Hamas began consolidating power in Gaza--first via elections in 2006, then via a bloody battle in June 2007, in which Hamas drove out the rival Palestinian group Fatah and seized all power in the enclave.
Since then, Hamas has been running Gaza as a territory reduced to basically two industries: aid and terrorism.
Pivotal to this arrangement is one of the UN's oldest and most oddly configured agencies: the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA. ...
UNRWA employs more than 24,000 staffers. That's more than any other UN agency, including the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR, which with some 6,300 staffers--about one-quarter the manpower of UNRWA--is responsible for all other refugees worldwide, totaling more than 11 million.
At UNRWA, more than 99% of the staff are local Palestinians. They sit at the many local levers of the UNRWA distribution machinery, which under UNRWA policy takes on the coloration of and yields to the policies of host governments--as UNRWA officials explained to U.S. lawmakers who some years ago challenged the use of anti-Israeli textbooks in UNRWA schools.
In today's terrorist-run Gaza, such an approach carries exactly the kind of deadly implications now playing out--while UNRWA and other UN officials call for an end to the violence.
And those UNRWA employees have the nerve to argue that Gaza is "starving." Far from starving Gazans, we're subsidizing Hamas terrorism.
It is understandable that thug states like Iran or idiot Europeans would want to support Hamas. But what is our excuse? Moslems around the world are eager to fight Israel to the last Palestinian and egg Hamas on from afar. Iran famously signed up Iranians to be suicide bombers in defense of Hamas and then forbade these jihadi wannabees from heading to Gaza:
Iran's top leader banned hardline Iranian volunteers on Thursday from leaving the country to carry out suicide bombings against Israel, but warned that Iran would assist the militant group Hamas in other ways.
Yet we pay for Hamas's logistics.
Why should we pay for this? Has our open pocket book for the last six decades gotten us any good will among the Palestinians? Let Iran foot the entire bill. We'll see if Iran prefers to send food over rockets. Let European Leftists spend their Euros on Hamas now that there is no point to supporting Sunni Arab terrorism in Iraq.
We need to cut off our aid to UNRWA in Gaza at the very least. And then look at the whole program with fresh and skeptical eyes. Now that would be hope and change.
