The recent intention expressed by the United States and many of it’s allies, including Canada, to suspend funding for the United Nations’ Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) may lead to increased suffering and death of Palestinians. A review of the history of the relationships involving Israel, the Palestinians, and Hamas may help our understanding of some of the backstory to this crisis.
Palestinian refugees queue for food distributed by the UN Relief and Work Agency for Palestinian refugees at a camp in Gaza, 9 November 1956 (Rene Jarland/AFP)
Jonathan Cook, an award-winning British journalist based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years, is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Cook reports in his blog that leading western states, the UK among them, have decided to freeze funding to the United Nations’ Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the main channel by which the UN disseminates food and welfare services to the most desperate and destitute Palestinians. The funding cut – which has been also adopted by Germany, France, Japan, Switzerland, Canada, Netherlands, Italy, Australia and Finland – was imposed even though the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled on Friday that Israel may be committing genocide in Gaza.
The UN immediately sacked all the accused staff, seemingly without due process. We can assume that was because the refugee agency was afraid its already threadbare lifeline to the people of Gaza, as well as millions of other Palestinian refugees across the region – in the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria – would be further threatened. It need not have worried. Western donor states cut their funding anyway, plunging Gaza deeper into calamity.
They did so without regard to the fact their decision amounts to collective punishment: some 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza face starvation and the spread of lethal disease, while another 4 million Palestinian refugees across the region are at imminent risk of losing food, health care and schooling. (Cook, 2024)
Ironically, Cook presents history that points to the UNRWA being Israel’s creature: it was set up to keep the Palestinians a case apart, an anomaly.
UNRWA is separate from the UN’s main refugee agency, the UNHCR, and deals only with Palestinian refugees. Although Israel does not want you to know it, the reason for there being two UN refugee agencies is because Israel and its western backers insisted on the division back in 1948. Why? Because Israel was afraid of the Palestinians falling under the responsibility of the UNHCR’s forerunner, the International Refugee Organisation. The IRO was established in the immediate wake of the Second World War in large part to cope with the millions of European Jews fleeing Nazi atrocities.
Israel did not want the two cases treated as comparable, because it was pushing hard for Jewish refugees to be settled on lands from which it had just expelled Palestinians. Part of the IRO’s mission was to seek the repatriation of European Jews. Israel was worried that very principle might be used both to deny it the Jews it wanted to colonise Palestinian land and to force it to allow the Palestinian refugees to return to their former homes. So in a real sense, UNRWA is Israel’s creature: it was set up to keep the Palestinians a case apart, an anomaly. (Cook, 2024)
Cook makes the case that Israel’s efforts to get rid of UNRWA are not new.
They date back many years. For a number of reasons, the UN refugee agency is a thorn in Israel’s side – and all the more so in Gaza. Not least, it has provided a lifeline to Palestinians there, keeping them fed and cared for, and providing jobs to many thousands of local people in a place where unemployment rates are among the highest in the world. It has invested in infrastructure like hospitals and schools that make life in Gaza more bearable, when Israel’s goal has long been to make the enclave uninhabitable. UNRWA’s well-run schools, staffed by local Palestinians, teach the children their own history, about where their grandparents once lived, and of Israel’s campaign of dispossession and ethnic cleansing against them. That runs directly counter to the infamous Zionist slogan about the Palestinians’ identity-less future: “The old will die and the young forget.” (Cook, 2024)
As a number of Israel's allies cut funding to the refugee body, Alex MacDonald reporting for the Middle East Eye (MEE) looks at its turbulent history with the international community.
In 2018, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called for responsibility for Palestinian refugees to fall under the UNHCR, claiming that Unrwa "perpetuates the Palestinian refugee problem" by giving refugee status to Palestinians with citizenship of other countries.
The move would see millions of the roughly 5.7 million Palestinians stripped of their refugee status, undermining the right of return - enshrined by United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194 - by Palestinian refugees and their descendants to the homes they were expelled from in 1948.
Despite the allegations of ties to Hamas in Gaza, the relationship between Unrwa and the Palestinian group has often been strained - although officials have repeatedly stressed that coordination between the two is necessary by virtue of practicality, Hamas has at times intervened in the education curriculum and shut down activities it sees as conflicting with its conservative agenda.
There have also been repeated accusations that Hamas requisitioned vehicles and facilities from UNRWA for its own purposes. (MacDonald, 2024)
The history of tension between UNRWA and Israel and the strained relations between UNRWA and Hamas indicates that rushing to suspend the work of this agency will inflict collective punishment on Palestinian non-combatants who are in emergency need of food and medical supplies.
References
Cook, J. (2024, January 30). In waging war on the UN refugee agency, the West is openly siding with Israeli genocide. Jonathan Cook. Retrieved February 2, 2024, from https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2024-01-30/war-un-refugee-israel-genocide/
MacDonald, A. (2024, January 29). Israel, Unrwa and the West: A history of claims and cuts. Middle East Eye. Retrieved February 2, 2024, from https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/unrwa-budget-cuts-history-israel-west
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