Testimony by United Nations Watch to 52nd Session of the Human Rights Council, on the systematic hatred, violence and antisemitism preached at UNRWA’s schools, delivered by Jillian Rolnick on 30 March 2023:
The United Nations was founded to promote peace and fight racism. Yet our new report, produced jointly with IMPACT-se, demonstrates how UNRWA, the UN agency that runs schools for Palestinians, continues to hire teachers who openly incite to racism, hatred, and violence.
Entitled “UNRWA Education: Reform or Regression,” our 100-page report documents how teachers and schools at this agency regularly call to murder Jews, and create teaching materials that glorify terrorism and encourage martyrdom.
The report identifies more than 200 perpetrators, and captures evidence taken from inside UNRWA classrooms, including pictures of blackboards, showing the teaching of materials that glorify terrorists such as Dalal al-Mugrabi.
All of this is in breach of the agency’s stated policies of zero tolerance for racism, discrimination and antisemitism.
In wake of our report, UNRWA already suspended one of the perpetrators, a teacher who endorsed the 2014 murder of Jewish worshippers at a synagogue in Jerusalem. We commend Dorothy Klaus, UNRWA’s director in Lebanon, for taking this action.
However, despite numerous prior reports, UNRWA has failed to fire any of the perpetrators.
UNRWA downplays all of this as a trivial matter of social media infractions.
But in truth, the core problem is that a $1 billion dollar UN agency is systematically hiring teachers who preach racism, hatred and violence — thereby poisoning the hearts and minds of young Palestinians.
Thank you.
