Toward the end of 2011, the UN Country Team in the occupied Palestinian territory gathered at its annual retreat to discuss the critical developments and humanitarian challenges affecting Palestinians living under Israeli occupation.
As part of the discussion, the UN initiated a study to predict what the Gaza Strip might look like a decade later. The exercise resulted in a report titled “Gaza in 2020: A Liveable Place?” The short answer to that question, in what was a rather comprehensive and scathing report, was no, it would not be.
As we fast approach the end of 2020, those who compiled the report could not have predicted we would be faced with a global pandemic and a US president who cut all aid to the Palestinians.
They did, however, foresee further rounds of hostilities between Israel and Hamas, if not their intensity and the degree of devastation that would result. The report warned that in the “absence of sustained and effective remedial action and an enabling political environment, the challenges which confront the people of Gaza now will only intensify over the coming years to 2020,” especially when the population was expected to grow by half a million. In that sense, the report was right on the mark.
It is no surprise, then, that in a recent interview with Britain’s Guardian newspaper, Philip Lazzarini, who was appointed head of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNWRA) in March this year, warned the world of the extent and depth of the despair among the people of Gaza, and also among Palestinian refugee populations in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and the West Bank.
An experienced humanitarian who has worked in some of the world’s most troubled conflict zones, he highlighted a situation in which the people of Gaza are suffering from food insecurity to the extent that they are obliged to sift through trash dumps to find sustenance.
It was not a soft landing for Lazzarini to find himself leading the UN’s humanitarian aid operation for Palestinians, as his organization suffers from chronic financial shortfalls, intrinsic structural shortcomings and hostile environments, all worsened by the effects of the coronavirus pandemic.
UNWRA’s unfathomable problem, through no fault of its own, is that it has become part of a deeply problematic political and social landscape — not only that of the Israeli-Palestinian standoff, but also of the surrounding countries in the region. Worse, it has become a political pawn, used cynically on the Israeli-Palestinian chessboard, in the domestic dynamics of its host countries and also of the US.
When it was established, the agency was designed to be a temporary measure to relieve the humanitarian predicament of 750,00 Palestinian refugees who were either forced out of their homes or fled the horror of the 1948 war. As the saying goes, “nothing is more permanent than a temporary measure.” In the absence of a peace agreement and a fair and just solution for the refugees, UNRWA’s mandate has been extended repeatedly over the past 71 years and counting.
Now it is responsible for aiding 5.5 million Palestinians, most of them the descendants of those who suffered during the original Nakba (Catastrophe) of 1948. The agency’s fundamental objectives have not changed but the circumstances it operated within continue to do so, and with them the political and budgetary pressures.
Ensuring that refugees receive human-development and humanitarian services — including education, health care, social services, and the maintenance and improvement of infrastructure in the camps — always have been UNRWA’s primary tasks, with the aim of ensuring they can enjoy life with dignity. It also encourages entrepreneurship through microfinance support.
Yet the constant political and economic instability in some parts of the region — the war in Syria where so many Palestinian refugees reside, for example, or the rounds of hostilities between Israel and Hamas in Gaza — is making the organization’s task increasingly difficult, especially when Israel, backed by the US, opportunistically accuses UNRWA of perpetuating the refugee problem.
This accusation is an immoral aberration of the truth — especially coming from a country that bears, directly or indirectly, much of the responsibility for creating the problem. Its governments for many years have been proactively destroying the possibility of a viable peace agreement with the Palestinians, based on a two-state solution, and in doing so have made any resolution to the refugees’ predicament almost impossible.
UNRWA was never intended to be a long-term answer to the needs of Palestinian refugees. A major reason why it continues to find itself on the receiving end of vicious attacks is that it serves as a constant reminder of the collective failure of all involved to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and ensure the legal status and well-being of the refugees.
As long as the status and rights of Palestinian refugees are not resolved satisfactorily and humanely there will be no substitute for the crucial work being done by UNRWA.
Yossi Mekelberg
The criticisms leveled at UNRWA, and the constant attempts to hamper its operations, are mere deflections from that collective failure, which has left millions of Palestinians to languish in refugee camps destined, as a result, to a life of deprivation and unfulfilled potential.
In an ideal world, organizations that deal with refugees would not exist in the first place. The aggressive and unlawful behavior of governments that evict millions of people from their homes and their homelands is what makes organizations such as UNRWA or The UN High Commissioner for Refugees essential.
As long as the status and rights of Palestinian refugees are not resolved satisfactorily and humanely there will be no substitute for the crucial work being done by UNRWA. Yes the organization has its shortcomings. But considering the environment in which it operates — providing services to a population the size of a small country, scattered across five operational zones, each of which is extremely challenging and in some cases violent — its devoted efforts, provided mainly by Palestinian refugees employed by the agency, amount to nothing short of a miracle.
Is anyone volunteering to take responsibility for the refugees living in, for example, the Nahr El-Bared camp in Lebanon, the Yarmouk camp near Damascus, or the Jabalia camp in Gaza? I hear a deafening silence in response to that question, which suggests that in the absence of a peace agreement the international community should rally behind UNRWA and ensure that it enjoys financial stability, with guaranteed and adequate funding for at least the next three to five years.
Not only is this the morally decent thing to do, it is also expedient.
- Yossi Mekelberg is professor of international relations at Regent’s University London, where he is head of the International Relations and Social Sciences Program. He is also an associate fellow of the MENA Program at Chatham House. He is a regular contributor to the international written and electronic media. Twitter: @YMekelberg
