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In the News

<p><em><strong>B’nai B’rith International CEO Daniel S. Mariaschin</strong> and <strong>AJIRI-BBI Chair Richard P. Schifter </strong>sent a letter to the New York Times regarding its recent guest article by UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini, in which Lazzarini absurdly defends UNRWA despite the organization’s financial abuses, links to terrorism, and role in perpetuating the Palestinian refugee crisis to undermine Israel</em><em> (“I<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/30/opinion/israel-gaza-un-unrwa.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">srael Must Stop its Campaign Against UNRWA</a>”, New York Times, May 30, 2024).</em></p>
<p><strong>From Daniel S. Mariaschin, B’nai B’rith International CEO and Richard P. Schifter, AJIRI-BBI Chair:</strong></p>
<p>To the editor:</p>
<p>Phillip Lazzarini’s demand that “Israel Must Stop its Campaign Against UNRWA” (NYT Opinion, May 30, 2024) is reminiscent of the proverbial boy who murdered his parents and then pleaded for mercy because he is an orphan. This has been rightly called the ultimate definition of the word “chutzpah.”</p>
<p>Any civilians tragically killed in Gaza during the current war are unfortunate victims of Hamas’s unprovoked and despicable attacks on Israelis on Oct. 7.</p>
<p>But despite Mr. Lazzarini’s protestations, UNRWA, as an organization, is not an innocent bystander. The financial abuses, links to terrorism, decades of hate education and the participation in murder and kidnapping on Oct. 7 by UNRWA employees, are well documented.</p>
<p>As a refugee agency dedicated (uniquely among refugee situations all over the world) to only one particular group, the Palestinians, its establishment and perpetuation were meant to keep the Palestinians as refugees in order to undermine the State of Israel, and to keep alive the evil dream that Israel’s establishment in 1948 might be reversed.</p>
<p>It is a shame that UNRWA is using the cover of the current suffering in Gaza to plead for the further indulgence of the international community, whose plentiful resources they have already tragically squandered.</p>
<p><i>Daniel S. Mariaschin, CEO, B’nai B’rith International AND Richard P. Schifter, Chair, American Jewish International Relations Institute-B’nai B’rith International (AJIRI-BBI), Washington, D.C.</i></p>


<p><strong>From Daniel S. Mariaschin, B’nai B’rith International CEO and Richard P. Schifter, AJIRI-BBI Chair:</strong></p>
<p>To the editor:</p>
<p>It is a shame that Irish public opinion has swung so extremely against Israel during its just war of self-defense against Hamas terrorists (Una Mullally, “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/27/opinion/biden-ireland-gaza-varadkar.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Biden Loves Ireland, It Doesn’t Love Him Back</a>”, March 27, 2024).</p>
<p>Ms. Mullally is unfortunately correct in depicting this mood in Ireland and among Ireland’s leaders.</p>
<p>But attempts to turn Israel into an international pariah are misguided and unjustified. Some Irish leaders have indeed made pro-forma and weak denunciations of Hamas’s barbaric attacks on Israeli civilians on October 7.</p>
<p>But they have reserved almost all of their ire for Israel’s actions in self-defense. The blood of all Palestinians who are dying is solely on the hands of Hamas.</p>
<p>Zionism is the movement for self-determination of the Jewish people. Just as the Irish people carried out a valiant and heroic struggle against foreign tyranny, the Jewish people did the same in Israel.</p>
<p>In the aftermath of the Good Friday Accords, which brought peace to Northern Ireland, Ireland sees itself as a role model for conflict resolution. It can play a constructive role between Israelis and Palestinians as well. But not by blatantly taking sides, and not by lending a hand to Israel’s delegitimization.</p>
<p><i>Daniel S. Mariaschin, CEO, B’nai B’rith International AND Richard P. Schifter, Chair, American Jewish International Relations Institute-B’nai B’rith International (AJIRI-BBI), Washington, D.C.</i></p>


<p>Just a few days ago, a Hamas tunnel network – complete with a data center, living quarters, industrial battery power banks, and other vital operational infrastructure – was found beneath United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East’s (UNRWA) Gaza Headquarters. The news came out not long after reports that twelve UNRWA employees likely participated in Hamas’ October 7 terrorist attack. These revelations are appalling but unsurprising, particularly given estimates that around 1,200, or one tenth, of UNRWA’s employees in Gaza have ties to Hamas and its affiliates. The UN must not only investigate this grave oversight but also reckon with the anti-Israel bias that has long plagued its institutions.</p>
<p>The UN’s predisposition against Israel has never been more apparent – or more harmful – than it is today, but it’s nothing new. In 1975, the UN passed Resolution 3379, which falsely equated Zionism with racism and apartheid in South Africa. Critically, the resolution established the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (CEIRPP) and the Division for Palestinian Rights (DPR). Along with the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People and Other Arabs of the Occupied Territories (SCIIHRP), these UN institutions pursue an explicitly anti-Israel agenda. Although Resolution 3379 was revoked in 1991, the anti-Israel infrastructure it created remains.</p>
<p>For decades, these entities have churned out anti-Israel propaganda that reinforces the false equivalency between Zionism and racism, which protestors around the world have repeated countless times since October 7.</p>
<p>Their narrative holds that Israelis are colonial, white imperialists. At its most innocent, this claim dismisses the history of the Jewish people, who faced persecution, exile, and violence for millennia. At its worst, this falsehood encourages antisemitic hate. It denies Jews’ absolute right to live safely in their ancestral homeland – which the UN established as a Jewish state more than 75 years ago.</p>
<p>This narrative leads the UN to single out Israel and hold it to a higher standard. Last year, Israel faced 14 censures. The rest of the world, including numerous autocratic regimes, received only seven total. Since the UN Human Rights Council’s (UNHRC) establishment in 2006, it has adopted 103 resolutions against Israel, more than all those leveled against North Korea, Iran, and Syria combined.</p>
<p>This unfair treatment continues in the wake of the October 7 attack. The General Assembly and Security Council have considered five resolutions calling for a ceasefire and humanitarian intervention. None has mentioned Hamas, let alone condemned it for initiating this war.</p>
<p>The UN also displayed disturbing inaction in the face of widespread evidence that Hamas not only slaughtered Israeli civilians but sexually assaulted them. Hamas terrorists proudly used body cameras to record and broadcast their actions. Indisputable evidence – including eyewitness testimony – of these atrocities was available from the earliest days of the war.</p>
<p>President Biden and American officials swiftly condemned Hamas’ sex crimes. The UN, however, remained silent. Secretary General António Guterres took more than seven weeks to acknowledge the reports of rape and to pledge investigation and prosecution. The UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and UN Women were also silent for weeks.</p>
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<p>The UN’s failure to address its institutional bias against Israel is egregious. That this bias would prevent the UN from speaking out against sexual violence threatens the very principles that underpin its charter.</p>
<p>The lack of immediate global condemnation made many Israelis and Jews feel abandoned by the international community. Crucially, it gave Hamas time to insist that they didn’t commit sexual violence. Sadly, evidence suggests that Hamas’ sex crimes continue against the remaining hostages.</p>
<p>Some sympathetic to Hamas now demand to hear directly from the survivors to confirm that rape took place. Aside from the grim fact that Hamas murdered or took captive most of its victims, the idea of forcing survivors to speak about their trauma – especially publicly – defies legal necessity and the treatment of rape survivors in modern society.</p>
<p>The UN’s failure to rectify its maltreatment of Israel also undermines innocent Palestinians. Hamas often siphons UNRWA humanitarian aid for its own malicious ends. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), while imperfect, can better serve Palestinians than an agency with ties to the terrorists ruling over them. Recognizing that UNRWA is the only agency capable of aiding Palestinians right now, once the war is over, the UN ought to dissolve UNRWA and transfer its resources and responsibilities to the UNHCR without diminishing any aid for Palestinians. It should also dismantle the infrastructure which spews propaganda seeking to delegitimize and demonize the Jewish State.</p>
<p>Certainly, Hamas, whose charter states its mission is to “fight Jews and kill them,” can draw comfort from a UN that also tries to vilify Israel. As the recent UNRWA debacle revealed, the UN’s opposition to Israel can lead to direct support for those who seek to destroy the world’s only Jewish democratic state.</p>
<p>If we’re to prevent that unspeakable outcome, the UN must take an objective look not only at what happened on the ground on October 7 but also at what happens in its own halls every day.</p>
<p><em class="styles_em__gCOZs">Steny H. Hoyer, a Democrat, represents Maryland’s fifth district in the U.S. House of Representatives and is the former House Majority Leader. Richard P. Schifter is the chairman of the American Jewish International Relations Institute. Hoyer worked closely with his co-author’s late father, Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs Richard Schifter, to support Soviet refuseniks and the State of Israel.</em></p>
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<p>From Daniel S. Mariaschin, B’nai B’rith International CEO and Richard P. Schifter, AJIRI-BBI Chair:</p>
<p>To the editor,</p>
<p>The New York Times, in purporting to present an objective overview of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (“<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/26/world/middleeast/unrwa-aid-israel-hamas-attack.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">What to Know About the UN Aid Agency for Palestinians</a>,” January 27, 2024) misses the mark by far. The egregious abuses by UNRWA and its staff notwithstanding—hate education, UNRWA employees celebrating the Hamas massacres of Oct. 7, UNRWA employees participating in the planning of the massacres of Oct. 7, etc.—the real problem with UNRWA is much more fundamental.</p>
<p>The real problem with UNRWA is its very existence. Why is there a separate UN agency only for Palestinian “refugees”? Why are numerous generations of descendants of Palestinian “refugees” still considered refugees (unlike refugees’ descendants in any other conflict)? How are any Palestinians in Gaza considered refugees, when they live, and have always lived, within the territory of mandatory “Palestine” (and purportedly within the territory of a potential Palestinian state)?</p>
<p>The answers to these questions are troubling. UNRWA has encouraged generations of Palestinians to believe they will “return” to what is now, and has been for 75 years, the State of Israel. It is this evil dream and the incitement that accompanies it, that has fueled the violent hatred of Israelis and Jews that led up to Oct. 7. Far from being a humanitarian agency that is “a vital lifeline” and merely “a point of contention with Israel,” UNRWA is a major obstacle to any peaceful outcome for Israelis and Palestinians.</p>
<p><i>Daniel S. Mariaschin, CEO, B’nai B’rith International AND Richard P. Schifter, Chair, American Jewish International Relations Institute-B’nai B’rith International (AJIRI-BBI), Washington, D.C.</i></p>


Videos

<p>November 1, 2023 briefing by Einat Wilf, (co-author of The War of Return), speaking on &#8220;October 7th Was Decades in the Making.&#8221; Sponsored by American Jewish International Relations Institute-B&#8217;nai B&#8217;rith International (AJIRI-BBI), B&#8217;nai Brith International (BBI) and the Israel Allies Caucus (IAC).</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://youtu.be/At72-a-EDhY?si=rGUK2KTvgfje5U8E" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Watch the program here</a>.</strong></p>


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<p class="layoutArea">From Daniel S. Mariaschin, B’nai B’rith International CEO and Richard P. Schifter, AJIRI-BBI Chair:</p>
<p class="layoutArea">The Washington Post unfortunately misses a crucial and central point in its article about the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) (“<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/10/16/unrwa-palestine-gaza-un-refugee/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">What is UNRWA, the U.N. agency in Gaza struggling to help Palestinians?</a>” Washington Post, October 16). Far from being an agency acting merely “to protect and support civilians,” it is an extremely problematic entity that for 75 years has exacerbated the Palestinian problem and symbolized the failure to solve it.</p>
<p class="layoutArea">As the article itself casually states, UNRWA is “unique&#8230;in terms of its long-standing commitment to one group of refugees.” UNRWA is, in fact, an outrageous anomaly (all other refugees in the world are covered by UNHCR—the U.N. refugee agency) that has perpetuated the Arab-Israeli conflict and has thus cost many thousands of lives, including the lives of over 1,300 innocent Israelis massacred on October 7 by Hamas terrorists claiming the phony grievances—of “dispossession”—that are pushed by UNRWA.</p>
<p>The refugees from 1948 (refugees from a war initiated by Arab states against the new State of Israel, the aim of which was to destroy the latter) should have been resettled long ago, as have been millions of refugees from other conflicts all over the world. They were purposely kept as “refugees” by the Arab governments and by UNRWA to whip up hatred against Israel.</p>
<p>Although there are believed to be only some 30,000 living Palestinian refugees from 1948, UNRWA incredibly recognizes over 5.9 million descendants of these refugees, as eligible for its services. UNRWA schools, far from teaching Palestinian children to become “confident, innovative, questioning, thoughtful, and open-minded, to uphold human values and tolerance,” as the article falsely claims, inculcate generation after generation with hatred of and resentment against Israel and with the false fantasy that they will one day “return” to their homes.</p>
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<p class="layoutArea">As pointed out in Einat Wilf and Adi Schwartz’s excellent book, “The War of Return,” numerous terrorists (including at least one of the surviving Munich Olympic massacre perpetrators) were direct products of UNRWA schools. UNRWA is simply not a neutral humanitarian institution. It is a malign actor that exacerbates the problems and suffering of the Palestinian people.</p>
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<p><strong><a href="https://bnaibrithinternational.podbean.com/e/fighting-anti-israel-bias-at-the-un/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Listen to AJIRI-BBI on the B&#8217;nai B&#8217;rith International Podcast</a>.</strong></p>
<p>Since its founding in 2005, AJIRI – the American-Jewish International Relations Institute – has been forward-thinking about combating anti-Israel bias at the United Nations.</p>
<p>Now an affiliate of B&#8217;nai B&#8217;rith, AJIRI-BBI works directly with B’nai B’rith’s long-standing Office of U.N. Affairs to overcome anti-Israel efforts engrained at the United Nations, securing important vote changes – with fewer countries now supporting the annual U.N. resolutions that renew mandates and funding for the U.N.’s anti-Israel propaganda apparatus.</p>
<p>Tune in to the B&#8217;nai B&#8217;rith Podcast as AJIRI-BBI Chair Rick Schifter and Executive Director Gil Kapen speak with B&#8217;nai B&#8217;rith CEO Dan Mariaschin to discuss their work defending Israel against bias at the United Nations and why combating it is critical to the future of the Jewish state.</p>


Books

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<div id="description" class="style-scope ytd-video-secondary-info-renderer">Ambassador Richard Schifter describes how, as Jews, he and his parents faced Nazi persecution in Austria during the 1930s. Schifter escaped the Nazis by immigrating to the United States before the war and was later drafted in the United States Army. After training at Camp Ritchie, Maryland, as a prisoner of war interrogator, he arrived in Normandy, France in August 1944 to fight. Schifter went on to become one of America’s most distinguished diplomats.</div>
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<p>Israel&#8217;s Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Danny Ayalon explains the historical facts relating to the issue of refugees in the Israeli Palestinian conflict. The video explains the reason there are still refugees after more than six decades is because of Arab leaders&#8217; recalcitrance to accept their brethren and the United Nations which created a separate agency with unique principles and criteria. The video also highlights the issue of the Jewish refugees who were forced out of their homes in the Arab world, and were subsequently absorbed by the State of Israel.</p>
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