The Free Press
In May 2024, I wrote a column praising universities—specifically Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri—for prohibiting students and faculty from intimidating Jewish students and chanting antisemitic epithets on campus.
It was not a controversial column. Except at the pro-United Nations organization I volunteered for.
For the last 10 years, I’ve been on the board of an organization called USA for UNHCR, which has raised hundreds of millions of dollars for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, otherwise known as UNHCR, created in the aftermath of the Second World War to help resettle the tens of millions of refugees uprooted by war.
Shortly after my column was published, I was sent an email by leaders of the organization questioning my “suitability” as a board member. They told me my views were at odds with their standings “as a humanitarian and peace-keeping organization.”
I was stunned. USA for UNHCR has been the major cause of my adult life. My father, Mark Vittert, helped create the organization after his own stint as a UN volunteer. I believed in its mission. My opinion piece was strictly limited to the bravery it took for schools to stand up to the antisemitic intimidation of their students. Yet it turned out to be at odds with their values as a “humanitarian and peace-keeping organization.”
It was heartbreaking for me. But the truth is the culture of USA for UNHCR had changed so completely during my tenure that they were trying to silence me.
The accusation that I was somehow unsuitable to retain my seat on the board seemingly came out of nowhere, and the arguments I made in the op-ed were an extension of the values that had motivated my father to help create the organization in the first place.
Now, as of April 1, 2025, I’ve resigned from the board. But let me tell my story from the beginning.
Since my father co-founded it in 1989, I have believed in USA for UNHCR and its mission: helping those forced to flee their own country due to war, violence, and persecution. It’s a mission that’s always been important to my family: My father’s mother was a refugee, having escaped the pogroms in Ukraine in 1909 before making the journey to the United States and settling in St. Louis.
When I joined in 2015, the organization had four board members and less than $22 million in revenue. By 2022, when I was one of the five members of the executive committee and heavily involved in fundraising, the organization had increased its donations tenfold to $234 million and 17 board members.
I served on the board as a volunteer for my entire tenure. During that time, I held academic positions at schools like Harvard, Washington University in St. Louis, and my own alma mater, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
So I never had a salary at USA for UNHCR—on the contrary, I donated tens of thousands of dollars to support its work and never took a penny for any travel-related expenses or anything like that. My family donated a good deal of money to the organization, too.
The funds went to the aid, protection, and health of refugees worldwide. In addition to raising money for UNHCR, I led trips for donors to see firsthand the refugee camps they were paying for.
Then, in the wake of the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, everything changed. Despite the fact that many wonderful people have worked and continue to work at USA for UNHCR, the demonization of Israel that has long corrupted the UN itself erupted in my own organization. Such bias had already contaminated UNHCR’s “Commission of Inquiry,” established in 2021 to investigate Israel’s response to over 4,000 rockets fired out of Gaza at Israeli population centers.
I apologize for all the acronyms I’m about to throw at you, but it’s important to understand that UNHCR deals with refugees from all over the world—except Palestinian refugees. They have their own UN support organization, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).
According to UNRWA, Palestinian refugees are not merely those personally displaced in 1948 and 1949. Instead, it treats refugee status as a hereditary condition that includes all of the descendants of those originally displaced now living in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria, or Lebanon. This rubric is used for no other group of displaced people, including the 800,000 Jews expelled from Arab nations after the creation of Israel in 1948, most of whom were absorbed by the Jewish state.
UNRWA has also adopted “return,” rather than resettlement, as its mandate, another reversal of the rubric used by UNHCR for all other refugees, effectively transforming a bureaucratic agency into an instrument for undermining the legitimacy of Israel.
According to Israeli intelligence, UNRWA was heavily infiltrated by Hamas. In the lead-up to October 7, some 1,200 UNRWA employees—or about 10 percent of the organization—had links to Islamist groups. One of them even allegedly led an assault that killed 16 Israelis in a bomb shelter and captured four more, who were taken as hostages back to Gaza.
Some of the 250 hostages taken by Hamas on October 7 were held in UNRWA offices, which also provided exit and entry points for Hamas’s tunnel network. Its sophisticated data center ran on electricity provided by UNRWA. And because UNRWA was then a major recipient of U.S. foreign aid, to the tune of $422 million in 2023, American taxpayers were contributing to the salaries of Hamas terrorists.
The United Nations did not admit to any of this, saying after an internal investigation only that nine UNRWA staffers “may have been involved” in October 7 and so would be fired “in the interests of the agency.”
You would think that a scandal of this magnitude—employees of a UN agency taking part in the most horrific terrorist attack since 9/11, helped along with money from gullible Western governments—would be such a major scandal that the United Nations would be forced to reform itself. Instead, it did the opposite.
My organization, USA for UNHCR, seems to have done nothing to distance itself from UNRWA and the rest of the United Nations. It was also quick to denounce Israel’s military response to the Hamas attack and to call for a ceasefire in the opening weeks of the war.
On November 1, 2023, USA for UNHCR retweeted a statement by the leader of UNHCR, Filippo Grandi, a former head of UNRWA, calling for a “humanitarian ceasefire” and the “end of the “Israeli occupation.” Grandi’s statement made absolutely no mention of the return of the hostages.
This was followed five days later by a tweet criticizing the Israeli war effort, then in its opening stages: “It’s been 30 days. Enough is enough. This must stop now.”
At least this tweet included a line calling for “the immediate and unconditional release of all civilians held hostage." But this came after nearly a month of deafening silence from USA for UNHCR on the rape, murder, and torture of Israelis by Hamas.
The CEO of USA for UNHCR, instead of unambiguously denouncing October 7, released a statement shortly after that tweet (and a contentious board meeting on the matter) effectively saying UNRWA was our sister organization—a phrase our organization’s leaders began repeatedly in meetings. Other leaders in the organization referred to our “UNRWA brothers and sisters.”
At this point, I began pulling away from USA for UNHCR—reducing my fundraising efforts and attending fewer events, though I still believed in the mission and naively hoped that people would come around.
Perhaps more than anything, I wanted to honor my father’s legacy, and the organization born out of his generous spirit, even as I felt his vision was being betrayed before my eyes.
Yet I remained on the board, in part because my father urged me to stay. The organization had done so much good work in my 10 years there, it was hard to believe it would be forfeited for the sake of protecting UNRWA and its support for Hamas.
I still ask myself why I stuck around. But when an institution changes around you, it can be hard to abandon the hope that it might yet return to the virtues that animated its early life.
This past November, a UN statement signed by the leadership of UNHCR stated that Israel’s “blatant disregard for basic humanity and for the laws of war must stop.” The statement reduced the Israeli hostages to a footnote, while never mentioning the participation of UNRWA employees in the October 7 attacks.
On the contrary, the statement was unapologetic: “Let us be very clear: There is no alternative to UNRWA.”
At some point, you just have to give up. I could no longer ask other major donors to match my commitment when I truly didn’t know where the funds were going or for what cause. Even my father had given up at that point and agreed it was time for me to leave.
UNHCR and UNRWA aren’t the only UN organizations that are guilty of antisemitism. It’s a disease that affects everything the United Nations touches now. For example, UN Special Rapporteur Francesa Albanese, an “independent” human rights expert appointed by the UN Human Rights Council, has frequently made antisemitic and incendiary statements, including that America is “subjugated by the Jewish lobby” (a statement she has since said she regrets) and that Hamas has the “right to resist this occupation.”
These are among hundreds of examples of the toxic biases and hatreds that have been allowed to flourish at the United Nations. USA for UNHCR has implicitly chosen to endorse some of these attitudes while abandoning even a pretense of humanitarian neutrality, politicizing itself and jeopardizing its ability to help millions of refugees fighting for their lives.
I still hope USA for UNHCR changes course and reorients itself to what should be its central mission: aiding refugees and the selfless people who work on the front lines, and protecting the most vulnerable populations throughout the world.
But until the antisemitic, anti-American, and frankly antihuman values that have contaminated the United Nations are rooted out, I cannot support the UN and its relief agencies, and the United States shouldn’t either.
Dr. Liberty Vittert Capito is a professor of data science and statistics.