A few weeks back, I observed a pretty sad scene down at the local shops. A mother was holding out of her son’s reach a packet of Allen’s snakes. He looked to be around five or six, and was outright refusing to say the magic words, ‘Please mummy, may I have one?’

She seemed resolved enough at first, with the little brat dancing around her dress trying to get a better position to seize the sweets.

It was a battle of wills. I looked away with a smirk, remembering my own children trying this sort of thing on. At one point he crossed his arms and spluttered grumpily, ‘Noh, noh!’

Then the little kid screamed with such high pitch and volume that everyone in the vicinity swung their heads to see who or what was being tortured. This one act broke the deadlock and the mother handed over the snakes.

My guess is that the boy had long observed his mother’s embarrassment when it came to public displays of family dysfunction and had developed a knack for perfect timing.

In an even sadder ending to the incident, the mother tried to salvage something useful, insisting that, ‘Next time you’ll have to say please!’

Sure.

It would be simple enough to turn this incident into a metaphor for the decline of Western Civilisation where entitled, rude kids are growing up in a world where they became too feeble to deal with genuine problems. Slowly, hard people replace the weak.

That’s too big a stretch I think, but the mother’s weakness, I suspect, does serve a useful lesson for Western countries when it comes to dealing with the disgraced United Nations organisation known as the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).

UNRWA’s supposed mission is to provide education, health, and welfare services to refugees. It is a mission brief which has massively expanded over decades as UNRWA adopted a definition of ‘refugee’ that excludes virtually no one.

And we learnt recently that UNRWA has surreptitiously widened its scope of operations… Not only is it dedicated to humanitarian assistance, it has been alleged that employees of the organisation have branched into committing human massacres.

I guess it’s logical for the Palestinians… The more destruction, chaos, and desperation created, the bigger the financial empire it can build through donations given to organisations like UNRWA. It is one of those genius quangos which has worked out how to grow its own food.

12 of UNRWA’s staff have been accused of direct involvement in the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust, the October 7 massacre in southern Israel.

Of those UNRWA employees accused of participating in the Jewish massacre, one was a teacher found to be armed with an anti-tank missile launcher.

Another one served as a commander in the killings at the Kibbutz Be’eri.

An UNRWA social worker apparently stole the dead body of an Israeli soldier, in addition to distributing ammunition and coordinating vehicles used to kill and kidnap Jews.

Yet another is accused of filming hostages being rounded up and slaughtered.

While only 12 staff have been sacked, many more joined October 7 Street celebrations and posted their excitement on social media accounts. The Wall Street Journal estimated that around 10 per cent of UNRWA’s 30,000 staff have links to Islamist militant groups.

As I’m writing this article, news just broke that Bank Leumi has suspended the bank accounts on UNWRA for ‘suspicious’ transactions, likely the covert funding of terrorist activities.

UNRWA does not only operate in Gaza, it has operations in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and the West Bank. Research by a non-government organisation UN Watch has unearthed many cases of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish activities, particularly in its schools.

One fun game played by UNRWA ‘teachers’, apparently, is the erasing of Israel on maps used in geography class. Children get to colour in the lands of Israel on maps with depictions of the Palestinian flag.

In March 2022, a shooting at Bnei Brak killed four Israeli civilians and one policeman. The perpetrator was described in a school classroom as a ‘martyr’ whose name should ‘forever remain in letters of fire, might, and magnificence’. The lesson was reportedly taught by a Syrian UNRWA maths teacher.

An UNRWA Lebanon teacher was found to have taught children to venerate a murderous Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades Commander as a ‘martyr’ and the ‘noblest of souls’.

An UNRWA Syria employee celebrated Adolf Hitler by sharing a photograph of the German dictator and calling on him to wake up because ‘there are still some people you need to burn’.

At UNRWA’s Al-Zaytun Elementary School in Gaza, 9th-grade students were taught to glorify the terrorist who carried out the 1978 Coastal Road Massacre in which 38 Israeli civilians including 13 children were killed.

UNRWA’s Al-Maghazi Middle School for Boys in Gaza created an Arabic reading comprehension exercise for 9th graders which celebrated a Palestinian firebombing attack on a Jewish bus as a ‘barbecue party’.

In another school text, 9th-graders were given fictional stories of Israelis doing atrocious things, one depicted a ‘Zionist officer’ shooting to death a Palestinian fisherman for being late back to shore.

One 9th-grade social studies class taught children that Israel infects Palestinians with cancer by dumping toxic waste in the West Bank and Gaza.

UNRWA’s Asma Middle School for Girls told students that ‘the most precious thing’ a person has for serving the homeland is to ‘sacrifice their blood’.

The Trump administration defunded UNRWA in 2018, but the decision was quickly reversed when Biden won office in 2020. The US has once again ‘paused’ funding and other countries like Australia have followed. But for how long, I wonder?

I suspect the most valuable thing for Gaza and the West Bank is to get UNRWA out of the way so decency and peace has a better chance. Other organisations will have to step in and replace it, even if that will be disruptive for a period.

Time, I think, to take the lollies away and not give in when they scream.

Nick Hossack is a public policy consultant. He is former policy director at the Australian Bankers’ Association and former adviser to Prime Minister John Howard.

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