US should stop funding UNRWA

Why is it that the U.S. government continues to fund the UNRWA, the UN agency in charge of Palestinian refugees? For some reason, this question is rarely raised. Instead, everyone assumes that the Palestinian refugee problem is an intractable one that only Israelis can solve. That view, however, excludes several important facts:

-- Everywhere else in the world the main UN refugee agency, UNHCR, accepts refugees into camps, takes care of them, and then helps them find a permanent place to live. That place may be back home; it may be in the country housing the camp; or it may be in a third country. But people don't just live indefinitely as refugees - except for Palestinians. The United States is an important contributor to UNHCR.

-- Other refugees whose plight dates back to the period during and after World War II were resettled, most of them decades ago. That includes 12 million Germans forced out of eastern Europe; millions of Indians and Pakistanis; and the 800,000 or so Jews forced out of Middle Eastern and North African countries (a number slightly higher than the original 750,000 Palestinian refugees). The bottom line for most of these people: you were thrown out but you have to put it behind you. While that may sound cruel and unjust, the reality is that virtually all of those former refugees and their descendants are now leading reasonable lives - while the third generation of Palestinians is still awaiting 'justice.'

-- UNRWA is notorious for sheltering Hamas. The IDF charges that Hamas was shooting at them from the school which was hit, and that most of the deaths that occurred were due to booby-trap bombs set off by the Israeli return fire. (See Melanie Phillips' column here.) Nor is this in any way unusual; if you go to the IDF's YouTube site you can see a film of mortars being fired from a UN school in Gaza in October 2007. Nor are these all just casual encounters; last spring the headmaster of a UN school turned out to be a Hamas rocket-maker.

So, back to my original question: why are U.S. taxpayers funding UNRWA?