Hillel Neuer joined the Morning Wire with John Bickley to discuss why it’s time for the West to defund UNRWA.
John Bickley, The Daily Wire: Joining us now to discuss the controversy surrounding UNRWA is the Executive Director of UN Watch, Hillel Neuer. Hillel, thank you so much for coming on. So your organization has been watching very closely the actions of the United Nations, including UNRWA, which has come under a lot of scrutiny for good reason in the last year. First, what prompted your team to investigate UNRWA’s radical ties?
Hillel Neuer: Well, you know, we’ve been tracking UNRWA to some degree over the past 10 years. I would say every year, a couple times a year, we would take a look at who the teachers are what they’re up to on their social media because UNRWA has operations in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Gaza, and so forth. And I don’t have immediate access to those places but on social media you can actually see who the teachers are and what they’re saying.
And we discovered over a period of 10 years going back to 2015 that UNRWA teachers regularly were glorifying terrorist attacks, glorifying Adolf Hitler, calling to slaughter Jews, jihad against the West. So this was regular stuff that’s being put out by UNRWA teachers. So that’s the background we were exposing for 10 years.
And in the past year, it reached the next level. The October 7th massacre we learned included, among the people perpetrating the massacre from Gaza, were actual UNRWA employees, UNRWA social workers, UNRWA school principals. And that’s when we took an even, even deeper dive. And I’d say we’ve been intensely focused on that agency for the past year. And what we discovered is actually astonishing and despicable.
John Bickley, The Daily Wire: Tell us more about that. What did you learn over this last year?
Hillel Neuer: Well, we learned, just to give a few examples that one of the heads of UNRWA’s education system, one of the leading figures, is a gentleman in Lebanon whose name is Fathi al-Sharif. He was the principal of a major school belonging to UNRWA outside the city of Tyre in Lebanon. He was head of the teachers’ union for UNRWA in Lebanon. So he was overseeing 2,000 teachers.
And we began to take a look at him and we saw that for the past decade he’s been inciting to Hamas terrorism on a regular basis. He’s been posting pictures of himself with jihadi leaders and even including Al-Qaeda offshoot figures in Lebanon on a regular basis. And we sent it to UNRWA and they didn’t want to deal with it. They got some complaint, maybe from Israel and they suspended him.
They gave him a slap on the wrist but they wouldn’t fire him. And actually all of UNRWA’s staff, thousands of staff in Lebanon, went on strike this last year from March until the end of May in support of Fathi al-Sharif who we could see was some kind of Hamas figure.
You know, we sent this information to UNRWA. They didn’t want to talk about it. They didn’t want to deal with it. And then it emerged that in September Fathi al-Sharif was eliminated by an IDF missile and he was taken out. And the day that he was killed Hamas put out an announcement saying our leader was killed.
They put out a video of Fathi al-Sharif the head of the UNRWA teachers’ union in Lebanon, principal of a major school. They said he was our leader and they put pictures of him with Hamas Chief Ismail Haniyeh They said, we praise his jihadi education. So just to give one example of what we found is a major figure.
And by the way, we’re paying for this, okay? The United States up until March was giving well over $300 million a year. The Biden administration gave them over a billion dollars in the past three to four years. And the head of their education system was the head of Hamas in Lebanon.
And sadly, that’s not a one off. Similar examples in Gaza. So, if you go from top to bottom, whether it’s regional directors, school principals, teachers, truck drivers, are infiltrated by Hamas people who were involved in planning the massacre carrying out the massacre.
And UNRWA’s response is, we didn’t know. Nobody told us. We’re surprised. It’s a few bad apples, just one pathetic excuse after another. And frankly, we reached the conclusion this agency is rotten to the core. It’s got to be dismantled.
All they do is perpetuate the ideas of resentment, war, and terrorism among Palestinians. They perpetuate dependency. It’s time to get rid of it. Palestinians will manage themselves and not have the UN funding an agency that has sworn to the destruction of Israel.
John Bickley, The Daily Wire: And you said the U.S. under the Biden administration directed a billion dollars to this organization.
Hillel Neuer: That is correct. And that is despite the fact that in the first Trump administration under John Bolton and Nikki Haley, the U.S. had cut funding for two years and stopped. So, Biden reinstated funding. And, you know, the State Department never called us and asked if they could learn more about what the problems are. We’re the only organization that is regularly tracking who the teachers are who the school principals are just by looking at their social media.
It’s all open source and they weren’t interested. So it means that they knowingly, the State Department under the Biden administration together with European countries, Canada, Australia, all the European countries, were funneling over a billion dollars to UNRWA every year.
The good news is in the past year I testified in Congress four times, I went to the European Parliament, the Swiss Parliament, the Dutch parliament. I’m going to be back in the Swiss parliament in 10 days in the Swiss Senate. And thankfully, I can inform you that the United States in March passed a bipartisan legislation.
It was initiated by my friend Representative Chris Smith and others in the Republican Party. But enough Democrats went on board because they had to if they wanted any foreign aid to get out the door. The U.S. has frozen funding for UNRWA until March. I’m hopeful the incoming Trump administration will reinstate that freeze.
The Netherlands voted a couple weeks ago to begin cutting funding for UNRWA which is huge, the first EU country to do so. Sweden, about two weeks ago, voted to immediately defund UNRWA which is surprising, but there’s now a sort of a conservative government there. And in Switzerland the lower house voted in September to immediately suspend funding for UNRWA. They cited our reports and I’m invited to appear in the Senate on January 20 in the city of Bern in the capital.
So enough countries are beginning to see it but sadly the majority, France, Germany, the U.K., Canada, under Trudeau. For now, Trudeau’s leaving. But for now, Australia, they’re all funding UNRWA.
John Bickley, The Daily Wire: Has there been any accountability at all from the United Nations to keep this group in check over the years?
Hillel Neuer: Not really. There were, you know, face saving gestures, artificial gestures, meant to throw sand in our eyes. They, from time to time, will put a slap on the wrist on some principal and suspend him for a few months. The head of the UNRWA teachers’ union in Gaza is a guy named Suhail al-Hindi. He was exposed of having Hamas ties back in 2011. They slapped him on the wrist suspended him for a month or two.
He was back running the teachers’ union, running a school. And then it emerged in 2017 that he was elected to the Hamas politburo together with Yahya Sinwar who’s the mastermind of the October 7th massacre. One of his colleagues on the Hamas committee was this leading UNRWA figure of education. So, it’s not somebody who’s in charge of giving out bags of food or about building apartments for people. It’s the person in charge of education.
And we’re told that the UN is making sure that the Palestinians are getting educated for peace and human rights and it’s all a lie. So from time to time they would do fake suspensions. A few months ago, in February, they created a supposed inquiry or probe headed by the former French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna. It was a sham. It was rigged from the start.
Catherine Colonna is a huge supporter of UNRWA. She brought three Scandinavian NGOs. Each one is a bigger champion for UNRWA than the next. It was all rigged from the start. So you asked me about accountability. There have been a few pretend gestures but never have the donors of UNRWA actually ever attempted to do anything serious.
John Bickley, The Daily Wire: With the U.S. suspending funding and a few other countries like you’ve outlined joining that effort. Is that enough to eliminate this group or is it just going to keep existing as long as they have a few of these states continuing to give money?
Hillel Neuer: Well, there’s money, there’s political support. Annually, there’s UN General Assembly resolutions that proclaim their support for UNRWA. So there they get large majorities. So for now, it’s going to take a lot. It’s going to need defunding by major countries, meaning Germany, France, the U.K.
They need to get on board on defunding. And they have to recognize that the entire raison d’etre, the entire purpose of UNRWA over the years has become twisted. It was founded in 1949 to actually help resettle Palestinians who had left the region and gone to Jordan after the war of 1948.
And over time, it became the opposite. They haven’t resettled a single Palestinian. Even those who have citizenship in Jordan for 70 years, the UN says, tells them you are a refugee, which is absurd. Someone who moved to America 70 years ago and became an American citizen neither him, his daughter, his grandson they’re not refugees anymore they’re American citizens.
But according to UNRWA, if you were ever a Palestinian, you are forever a refugee. And you’re going to go to Israel you’re going to dismantle Israel. What they call the right of return which we know on October 7th means to massacre violently destroy Israel in order to dismantle it.
So as long as that is the purpose of the agency which that is the purpose of the agency it is pathological. There’s no way to reform this agency. It is, the people say, who will replace UNRWA? That’s like asking, as Dr. Einat Wilf said that’s like asking who will replace the arsonist?
UNRWA is not the firefighter they’re not the ones solving the problems of war. They’re the ones creating war. They’re perpetuating war. They tell Palestinians in Gaza Gaza is not your home. Your home is in Tel Aviv. And so we shouldn’t be surprised that UNRWA graduates are those who carried out the massacre on behalf of Hamas on October 7th.
John Bickley, The Daily Wire: What are the next steps in terms of continuing this momentum to expose the group and defund them?
Hillel Neuer: I think we need leadership. We need leadership. So our organization is a non-governmental organization, a nonprofit group based in Geneva. We’re doing our part to set out the facts and we have huge amount of data going back 10 years, especially in the past year, documenting in detail how from the top to the bottom there is infiltration by Hamas with this UN agency which we’re all funding again.
The U.S. even, this year they froze funding, but that didn’t stop the State Department from shoveling out, I think, over $100 million by the time the freeze was announced in January 25th. They already shoveled out the door over $100 million, which is absurd.
So the next steps are, you know we’re going to continue exposing their infiltration, but we’re going to need leadership. You know, at least Stefanik is the incoming U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. We’re going to need her. We’re going to need new incoming Secretary of State Marco Rubio to take leadership and really speak to their allies the French, the Germans, the Spanish, the Italians, the Norwegians, who are major supporters of UNRWA, and tell them, look, if we want to keep perpetuating war, I’m going to quote the Swiss foreign minister in 2018, you wouldn’t expect it from Switzerland, but the Swiss foreign minister, Ignazio Cassis visiting UNRWA facilities in Jordan, said, look, this is a perverse logic. UNRWA is not the solution, it’s the problem. We are perpetuating it. And he said, it’s a perverse logic. We’re just perpetuating the problem from one generation to the next.
So we’re going to need leadership and we’re going to need Western leadership. Because the truth is the Arab countries could fund UNRWA. It’s only one and a half billion dollars. Qatar spends that much on buying a sports team every second day so they could easily fund it but they want the Western states to fund it for the legitimacy of the pathological agenda. We need leading democracies to say this is a failure.
Palestinians should and are able to govern themselves and they don’t need an agency that perpetuates only war grievance, terrorism and dependency.
John Bickley, The Daily Wire: Well, you outlined a lot of disturbing things. I think the most disturbing, though, is how openly these members of UNRWA were supporting terrorism. And a bunch of countries from the West just seem to turn a blind eye to it. Hillel, thank you so much for talking with us.
Hillel Neuer: Thank you for having me.
