In the wake of the 1948 Nakba and the resulting transformation of a large majority of Palestinians into refugees, UNRWA was established, pursuant to Resolution No. 302 of the United Nations General Assembly on 8 December 1949, with the aim of providing direct relief and employment programs for Palestine refugees. The agency began its operations on May 1, 1950.

In the absence of a solution to the question of Palestine refugees, the General Assembly worked to renew UNRWA’s mandate repeatedly over a period of 75 years.

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The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), as it calls itself and defines its mission, provides assistance, protection and advocacy for Palestine refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the occupied Palestinian territories until a solution to their suffering is reached, while the agency is funded almost entirely through donations. voluntary efforts of member states of the United Nations.

The director of UNRWA in 1959, the American John Davis, summarized his vision of the agency’s role as “a low cost paid by the international community in exchange for not solving the political problem of the Palestinian refugees.” The agency represents a lifeline for about 6 million Palestinian refugees by providing social and economic services in exchange for ignoring their political rights. “.

According to UNRWA’s operational definition, Palestine refugees are those persons whose natural place of residence was Palestine during the period between June 1946 and May 1948, and who lost their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 war – the “Nakba of Palestine”.

The descendants of those original Palestinian refugees also deserve to be registered in the agency’s records. When the agency began its work in 1950, it was working to respond to the needs of approximately 750,000 Palestinian refugees. Today, approximately 5.9 million Palestine refugees are entitled to UNRWA services.

One third of the Palestinian refugees registered with UNRWA, or more than 1.4 million refugees, live in 58 recognized refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

Following the June 1967 war and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, ten camps were established with the aim of housing a new wave of displaced refugees and non-refugees.

Israel believes that UNRWA contributes to perpetuating the refugee issue, and even amplifying it, by increasing the number of refugees registered with it from 750,000 people in 1948 to 6 million people currently due to granting the children and grandchildren of refugees in 1948 refugee status.

The Israeli vision is based on dismantling UNRWA, transferring its budget to the governments of the countries hosting refugees, transferring the agency’s powers, budget, and everything related to it to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and assigning it to work on transferring refugees to a third country, allowing them to obtain the right to permanent residence and naturalization, and thus ending the refugee issue. .

In order to pass this plan, Israel continues to incite against UNRWA and make many accusations against it, the most prominent of which is supporting Palestinian organizations that it considers to be terrorist organizations. This is an accusation that was repeated during the first and second intifadas, and recently returned by claiming the participation of 12 employees from the Gaza Strip in the events of October 7. Last October, which prompted the United States and some Western countries to freeze its funding (at least 13 countries).

On this topic, we conducted this dialogue with the director of the Palestinian Alternative Resource Center for Citizenship and Refugee Rights, Nidal Al-Azza.

“Arab 48“It is known that targeting UNRWA as a means of liquidating the refugee issue is not new. In recent decades, Israel in particular has made every effort to do so. However, the timing of this targeting raises many questions…

PrideThe process of targeting UNRWA by Israel as an organized campaign basically began after the signing of the Oslo Accords, as Israel considered that the peace process required ending the refugee issue, so it began working with its allies in the world to transfer the funds that go to UNRWA, in order to build the newly emerging Palestinian Authority. Under the Oslo Accords, under the guise of building state institutions.

Donors spoke frankly that it was not right to fund the Palestinian people with two different parties, and a project to get rid of UNRWA as a means of liquidating the refugee issue actually began to take shape, and serious projects were put forward by Canada, America, and the European Union, the agency’s main funders in the 1990s.

After the failure of Oslo (meaning the failure of the final status negotiations) and the launch of the Second Intifada, the campaign returned and intensified under the guidance of Israel, and in one of the Israeli strategic conferences known as the Herzliya Conference, a paper was issued that spoke clearly about the necessity of getting rid of UNRWA, considering that it is the international agency that perpetuates the refugee issue and their dream of return.

This campaign then focused and took the form of demonizing UNRWA in various ways, as many accusations of corruption emerged among employees at high levels in the agency. This was also linked to the promotion of allegations of the agency’s inefficiency in managing the refugee issue, managing the camps, and making the refugees self-reliant, all of which were aimed at attempts to limit From dealing with UNRWA, entering refugee-hosting countries and donor countries.

However, the most successful campaigns for Israel and the most influential in the West were to fabricate charges of terrorism against UNRWA. It was sufficient to prove that anyone working for UNRWA belonged to one of the factions, regardless of their identity, such as if he was convicted in an Israeli military court of this charge, in order for this to be used. The issue was exploited internationally in order to pin the accusation of cooperation with terrorist organizations on all of UNRWA.

“Arab 48“: We know that the campaign escalated during the Trump era, as plans were made to get rid of UNRWA and the refugee issue, and American funding for the agency was reduced and even effectively cut off?

Pride: True, and the file was handled at the time by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and advisor, who had a program to stop international responsibility for UNRWA and the Palestinian refugee issue, by transferring responsibilities to the host countries.

At the time, the campaign against the former commissioner, Pierre Krähenbühl, was used by Israel to show that this agency was corrupt and incompetent, and the Trump administration coordinated behind it and funds were frozen, and other Western countries joined, including Switzerland, whose foreign minister reiterated in At that time, Israel claimed that the agency’s work should be terminated because it perpetuates the refugee issue.

However, Kushner’s project, of Jewish origin, failed after it was met with the rejection of the countries hosting the refugees – Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority – which rejected the financial temptations offered to them and insisted that the refugee issue must fall within the framework of a comprehensive political solution to the Palestinian issue.

Then I also raised the issue of transferring responsibilities through cooperation with other international organizations, which do not necessarily have to be mandated by the United Nations. Funding is transferred to them and not to UNRWA, and the intention behind this is to get rid of the mandate assigned by UN resolutions with regard to UNRWA.

“Arab 48“I think that the uniqueness of UNRWA is that it is the only international organization that specializes only in the issue of Palestinian refugees?

PrideAt the time, this was a correct decision by the Arab countries in 1948, as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees had not been established at that time. Rather, there was a refugee organization specialized only in refugees in Europe.

The Arab countries considered that the United Nations bears direct responsibility for the issue of Palestinian refugees, because it caused the emergence of the refugee issue as a result of the Partition Resolution that it issued in 1947, and therefore they refused to include the Palestinian refugees and treat them like other refugees and demanded special protection for them, and accordingly, the “United Nations Relief Authority for Palestinian Refugees” was established. In November 1948, in order to coordinate emergency relief for refugees, which was replaced by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Middle East (UNRWA), in December 1949, it began its work at the beginning of the year 1950.

“Arab 48“The mandate of UNRWA was renewed over a period of 75 years, because the issue it is concerned with, which is the Palestinian refugee issue, perhaps unlike other refugee issues, has not been resolved to this day, and its aggravation increases the need for UNRWA?

PrideThis situation arose after the failure of the international community and the United Nations during all that period to find a just solution to the issue of Palestinian refugees, guaranteeing their return to their homes and compensation for the damages they sustained. In this context, it can be noted that the work of the United Nations committee that was established in 1948 has faltered. According to Resolution 194 called the “United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine,” which was charged with the return of Palestinian refugees and granting them international protection until they returned to their homes in accordance with international law.

This committee faced Israeli opposition and faced obstacles from the influential countries at the time, the United States and France, to announce in the early 1950s that its work had faltered due to the lack of political will among the countries concerned with the refugee issue, in reference to Israeli rejection in particular and the absence of international pressure.

As is known, all decisions issued by the United Nations for the return of refugees within the framework of finding a just solution to the Palestinian issue, since that date, have also been thwarted, which has perpetuated the refugee issue and the need for the agency concerned with their protection, which is UNRWA.

“Arab 48“So, Israel and its Western allies, who caused the refugee issue and thwarted the solutions calling for their return to their homes, want to liquidate the refugee issue by liquidating the international organization based on their protection, by drying up its sources of funding and stopping its services?

PrideAs I mentioned, the issue of transferring responsibilities did not succeed, and the issue of cutting funding during the era of the Trump administration did not serve the required purpose, and the Biden administration was forced to restore funding, but it imposed with the European Union conditions related to combating terrorism, so that UNRWA turns into an agency that monitors its employees who have become bound by restrictions. Severe censorship prevents them from engaging in any political activity or even expressing opinions through various platforms.

Conditions were also imposed on the education curricula in schools, as UNRWA schools were prohibited from teaching certain topics that are present in the Palestinian curriculum. A guidance booklet was issued for teachers on how to deal with certain terms, such as “the apartheid wall,” “the right of return,” and others. It happened that Employees were dismissed due to their detention due to posts glorifying the resistance on social media. An employee was even prosecuted because he glorified his martyred brother. Before the war, there were 30 cases being examined by UNRWA, based on Israeli reports, most of them posted on Facebook.

What happened recently in Gaza is the exploitation of the existence of Israeli accusations or allegations against 12 employees who are alleged to have a relationship with Hamas and the events of October 7 (12 employees out of 13 thousand employees) and exploiting this to incite against UNRWA, brand it with terrorism, and put pressure on allied countries. Which quickly cut off funding for the agency, even without the issue being identified, investigated, and verified.

It appears that this measure is a response to the most important decision of the International Court regarding the immediate entry of aid into the Gaza Strip, and as is known, UNRWA is among the most capable and efficient international bodies in providing refugees and even all Gazans with services, as it possesses the staff, facilities and means of transportation inside. The Strip is therefore the only international agency qualified to receive and distribute international aid in light of the permanent war on the Gaza Strip, and targeting it means cutting off its lifeline, or in the words of UNRWA Commissioner Philip Lazzarini, stopping its life-saving services.

“Arab 48“The American-Western complicity with the Israeli allegations must indicate a plan of what they are seeking to achieve…

PrideI believe that the issue, in addition to the primary goal of liquidating the refugee issue, carries a political project that the Western countries allied with Israel are working on in the war on Gaza, and it is a post-war issue. Therefore, the Israeli Foreign Minister’s statement came that “there will be no UNRWA the next day.” For war,” and there are Knesset members who called for the destruction of the agency.

I personally do not agree with those who say that Israel does not have a plan for the next day, and I believe that its plan is so filthy that it cannot announce it, and when it is said that the Gaza Strip must be evacuated from UNRWA, this means politically an attempt to legitimize and market the next authority, meaning that it will Employing reconstruction and people’s daily needs for political purposes, and if UNRWA is removed, the people will have no choice but the authority that will be created inside the Gaza Strip.

All of these humanitarian needs that UNRWA provides, such as health, education, food, and shelter, will be linked to the supposed authority, whether it is a “military rule” authority or “military rule with civilian powers” ​​similar to the “civil administration” that existed before Oslo or the “Palestinian Authority” after its renewal project or The “Village Links” project or the “Arab Countries” project and other circulating ideas require the development of an effective international body capable of providing these basic services to people.

Meaning, the foundations are now being made to legitimize the next authority, which will be according to Israel’s size, by using the needs of the people and reconstruction projects and employing them for political purposes.