IN RECENT WEEKS THE WEEKLY STANDARD has published a number of articles concerning the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). These have contained a large number of serious inaccuracies and misinterpretations. Among these articles were David Tell’s The U.N.’s Israel Problem (May 6) and Charles Krauthammer’s Kofi’s Choice and Dov B. Fischer’s The Overseers of Jenin (May 13). Please allow me to set the record straight.

1. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) was set up in 1949 to provide humanitarian services to Palestinian refugees who had lost their homes during the war of 1948, pending a political solution to their problem. (Unlike the Jews who fled from Arab countries in the same period–and the Muslims who fled India in 1947–the Palestinian refugees had no state of their own to go to.) This role is quite different from the mandate of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, which is mainly to ensure that states fulfill their obligations to protect refugees and asylum-seekers under the 1951 Refugee Convention.