Senator to probe UNRWA funding
MONEY provided by Australia to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) is being used “for evil purposes”, Senator David Leyonhjelm said last week.
MONEY provided by Australia to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) is being used “for evil purposes”, Senator David Leyonhjelm said last week.
The Liberal Democrats Senator has pledged to “start asking some awkward questions” about Australia’s funding of the UN body after recently returning from Israel and the Palestinian territories where he saw firsthand how UNRWA funds are spent.
Reflecting on the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC) Rambam Israel study mission at a lunch last Friday, the Senator described visiting a Ramallah refugee camp.
“You’d struggle to call it a refugee camp. I’ve seen worse, much much worse … the popular image of a refugee camp is rows of tents and food kitchens and all those sorts of things, [it was] nothing like that at all,” he said.
“It’s absolutely not desperate poverty, absolutely not.”
He said he began to think about whether Australia should curb its UNRWA funding, as United States President Donald Trump has done, while on the mission.
“The more I listened to the briefings, the more I looked around, I thought that’s a good idea,” he said.
“Then I went to the refugee camp and saw what was being paid for by UNRWA. I thought this makes no sense at all.
“We went to Palestinian Media Watch and they told us what was being taught to the kids in the schools on the West Bank with UNRWA money, and I thought okay, I am now convinced.”
Leyonhjelm also supports the idea of Australia moving its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, but said while that “is symbolic, UNRWA funding is way more than symbolic”.
“If I can force UNRWA to lose its money from Australia, that will have a material effect,” he said.
Liberal North Sydney MP Trent Zimmerman also participated in the study mission and gave his impressions at the lunch.
He spoke of the shock of realising “how relatively small the borders are, how relatively close the foes of Israel are and why that creates a security pressure which you don’t fathom” from Australia.
He said the trip also brought home “the threat the international community faces from Iranian malevolence” and took aim at the corrupt and authoritarian nature of the Palestinian Authority.
“It is hard to see how you could ever partner for peace, as much as we’d like it, with an organisation whose fig leaf of any governance or democratic pretensions really have been undone by its history over the past decade,” he said.
“I came away thinking the preconditions for a peaceful settlement just simply don’t exist.”
GARETH NARUNSKY
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