Millions of Palestinians rely on UNRWA. Why is the US suspending funding based on Israeli accusations?

On Friday, the United States suspended funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the main lifeline for millions of Palestinian refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Multiple western countries then followed the US’s lead. The given reason? The Israeli government alleges that a dozen people working for UNRWA (which employs around 13,000 people in Gaza alone) were involved in the assaults of 7 October that killed around 1,200 people in Israel.

There should be no question that the 7 October attacks were atrocities. But to punish the UNRWA – and, by extension, the Palestinian people as a whole – because of accusations against 12 people is unconscionable. It is an act of political retaliation that puts the lives of millions of people needlessly at risk and an abdication on an international scale of the United States’ supposed western liberal values.

The decision is an insult to the most basic tenets of law and morality as understood by the US, international law and the legal systems of countless other countries, especially the principles that accusations are not facts; guilt is individual, not collective; and people are innocent until proven guilty. All of that has just been thrown in the trash with a lit match by the US and many other western powers.

Not only have the US and allies including Britain, Germany, Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, Finland, Australia and Canada abruptly suspended funding to an institution that provides millions of civilians with essential needs, they’ve done so on the basis of accusations leveled by Israel, which is hardly a disinterested party.

In fact, Axios, citing a senior Israeli official, reports that much of the intelligence underlying the accusations comes from Israeli interrogations of prisoners. Human rights groups frequently describe Israeli detention practices as rising to the level of “torture”, which is not only morally abhorrent but also a notoriously poor provider of actionable intelligence. That Israel would have its own agenda in making these accusations should be self-evident.

And even if we were to accept, purely for the sake of argument, that those accused did participate in the October attacks, what does that have to do with UNRWA? The New York Times has seen the dossier the Israeli government presented to the US, but the Times’s story reported no institutional collusion between UNRWA and Hamas, only that the accused had jobs with UNRWA.

As a point of comparison, the US army reservist Sabrina Harman was convicted in 2005 of maltreatment of detainees in connection with the Abu Ghraib scandal in Iraq. Harman worked as an assistant manager for Papa John’s Pizza in Alexandria, Virginia, shortly before heading to Iraq. Should Papa John’s also have been prosecuted for maltreatment of detainees? Is Papa John’s responsible for Harman’s actions? Of course not. (If Papa John’s should be prosecuted for anything, it should be for their pizza.)

Context, rather than accusation, offers a much better explanation as to what’s going on here. First, there is the context of what this agency really is. UNRWA is certainly a necessary social service provider, but it’s also an international agency whose history imbues it with considerable symbolic and material weight. Solely by its continued existence after more than seven decades, UNRWA has become an abiding testament to the still unsolved refugee crisis at the heart of the Palestinian question.

Established by the UN general assembly in 1949, UNRWA began operations in 1950, immediately aiding the 750,000 Palestinians who had been displaced from their homes after the 1948 war. Initially, many considered UNRWA a temporary institution, as Palestinian refugees awaited the execution of UN Resolution 194, which stated that “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”.

Needless to say, that day has never come. UNRWA has continued to register Palestinian refugee after refugee after refugee (nearly 6 million of them now with UNRWA) in the five areas (Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria) where it operates and to provide them with healthcare, education, job and loan assistance, and other basic infrastructural needs and some ability to live dignified lives under the most difficult of circumstances.

Many Palestinians rely primarily on UNRWA for assistance and employment; many Israelis, on the other hand, view UNRWA as a nagging reminder that Palestinian refugees continue to exist and, worse yet, demand their rights. If UNRWA were to go away, in the view of some Israelis, those refugees’ rights would disappear with it.

Palestinians are very aware of this thinking. A Palestinian NGO worker put it this way to the International Crisis Group in August 2023: “In the Palestinian consciousness, as long as UNRWA exists as a temporary international mechanism, which has now survived for 75 years, a Palestinian refugee has the right to return to his homeland. If UNRWA goes, his own status is no longer temporary but becomes permanent.”

For this reason the Israeli government has repeatedly tried to defund and delegitimate UNRWA. Israel succeeded, briefly, during the Trump administration, which defunded UNRWA in a misbegotten effort to eliminate the “right of return” guaranteed by the UN Resolution 194. Back then, other nations stepped in to make up for some of the shortfalls, since the action was so obviously Trumpian, one-sided and politically egregious.

Today the American political context is different, but behavior much worse. On the same day that the US announced its suspension of funding for UNRWA, the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel must protect Palestinians from “irreparable consequences” and desist from certain actions that might constitute genocide.

The court has not yet ruled on the allegation of genocide but did indicate certain measures that Israel must immediately implement. Among them was this: “The State of Israel shall take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”

Since, as everyone knows, UNRWA is overwhelmingly the major provider of basic services and humanitarian aid in Gaza, suspending aid to UNRWA makes fulfilling the ICJ’s order virtually impossible. If that doesn’t translate directly into western complicity in genocide, then I don’t know what would.

Efforts to eliminate UNRWA go hand-in-hand with both the destruction of individual Palestinian lives and the eradication of the recognized and collective aspirations of the Palestinian people. South Africa’s decision to sue Israel for genocide in the International Court of Justice was motivated to protect Palestinians from precisely this kind of brutality and subjugation. During the ICJ trial, the whole world waited with bated breath to hear how international law would rule.

By choosing to ignore the most basic principles of law and morality in favor of their own cynical political calculations, the US and its allies are not just putting Palestinian lives in Gaza at grave – if not genocidal – risk, but jeopardizing the rule of law everywhere and placing all of us in future peril.