The mask is finally off. The UN and its benefactors can stop deceiving the world that UNRWA (UN Relief and Works Agency) is a humanitarian organization. The Palestinian Authority (PA) itself, UNRWA’s most ardent and interested advocate, has inadvertently admitted the essential role played by UNRWA in the Middle East is political and not humanitarian.
UNRWA’s mission came into the spotlight after the Knesset passed a law that goes into effect on January 30, banning UNRWA from operating within sovereign Israel. In response, the UN, NGOs, and numerous donor countries quickly joined the PA in condemning Israel’s law.
They all complained that UNRWA could no longer fulfill its role. However, there is a complete misunderstanding among UNRWA’s benefactors about what UNRWA’s role really is.
The UN asserted that UNRWA “has provided essential humanitarian services to Palestine refugees.” Human Rights Watch, along with 52 NGOs, concurred that Israel’s move “threatens… the international humanitarian operation in Gaza.” Foreign ministers of donor countries, including Canada, Australia, France, Germany, and the UK, expressed “grave concern” because “UNRWA provides essential and life-saving humanitarian aid.”
In each response, the mantra is that UNRWA’s role is humanitarian. Comparing these reactions to those of the PA underscores the vast divide between what much of the world thinks UNRWA is and what its champion – the PA – knows UNRWA is.
Nabil Abu Rudeina, spokesperson for PA head Mahmoud Abbas, sounded the PA’s position: “The newly passed [Israeli] law aims to liquidate the issue of refugees and their right to return and compensation.” Abbas’s office then added: “The presidency decided to act urgently… since the topic of UNRWA is a political topic that is related to the right of return.”
Ahmad Abu Houli, chairman of the PLO Department of Refugee Affairs, concurred that “this [Israeli law] is part of its efforts to eliminate the Palestinian refugees’ cause and their well-rooted right of return, negate their status as refugees, and unilaterally change the criteria for a future political solution.”
The PLO Department for Expatriate Affairs added that Israel’s plan was “to eliminate the refugees’ cause and erase the right of return” [The PA’s responses are all published by WAFA, the official PA news agency].
A giant abyss
THERE IS a giant abyss between the world’s “humanitarian” UNRWA and the PA’s political “right of return” UNRWA. The first commandment of Palestinian national identity is that the few thousands of Arabs who fled Israel during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence and are still alive, together with the 5.9 million residents of UNRWA camps, have a “right of return” to “Interior Palestine” – the PA’s term for the State of Israel.
Even though 99% of them are living in the countries where they were born and raised, UNRWA keeps them registered as “refugees” – stigmatized forever as foreigners in the only country they have ever known.
Israel agrees with the PA’s statements that UNRWA’s unique role was never humanitarian. Indeed, UNRWA’s humanitarian role could easily be filled by others, as in the Israel-Gaza War, wherein only 13% of the aid has been distributed through UNRWA, while 87% has been through other organizations.
The UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which provides “life-saving assistance, including shelter, food, water, and medical care” in 136 countries, would be the organization caring for the refugees from Israel’s War of Independence, if their needs were only humanitarian.
However, as the PA has made clear, UNRWA’s distinctive role is political – to perpetuate “the right of return” by branding all newborns as “refugees,” thus denying their right to citizenship and equality in their countries of birth. Precisely because Israel and the PA agree about UNRWA’s political purpose, Israel is closing UNRWA down, while the PA wants UNRWA to stay open.
Many insist UNRWA should be closed because of its involvement in Hamas terror, but this is missing the main point. Even if UNRWA would completely distance itself from terrorists and terror, and even if UNRWA education stopped promoting hatred, the organization that turned 750,000 refugees in 1949 into 5.9 million “refugees” today is a human rights abuser with no right to exist.
The international community and the UN must now take the PA’s definition of political UNRWA at face value and let Israel’s shuttering of UNRWA signal the start of a process of its phasing-out. While this will take years, the world must recognize that it must start the process.
Maintaining and funding political UNRWA until it inevitably reaches 10 million dependents in the coming years is not sustainable for the donor countries, and is unethical treatment of the residents who deserve freedom.
Israeli citizenship is also not an option. Observing Europe’s immigration crises with a relatively small percentage of Arab and Muslim immigrants must erase any illusion that Israel, with a population of 10 million, will absorb 5.9 million Arabs or even half a million.
PA Prime Minister Mohammad Mustafa recently admitted that the PA’s concern is not to stop the refugees’ suffering by solving the refugees’ predicament but rather their goal is to perpetuate it.
“The refugee camps are a symbol of our glory,” he said, according to the official PA daily, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida [December 15, 2024]. “They are a national symbol that we must preserve.” Forcing people to be “preserved” as refugees because of a political agenda is a fundamental abuse of human rights.
Democratic countries, together with humanitarian organizations, must confront UNRWA with the PA’s own words and end the charade of a “humanitarian” UNRWA, and stop the violation of human rights.
Donor countries must then start the complicated but unavoidable process of transferring responsibility for the 5.9 million people from political UNRWA, which preserves refugees, to UNHCR, which resettles refugees. The PA’s political and unachievable so-called “right of return” would then be replaced by the humanitarian and achievable right to freedom and equality.
The writer is the director of Palestinian Media Watch.