James G. Lindsay

James G. Lindsay is an American attorney specializing in security and international relations. For twenty years he worked in the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, with assignments in the Internal Security, Appellate and Asset Forfeiture Sections. Between 1985 and 1994, he was seconded to the Multinational Force and Observers in Sinai, as the force counsel for legal and treaty affairs. In 2000, he retired from the Justice Department to join the UN Relief and Works Agency in Gaza. He was the legal advisor and general counsel for the UNRWA from 2002 to 2007. He oversaw all legal activities, from aid contracts to relations with Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinian Authority.
Lindsay is currently an Aufzien fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, focusing on Palestinian refugee issues and UN humanitarian assistance.
In the report, Lindsay refers to Peter Hanson, former Commissioner-General to the UNRWA, who in 2004 said, "I am sure there are Hamas members on the UNRWA payroll and I don't see that as a crime. Hamas as a political organization does not mean that every member is a militant and we do not do political vetting and exclude people from one persuasion as against another."
According to the Jerusalem Post, Lindsay appears concerned about the lack of accountability within the organization. Quoting the report, he claims, "Over the course of its long history, UNRWA has rarely been the subject of comprehensive external evaluation, and virtually nothing has been written on the organization's strategy and operations by a senior staff member with knowledge of how UNRWA actually works." Lindsay further comments on the Hamas involvement within the organization, "UNRWA has taken very few steps to detect and eliminate terrorists from the ranks of its staff or its beneficiaries, and no steps at all to prevent members of terrorist organizations such as Hamas from joining its staff.", said "The report makes selective use of source material and fails to paint a truthful portrait of UNRWA and its operations today and does not detail the organizations three year process of reform. For all these reasons, UNRWA rejects the article and its findings and is preparing a detailed response to it."
In an rejoinder approved by the United Nations, Dr. Maya Rosenfeld, a research fellow of Harry S. Truman Research Institute at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, criticizes the report: "We argue that Lindsay's recommendations stem from the prejudiced political stand of the author with respect to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Palestinian refugee problem rather than from a research-based evaluation of UNRWA's performance in the past and present." She adds, "The attack against UNRWA appears to be led and conducted by ultra-right wing oriented research centers and media agencies in Israel and by their counterpart pro-Israel foundations and lobby organizations in the US, and is addressed primarily to the US administration."

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