Richard Crossman, British Labor member of Parliament, asserted today that one of the first steps that should be taken to end the state of war between Israel and the Arabs would be to start bringing to an end the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for the Palestine Refugees.
“The blunt fact,” Mr. Crossman asserted in a talk over the BBC Hebrew Broadcast Service, was that UNRWA as an institution had become not merely a most powerful propaganda weapon against Israel, but a deeply rooted vested interest in the socio-economic life of the Arab countries adjacent to Israel. He said that impartial investigators had proved “without question” that the number of refugees had been deliberately inflated.
The Labor leader made his comments in a discussion of the final report by Dr. John H. Davis as UNRWA commissioner-general, to the current General Assembly of the United Nations earlier this week. Mr. Crossman declared that, by asserting there was no possibility of winding up relief work for the refugees unless the United Nations was prepared to impose physical starvation on the refugees, Dr. Davis had “thrown away his only ace. ” He held that, by that statement, Dr. Davis had also made it impossible for either the British or American representatives to play the only ace they had in dealing with the problem.
With the aid of money collected by the UN, mainly from Britain and the United States, and with the cooperation of UNRWA officials, Mr. Crossman asserted, the refugees have organized themselves into a “powerful privileged group” whose children enjoy better health services and far better education than any other group of Arab children in the Middle East.
CALLS FOR FULL ‘EXPOSURE’ OF AGENCY’S OPERATIONS BY U.S.A. OR BRITAIN
Asserting that the number of Arabs paid fulltime to run UNRWA was out of all proportion to the work they do, Mr. Crossman declared that UNRWA, which had originally been established as a short-term measure to alleviate the aftermath of war, had since become one of the major obstacles to settlement.
He declared there were today nearly 1,000,000 Arabs with a vested interest in the present state of the Israel-Arab cold war. In Jordan, he said, they forced a large enough part of the total population to have an “absolutely decisive” voice in Jordan’s politics.
The Labor leader called on either the United States or Britain individually or jointly to take the risk of permitting a frank, impartial exposure of the abuse to which their taxpayers’ money was being put in UNRWA. He argued there was no use in introducing proposals for ending Israel-Arab tensions which Israel might conceivably accept, and which any Arab state could reasonably accept, if it were known in advance that the proposals would be rejected by those “who control the refugees and who know that peace means the end of UNRWA.”
Peace can come to the Middle East only if a time limit is set for the end of the agency and, when all details about UNRWA are ruthlessly exposed to the light of day, he added. Sooner or later, he declared, the “conspiracy of silence” must be broken, and the Englishman or American who succeeded in doing so would deserve well not only from the Israelis but also from his own people, who have a vital interest in creating the conditions for Middle East peace.
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