Brussels doesn’t know where to stand on Israel—not that anyone is really listening, anyway. Leaders accept that Israel is, as Friedrich Merz put it, doing the “dirty work” for “all of us,” while continually urging it to stop striking Iran. But when it comes to contentious organisations with apparent links to Hamas terrorists, they are far more assured about their backing.
As such, the European Commission has this week announced the allocation of €52 million—that is, of taxpayer cash—to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).
That’s despite reports some of the agency’s staff were involved in the October 7th pogrom and “regularly” met with Hamas terrorists, and more recently that Israeli hostages were held at one of UNRWA’s refugee camps.
.@EU_Commission Your new millions for UNRWA are going to Hamas.
LEFT: Suhail al-Hindi, longtime UNRWA union chief in charge of all 30,000 UNRWA employees, and one of the last surviving members of the Hamas Politburo RIGHT: Yahya Sinwar, mastermind of October 7 massacre https://t.co/UjnwxQEaqgpic.twitter.com/ZrM3r8yNpP
The Commission said this funding would go towards “the delivery of critical services, including education.” It is worth noting, then, that interviews with Palestinian children who attended UNRWA schools late last year raised serious questions about the embedding of anti-Israeli—and anti-Jewish—messaging.
Even more money (€150 million) is being handed to the Palestinian Authority, which the Commission said was “linked to the implementation of the reform agenda.”
After a call in April with PA President Mahmoud Abbas, who once said Hitler “killed the Jews” not because they were Jews but because of “their social role, which had to do with usury, money, and so on,” France’s Emmanuel Macron accepted that the group needs “reforming.”
But much more than a little brushing-up would be required to deal with its incentivising of terrorism—well expressed by Abbas when he prayed for the “martyred” soul of a Hamas leader who was partly responsible for October 7th—and its well-documented corruption, to name just two flaws.
This new funding comes in the same week that Brussels has had a(nother) pop at Israel for supposedly being “in breach of its human rights obligations under Article 2 of the EU-Israel Association Agreement.”
Michael Curzon is a news writer for europeanconservative.com based in England’s Midlands. He is also Editor of Bournbrook Magazine, which he founded in 2019, and previously wrote for London’s Express Online. His Twitter handle is @MichaelCurzon_.
