Eliot Engel speaks truth to power. “US congressmen demand UNRWA reform,” by Etgar Lefkovits for the Jerusalem Post, May 27 (thanks to Louis):
A group of bipartisan US congressmen is urging reform in UNRWA, the UN body that deals exclusively with Palestinian refugees and their descendants, and calling for alternative solutions to the containment of refugees in squalid camps.
“The Palestinian refugees have been used as political pawns for the past 60 years by people who don’t want peace in the Middle East,” said Congressman Eliot Engel (D-New York) at a meeting of international parliamentarians hosted last week by the Congressional Israel Allies Caucus, a bipartisan pro-Israel parliamentary group.
“The UN has been part and parcel of this conspiracy,” he said.
Engel, who co-chairs the parliamentary group – established as a sister-caucus to the Knesset’s Christian Allies Caucus – said that UNRWA, which was established by the United Nations General Assembly in 1949 to carry out relief and works programs for Palestinian refugees, was actually designed to perpetuate the festering sore of the refugee problem.
“Instead of resettling them, UNRWA keeps them in refugee camps,” Engel said. “The Palestinians are in the refugee camps because the Arab nations want them in refugee camps in order to perpetuate political hatred against Israel.”…