A few years ago, I called for defunding the UNRWA.
The UNRWA is the biggest employer in the West Bank and Gaza after the Palestinian Authority and the vast majority of its employees are "locally recruited". Varying figures place the share of local employees at between 90 and 99 percent.
Even though there are more Arab Muslims living in the West Bank than in Gaza, there are more "official" refugees in Gaza, which means that more UNRWA funding and efforts are directed there. The UNRWA only runs 96 schools in the West Bank, but it runs 245 schools in Gaza. It employs less than 3,000 education staffers in the West Bank, but over 10,000 in Gaza.
Why does Hamas, which is obsessed with brainwashing the next generation into martyrdom, allow a foreign organization to run an educational system for 232,000 pupils?
It's because in Gaza, Hamas and the UNRWA are the same thing.
The UNRWA’s Gaza staff has its own union. In the 2012 election, a pro-Hamas bloc won the support of most of the union with 25 out of 27 seats on a union board.
"I am sure that there are Hamas members on the UNRWA payroll," a former UNRWA Commissioner General said, "and I don’t see that as a crime."
The position of the Israeli government has been more complicated. And I have received criticism for that article.
Now Netanyahu has crossed the red line. At least part of the way.
In public remarks to his cabinet at its weekly meeting, Netanyahu said UNRWA perpetuated, rather than solved, the Palestinian refugee problem and that anti-Israeli incitement was rife in its institutions, which includes schools.
"It is time UNRWA be dismantled and merged with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees," Netanyahu said.
That means rolling UNRWA into UNHCR. UNHCR is the UN refugee agency. The UNRWA is a bizarre creature that shouldn't even exist. It's a UN agency dedicated to the so-called Palestinians, groups of Muslim settlers and colonists living in and around Israel. There's no reason not to roll UNRWA into UNHCR except corruption and hostility toward Israel. It's an inefficient and ineffective arrangement.
And it's not going anywhere.
The idea that generations of Jordanians and others living outside Israel, who were born there, are refugees, who need a dedicated UN agency is absurd. Depicting their cities and towns as refugee camps is a mockery of basic facts. But nobody is truly ready to change the status quo.