The Campaign to Abolish UNRWA (jewishcurrents.org)
The recent defunding of the aid agency is part of a longstanding effort to extinguish Palestinian refugees’ dreams of return. THE UNITED NATIONS RELIEF AND WORKS AGENCY (UNRWA), which has provided education, health care, and other essential services to Palestinian refugees since 1949, could soon disappear. In recent weeks, the United States and at least 18 other countries have suspended aid to the agency, which operates in the Gaza Strip as well as the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, serving more than five million people. The House and Senate are both considering legislation to prevent the US—which is UNRWA’s largest donor—from ever resuming that funding. UNRWA officials have said that if funding is not restored, the organization will likely halt operations as early as the end of this month. The current effort to abolish UNRWA dates from late January, when Israel alleged that 12 of the agency’s staff members took part in the October 7th massacre, and that roughly 1200 employees—10% of UNRWA’s workforce in Gaza—have ties to Hamas or other militant groups. But Israel and its supporters in the US have been seeking to undermine the agency for at least a decade. In 2018, when leaked emails revealed that then-President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor Jared Kushner was attempting to “disrupt UNRWA” because the agency “perpetuates a status quo” and “is corrupt, inefficient and doesn’t help peace,” a number of mainstream Jewish groups praised Kushner’s efforts. The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations declared that UNRWA “is not the answer” to Palestinians’ humanitarian needs. (The Trump administration later cut off US aid to UNRWA; Joe Biden restored the funding soon after entering office.) In 2021, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, urged that “this UN agency for so-called ‘refugees’ should not exist in its current format.” This longstanding campaign against UNRWA reflects a deeper pattern in Israeli political discourse: an inclination to frame Palestinians not as a people with their own political opinions and aspirations, but as marionettes operated by someone else. For more than 40 years, no one has exemplified this tendency better than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Even before he sought elected office, in a 1982 interview with the Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson, he referred to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as the “chief proxy” of the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union fell but the PLO did not, Netanyahu pivoted to calling the PLO a tool of hostile Arab regimes, describing it in his 2000 book, A Durable Peace, as a “Pan-Arab Trojan horse.” Extending that logic in 2018, he argued that peace with Arab governments would render the Palestinian problem trivial. “Normalize relations with the 99 percent” of the Arabs, he explained, “and you’ll eventually get peace with the one percent.” Today, Netanyahu regularly calls Hamas an “Iranian proxy,” even though Hamas defied Tehran by supporting the rebellion against Syrian dictator Bashar Assad. In his 2018 biography of the prime minister, Haaretz columnist Anshel Pfeffer writes that “Netanyahu has always maintained that the Palestinian issue is a diversion, not a central problem in the region.” UNRWA is yet another bogeyman that allows Netanyahu and his supporters to imagine that Israel’s problems with the Palestinians primarily stem not from Palestinians’ own responses to Israeli oppression, but from some outside force. Israeli leaders and their allies abroad level two main charges against UNRWA. The first is that it foments violent resistance among Palestinians; the second is that it encourages their dreams of return to their native lands. In both cases, Netanyahu and his ilk get the causality backwards, blaming UNRWA for aspects of Palestinian politics that stem from the Palestinians’ fundamental status as refugees—the very dispossession that UNRWA exists to address. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#28940): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/28940 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/104406259/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
