Gaza

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UNWRA

The current controversy around the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNWRA) is dfifficult to make sense of.

On the strength of allegations by the the Israeli Government that 190 employees of the agency are members of Hamas or Palestinian Jihad and, even more seriously, that 12 of it employees were active participants in the atrocities of 10/7 some of its major donors have suspended their funding of UNWRA.

This is funding to an organisation of 30,000 employees who operate across Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon providing a range of welfare services including health, education and relief for people displaced by decades of conflict in the region.

More specifically it is currently engaged in providing food, water and health services into Gaza where the Israeli government’s war on Hamas has cost over 25,000 Palestinian lives and displaced 85% percent of the territories 2.2m inhabitants.

The speed with which the USA and the UK suspended its payments seemed remarkably swift. It was based on the allegations contained in a 6 page dossier which the Israeli Government would not provide to UNWRA. It is still not clear if these allegations have been independently corroborated.

It is not as if the allegations have emanated form an independent source. The allegations came shortly after the International Court of Justice found it plausible that Israel’s acts could amount to genocide in relation to its operations in Gaza. Trying to undermine the work of UNWRA might be seen as consistent with attacking the Palestinian civilian population as opposed to Hamas.

But even if we assume the allegations are eventually proved to be true. Is the response of the US and the UK appropriate?

If we add together the 190 accused of membership of Hamas and the 12 accused of engagement in 10/7 it amounts to 1.5% of UNWRA’s workforce in GAZA. Hardly definitive evidence that the Agency is systemically infiltrated by Hamas.

As soon as the allegations were made the head of UWRA preemptively dismissed the twelve employees accused prior to any independent investigation into their guilt or otherwise. Further, he referred the allegations to the UN’s Investigations Department for a thorough, Independent review of them.

Whilst UNWRA does carry out background checks on its employees, it also provides a list once a year to the Israeli government of the names of all its employees in Gaza and the West Bank.

An agency which acts in such a manner seems to be behaving precisely as you might expect and it is difficult to see what more it could do. Particularly as it is operating in a very challenging environment and has had 133 of its staff killed in Gaza since 10/7 as they struggle to support the 85% of the 2.2m Palestinians that have been displaced by the Israeli bombing.

In any circumstances a more appropriate response from our government and that of the US would be to set out their concerns and seek to ensure that a thorough and independent assessment of the allegations is carried out. If it proves to be true that 1.5% of UNWRA’s staff have gone rogue but that sensible precautions to avoid this have been taken then it should be a “lessons learned” exercise. UNWRA should set out how it would seek to prevent this in the future. This can never been anything other than best endeavours.

Only if it were to be proved definitively that the leadership of UNWRA were actively engaged in supporting the activities of Hamas should further action be taken.

But of course if UNWRA did not exist it would have to be invented. The needs of the Palestinians will not go away. Israel is not going to support them. Is Britain or America wanting to take on the role themselves?

After some very harsh words there seems to be some drawing back. The US pointing out that the vast bulk of its funding has already been paid to UNWRA. That they have money until the end of February. That the UN Investigation should be carried out in record time. Investigations that normally take months are to be completed in weeks.

It may have started to occur to the US and Britain how this is going to play around the world if relief via UNWRA stops. They will look even more complicit in the destruction of one of the last remaining homelands of the Palestinians. In a changing world this is not just morally indefensible it is diplomatically crazy.

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“so it goes.”

In Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut’s character, Billy Pilgrim, uses the phrase “so it goes” every time he comes across a dead body. The repetition of the simple phrase tallies the fatalities of war and illustrates how people become desensitised to death. In Gaza death must now be so familiar that people are becoming numbed by its occurrence.

For most of us the loss of a family member is a shock and source of deep sadness. Particularly intense if it is a child. How does one cope when 10 members of your family have been killed in an instant, including brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers? Worse, when the cause of that sudden loss continues to threaten your own existence.

For those removed from the conflict the rolling news coverage first shocks, then disgusts and then it risks becoming sedimented, “so it goes.”

I have no doubt that the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, is working hard to mitigate the actions of the Israeli government in Gaza, the West Bank, and now Lebanon. War in the Middle East would be a disaster for the global economy and for US interests. Not great in an election year.

One detects an increasingly frustrated tone in his comments about the need to protect civilians and focus on the future when Israel ends the war against Hamas. Particularly in view of the fact that Prime Minister Netanyahu not only ignores Blinken but as much as tells him that he will be ignoring him.

Prime Minister Netanyahu may be happy to risk a regional conflict. He may conclude that Israel has previously benefited at the expense of the Palestinians in such events. However, the world is a different place to what it was in the 1940s and 1960s. Prime Minister Netanyahu may be in danger of overplaying his hand.

At the moment there are two players only who can stop what is happening in Gaza. One is Israel. A right-wing prime minister held hostage from the extreme right in a country where many ordinary Jews feel properly aggrieved at the murderous events of 10/7, does not look like a place to find compromise.

The only other player is the United States who could apply pressure through the $3bn per annum military aid it provides to Israel. So far Secretary of State Blinken does not appear to have even threatened to use that leverage in public. We don’t know what he might have said privately. But whatever he has said does not seem to have impacted much on the Israeli government’s plan of action.  

As I have said previously, when this does stop, it is very likely to look like an exercise in ethnic cleansing, whatever the intention. Further, it is going to be difficult for the US and the UK to look shocked and surprised at what has happened. Their credibility in future negotiations with Arab partners after the bombs stop will at best be threadbare.

However much the Palestinians in the West Bank are chased around the strip by bombing campaigns, at the end of the day, they are still going to be there. That reality should be front and centre of any government’s thinking about long term security and screams the need for significant compromise by Israel if they want peace.

Apart from a brief humanitarian pause to secure the release of some of the hostages abducted by Hamas there has been a pretty much continuous campaign of bombing in Gaza. From the start there have been civilian casualties.

On 10/7 around 2,300 Israeli civilians were killed, “so it goes”. Some 240 Israelis, mainly civilians, were abducted, some of whom have since been killed, “so it goes”.  More than 250 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank, “so it goes”. Palestinian deaths in Gaza are well in excess of 20,000, “so it goes.” Of the 20,000 killed, around half have been children, “so it goes”.

The scale of death in Palestine is mind numbing. In three months roughly twice as many civilians have been killed in the Palestinian territories than in Ukraine during almost two years of war, 10,000 Ukrainians, 20,000 Palestinians.

In neither case should we, or more particularly our political leaders, succumb to the dehumanised response, “so it goes”.

However powerful the justification for Israel taking action against Hamas originally, the scale of civilian deaths has undermined the moral force and validity of its campaign. Increasingly the reference back to 10/7 looks more like a rationalisation for something altogether different to a war against Hamas.

If there is no material action taken to apply pressure on Israel to curtail its programme of mass destruction in Gaza there will be no excuses for those that failed to act. The fundamental moral position they have taken will be captured in three words, “so it goes.”