dalal Mughrabi who carried out the Coastal Road Massacre in 1978 that killed 38 Israelis. UNRWA's response then was typical: denial followed by verifiably false claims that the problem had been rectified, peppered throughout with criticism for those organizations doing the hard work they refused to do and uncovering the problems in their curriculum and hiring practices.
Other UNRWA-created materials promote "armed struggle" against Israel and encourage "martyrdom." Textbooks routinely demonize Israelis and Jews, and one even describes the firebombing of an Israeli bus as a "barbecue party."
A separate discussion is needed about UNRWA's mandate and its mission and whether so many Western governments should be funneling so much money into an organization with the sole purpose perpetuating, rather than mitigating the conflict in the Middle East.
In the meantime, as long as governments are funding UNRWA to the tune of over $1 billion a year, they should be demanding both accountability in its hiring and an educational curriculum that lives up to their promised neutrality.
Shany Mor is Director of Research at United Nations Watch and holds a PhD from Oxford University.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
