The Possibilities and Limitations of “Solidarity Aid” to the Palestinians

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The Possibilities and Limitations of “Solidarity Aid” to the Palestinians

By : Melanie Meinzer

Since the 1993 Oslo Accords, the Palestinians have been among the world’s highest per capita recipients of non-military aid. This aid was meant to advance the peace process with Israel through Palestinian state-building under the Palestinian Authority (PA), and by cultivating a democratic civil society through funding Palestinian non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Over the past twenty-five years, the failed Oslo aid regime has produced neither peace, nor an independent Palestinian state. Instead, dependence on foreign aid has dismantled the Palestinian economy, reinforced the unpopular PA government, and demobilized Palestinian civil society by distancing Palestinian NGOs from grassroots resistance movements. Donors have depoliticized development and limited civic leaders’ abilities to mobilize society against the occupation, so that development has become a form of “peacebuilding as counterinsurgency.”

This article argues that a subset of foreign donors in the occupied Palestinian territories (OPT) are engaging in an alternative development practice centered on Palestinian sovereignty and self-determination, two key principles missing from Oslo aid model. The article will examine how these “solidarity donors” support Palestinian educational NGOs that work in the informal spaces around the donor-funded PA curriculum, to re-insert Palestinian history and identity into education. The two main features of solidarity donors are first, that they share Palestinian NGOs’ commitment to the principles of the popular education movement from the first intifada, namely reuniting education with resistance as a foundation for political mobilization. In contrast to the Oslo aid model where NGOs are accountable to donors, solidarity donors hold themselves downwardly accountable to NGOs’ priorities. Second, because solidarity donors share a common cause with these NGOs, they establish longer-term funding relationships with them, giving NGOs greater autonomy over their educational programs. This approach differs from the project-based approach to development aid, which forces NGOs to align their priorities with their donors in order to receive funding. Against the backdrop of the failed Oslo aid model, this solidarity-based approach shows how foreign aid can support Palestinian sovereignty and self-determination so that development expands, rather than restricts political freedoms. Solidarity aid has not replaced the prevailing Oslo aid model, but exists alongside it, and has the potential to transform aid practice and development from within.

However, “solidarity aid” is not immune to the tensions and contradictions of the donor-driven development paradigm. Although “solidarity donors” make a positive contribution, the vast majority of Palestinian aid still follows the Oslo model. While “solidarity donors” give aid with fewer political conditions, they still have the ultimate say over how their money is spent. Finally, civil society organizations’ reliance on donors inevitably means that regardless of overlap in their values and priorities, donors continue to play a significant role in setting the agenda for civil society and in shaping activist spaces.  

Palestinian NGOs and Popular Education

Palestinian education continues to be a site of external intervention because of its relationship to Palestinian nationalism and resistance.

Palestinian education continues to be a site of external intervention because of its relationship to Palestinian nationalism and resistance. Under the British Mandate, contemporary history was excluded from the curriculum, and Palestinian teachers were forbidden from publishing educational materials outside of the British-controlled curriculum.[i] After the 1967 war and start of the Israeli occupation, the Jordanian curriculum was taught in the West Bank, and the Egyptian curriculum in Gaza. Similar to under British rule, neither curriculum taught Palestinian history or instilled a sense of Palestinian identity, and so informal learning continued outside of schools. During the first intifada (uprising), Israel closed Palestinian schools and universities for weeks to months at a time, fearing that they would become centers for political organizing. These school closures prompted neighborhood popular committees to organize ad hoc schools that united education and resistance.[ii] In these hidden spaces, the “popular education” movement experimented with participatory learning, teaching Palestinian historical narratives missing from the school curriculum under the occupation.

The first-ever Palestinian Ministry of Education was established in 1994, one year after the Oslo Accords, and the donor-funded Palestinian Curriculum Development Center published its first curriculum in 2000. Shortly thereafter, an Israeli watchdog group alleged that the textbooks were anti-Semitic and incited violence against Israel. This led Italy to cancel its support for the curriculum, and the World Bank to temporarily demand that the PA divert its textbook funding to other projects.[i][iii] Several joint Israeli-Palestinian and US studies later discredited these allegations, but the controversy over the textbooks showed how external actors continued to intervene in Palestinian education even after the PA was established.

However, the PA textbooks have also been largely sanitized of any political content deemed controversial by donors. Revolutionary Palestinian historical figures were removed from the textbooks, as were maps showing Jerusalem as the future capital of Palestine. The incomplete account of Palestinian history and identity in the school curriculum does not resonate with what students experience in daily life under the occupation, or learn through informal channels like family, friends, the media, and community education programs. The PA curriculum is therefore caught in a double-bind between the need to teach Palestinian history as a basis for national liberation, and donor demands for “peace education” to promote peaceful coexistence with Israel. The result is a curriculum that is simultaneously “too political” for donors, yet not political enough for the society for which it is intended.[iv]

As it had during the first intifadaPalestinian civil society has sought to meet the need to teach Palestinian history and identity to compensate for weak instruction in these areas in the official school curriculum. Although aid dependence and the “NGOization” of Palestinian civil society has distanced civic leaders from grassroots movements, a number of teachers and educational activists from the popular education movement during the first intifada have continued this work under the auspices of Palestinian educational NGOs.[v] Their goals as educators remain the same as their pre-Oslo predecessors: to reunite education with resistance in order to preserve collective historical memory and identity as a bulwark against cultural erasure and loss of land. 

These Palestinian educational NGOs provide extracurricular theater, creative writing, and debate programs in and outside of schools to teach Palestinian history and cultivate a sense of collective identity using participatory learning methods from the popular education movement. The A. M. Qattan Foundation’s support for teachers and students in the creative arts, and the Teacher Creativity Center exemplify this participatory approach. The Freedom Theater in Jenin Refugee Camp similarly uses drama training and political theater to encourage “cultural resistance,” and The Tamer Institution in Ramallah, and Project Hope in Nablus publish stories and graphic novels written by young people about life under the occupation. These programs are examples of how NGOs use participatory learning to engage students in producing knowledge that sustains historical memory and cultural identity in the spirit of the popular education movement. In doing so, these NGOs are strategically repurposing aid to retain Palestinian sovereignty and self-determination over the content and pedagogies of education.

The Role of “Solidarity Donors”


“Solidarity donors” play an important role in making these NGOs’ work possible. Absent donor funding, it is likely that NGO leaders would seek other avenues to practice popular education, as many Palestinian educational membership-based organizations have done. Nevertheless, it is Palestinian educational NGOs’ strategic relationships with donors that allow them to reach wider audiences than they may have otherwise without external funding. These NGOs are also able to use their positions as more credible representatives of grassroots priorities (relative to other NGOs that do less political work), to hold donors accountable to Palestinian needs in education, rather than simply implementing donor agendas.[vi]

The first feature that distinguishes solidarity donors is that they share Palestinian educational NGOs’ belief that education under the occupation should raise political consciousness, understood as a revolutionary awareness of contradictions and injustice in political life.[vii] These NGOs and solidarity donors recognize the enduring need to unite education and resistance to combat the suppression of Palestinian history and identity under colonial and Israeli rule, and now under the Oslo aid regime. Because solidarity donors understand this need, they fund projects based on recipients’ priorities, rather than asking NGOs to implement a preset agenda. This was evident in the sixteen original interviews conducted with Palestinian educational NGOs and their donors in the West Bank between 2014-16, which are part of a larger study on the impact of foreign aid on political consciousness in Palestinian education.[viii] In these interviews, donors sought to distinguish themselves from other larger donors that depoliticize Palestinian education. According to one solidarity donor,

We are working according to their [the NGOs’] needs. We never come with a project and tell them “you will implement this project.” We have discussions about which kinds of problems they can solve through their activities, and what they think each kind of problem they have in society. We conduct this discussion, and after that, we make our program goal. They are the owner of the problems and solutions, not us.[ix] 

This solidarity donor developed their priorities in collaboration with their recipients. Another donor expressed this in terms of their support for participatory learning, a core component of the popular education movement.

We are trying to involve students more. We want to push through this mentality of teaching where the teachers are the ultimate source of education, and students are only recipients, where the students are taught to be tame- to receive information, remember it, write it down on the test. You don’t think, you don’t question, it’s not your role. We are trying to break through this through our projects with our partners.[x]

Because solidarity donors and the NGOs they fund both value participatory learning, their collaboration with Palestinian educational NGOs extends the reach of this approach beyond what NGOs may have been able to accomplish on their own, or as smaller membership-based organizations. Donors’ interest in participatory learning also extended to how they perceived their relationships with recipients, which they envisioned as less hierarchical than the traditional top-down model of donor-driven development. Nevertheless, donors were unable to entirely extricate themselves from their inherently more powerful positions. According to one donor: 

You want to establish a genuine, democratic, participatory approach. You want to minimize the gap [between donors and recipients], but you can never escape it. We try our best to minimize this power game, this unbalanced structure, by discussing, brainstorming a lot with our partners. Trying to arrive at common ground together, to work out ideas of mutual interest. To develop things together and not to enforce things, and trying to push the Palestinian agenda.[xi] 

These excerpts show that what distinguishes solidarity donors from the traditional donor mindset is their desire to hold themselves downwardly accountable to NGOs’ priorities in politicizing education.

The second feature of solidarity donors is that they view development, like education, as a long-term process of socio-political change. Solidarity donors establish longer-term funding relationships with their recipients and give aid with few political conditions to give their recipients greater autonomy over their work. The interviews revealed that Palestinian NGOs also purposely seek out donors with more open-ended funding. A representative of a theater NGO described her organization’s criteria in selecting donors: 

We are very critical with donors. We do not take money from USAID for example. We do not take money from Europeans if they want us to do something we do not believe in. We do not do it because we want to survive. Money becomes a tool to implement our ideas and beliefs.[xii]

Most of the NGOs interviewed refused to apply for USAID funding because they saw US support for Israel as hypocritical, and found USAID’s anti-terrorism conditionality insulting.[xiii][xiv] For the NGO quoted above, aid given with fewer conditions allowed them to credibly claim that the donor did not control their work. This gave the NGO the freedom to set their own agenda, and lent them a greater degree of social legitimacy in an environment where NGOs are seen as elite institutions that are out of touch with the Palestinian cause.[xv] NGOs saw “solidarity aid” as compatible with their visions for reforming education. When asked about how donor funding after Oslo impacted his NGO, a representative admitted that: “yes, the money changed me, but I [kept] working.” He pointed out that prior to Oslo, funding came from the Soviet Union, and asked “why is this funding good, and this funding is not?”[xvi] He saw aid as fungible—how the money was used, was more important than its source. Unlike the restrictive Oslo aid model, solidarity aid can support NGO efforts to reclaim sovereignty over education.

The Limitations of “Solidarity Aid”


These collaborative relationships between “solidarity donors” and Palestinian educational NGOs make it possible for popular education programs to reach a broader audience than they otherwise would. These partnerships, however unequal, demonstrate how NGOs can strategically repurpose aid so that it supports Palestinian sovereignty over education and development. Moreover, social movements ranging from the Landless Workers’ Movement in Brazil, to the Zapatistas in Chiapas, to the Black Panther Party in the United States, have long understood the formative power of education to raise political consciousness and mobilize people against injustice. Palestinian educational NGOs contribute to cultural resistance by helping to maintain the cultural fabric of Palestinian communities fragmented by the occupation, reviving earlier pre-Oslo forms of community organization and mobilization. Although “solidarity aid” has the potential to challenge the depoliticizing and demobilizing effects of the Oslo aid model, there are two limitations worth noting.

The first limitation is that despite their overall support for popular education, solidarity donors still impose restrictions on NGOs. For example, one foreign donor objected to a theater NGO’s use of the terms “occupation,” “apartheid,” and “colonialism” in a play. This donor acknowledged that Palestine was occupied by Israel, but did not recognize the system of apartheid or settler-colonization of the West Bank. The NGO removed the donor’s logo from the production at the donor’s request, which allowed them to keep their funding and retain the controversial terms. Although this was a victory for the NGO, it underscored the power that donors still retain, and occasionally wield, over their recipients. Another theater NGO recalled a time when a donor asked them not to use the term “martyr” in a play:

[The donor] said “we will support you fully, but you cannot use the word ‘martyr’ in what the children have written about what they faced during the war.” They [the children] are talking about what they have lived: it’s testimonies. [The donor] is about the rights of children, and they told us “tell your children not to write the word ‘martyrs.’’ I was flipping out, I said “thank you, we don’t want your money, keep it for yourself. This is against your mandate, it’s not against ours.”[xvii] 

Ultimately, this NGO declined donor funding for this play. Even when donors appear to share a NGOs’ mission, they have the final word when it comes to the content of these programs.

The second limitation is that regardless of solidarity donors’ willingness to support popular education, NGOs must still walk the line by separating their work in education, from overt political organizing. This meant that most of the Palestinian educational NGOs interviewed would not publicly support the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) Movement. BDS was launched in 2005 by a coalition of Palestinian civic organizations calling for an international academic, cultural, and economic boycott of Israel. A sign of the movement’s strength, Israel’s parliament passed a law in March 2017 banning foreign supporters of BDS from entering Israel. The US Senate passed an anti-BDS bill in 2019, which if passed by the House of Representatives, would bar state governments from contracting with supporters of the boycott. All of the Palestinian organizations interviewed supported BDS privately, but were quick to distinguish between their personal support for BDS, and their organizations’ work. One NGO director said he personally supported the boycott, but that the board did not discuss “political issues,” and had not taken a position on BDS.[xviii] Another NGO director reframed BDS as a question of supporting freedom and resistance and opposing the occupation. Her NGO did not participate in the boycott directly, but supported it indirectly as a member of the Palestinian NGO Network, which launched BDS. She added that her staff did not use Israeli products at the NGO’s activities, and that she encouraged her family to boycott Israeli products.[xix] This NGO’s employees participated in the boycott, but could not publicly support it through their organization.

Policy Recommendations


“Solidarity donors” support these Palestinian NGOs’ critical education projects, which raise political consciousness and reconnect education to resistance under the occupation. Nevertheless, the top-down structure of the Oslo aid model constrains recipients’ agency, contradicting the democratic rhetoric of “participatory development.” The following policy recommendations are based on the foregoing discussion of the potential and limitations of the “solidarity aid” model.

  1. Donors should expand multi-year programmatic support for Palestinian NGOs (in contrast to short-term project-based funding). Longer-term funding gives NGOs greater autonomy to determine the content and direction of their programs.
  2. Palestinian NGOs should cultivate stronger connections to grassroots movements, and leverage these relationships to hold their donors accountable to NGOs’ priorities and to civil society more broadly.
  3. NGOs can also reduce donor interference in their projects by diversifying their donor portfolio to lessening their dependence on any single donor or group of donors. Where possible, NGOs should seek out donors that unequivocally support Palestinian rights, and be willing to exit donor relationships to maintain the integrity of their programs.
  4. Individuals and foundations can help release Palestinian NGOs from the political conditions of donors by directly funding critical education projects in the occupied territories.

Moving towards a “solidarity aid” model means strategically using aid to deconstruct the restrictions that donors place on recipients’ political freedoms. Donors, NGOs, and social movements all play a role in moving beyond the failed Oslo aid model and towards a solidarity economy centered on the right to self-determination. For more on “solidarity donors” and popular education, see Palestine and Rule of Power: Local Dissent vs. International Governance (2019).




[i] A. L. Tibawi, “Educational Policy and Arab Nationalism in Mandatory Palestine,” Die Welt des Islams 4, no. 1 (1995), 15-29.

[ii] Munir Fasheh, “Community Education: To Reclaim and Transform What Has Been Made Invisible,” Harvard Educational Review 60, no.1(1990), 19-36.

[iii] Fouad Moughrabi, "The Politics of Palestinian Textbooks," Journal of Palestine Studies 31, no. 1 (2001), 5-19.

[iv] Ibid.

[v] Melanie Meinzer, "Agents of Change? Critical IR, Foreign Aid and Political Consciousness in Palestinian Education," PhD diss. (2017); Islah Jad, "NGOs: Between Buzzwords and Social Movements," Development in Practice 17, no. 4/5 (2007), 622-29.  

[vi] Melanie Meinzer, “Solidarity Donors and Popular Education in the West Bank,” in Palestine and Rule of Power Local Dissent vs. International Governance eds. Alaa Tartir and Timothy Seidel, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 
 

[vii] Benedetto Fontana, “Liberty and Domination: Civil Society in Gramsci,” Boundary 2 33, no.2 (2006), 51-74.

[viii] Melanie Meinzer, "Agents of Change? Critical IR, Foreign Aid and Political Consciousness in Palestinian Education," PhD diss. (2017)

[ix] Donor (Anonymous). Interview with Melanie Meinzer. January 6, 2016. Originally published in Meinzer 2019.

[x] Donor (Anonymous). Interview with Melanie Meinzer. November 8, 2015. Originally published in Meinzer 2019.

[xi] Donor (Anonymous). Interview with Melanie Meinzer. November 8, 2015. Originally published in Meinzer 2019.

[xii] NGO (Anonymous). Interview with Melanie Meinzer. December 2, 2015. Originally published in Meinzer 2019.

[xiii] NGO (Anonymous). Interview with Melanie Meinzer. December 2, 2015. Originally published in Meinzer 2019.
 

[xiv] NGO (Anonymous). Interview with Melanie Meinzer. January 8, 2014. Originally published in Meinzer 2019.

[xv] Sibille Merz, “‘Missionaries of the New Era’: Neoliberalism and NGOs in Palestine,” Race & Class 54, no. 1 (July 2012), 50–66; Sari Hanafi and Linda TabarThe Emergence of a Palestinian Globalized Elite (Institute of Jerusalem Studies & Muwatin, The Palestinian Institute for the Study of Democracy, 2005).
 

[xvi] NGO (Anonymous). Interview with Melanie Meinzer. January 4, 2016. Originally published in Meinzer 2019.

[xvii] NGO (Anonymous). Interview with Melanie Meinzer. December 2, 2015. Originally published in Meinzer 2019.

[xviii] NGO (Anonymous). Interview with Melanie Meinzer. January 11, 2014. Originally published in Meinzer 2019.

[xix] NGO (Anonymous). Interview with Melanie Meinzer. January 8, 2014. Originally published in Meinzer 2019.

 

UNRWA and Palestinian Refugees Under Attack: When Politics Trump Law and History

Between January and August 2018, the US administration, through a number of public and leaked statements, has manifested its intention to terminate its long tradition of support for Palestinian refugees and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), the body that has assisted Palestinian refugees since 1949. UNRWA has been accused to be “irredeemably flawed,” “perpetuat[ing] a status quo” and “not helping peace.” Allegations have gone as far as inferring that the agency should “unwind itself and become part of the UNHCR” by 2019. These various pronouncements bear no legal implications on UNRWA and Palestinian refugees, since the US administration is in no position to either unilaterally proceed to abolish UNRWA or amend its mandate, or relinquish fundamental rights Palestinians enjoy under international law. Legally, the General Assembly is the only entity who can determine the cessation of or any change in UNRWA’s mandate (and it is unfathomable that it will dismantle UNRWA in the absence of a solution to the conflict, including a just resolution to the refugee problem). Despite this, the political implications and consequences of such turn in US policy, are potentially very dangerous.

The recent debate around UNRWA and Palestinian refugees and the perception of the agency “perpetuating the refugee crisis” has been alimented by selective and at times erroneous use and interpretation of facts regarding Palestinian refugees and UNRWA, as well as ignorance of international norms and procedures regarding refugees, particularly with reference to UNRWA and UNHCR respective mandates. The fact that some of the unfounded allegations were made by legal experts within the US administration is disheartening, beyond disconcerting.

The problem appears to be primarily linked to the way the Agency defines, counts and registers what the US administration calls its “endlessly and exponentially expanding community of entitled beneficiaries,” namely the 5.5 million refugees it serves across Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Syria, and Lebanon. UNRWA’s refugee definition and registration system are decried as inconsistent with the way in which all other refugees in the world are classified. This, as the allegations go, allows generations of descendants to be considered as refugees “in perpetuity.” UNRWA’s definition of refugees, US officials claim, should be limited to (those who remain of) those originally displaced in 1948.

UNRWA’s definition of Palestine refugees—i.e., those living in Palestine between 1946-1948 who lost homes and livelihood as a consequence of the 1948 war—is different from the universal definition of “refugee” under the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees (“Refugee Convention”)—a person seeking international protection out of “well-founded fear of persecution” in his/her own country. This has a historical reason. The events that displaced two-thirds of the Arab population of British Mandate Palestine in connection with the creation of the State of Israel, predate the entry into force of the Refugee Convention. At the time, the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine (UNCCP), the peace-making body mandated by the General Assembly to solve the conflict over Palestine comprehensively, tried to elaborate a definition of refugees for the purpose of “return” under UNGA Resolution 194. Meanwhile, UNRWA, which was to provide relief and assistance to the refugees pending a solution of the conflict, developed an “operational” definition to determine who, among the displaced, was eligible for assistance. UNRWA, who had inherited inflated refugee rolls from other organizations previously attending to refugee needs, was under enormous pressure by the donor community, led by the United States, to put a limit to the refugee rolls. This demonstrates that the aim of UNRWA’s definition was to limit the number of refugees instead of inflating them.

Rather than with UNRWA, which has no mandate either to resettle Palestinian refugees or promote peace in the region, the lack of a solution to the refugee crisis should be examined in connection with the dynamics of the Middle East peace process, or lack thereof.

Based on this definition, UNRWA has provided services to generations of Palestine refugees, the majority of whom had only UNRWA to turn to for assistance and protection. Contrary to the US assertions, UNRWA registration of descendants is in line with international law, protecting the family unity, as well as UNHCR procedures and practice. Descendants of millions of other refugees around the world—from Afghanistan, Burundi, Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea, DRC, Angola, and Bhutan—find themselves in protracted refugee situations and protected by UNHCR. In 2017, UNHCR estimated that 13.4 million refugees, i.e., two-thirds of the worldwide refugee population, are caught in a political limbo with no solution in sight. Like the Palestinians, some have lingered in such a situation for decades, like the 2.3 million Afghan refugees stranded for forty years in Iran and Pakistan. The various generations born and raised in exile are registered and counted by UNHCR as refugees.

Needless to say, the UN General Assembly, which created UNRWA and oversees its work, has progressively and overwhelmingly endorsed the work of the agency, including its refugee definition and the registration of new births.

The growth of UNRWA’s refugee population has more to do with demography and the fact that, pending a solution to the conflict, Palestinian refugees had babies, than the agency’s policies. Besides, the protracted nature of the Palestine refugee crisis has been determined first and foremost by Israel’s adamant refusal to allow the original displaced to return and the defiant dismissal of international law under the vigilant eye of the international community—not by the fact that Palestinian refugees exist. Had international law, as it stood in 1947, been applied and enforced soon after the Palestinian displacement, we would not be talking about a refugee “problem” seventy years on. It is to say that in its early days, UNRWA tried to encourage the integration of Palestinian refugees into local economies. It did not work due of opposition from Arab states—who had no legal obligation to resettle the refugees—and the refugees themselves; none wanted the refugee issue to be liquidated without prospects for the return of anyone. In short, rather than with UNRWA, which has no mandate either to resettle Palestinian refugees or promote peace in the region, the lack of a solution to the refugee crisis should be examined in connection with the dynamics of the Middle East peace process, or lack thereof.

So, as there is no irregularity in UNRWA’s refugee definition and registration procedures, what are the consequences of the US tsunami after years of unwavering American support for UNRWA, confirmed as recently as December 2017 by a new multiyear cooperation agreement signed between the United States and the agency? Interestingly, on that occasion, the US administration reiterated its appreciation for the robustness of UNRWA’s management and the multiple challenges the agency faces.

If legally there are not going to be any consequences, given the lack of legal justification behind the various allegations, the political meaning and consequences of what looks like the US policy on UNRWA and Palestinian refugees deserve close examination.

First, Palestinian refugees and UNRWA have been caught by the wave of retaliation the US administration unleashed against the Palestinian leadership for breaking of diplomatic relations with the US in response to the illegal US recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and subsequently objecting to swallowing happily the peace plan proposed by the Trump’s acolytes, referred to as the “deal of the century.” Hence, UNRWA and Palestinian refugees are being punished for the Palestinian Authority’s actions, no matter how legitimate they are.

Second, an unprecedented constellation of openly pro-Israel characters have entered key strategic positions within the current US administration, aligning all odds along Israel’s interest. For years Israeli pundits have called for a dismissal of UNRWA and an extension of UNHCR’s mandate to Palestine refugees (incidentally, the same pundits vocally deny the existence of the right of return for Palestinian refugees). Behind this is the thought that UNHCR would instantly resettle Palestinian refugees or push for their local integration into host countries; quite a naïve thought, though (the number of resettlement places available globally does not exceed one percent of the world’s total refugee population). Not only is UNHCR’s most preferred remedy to mass refugee crises voluntary repatriation (right of return), as confirmed by the global numbers of refugees who return to their country  compared to those who are  resettled (5 million versus 102,800 in 2017), but also, should UNHCR register Palestinian refugees, their numbers would be much higher since—unlike UNRWA which only registers refugees through male line—UNHCR registers both male and female lines. Further, UNHCR counts as Palestinian refugees the “1967 displaced” (including descendants) which in UNRWA’s system receive services without counting in the overall Palestine refugee population (unless in 1967 they were refugees already—from the 1948 war). Furthermore, no durable solution can be implemented without political will—the ingredient that has always been missing in connection with the resolution of the Palestinian refugee question—and no UN agency can circumvent this.  

The current US administration appears adamantly determined to help Israel realize its wildest dreams: after Jerusalem as the undivided capital of the State of Israel, comes the obliteration of any discussion on the right of return and the instantaneous resolution of the Palestinian refugee in question, somehow. Certainly, there is no plan to resolve such question other than by eliminating it nominally: stopping calling Palestinians “refugees” and closing down the one institution that has catered to their needs for the last seven decades.  

While defunding UN agencies for political reasons is not uncommon for the US administration, the recent attacks against UNRWA demonstrates an unprecedented politicization of humanitarian aid. Not only the pressure on UNRWA to align its policies and procedures to US (and Israeli) diktats runs against UN rules, international norms and the interests of the refugees. Also, the influence that the United States appears to be exerting on other UN member states and host countries, such as Jordan, to change their policies vis-à-vis UNRWA and Palestine refugees sits uncomfortably with these states’ sovereignty, the independence that UN agencies enjoy under the 1946 Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nation, and the overall purposes of independence of states in their dealing with the UN and state cooperation for maintenance of peace and stability enshrined by the UN Charter. The current US endeavours are unhinging the fundamental principles the UN and international relations are premised upon: justice, respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law, and respect for the United Nations.

By hitting hard on UNRWA, the United States is undermining an entity which has contributed to maintaining stability in the region through means such as quality education, job opportunities, development and relief to millions, in one of the most intractable and inflammable conflicts of modern history. To its credit, the United States has historically been part of this effort, until now.

The sense of betrayal that this recent US policy is spreading among Palestinian refugees is dangerous especially at a time of rising extremisms in the region. This is particularly true for the youth, the largest among Palestine refugee population groups: leaving them further unprotected, without hope and the support of essential services for them to develop into productive elements of society, and with a clear understanding of the way the world is turning its back on them, is a way to make them even more marginalized and vulnerable.

It is incumbent upon all countries, and all of us, to act to counter the effects of the current UNRWA crisis and avert a further spiral of instability. The international community should take this challenging turning point as an opportunity to improve the situation in the Middle East through new visions and strategy, within the framework of UN rules and procedures and, bearing in mind the importance of respecting international law, especially human rights norms, also as a stabilizing factor. In the short run, members of the General Assembly could strike back in opposing the attacks on multilateralism that the US decisions on UNRWA represent, filling the funding gap so the agency can continue with its operations sustainably, namely with multi-year agreements which make UNRWA’s dependency on the United States a memory of the past. This would create, in the long term, a conducive environment to discuss ways in which the Palestinian refugee question can be resolved, as well as UNRWA’s role and any needed reforms.