06-Aug-15: Educating their children: a modest, peace-focused proposal

Arab schoolchildren: Baqa al-Gharbiyye, Israel [Image Source]

This post is about making a radical change to the education that Palestinian Arab children get in their schools. A change for the better, but then - as most people know - that's not saying much.

We have posted here about UNRWA dozens of times over the years (here's a link). Why? Because its existence is a fundamental pre-requisite for the hatred and passion for lethal violence that is cynically injected daily, year after year for almost 66 years into the blood and consciousness of generations of Palestinian Arab children.

This has been happening for nearly seventy years. As refugee support organizations, can there be one as spectacularly ineffective as UNRWA? As a terrorist training institution, can there be one as heart-breakingly effective as UNRWA?

We have recently been focusing on the money problems at the billion-dollar-annual-budget agency, and how its absolutely sickening focus on educating for terror goes unremarked, unchecked and un-stopped by all of the world's agencies for the protection of children. We're referring, in no particular order, to UNICEF, Defence for Children International, UNESCO, Child Rights International Network, UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, the Washington-based Jerusalem Fund, Save the Children, Arab Council for Childhood Development and numerous others. Thousands of bureaucrats, hundreds of fund-raisers and no one with enough time to address the daily disaster which is Palestinian Arab education. 

Just a few recent examples of those posts of ours:

• 27-Jan-13: Hamas' new army of children: Will the UN's and foreign funders' role in this scandal be critiqued by the news-reporting media?
• 15-Jan-14: When a society praises itself for turning its children into human bombs, whose problem is that?
• 27-Jan-14: In Gaza, a death cult celebrates its graduating class
• 19-May-14: Will momentary focus on UNRWA throw any light on PA and Hamas abuse of their own people? 
• 10-Feb-15: The Islamists of Gaza: Yet again preparing children to kill and be killed
• 03-Jul-15: Misery, terrorism and money-making: a cynics' guide

Arab schoolchildren, Umm Tuba, East Jerusalem [Image Source]

Now there's a new UNRWA crisis. Alright, not exactly a new crisis, but a new batch of reports and headlines referring to something chronically and terribly wrong at UNRWA - the abuse of its allegedly-humanitarian mission, the mis-allocation of its massive resources, and the setting of its hugely-politicized priorities. 

Naturally, the principal victims are the children:

UNRWA funds crisis worries Palestinian refugees | Nisreen El-Shamayleh | Aljazeera | Yesterday |  With a funding shortfall of $101m, UNRWA, the UN agency that has been looking after Palestinian refugees in the Middle East for 65 years has said it may be forced to delay the new academic year at the schools it runs in refugee camps across the region. UNRWA schools are considered one of its most successful projects. With 700 overcrowded schools in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza unable to open their doors to students, half a million Palestinian children will be deprived of their right to education. And if that's not enough, 22,000 UNRWA teachers will be out of their jobs...

And if that's not enough, there's a distinct loss of perspective here. The Palestinian Arabs are part of a larger Arab world that includes several of the world's wealthiest populations both per capita and in absolute terms. If they can't fix this, they don't want to fix it.

But this is not the time to score political points. There's a humanitarian crisis approaching, and we need to be helpful.  So let's take a broader look at this latest UNRWA crisis.

Arab teacher, unidentified pupil - the Jerusalem campus of the Hand-in-Hand
bilingual Arabic/Hebrew schools, Israel [Image Source]

We did some sums. 

The funds of which UNRWA is so desperately short amount to 0.05% (in simple words: one twentieth of one percent) of the sum reported to be being laid out by the Qataris alone for something else of a comparably urgent life-and-death nature. 

Why single out Qatar? Because of the gas-soaked family business' fraternal passion, endlessly trumpeted, to "leverage the enormous and abiding symbolism of the Palestinian cause to both enhance its own profile and credentials" [source]. 

Since Qatar's owners read the news and know about the existential dangers of which UNRWA bleats, and do nothing to help, might it be a smart move if Israel were to step up and offer to take over the education budget of the morally-and-otherwise bankrupt UNRWA? And develop a suitable educational curriculum that actually promotes peace?

What an opportunity. And cheap at the price.

So Chris Gunness, when you're ready to have a constructive discussion about healing the minds and souls of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arab children (that's not meant to sound funny), please touch base [thisongoingwar@gmail.com]. 

And no, to be frank and based on past experience, we're not waiting.

By the way, in Hamas-controlled Gaza yesterday, they completed yet another highly successful values-rich "educational" program for some 25,000 school-age children. To understand why "educational" is in quotation marks, take a look at this article and this article and this article. And two previous posts of ours (among many others): "14-May-15: Dozens more Hamas victims of unstoppable Hamas blood-lust"; "18-Jun-13: They want their children to become killers and they say why. The rest of us are left with questions".

And if children's minds and welfare mean something to you, as they do to us, prepare to weep.