Dan Steinbock
New York
(Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Early in the year, State Department
officials briefed Joel Rayburn from the Trump transition team there could be a
humanitarian “catastrophe” in Gaza when a new Israeli law barring contact with
the UN refugee agency for Palestinians takes effect at the end of the month.
The UN Relief
and Works Agency (UNRWA) is the primary aid agency operating in the Gaza Strip.
After more than a year of war, the UN and other aid organizations warn Gaza is
close to uninhabitable. Tens of thousands of houses have been destroyed. More
than 46,000 Palestinians have been killed and over 107,000 injured. In the
future, these numbers are likely to prove three to four times higher. And still
worse could be ahead.
During President
Trump’s first term, his administration gradually cut all U.S. assistance to
UNRWA. The Biden administration later resumed U.S. aid to the agency. Last
March, Congress passed a law that bans the U.S. from funding UNRWA until at
least 2025.
Why should the
horrific policy errors of the past be compounded with monstrous new policy
mistakes?
The origins
The fate of
UNRWA is one of the many dilemmas I scrutinized while working on The Fall of
Israel (2025). After achieving an initial truce in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War,
Count Folke Bernadotte, a Swedish diplomat, used it to lay the groundwork for
the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.
Bernadotte tried
to balance the different interests of the Israelis and Palestinians, the major
powers in the region and the UN Partition Plan. Having witnessed the horrible
outcome of the Jewish Holocaust in Europe and hoping to avert a catastrophe in
Palestine, he also proposed that the UN should establish a Palestine
conciliation commission and Arab refugees would have a full right to return to
their homes in Jewish-controlled territory.
Just hours after
his proposal, Bernadotte was assassinated in Jerusalem by the Jewish
paramilitary Stern group, while pursuing his official duties. One of those who
planned the killing was Yitzhak Shamir, the future prime minister of Israel,
and the predecessor and onetime mentor of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s current
PM.
Ever since then,
UNRWA has been a lifeline to generations of Palestinians in the West Bank, the
Gaza Strip and the adjacent Arab countries. Created as a purely temporary
measure, UNRWA’s mandate has been subject to renewal every three years ever
since.
Historically,
the United States has been UNRWA’s largest financial contributor, with more
than $7.3 billion since 1950. From the start, these contributions have been
subject to a variety of legislative conditions and oversight measures, however.
Funding
threats
Decades of U.S.
policy toward Israel and the occupied territories, however ambiguous, was
reversed almost overnight, when the Trump administration executed a series of
dramatic policy changes in 2018 and canceled nearly all U.S. aid to the West
Bank and Gaza, plus $360 million in annual aid previously given to the UNRWA.
Subsequently, the Biden administration restored much of the funding, yet
provided Israel weapons and financing for the mass atrocities of those the
UNRWA funding was supposed to help.
After
allegations surfaced connecting a few of the 30,000 UNRWA employees with the
October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks against Israel, the Agency fired nine staff
members following a UN investigation. While it denied allegations that the
agency has widespread links to Hamas, Congress enacted a March 2024 prohibition
on U.S. funding to UNRWA (P.L. 118-47), which is set to last until late March,
2025.
To put things
into context: The Empire State Building is said to have 21,000 employees.
Imagine what would happen if six of them would be suspected of terrorism and
therefore the entire building would have to be dismantled and all employees
fired? It would be an absurd collective punishment for the alleged crimes of a
few.
Worse, the
Israeli laws passed on October 28, 2024 and scheduled to take effect 90 days
later, would endanger the lives of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in
Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem.
Millions of
lives threatened
The new U.S. and
Israeli legal measures emboldened Jewish settlers, particularly the Messianic
far-right. In May 2024 they launched several attacks on the UNRWA headquarters,
setting fire to the perimeter of the building in East Jerusalem. The attacks against
UNRWA came after months of far-right settler protests outside of the building,
following Israeli claims of UNRWA-Hamas links; accusations that lacked
verification, according to U.S. intelligence.
Among the
protesters was Aryeh King, a deputy mayor of Jerusalem and a prominent advocate
for settlements, who called Palestinian Gazans “Muslim Nazis,” described them
as “sub-human” calling for captured Palestinians to be “buried alive” in
December 2023.
By the year-end
of 2024, some 265 UNRWA staff had been killed in hostilities since October 7,
2023. Despite a record-high number that suggests intentional targeting, those
behind the Israeli strikes have not been prosecuted.
More than 5.9
million Palestinians, including three of four in Gaza, are registered with
UNRWA as refugees.
The stakes
In Gaza, nearly
two million Palestinians are displaced and dependent on aid for food, water and
medical services. U.S. officials say there’s no serious backup plan for
providing humanitarian supplies and services to Palestinians. With the new
U.S.-Israeli laws, senior UNRWA emergency officers presage social order in the
Strip could collapse.
Here are some
ways to preempt such disasters:
- The White House should pressure Israel to suspend and nullify the impending adverse acts against UNRWA
- S. Congress should lift current prohibition on UNRWA funding through March 2025
- UNRWA’s funding should be broadened by the U.S. and internationally in light of the devastation and genocidal atrocities caused in Gaza
- The Agency’s existence should be premised on the implementation of all relevant and existing UN resolutions both the U.S. and the international community have voted for.
How probable are
such measures in the conceivable future? Highly unlikely.
What’s the
alternative? Far worse, far worse.
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