Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, led 24 Republican colleagues in a letter on Monday urging U.S. President Donald Trump to work with the United Nations to dismantle and defund the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA.
On Tuesday, Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, told JNS that he thinks that his Democratic colleagues should have their own approach to dismantling UNRWA, which works with Palestinian refugees and which Israel, the United States and others have accused of having ties to terror groups in Gaza and Judea and Samaria.
“Just getting rid of UNRWA and not having anyone there to feed and house and help people empowers the more extreme elements,” the Washington Democrat told JNS.
The letter should have discussed creating an alternative to the U.N. agency, according to Smith, who is not Jewish but whose home anti-Israel protesters have picketed.
“If you want to dismantle UNRWA and come up with some alternative, I think that’s got to be part of it,” he told JNS. “I would like to see something that says, ‘And here’s what’s going to be there instead.’”
Smith thinks that Democrats should talk about their approach to replacing UNRWA, and that it would be a good idea for them to “stake out a reasonable position.”
“I don’t see it coming,” he said.
“One of the core problems I have here is within the Democratic Party, the perception now is that Israel is radioactive, and you see all the people getting ready to run for president, just sprinting away in one way or another from Israel,” he told JNS. “I think we Democrats need to push back on that.”
Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, told JNS that “Many claim that Palestinians cannot survive without UNRWA, but that paternalistic logic is exactly what has trapped generations in permanent dependency.”
“Palestinians already have educated professionals, businessmen, doctors, engineers, civil servants and local governing structures. Gaza had its own ministries, police, schools and billions in international aid long before Oct. 7,” Neuer said.
“Palestinians do not need a unique U.N. agency that exists nowhere else on earth,” he told JNS. “They need leaders who build functioning institutions and a future for their people, instead of international bureaucracies that subsidize fantasies of endless war against Israel. UNRWA seeks to disguise its pathological agenda of dismantling Israel with claims of humanitarian goals, but it’s time to take off the mask.”
Israel has presented evidence of UNRWA staffers participating directly in the Hamas-led Oct. 7 terror attacks, and the Jewish state passed legislation which banned UNRWA operations in Israel and cut off communication between Israeli officials and the agency.
Congress has cut funding to UNRWA on a bipartisan basis.
