FAIT Committee Meeting

37th PARLIAMENT, 2nd SESSION

Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade

EVIDENCE

CONTENTS

Wednesday, November 5, 2003

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1555

The Chair (Mr. Bernard Patry (Pierrefonds—Dollard, Lib.))

Mr. Peter Hansen (Commissioner General, United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA))

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1600

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1605

The Chair

Mr. Stockwell Day (Okanagan—Coquihalla, Canadian Alliance)

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1610

The Chair

Mr. Peter Hansen

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1615

The Chair

Mr. Peter Hansen

The Chair

Mr. Peter Hansen

Mr. Yves Rocheleau (Trois-Rivières, BQ)

Mr. Peter Hansen

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1620

The Chair

Hon. Art Eggleton (York Centre, Lib.)

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1625

Mr. Peter Hansen

Hon. Art Eggleton

Mr. Peter Hansen

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1630

The Chair

Ms. Alexa McDonough (Halifax, NDP)

Mr. Peter Hansen

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1635

The Chair

Hon. Diane Marleau (Sudbury, Lib.)

Mr. Peter Hansen

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1640

The Chair

Mr. Keith Martin (Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, Canadian Alliance)

Mr. Peter Hansen

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1645

The Chair

Ms. Aileen Carroll (Barrie—Simcoe—Bradford, Lib.)

Mr. Peter Hansen

Ms. Aileen Carroll

Mr. Peter Hansen

The Chair

Ms. Alexa McDonough

Mr. Peter Hansen

The Chair

Mr. Peter Hansen

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1650

Hon. Art Eggleton

Mr. Peter Hansen

Hon. Art Eggleton

Mr. Maher Nasser (Chief, Liaison Office (New York), United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East(UNRWA))

The Chair

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CANADA

Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade

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NUMBER 056

l

2nd SESSION

l

37th PARLIAMENT

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EVIDENCE

Wednesday, November 5, 2003

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

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[English]

    The Chair (Mr. Bernard Patry (Pierrefonds—Dollard, Lib.)): The order of the day is, pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), consideration of relations with Muslim countries.

    As witnesses today we have, from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, Mr. Peter Hansen, who is the commissioner general, and Mr. Maher Nasser, who is the chief, Liaison Office, New York. Welcome, both of you.

    I just want to point out to colleagues first that tomorrow morning at 9 o'clock we're going to meet in room 237-C concerning Mr. Sampson, who will appear before the committee.

    Also, I just want to let you know that I have proposed that the notice you've already received for tomorrow be modified, and we're going to meet from between 10 and 10:30 till 10:45 for work of the committee. We have a motion from Mr. Eggleton, a motion from Mr. Cotler, and also a motion from Mr. Martin, and we're going to adopt the report of the Subcommittee on International Trade. After that, from 11 o'clock until 1 o'clock, we're going to hear from Mr. Feldman in room 253-D in the Centre Block.

    Now, Mr. Hansen, you have the floor. Please.

    Mr. Peter Hansen (Commissioner General, United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA)): Thank you very much, and thank you for having me here today to try to give you a bit of a perspective on the Middle East, which I and my organization live in and try our best to work in.

    I'll say a few words about my organization. I'm not quite sure how well you know it. It is--unfortunately, I would say--the oldest humanitarian agency in the world. It was established to exist for maybe one or two years, at most three years, and here we are fifty-some years later. There's still a refugee population, a much larger refugee population than the one the organization started to assist when it went into action back in 1950. We now have the responsibility for the education, health, and welfare of some 4.1 million registered refugees, a population that is about the size of Ireland's.

    We are a unique agency in the sense that we are one that gives services directly to people. There's a school system with about half a million students and about 6,000 vocational students in training. We have a major primary health care system, which handles some nine million patient visits per year, and a social relief and welfare system that looks after the special hardship cases, as we call them.

    I would like to emphasize that UNRWA does not give general distribution to the refugee population as a whole. We target people, so the people who get social support are only those who cannot otherwise look after themselves. In what we would call normal circumstances, this is as little as 5% of the Palestinian population in Jordan and as much as 11% in Lebanon. In today's strife and violence, of course, we have a much larger caseload, especially in Gaza and the West Bank, where there has been a great deal of material and human damage done in the course of the past three years.

    Finally, there's a major program I would mention to you because it is a relatively new program in UNRWA; it's only about eight years old. That is the microenterprise and microcredit program, which is the largest and fastest-growing such program in the Middle East, a program that has a loan portfolio of between $60 million and $70 million and has given loans to some 60,000 loan takers, who with these loans have been able to go about productive work and take care of their own families.

    I mention that because one of the many stereotypes that exist about UNRWA is that UNRWA somehow sees its task as keeping the refugees in dependency so they can be utilized as political pawns in the Middle East conflict. Nothing, you'll see when you look into the nature of our program, could be further from the truth. The largest microcredit program in the region, a program with the largest group of new entrepreneurs created and where 85% of its budget goes into primary health care and into education, can hardly be fairly characterized as a program of an organization that keeps that population in dependency. It's quite the contrary, as with so many other things that have been said about UNRWA.

    In many respects we are living through very difficult times in the occupied territories now. Three years of Intifada has taken a big toll, first of all on the hopes of both Palestinians and Israelis in their search for a peaceful solution.

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    We saw rapid growth for Palestinians in the first years of their self-government, with gross national income growing 9% and 10% a year until 2000 but then plummeting, probably as few other economies ever have in the world. We are now where the absolute size of the Palestinian economy is down to the level it was in 1986. We have not only gone backwards and wiped out all the progress that was made after the Oslo agreement, we have been set back almost ten years in terms of losses, yet that economy has to support a much larger population.

    That translates into absolute poverty numbers that have tripled since the late 1990s, when the percentage of Palestinians living below the poverty line of $2 per day was about 20%. Today it is about 60% of the population who live at that income level. Unemployment, which during the good years of hope and progress had declined to the teens, is now between 35% and 50%, depending on which measure you use for measuring unemployment. The levels of malnutrition, which were brought down dramatically in the years of the fifties, sixties, and seventies, are now climbing back up again. According to Johns Hopkins University and the USAID, malnutrition levels are in the range of 25% again.

    We have seen an explosion in the needs of people, with incomes dropping, largely because of the movement restrictions on the Palestinian population, which have been imposed by Israel as a measure against the violence from the Palestinian side in the conflict. Again, we have seen the needs we are confronted with grow considerably. Under the circumstances we have now, instead of 7% or 8% of the population, about half of the population depends on food aid from UNRWA. That is, 1.2 million people are dependent on food aid. People who would otherwise not be dependent, who had grown out of their dependence, have now been thrown back into that situation again.

    We have seen massive declines in public health statistics, we have seen an increase in demands on our health services, and we have seen, in recent weeks and months at least, a very dramatic increase in the number of people who have lost their homes due to bulldozing, especially in southern Gaza. In October alone some 200 buildings, some of them multi-family dwellings, were flattened, and 2,000 people were left homeless on the rubble of what used to be their homes. That figure, I should say, should be added to the more than 12,000 people who in Gaza alone have been made homeless and to the several thousand more who have been made homeless in the West Bank.

    We are finding ourselves in a situation where we have to run faster and faster in order to stay in the same place. We have so far constructed 228 replacement shelters and we have another 250 we will soon have ready, but we are seeing these homes destroyed at a much faster pace than we can rebuild them. We have also seen a certain fatigue in the international community, where more and more donors are asking themselves the question as to whether they should be paying the costs of the destruction caused by the occupation.

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    When I mention all this destruction, let me be very clear that there are two sides to a conflict. It is not a question of one side killing people on the other side and destroying their homes just without any reason. Israel is a society that lives in deep fear, in deep insecurity. It is a society that, at least for its Jewish inhabitant-citizens, is a democracy, and one would expect people in a democracy to make demands on their government and leaders to give them protection and give them safety and security. One could not, of course, expect Israel to just let attacks on their population go without response, so violence is to be expected from the Israeli side.

    I suppose it is difficult to imagine a situation where, under occupation, there would be no violence at all from the Palestinian side. Even though some people don't like the use of the term “cycle of violence”, I think that is what we have, a very unhappy, tragic cycle that leads to an upward spiral in violent action and reaction. More than 800 Israelis have been killed in the course of this conflict, and about 2,500 Palestinians have been killed.

    I might say that unfortunately our own staff in UNRWA figures on the fatality list, with figures that are relatively larger than the numbers for both Palestinians and Israelis. We have lost nine of our staff so far, all killed by the Israeli Defence Force under different circumstances. You will know some of the more celebrated cases, like the killing of our project manager in Jenin, the British worker Iain Hook, who about a year ago was unfortunately killed while trying to extricate our staff from a compound around which fighting had earlier taken place.

    There is no doubt in my mind that what we are doing in UNRWA can only be a band-aid. Humanitarian aid is no answer to the situation we find ourselves in, which can only be answered by political solutions that require a much larger exhibition of political will on both sides of the conflict, a much bigger political will and a determination to make painful concessions. Mr. Sharon has often said he is willing and eager to demonstrate that will and determination, but we have seen, I am afraid, that more and more of these painful concessions have less and less support on both sides of the conflict.

    That is a very bad omen for the future because there is no easy and immediate turnaround to be seen, by me at least. Our fervent hope in UNRWA is that this will soon come to a situation where we can reach for a peaceful solution, where within a few years' time after that UNRWA will have become superfluous and can fold. Then we can all, so to speak, go home from UNRWA and no longer have to carry out the often very burdensome and very dangerous tasks we have to perform day in and day out--and night in and night out, as it often is.

    Mr. Chairman, I think we would be using our time to more advantage if I tried to respond to questions or comments from the committee than if I went on reciting things you are probably all too familiar with, unfortunately, already.

    Thank you very much for the opportunity.

    The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. Hansen.

    We'll go right away to questions and answers. Mr. Day for a five-minute round, please.

    Mr. Stockwell Day (Okanagan—Coquihalla, Canadian Alliance): Thanks, Mr. Chairman.

    There's no question about the value of the humanitarian work performed by this agency. Now, 23,000 employees are a lot of people. Can you just help me understand a couple of things?

    I see that 116 governments give to the funding of this agency. The United States gives about 30% of that overall. Canada, of course, is up there also. The figures show that in the year 2000 Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the other gulf emirates contributed only about 2%, and Egypt, Iraq, and Syria contributed nothing. I realize you are not responsible for that, but could you address that?

    Then, is there any linkage between that and the apparent--I'm using the word carefully--the apparent lack of input from the surrounding Arab countries to their cousins in terms of absorbing them on a refugee status basis, even as Canada does? Whenever there's conflict somewhere, Canada is there saying, we'll take our share. I know there's some absorption of refugees into other areas. Do you get a sense of why that would be? I don't want to say it's neglect from their cousins, but it appears that way.

    Also, we've had presentations to the effect that on the education side--and I know UNRWA is involved there--some of the documents and some of the programs Palestinian Arab kids see are pretty strongly anti-Israel. We've seen the actual stuff. Do you see that? Are your people able to intercept any of that?

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    The Chair: Mr. Hansen.

    Mr. Peter Hansen: Thank you.

    First of all, I do feel partly responsible if the Arab countries do not give enough because it means that I am not being effective enough in explaining to them that they have a moral and ethical duty to accept this international responsibility in the same measure as others do.

    When I first came to this task eight years ago, I heard that the Arabs were saying this was a problem that was created by somebody else, so somebody else should have the responsibility for dealing with the consequences. I'm glad I don't hear that from the Arabs any more. I'm glad they agree with me that they cannot take international responsibilities à la carte that way and say they'll deal with some but not with others. The Arab League has decided that they ought to contribute between 7% and 8% of UNRWA's budget, but they are very far from doing that. They will have to quadruple their contributions if they are to reach that level.

    But when you look at the Arab countries' actual performance as against their capacity, it is not all as bad as it looks when you say they just give about 2%. First of all, if you--and I have done that--take the World Bank statistics from the World Bank Atlas and you add up the gross national income of all the gulf countries, you come to a sum that is less than the gross national income of Belgium. I was very surprised to see that figure, but have it checked yourself.

    Now, given that this is the case, I have made an analysis of what the fair share of each donor country would be, and my best burden criterion is the UN scale of contributions that is made up according to the ability to pay. According to that, four out of the six Arab gulf countries, including Saudi Arabia, the emirates, Kuwait, and, I think, Bahrain, contribute more than they would have been assessed under a regular budget. Fewer than half of the North American and European countries contribute that much. Canada contributes some 80% of what it would have been assessed, which is less than the relative contribution of most of the Arab gulf countries. Canada did contribute its full share a few years ago but has unfortunately not been able to increase its contribution for the past three or four years, which might have many explanations, which I hope will be overcome.

    When I then take the list of countries and rank them in relation to who the highest contributors are, Sweden pays seven times as much as they would be assessed, Norway pays six times as much, and so does Luxembourg. But number four on that list is Kuwait; they are way up there on top.

    When I look at our appeals for emergency aid, I see we have had a pledge from the United Arab Emirates of $28 million for the rebuilding of the centre of the Jenin refugee camp that was destroyed. That is not all that bad; that would put the emirates way up on top among the highest contributors to emergency aid. In Syria there have been collections in schools, mosques, and so on, and they have collected a total of $3 million, which, if you consider the average income level in Syria, is probably higher than for any of the other donor countries.

    Now, I said I'm not satisfied with the contribution of the Arabs. I'll be going there shortly and I'll be pleading with them, saying they're not living up to their own promises to themselves of what they ought to give, and I would hope that I can persuade them to give more. Certainly, they can improve their performance, but it is not quite as bad as is often thought in the western world, when fingers are pointed in different directions.

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    The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Hansen.

    I will go to Mr. Rocheleau.

    Mr. Peter Hansen: Sorry, I omitted to talk about textbooks.

    The Chair: No, we don't respond to second questions. It was a five-minute round, and we allowed six and a half minutes. Sorry, those are the rules.

    We'll go to Mr. Rocheleau.

    Mr. Peter Hansen: I didn't know your rules. Sorry.

[Translation]

    Mr. Yves Rocheleau (Trois-Rivières, BQ): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

    Thank you, Mr. Hansen, for your work in the Middle East. When we hear you say that nine of your colleagues have been killed, we see how important and delicate your mission there is. It's all to your credit, and we can only thank and congratulate you.

    My first question is about relations between your organization and the Israeli government. Nine people apparently died because of Israel's actions. Were they accidents? Does Israel recognize your work? Israel is known to have very sophisticated weapons that can be used to target people. Were those people killed in accidents or were they targeted?

    Second, you talked about despair. I'd like to hear what you have to say about the construction of the wall and its psychological effects on Palestinians. I guess the wall is getting a little bit longer every day. How is it perceived by Palestinians and what are its effects on their morale?

[English]

    Mr. Peter Hansen: Thank you very much.

    Now I'll be really brief and say that with respect to our relations with the Israelis, yes, I think the Israeli government recognizes our presence there. In fact, the Israeli government has time and again talked about how indispensable UNRWA is in terms of providing the humanitarian assistance it does. Many of our detractors will say yes, UNRWA is indispensable in carrying much of the burden and the cost of the occupation. We don't see that we help one political party or the other as such; we help the victims of this conflict, and for that we have also received considerable recognition from the Israeli government.

    But we wish the Israeli government would give us much better conditions to operate under on the ground. We wish our ambulances had the priority ambulances ought to have. We have at some point had all our ambulances hit by Israeli bullets. We've had one of the ambulance drivers killed, one of the nine killed in the course of service. We've had many delays in deliveries of humanitarian aid, and we are constantly in a dialogue with the Israeli government about facilitating our activities, letting us do the job as we are supposed to do it and as Israel has committed itself to helping us do it.

    The wall--and I'll try to catch up--is a very big blow to the Palestinian economy. I should say the wall, the fence, or the separation barrier, because “walls” and “fences” have different connotations in English usage. In some places it is a wall, a very tall one, 28 feet high. That is about two or three times as high as the Berlin Wall was, which is a connotation that is often given there.

    For a city like Qalqilya it is particularly tragic because that city wanted to make itself a meeting place, a meeting ground between Arabs and Jews, a place of exchange and cultural contact, and so on. Qalqilya today is surrounded by a 28-foot-high wall with barbed wire in some places. There's one entry and that entry is also the exit of Qalqilya. The town is completely cut off, and when you go down the main street today, you see that what used to be a bustling marketplace now has shuttered windows with metal or whatever enclosures.

    What I think is bothering the people of Qalqilya in particular is that they have no future living in a city with these constraints and this economy. The population of Qalqilya, which before the wall was 42,000, is now--according to the mayor, who gave me the figures--around 37,000 and falling. That means that Qalqilya is slowly, if not becoming depopulated, then certainly losing a lot of its population. Where these people can go and what they can do are very big questions.

    The Qalqilya situation is certainly one the Palestinians see as a bad omen for the consequences of the wall. If it had been built on the green line, it would have been welcomed as a separation measure by many Palestinians as well, but it is now built inside the West Bank area and was apparently planned so Israel could take great chunks out of the West Bank. About 200,000 people are living in no man's land, among them some 13,000 refugees who can neither go into Israel nor go back into the West Bank but are literally living in limbo.

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    The Chair: Thank you.

    Mr. Eggleton.

    Hon. Art Eggleton (York Centre, Lib.): Mr. Hansen, thank you for coming today, and thank you for the work UNRWA does to look after the health, the welfare, and the education of the Palestinian refugees.

    I understand that although they're not well off, obviously, being in refugee camps, many of them are better off than some of the people in some of the neighbourhoods that surround them.

    But I'm concerned by some of the stories I hear about these camps becoming breeding grounds for terrorism. If indeed that is the case, then one could understand why the Israeli defence forces are frequently there and why these conflicts you've indicated a concern about exist. For example, apparently a majority of your workers--as I understand, you have 23,000 workers, as Mr. Day said--are Palestinians and perhaps refugees themselves. They have a union or unions, and one of them, an Islamic bloc that is affiliated with Hamas, overwhelmingly won executive positions in the union, apparently. There are some 8,000 clerks and teachers, and those in the service and worker sectors gained 23 out of 27 seats this past summer in an election. In the teachers' sector, apparently, they won majority votes in the Gaza and other places.

    According to one publication from an Arab country, UNRWA schools are greenhouses for suicide bombers. It goes on to say that the majority of those who commit suicide missions in Palestine are UNRWA school graduates born in refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza, which are under the responsibility of UNRWA, and the national anti-Israeli slogans and the education given to students in the refugee camps are responsible for their transformation into ticking bombs.

    On the website of Hamas they talk about having a conference in one of the schools in one of the refugee camps, where one of the leaders of Hamas indicated to the high school students that this was “the generation of liberation and victory...the Zionist enemy wants to overpower us and make us give up Palestine,” and Hamas would not let this happen. Another leader went on to praise some graduates who had carried out suicide attacks against Israel.

    Of course, as Mr. Day has pointed out, from what we've seen and what we've been told, the textbooks would not meet UNESCO's educational standards. In fact, they do nothing to try to bridge any gaps but in fact breed this kind of terrorism and suicide bomber glorification coming out of these camps.

    Now, Canada is a financial supporter of UNRWA, but Canada at the same time has by law banned Hamas, saying it's a terrorist organization. Why should we continue to support UNRWA if it's going to allow Hamas to have this kind of control, creating a breeding ground for terrorism in these camps?

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    Mr. Peter Hansen: Indeed, if it were so, you could ask that question, but let me try to respond to what you said. First of all, are the camps breeding grounds for terrorists? If I wanted to set up a laboratory, a greenhouse for terrorists, I would set up the kind of habitats of misery the camps are. They are isolated. They really, by the very nature of the environment in them, can only breed hatred and resentment. I am painfully aware of that, and so would you be if you came to visit some of these camps.

    What is UNRWA doing about it? Well, we don't have any civil authority in the camps. We don't have any police. All we have in the camps are the schools and clinics through which we provide these services.

    The people who work in our institutions have the right to elect representatives, but I am sorry to disappoint you: none of these elections are carried out under any union faction or party banner. There is no such thing as a Hamas candidate, and I would invite any scholar or researcher to go in and see if they can find any sign of any campaign by any representative of our staff who ran on a Hamas, Jihad, Fatah, or any other platform.

    Hon. Art Eggleton: It was an affiliated organization.

    Mr. Peter Hansen: Or affiliated. They don't run for affiliated organizations either.

    What sometimes has happened is, when these people have been elected as individuals without any organized party platform, there have been advertisements in the local press with Hamas or affiliated organizations congratulating them. That is what probably then leads some to say, aha, they are Hamas representatives. But there is absolutely no guarantee of that.

    Now, I cannot assure you that some teachers might not have Hamas sympathies. We are not political police or a mind-control party. What I have done, and this to a degree where our teachers and others have said I am limiting their freedom of expression, is to remind them all the time that they are UN staff and that they have to live up to the standards that should be expected of UN staff in terms of impartiality, in terms of non-partisanship, and in terms of non-participation in any events that could discredit the UN or--if your information was correct--could enable you to make such charges against UNRWA.

    The conference you talked about was an event that was held in an UNRWA school but was not an UNRWA event, and one of the teachers praised the work of the students. No witness has been found to support what you said, and I have looked into this because if this had been true, it would have been very serious and we would have had to do something about it. However, investigations have shown, the search for witnesses has shown, and the search in the public records for how that meeting appeared in newspapers and so on has borne out that this simply did not take place. These words were not spoken and there was no Hamas event in that school, so there is a real chasm here of what is being said by whatever sources you're using and what the facts are, or as well as they can be ascertained. I would invite anybody to go out and double-check this and find what there is about it.

    As to slogans in the schools, again, we have had many visitors, and you will not find slogans or posters inside the schools. You might find students who come with them and put them up because they feel strongly about what might have happened to their family or their house and so on, but they are taken down again. We have a group of people constantly circulating in the institutions to see they are clean of any political incitement.

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    The Chair: Thank you.

    Madam McDonough.

    Ms. Alexa McDonough (Halifax, NDP): Mr. Chairman, first of all I want to welcome our guests and say how very pleased I am to have the opportunity to express appreciation for what I think is the heroic, Herculean work I see UNRWA doing under absolutely impossible circumstances.

    I have to say I've been very disturbed, yet in a way I am glad my colleague opposite has raised the kind of questions he has because I think it's given you an important opportunity to address them at the same time. I'm personally very disturbed by what seems to be a fairly systematic campaign of misinformation from unnamed sources, accusations by unidentified persons about things happening. I would just have to say that having visited a number of the refugee camps, having visited UNRWA headquarters, and having done a lot of questioning about these kinds of accusations that just keep circulating, I couldn't find any evidence whatsoever. Now, I know the cynics would say, oh well, that's because people only took you where you would see the best of circumstances. Well, I suppose that makes it impossible, then, to ever satisfy the accusers if they're unknown, if they're anonymous, and so on.

    I want to say this and then invite your further comment on it, that in fact what I saw in a pretty random visit over a two-week period were programs directed at children and women especially to try to build a sense of hope, opportunity, and self-respect. Particularly impressive were the programs that seemed to focus directly on trying to stimulate the creativity of children. In the end, I guess, we're only going to solve these problems if we can build the self-confidence and creativity of people for them to engage in finding political solutions.

    I have a very specific question. As to this particular accusation about there supposedly being hate-mongering materials in the UNRWA schools, I wonder if you could just give us an impression of the overall picture with respect to schools in the occupied territories. In other words, how many schools are UNRWA-sponsored schools, how many schools are sponsored by the Palestinian Authority, and how many are actually private, if that is even a concept, schools that may in fact be sponsored by particular religious factions or whatever.

    Mr. Peter Hansen: Thank you very much.

    Let me say first that there has been material in school-books that I certainly don't think belongs in school-books. Let me go back to where I come from, Denmark. In my time we had a big issue with the Germans right after the war about what we should say about each other in school-books, and there were a lot of things there that were cleaned up. There have also been a lot of things about Arabs over the years in Israeli textbooks, and there have been things that should not have been said about Jews in Egyptian textbooks, Syrian textbooks, and others.

    What we have seen in the past decades has been that Israel has moved a very long way towards cleaning up its textbook act, as many European countries have cleaned up theirs. What we have seen also is that the Arab textbooks have changed fundamentally and drastically over the past several years, especially since the peace treaty with Egypt; even the Egyptian textbooks were cleaned up. But what the Palestinian authority has done is quite unique in world history, where a country under occupation.... I can tell you it would not have happened in Denmark, given the German occupation, that we would have changed our textbooks after the war and the occupation the way they were changed in Palestine.

    They have a new curriculum, and according to American researchers who have been there, studied it, and written books and reports about it...not the CMIP, but Professor Nathan Brown, for instance, whose research findings I'd like to share with you. First of all, he says that rather than blaming the Palestinians for incitement and hate-mongering, we should congratulate them for producing a curriculum that is free of incitement and hatred. In the conditions many Palestinian children live in, they see their families humiliated at checkpoints every day and many see their own houses or their friends' houses being flattened by bulldozers.

    If there are hard feelings against the Israelis, I can assure you the children didn't need to learn them from textbooks. They come altogether too naturally, unfortunately, from what these children live through every day. That the Palestinian Authority has gone as far as it has in cleaning up its act while its land is still occupied is no mean feat.

    Professor Brown, who is a Jewish-American professor, lived in Tel Aviv with his family and had his children in an Israeli school. He wrote in one of his books that what his children came home with from their Tel Aviv school was fully as regrettable as what had been in the Palestinian books or the Jordanian books before they were changed.

    I would just submit to you that this is not a black and white question that is only limited to Israel and Palestine. We have textbook issues all over the world, and I don't know why this particular area is singled out as the only black and white issue in textbooks. I think we should look positively at the huge progress that has been made and hope it will continue. It certainly is of no help to go on with a one-sided accusation, with one party against the other for hate-mongering.

    It was we, UNRWA, who produced all this material for CMIP, believing what they stated, that they wanted to increase mutual understanding. I don't believe any more, after having read the reports of the CMIP, that this is the purpose. I think the purpose is to show that you cannot rely on or trust the Palestinians. CMIP--sorry--is the Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace, which has done the “studies” of the textbooks that say the Palestinian and Arab schools are all bad and the Israeli schools are all good.

    Israeli schools are quite good, especially the secular ones, though not so much the religious and Orthodox schools. The secular ones have made great strides but so have the Palestinians, and they have come from behind. Do give them a little credit for having tried as hard as they have and for having come as far as they have in that.

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    The Chair: Madame Marleau.

    Hon. Diane Marleau (Sudbury, Lib.): Thank you for coming here, because I think that too often the plight of the Palestinians is not something we hear about enough.

    As you know, I've had the opportunity of visiting the camps and many of the areas you speak about, and at the time it was a time of relative peace. I must tell you that after having travelled in most poor countries around the world, frankly, I was ashamed of the condition of the camps. I was ashamed that we in North America, who have so much wealth, could abide this, not realizing how much poverty there was. That was in 1998 or 1999; I can't quite remember the date. I will say that now.

    Two other things that struck me at that time were how very young the population was and how high the rate of literacy was. The questions I'm going to ask now are, how much more has the population increased, what is the rate of literacy, is there any hope for these young people who are educated, I believe, and what more can we do during this time of great distress? It's not enough to just give you the same money you had before because the needs are that much greater, but perhaps you'd expand on that.

    Mr. Peter Hansen: First of all, with regard to literacy and the Palestinian young people, half the population is under the age of 17. That shows you what a youth bulge is coming there. Luckily, they are educated. Luckily, they have the chance, if given the opportunity, to become productive citizens of a society that will hopefully, some day soon, live in peace with their cousins, as they call them, on the other side. We have made, I think, tremendous strides towards enabling them to utilize the future.

    If I may, then, I'll just say that in terms of the school programs of UNRWA, we're not only passively following the curriculum of others. We have to do that as a basis, but we have curriculum enhancement and are teaching courses on tolerance, human rights, and peaceful conflict resolution. We are also putting other things into the curriculum that will not only make them literate but hopefully will also increasingly make them tolerant of the other and make them understand the other. We have sent our schoolchildren to schools with Israeli schoolchildren when that has been possible so they could live together and see each other as human beings. I'm sorry that the current situation does not augur well for such programs, but at least an effort has been made, and we'll continue to make it.

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    The Chair: We'll go to Mr. Martin.

    Mr. Keith Martin (Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, Canadian Alliance): Thank you, Mr. Hansen and Mr. Nasser, for being here today. We greatly appreciate your time.

    Two weeks ago Dr. Patry, Professor Cotler, and I were in the West Bank. We were in Ramallah and we went to Hebron and walked to the Tombs of the Patriarchs. What we saw was indeed deeply saddening, with both sides becoming more polarized. It appears that the radicals, shall we say, or the extremists on both sides appear to hold sway.

    My first two questions you don't need to respond to now, but if you could send your answers at a later date to the chair, I'd appreciate it. Do you know what the maternal and infant mortality rates in the camps are and how many refugees are in the camps in total? If you could provide that at a later date and send it to us when you get back home, I'd appreciate it.

    My question today is, what process do you see that can effectively build bridges between the sides to encourage the moderates, who will be able to push for the political resolution on both sides of this issue that is desperately needed? What specific solutions might you have, given your experience, and is there a role for Canada in that?

    Lastly, with respect to the homes that were destroyed, how many homes are you aware of that have been destroyed, and were they homes that were actually harbouring people building bombs and poised to attack Israel?

    Thank you.

    Mr. Peter Hansen: Thank you very much.

    We will send you the infant mortality rates.

    I agree with you, and I think I said in my introductory comments, that the sad thing about the current situation is that the constructive proposals that are coming forward from civil society now seem to have less and less support because of the radicalization on both sides. I think the only way to go forward is to support such proposals and to encourage serious treatment of them. The proposals of General Ayalon of Israel and Sari Nusseibeh and the proposal from Yossi Beilin are all, I think, very courageous. They outline what the solutions must be.

    We all know that, but it takes encouragement from the international community. It would be especially encouraging if a lot of the excessive violence that is taking place in fighting the Palestinian violence, what in my humble opinion is the disproportionate response against the Palestinians we've seen from the Israeli Defence Force, was tempered down. You have even now seen, as I've seen in press reports while I've been travelling, that the chief of staff of the Israeli army has said that this short-term tactical measure of disproportionate use of force is harming Israel's long-term strategic interests. It's probably creating more terrorist bombers--I'm convinced it is--by the excessive use of force than anyone could by stuffing any amount of textbooks down the throats of any number of schoolchildren, if that were the case.

    Whether one or two of the homes that were destroyed had been used for making bombs, I don't know. I cannot exclude the possibility that bombs were made. In fact, I do know for certain that in Jenin there had been bombs produced in several of the homes that were destroyed. That is a fact, but the amount of firepower that has been used by one side versus the amount of firepower that has been used by the other side is enormously disproportionate.

    If you want to find tunnels and destroy them--that was the case in Russia--I don't think the most militarily effective way of doing so is to have helicopter gunships shoot missiles down in heavily populated civilian areas and destroy 200 houses when these tunnels would have been located in three houses. They could have been pinpointed, I think, much more precisely with much less suffering and death and with less radicalization as a result of these actions.

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    The Chair: Thank you.

    Madam Carroll, you can ask a question.

    Ms. Aileen Carroll (Barrie—Simcoe—Bradford, Lib.): Then just allow me, Mr. Hansen, since I'm the last questioner, to give you my time. If there's anything further from your vast experience base you would like to share with this committee, why don't you use the time to do so?

    Mr. Peter Hansen: Thank you very much.

    I now have to go back to my notes and see where, in my ignorance of your rules, I cut my answers short.

    I think I managed to say this about the textbooks. I hope we can get the resources and the assistance to continue to provide extracurricular material so we can reinforce those parts of our curriculum that aim at human rights education and tolerance education. I hope that you and others, when you come to the area, will see some of the school exercises, some of the play activities children do about human rights and about understanding the other. I hope that would be helped and reinforced.

    I also hope that through providing them with additional shelters, we will be able to lessen the pain people are suffering, and I hope that we will be in a situation where we will be able to stop laying off our psychological trauma instructors. Their work is very much needed in the schools but unfortunately, because of the underfunding of our appeal, they are no longer available to work with the children as we would have wished them to do.

    Thank you for giving me the opportunity to follow up.

    Ms. Aileen Carroll: I think I caught you as badly by doing that as you got caught by the original rules that limited your response. But it was from you and from Mr. Nasser as well we wished to hear, so I thank you very much for that.

    Mr. Peter Hansen: Thank you.

    The Chair: Ms. McDonough.

    Ms. Alexa McDonough: Mr. Chair, I just have two quick questions. One is really on a point of order, whether there is any possibility at all that our visitors might be able to stay a bit longer if there are more questions, because not everyone has had a chance.

    The second is with reference to the particular research material of Professor Nathan Brown. I wonder if you could leave a reference with us or, if you can't do it presently, forward it to the committee chair or the clerk.

    Mr. Peter Hansen: We will send that to you if you don't have it now, and there are a number of other research projects by Israeli scholars who have pointed out much the same things as Nathan Brown has pointed out.

    The Chair: May I ask you to send that to the clerk, please?

    Mr. Peter Hansen: Okay, if we get the address.

    I would also like to send you what a highly respected Palestinian and Israeli institution, IPCRI, the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information, has done with the textbooks. That was done with U.S. financing in order to get an objective third party opinion on the school-book issue. That institution, considered impartial and objective by the U.S. government, has found that there was not the kind of incitement, hate-mongering, and all the other things Mr. Eggleton's sources have claimed there was.

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    Hon. Art Eggleton: They were Arab sources. I quoted all-Arab publications.

    Mr. Peter Hansen: If we could get the names of these--

    Hon. Art Eggleton: In fact, several of them talked about the Hamas organization.

    Mr. Maher Nasser (Chief, Liaison Office (New York), United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East(UNRWA)): Actually, the IPCRI report is available on the website of the American consulate in Jerusalem, because they are the ones who funded it.

    The article you referred to that made reference to UNRWA schools being greenhouses for terrorism is from a newspaper called Al Bayan, a United Arab Emirates newspaper. I have read the entire article. The entire article is about five pages long, and it's mainly an attack on UNRWA because of the statement that was issued by Mr. Hansen in June reminding staff that they needed to be neutral, reminding them of their obligations as United Nations staff. Now, that statement was made in the context of accusations being made about UNRWA schools being greenhouses for terrorism, so the entire article was turned over on its head and something was taken out of context. I know the source of that, and that's where the other quotations and sources come from. I have the entire article available in Arabic, and if you translate the entire article, you'll find that it actually defeats the argument that part of it was used for.

    The Chair: Thank you very much.

    Thank you very much, Mr. Hansen and Mr. Nasser, for appearing before our committee. We wish you a nice evening also.

    I just want to remind our committee that we're meeting tomorrow morning at 9 o'clock with Mr. Sampson. From 10 o'clock till 10:30 we have three motions, and at 11 o'clock we're meeting with Mr. Feldman.

    Thank you very much.

    The meeting stands adjourned.