Teaching That Jews Have Rights Would Violate Palestinian Rights

By Filippo Grandi, Commissioner-General, United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East

As the head of UNRWA, I oversee a vast operation to help Palestinians exercise their rights, and one of those rights is denying that Jews have rights.

Let’s start with the facts. My agency is tasked by UN mandate to provide certain basic services to Palestinian refuges and their descendants. One of those services is education, and we find it crucial to educate our charges to respect human rights. Our schools in the Gaza Strip take special care to make sure that the next generation of Palestinians knows what rights to demand. But Hamas objected to our human rights curriculum, saying that teaching tolerance of others’ views and promoting the use of non-violence trampled their children’s right to violently oppose, defeat, and then oppress the Jews of Israel.

While this organization sympathizes with that view, it’s not as if we weren’t already meeting Hamas halfway. The curriculum we proposed specifically omits any mention of religious tolerance or freedom of religion. And the “peaceful resolution of conflicts” it does seek to promote blatantly ignores its application to the conflict with Israel. What’s more, every place where human rights violations are mentioned in connection with Palestinians, Palestinians are inevitably portrayed as the victims of those violations. You can’t exactly call that pro-Zionist.

In the end, however, we decided to accommodate Hamas’s protests, because ultimately, it’s not so much about teaching Palestinians about universal human rights as it is about teaching them that their rights trump anyone else’s. After all, that’s why they get their own UN agency. Civil society and competence in self-administration are for other cultures, not for the Palestinians. A healthy sense of victimhood is crucial for the Palestinian cultural and historical narrative, and denying that would strike at the very heart of Palestinian culture.

In practical terms, teaching them to respect others would also undermine the raison d’etre of this organization. There are literally tens of thousands of pockets that the UNRWA budget lines, and it would go against the very essence of this agency to see the Palestinians of Gaza develop any sort of independent responsibility or agency. They need us, and we need them to need us.

Just as long as everyone keeps blaming Israel, we’re good.