Why De-Funding UNRWA is Another Crime of Genocide
The UN agency is a vital lifeline for Palestinian refugees across the region, not just Gaza. Removing that lifeline constitutes genocide under the Convention.
The collective Western allies of Israel are doing the Zionists’ bidding in helping to destroy a United Nations agency that is vital for the continuation of Palestinian life, culture and identity, thereby deepening their complicity in the deliberate genocide that Israel is perpetrating on the Palestinian people.
Indeed, Israel have long seen the United Nations agency as a major roadblock to the fulfilment of its Zionist dream to “eliminate” the Palestinian population in order to fully establish Eretz-Israel (“Greater Israel”) on the Levant, turning the entire land “from the river to the sea” into an ethnically “pure” Jewish homeland.
The West, by defunding and this destroying the United Nations presence in the occupied territories, is helping Israel to realise its Zionist dream.
What is UNRWA?
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNRWA), was established by United Nations General Assembly Resolution 302 (IV) of 8 December 1949 to carry out direct relief and works programmes for Palestine refugees.
UNRWA (pronounced “un-ra”) was created in order to continue emergency relief that had, up until December 1949, been provided by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the League of Red Cross Societies, and the American Friends Service Committee.
UNRWA has contributed to the welfare and human development of four generations of Palestine refugees, defined as “persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 War.” The descendants of Palestine refugee males, including legally adopted children, are also eligible for registration.
The Agency began operations on 1 May 1950.
The legacy of Count Bernadotte
The creation of UNRWA followed the assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte by Jewish terrorists in September 1948. Bernadotte was the UN mediator who was tasked with resolving what had become known as “the Palestine problem”.
The UN Security Council appointed Bernadotte to be the United Nations mediator in Palestine in May, 1948. His mandate was to “negotiate an end to the violence between Jews and Arabs following the war that broke out right after Israel declared independence”.
The Swedish Count and his convoy was attacked brutally and brazenly by the Zionist paramilitary groups Lehi, or Stern Gang, on September 17, 1948. Yitzhak Shamir allegedly planned the assassination, but he was never brought to trial, and instead later became Israel’s eighth Prime Minister.
Bernadotte was steadfast in his recognition of the newly declared State of Israel, but he was equally determined that Palestinian Arabs be accommodated fairly. In his last report to the UN, Bernadotte specifically articulated what was later enshrined in UN Resolution 194 as the “right of return” to which Palestinians are entitled:
“It is … undeniable that no settlement can be just and complete if recognition is not accorded to the right of the Arab refugee to return to the home from which he has been dislodged by the hazards and strategy of the armed conflict between Arabs and Jews in Palestine. The majority of these refugees have come from territory which … was to be included in the Jewish State. The exodus of Palestinian Arabs resulted from panic created by fighting in their communities, by rumours concerning real or alleged acts of terrorism, or expulsion.
Bernadotte also affirmed the preceding existence of the Arab Palestinian population:
It would be an offence against the principles of elemental justice if these innocent victims of the conflict were denied the right to return to their homes, while Jewish immigrants flow into Palestine, and, indeed, at least offer the threat of permanent replacement of the Arab refugees, who have been rooted in the land for centuries.”
It was Bernadotte’s very vocal support for an Arab right of return that caused the Stern Gang to murder him.
Palestinians’ “right of return” is official UN policy
The UN resolution 302 that created UNRWA was specifically based on the earlier UN Resolution 194, Article 11, which stipulates:
Refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.
UNRWA , UNCCP and “the refugee regime”
A year prior to the creation of UNRWA, the UN made a first attempt to deal with the Palestinian refugee problem. The aforementioned UN Resolution 194, which stipulated the Palestinians’ right of return, also created the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine (UNCCP), mandated to help achieve a final settlement between the warring parties, including facilitating “the repatriation, resettlement and economic and social rehabilitation of the refugees”. The Commission was composed of representatives from France, Turkey and the United States.
According to the Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question, the General Assembly gave the UNCCP three specific directives, one of which was:
3. Refugees wishing to return to their homes should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and the responsible governments or authorities should compensate the refugees for the loss of or damage to their properties as a result of the war. The assembly instructed the commission to facilitate the repatriation, resettlement, economic and social rehabilitation, and payment of compensation to the refugees.
According to the United Nations plan, the “Palestine problem” needed to be resolved in a way that treated the Palestinian refugees fairly, and that included a cooperation between UNRWA and the UNCCP, such that UNRWA would ensure the survival of the Palestinians while the UNCCP negotiated the final settlement between the Israelis, the Palestinians and the surrounding Arab countries.
The Interactive Encyclopedia explains:
Together, the UNCCP and UNRWA comprised what is sometimes referred to as the Palestinian refugee regime, notwithstanding the UNCCP’s considerably broader mandate for a peaceful settlement of the conflict as a whole. The two bodies shared responsibility roughly along diplomatic and technical lines. Accordingly, the UNCCP was responsible for assisting the parties in reaching agreements on repatriation, resettlement, economic and social rehabilitation, and the payment of compensation to the refugees. UNRWA was to play a role in the implementation of the agreements.
At a conference of Arab and Israeli delegates in Paris in late 1951, the commission tried but failed to achieve agreement on specific proposals for a peace settlement. After the breakdown of the conference, the commission, convinced that the parties were not yet prepared to make peace, confined its efforts to dealing with the Palestinian refugee problem.
Despite the lack of progress, the commission still exists and the General Assembly still continues to pass annual resolutions calling on it to continue its efforts to carry out its original mandate.
UNRWA is a unique agency with one mission
UNRWA’s mandate to serve only one group of refugees (Palestinians) is unique among UN agencies.
This sets it apart from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was founded in 1951 (a year after UNRWA started its operations) to assist Europeans displaced in World War II but now aids refugees anywhere in the world, with the exception of Palestinians in UNRWA’s geographic coverage area.
The main difference between these refugee groups is that UNRWA is specifically designed to accommodate a single, multi-generational refugee population, with an emphasis on a “right of return” and “resettlement” within a future Palestinian State as a result of an (expected) eventual settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict through other UN entities such as UNCCP.
Accordingly, UNRWA defines its refugee population as “persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 War.” The descendants of Palestine refugee males, including legally adopted children, are also eligible for registration.
UNRWA versus UNHCR
In addition to its “single mission mandate”, UNRWA differs from UNHCR in other important ways. For example, UNHCR generally does not extend its services to people who have acquired valid citizenship in a third country, but UNRWA does. For example, under UNRWA rules, the Palestinians who are living in Jordan and have been granted Jordanian citizenship are still eligible for the services of UNRWA.
UNRWA services are available to all those living in its areas of operations who meet this definition, who are registered with the Agency and who need assistance. When the Agency began operations in 1950, it was responding to the needs of about 750,000 Palestine refugees. Today, some 5.9 million Palestine refugees are eligible for UNRWA services.
This exponential growth is do to the fact that UNRWA, unlike UNHCR, automatically applies the status of refugee to all the patrilineal descendants of the 1948 refugees, regardless of their status and country of residence.
UNRWA’s defining mission is to ensure the survival of the Palestinian people AS A PEOPLE, distinct from other Arab and Jewish cultures and worthy of rescue and survival.
UNRWA is a response to ethnic cleansing
We must remember that UNRWA was originally formed as a result of the Nakba, the massive and violent ethnic cleansing campaign carried out by the Zionist Israelis against the indigenous population.
This also sets UNRWA apart from UNHCR, which handles the resettlement of people made refugees due to armed conflict. The Palestinians were not displaced by “war”, but rather by a deliberate attempt by another group to erase not just their lives, but their culture and their collective memory.
UNRWA was designed to thwart those efforts, which is why Israel hates UNRWA so passionately (more on that later).
A focus on Education and Health Care
A large [art of ensuring the cultural survival of the Palestinians is EDUCATION. You may have noticed that “UN schools” are often cited on the news as places where Palestinians congregate and seek shelter from the current bombing campaign.
That is because, prior to October 7, 2023, UNRWA operated a total of 700 schools in the Gaza Strip.
Indeed, UNRWA spends over half its budget on Education, whereas UNHCR spends less than 6% of its budget on Education.
This extensive and well-funded focus on ongoing cultural and educational initiatives also makes UNRWA unique.
Another area where UNRWA is different from UNHCR is in Health Care. UNRWA operated over 140 health care facilities in the Gaza Strip alone prior to the current conflict.
By contrast, UNHCR does not operate its own network of health care facilities, but rather “advocates for refugee inclusion in national health systems”.
In short, the unique nature of the founding of Israel and its continued existence prompted an equally unique solution to the people displaced by the establishment of the Jewish State.
The “Nakba” and the origin of the Palestine refugees
The need for a United Nations response was created by the violent expulsion of the indigenous Palestinian population by the Zionist militias and paramilitary forces in 1948. The Zionists called this brutal action their “War of Independence”. The Palestinians called it the Nakba”, or “catastrophe”:
An estimated 750,000 Palestinians were either driven from their homes or fled during the Nakba. This figure represents approximately 75% of indigenous Palestinians who had previously resided within what became Israel’s armistice lines in 1949. Israel disallowed virtually all Palestinians from returning afterward. It also demolished between 400 and 500 Palestinian cities, towns, and villages during the Nakba in attempt to efface the Palestinian presence from the land.
A catastrophe long in the making
The Middle East Institute reports:
In 1940, the director of the Jewish National Fund Lands Department, which was tasked with purchasing lands for the Zionist enterprise in Palestine, wrote in his diary; “There is no way besides transferring the Arabs from here to the neighbouring countries, and to transfer all of them…Not one village must be left, not one Bedouin tribe. And only after this transfer will the country be able to absorb millions of our brothers and the Jewish problem will cease to exist. There is no other solution.”
Plan Dalet
Israeli historian Ilan Pappé “conducted extensive research in Israeli Defense Force archives and revealed how Zionist paramilitary organizations, such as the Haganah, Irgun Zvai Leumi, and Lehi (Stern Gang), received orders to systemically attack and depopulate Palestinian villages”.
Moreover, MEI says, these orders were organized under a military plan named Plan Dalet, which was put forward by the Zionist High Command with the goal of taking over mandatory Palestine, establishing a Jewish state, and defending its borders.Plan Dalet set forth specific instructions that included:
— Mounting operations against enemy population centers located inside or near our defensive system in order to prevent them from being used as bases by an active armed force. These operations can be divided into the following categories:
— Destruction of villages (setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris), especially those population centers which are difficult to control continuously.
— Mounting search and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the village and conducting a search inside it. In the event of resistance, the armed force must be destroyed and the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state.
The villages which are emptied in the manner described above must be included in the fixed defensive system and must be fortified as necessary.
An Israeli cover-up of atrocities
According to MEI, the evidence regarding the intentions of Zionist paramilitary organizations and their implementation of Plan Dalet is well supported by the historical record and has been documented by Israeli and Palestinian historians alike, such as Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappé, Ahron Bregman, Simha Flapan, Martin Gilbert, Walid Khalidi, Nur Masalha, Rosemarie Esber, and others.
The historical record is so compelling in fact that the Israeli Defense Ministry has made a concerted effort to search through various archives and remove historic documents and other evidence of atrocities by Zionist forces, including mass killings and large-scale expulsions of Palestinians, all of which point to Israel’s complicity in the creation of the refugee problem.
The longest refugee crisis in history
Since no one has been able to find a solution to the Palestine refugee problem, the UN General Assembly has repeatedly renewed UNRWA’s mandate.
We must remember that the Palestinians have spent more time as refugees than any other population in history. The flip side of this statistic is that Israel has perpetrated the longest OCCUPATION in history.
Moreover, the European Council on Foreign Relations has declared that Israel has illegally prolonged their occupation.
UNRWA is much more than just Gaza
As of 2019, more than 5.6 million Palestinians were registered with UNRWA as refugees. Nearly one-third of the registered Palestine refugees, i.e., more than 1.5 million individuals, live in 58 recognised Palestine refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, the Syrian Arab Republic, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
UNRWA also maintains schools, health centres and distribution centres in areas outside the recognised camps where Palestine refugees are concentrated, such as Yarmouk, near Damascus.
The agency employs 30,000 people, of which 13,000 work in the Gaza Strip.
Why Israel hates UNRWA
Israel really, REALLY hates UNRWA. They — and their US allies — have been trying for decades to have the agency shut down and the plight of the Palestinians transferred to the UNHCR agency.
The Israeli motives are simple: such a change would make their “Palestinian problem” go away, while ensuring that their planned campaigns of genocide and ethnic cleansing would be supported, strengthened and even enhanced through official United Nations and international imprimaturs.
Emmanuel Navon, an Israeli political scientist writing in The Times of Israel, expresses the official Zionist position vis-a-vis Palestinians: “some 95% of ‘Palestinian refugees’ are not considered refugees under the UNHCR definition”.
UNHCR, according to Navon, seeks “permanent or durable solutions” to the plight of refugees, including “local integration” and “resettlement.”
Navon then explains the Israelis’ problem with UNRWA and the reason why Israel wants the Palestinians to be reassigned to the UNHCR:
UNRWA, on the other hand, does not encourage the integration of Palestinian refugees in countries such as Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. And, as opposed to UNRWA, UNHCR has a “cessation clause” for situations where refugee status ceases (generally because the refugees have found a durable solution or because the events that led refugees to leave their countries of origin have ceased to exist).
Moreover, Navon claims that UNRWA’s definition of a refugee is factually inaccurate, and that the 2.2 million Palestinians who live in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip are not refugees but “internally displaced persons” since “they did not leave their country in 1948 but were displaced within it”.
In addition, he says, the 2.2 million “Palestinian refugees” in Jordan are not refugees either since they have Jordanian citizenship. “UNHCR would not recognise them as refugees because they are citizens of their country of residence”, Navon claims.
He concludes: “only 5% of the refugees listed by UNRWA are, indeed, refugees”.
UNRWA holds back a constant Israeli Genocide
It os no secret that Israel has been opposed to UNRWA for years, and especially recently under Netanyahu:
While tensions have characterised Israel’s relationship with the agency since its 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the Israeli government’s recent shift to the far right has seen new demands that the agency be disbanded completely. The prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, made such calls himself in 2017 and 2018, long before the current war.
The reasons for this opposition are several:
UNRWA advocates and “enshrines the right of return” of the Palestinians;
UNRWA doesn’t just provide food and subsistence; it also protects, enhances and foregrounds Palestinian history, culture and education;
The existence of UNRWA assumes an eventual “conciliation” and settlement of “the Palestine problem” through the creation of a Palestinian state.
UNRWA provides desperately needed employment and dignity to Palestinians, employing more than 13,000 Palestinians in Gaza and over 30,000 total.
All of these ongoing activities stand athwart Israel’s Zionist plans, blocking their campaign of genocide.
In short, as long as there is an UNRWA, there will be a Palestinian people that cannot be ignored. And this, for Israel, is unacceptable.
Israel’s plans to destroy UNRWA
Shatha Abdulsamad, a legal and refugee expert with al-Shabaka, a Palestinian think tank, summed up the crux of the problem for Israel:
“UNRWA is uniquely placed to highlight the need for a just solution for the plight of displaced Palestinians,” she told Al Jazeera. Its elimination, she added, “would facilitate and expedite the liquidation of the Palestinian cause because it could contribute to undermining the collective right of return”.
In late December, a report from Israel’s foreign ministry revealed the existence of a three-stage plan to eliminate UNRWA from the Gaza Strip.
According to the report, the document recommends three stages to the move. The first involves a comprehensive report on alleged UNRWA cooperation with Hamas, which rules Gaza, and the entanglement of the UN body that provides welfare and humanitarian services for Palestinian refugees from the 1948 and 1967 wars and their descendants, with the terror group.
Check. Israel has convinced the USA and its allies to pull funding from UNRWA based on UNVERIFIED allegations that 8 to 12 UNRWA employees, approximately 0.3% of its total staff.
The next stage would see reduced UNRWA operations in the Palestinian enclave, amid a search for a different organisation to provide education and welfare services.
This stage would most likely see Israel succeed in what it has long proposed — transfer of the Palestinians from UNRWA to the UNHCR, along the lines that Emmanuel Navon iterated above.
The result is that Palestinians, under UNHCR rules, would no longer be considered refugees, they would no longer have the “right of return”, and they would all become citizens of Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt or Syria.
In short: the Palestinians would cease to exist as a people.
In the third stage, according to the report, all of UNRWA’s duties would be “transferred to the body governing Gaza following the war”.
Well, we all know that Israeli officials like Yoav Gallant have claimed that some yet-to-be-named “Palestinian authority” would govern Gaza after the war, probably an Israeli puppet similar to Fatah.
BUT — other officials, such as the right wing cabinet members Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smoterich, have advocated the complete removal of all Palestinians from Gaza.
Apparently the main intelligence services of the Israeli government agree:
Why destroying UNRWA is a crime of genocide
Golda Meir, the seventh Prime Minister of Israel, was the first to assert that “There was no such thing as Palestinians” before the Zionist Israelis showed up. According to Wikipedia, Meir coined this narrative in an interview with The Sunday Times on June 15, 1969. In an interview the following year, she repeated her claim:
“There was no such thing in this area as Jews, and Arabs, and Palestinians. There were Jews and Arabs“.
Meir’s dismissal of the Palestinian people was reiterated in March of 2023 by the far-right Likudnik and Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a self-proclaimed Jewish supremacist who favours genocide of the Palestinians in order to re-establish Greater Israel (Eretz-Israel).
Smotrich, speaking at an event in March, maintained that the notion of a Palestinian people was artificial:
“There is no such thing as a Palestinian nation. There is no Palestinian history. There is no Palestinian language,” he said
Zionists are constantly trying to convince us that the Palestinians don’t really exist as a people. But the existence of a Palestinian people has been confirmed by repeated resolutions from the United Nations officially recognising “the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, including the right to their independent State of Palestine”.
The genocide currently being perpetrated by Israel upon the Palestinian people in Gaza is — according to the International Court of Justice — a plausible case of genocide, with the court having affirmed the many, many cases of evidence of the Israeli leadership intending to commit genocide.
Defunding UNRWA has now become a part of that genocidal plan.
Genocide? Or Ethnic Cleansing? Or BOTH?
The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Article II) declares that “genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.
The Convention then lists five definitions of genocide, of which “killing members of the group” is only one. The third element of genocide, however, is more broad:
“c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;”
Prior to the current conflict, 80% of Gazans depended on UNRWA for food to survive, defunding UNRWA seems like a straightforward case of genocide, as well as genocidal intent, given that the vast majority of Gazans have no other recourse, and no other way to survive.
The bombing campaign and the economic impact of Israel’s wear on Gaza has meant that “Humanitarian response in Gaza ‘completely dependent’ on UNRWA”.
Removing that lifeline is a death sentence.
#End
Thank you again for this great article and much needed research detailing the history of UNRWA and the illegal occupation of Palestine by Israel.