Don’t cry for UNRWA. It helped sustain decades of Israel’s occupation

On the left an image of Palestinian refugees next to a tent in Gaza in 1948 and on the right, Palestinians displaced from their homes from the war in Gaza in 2023, photographed in a tent.

Arnon Degani and Ido Dembin write in Haaretz on 6 March 2024:

On June 6, 1967, only one day into the Six-Day War, Israel was on the cusp of gaining complete control over the Gaza Strip. Moshe Dayan, then Israel’s defense minister, was worried about what to do with the Strip’s civilian population of almost 400,000, most of whom were Palestinian refugees from the 1948 War. How would Israel carry the burden of sustaining so many people?

To resolve this problem, Dayan requested that the Israeli war cabinet empower him to negotiate on Israel’s behalf an arrangement between Israel and the UN that would shape the course of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Almost six decades later, that arrangement is seemingly set to end. He asked “to drive to Gaza now and reach an agreement with [the UN] that they will continue to be responsible for providing for the refugees…If we can achieve that…that UNRWA will continue to take care of the refugees, will be a huge achievement…”

Whereas in 1967, Dayan was seeking that the United Nations Relief and Work Agency carry on its mission to care for all those made refugees by the 1948 war, today, UNRWA is in Israel and the United States’ crosshairs due to the alleged participation of several of its staff in the deadly October 7 attacks in which Hamas terrorists and adjuncts killed almost 1,200 Israeli men, women, and children and sparked the current war.

On a deeper level, in the last decade, a growing number of Israeli pundits began to view UNRWA as no less than an existential threat because its mandate and policies have sustained the Palestinian refugees and their descendants’ demand to return to lands located within Israel’s recognized sovereign borders, a demand known as “the right of return.” Dismantling UNRWA is, therefore, critical to solving the conflict with the Palestinians. This February, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu even incorporated ending UNRWA as a policy point in his short-sighted “day after” policy paper.

But, while the “right of return” could impact Israel’s very existence, we suggest UNRWA might have harmed Israeli interests from a different perspective. That’s because, paradoxically, by becoming the main provider of education, welfare, and other such services for Palestinians, it created a threat to Israel’s existence stemming from the de-facto enabling and facilitating of Israel’s misguided occupation and illegal settlement project for decades.

Within the 1967 Israeli government, there was no one clear vision for the future of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. They ranged from housing refugees in the Sinai peninsula, to building Jewish settlements in sparsely populated areas, to sharing the territories with King Hussein of Jordan, or enacting full annexation with a path to citizenship to its residents, which is what happened in East Jerusalem. All, including Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, supported policies that would “encourage” Palestinian emigration from the West Bank and Gaza.

The exterior of an UNRWA health centre in Gaza damaged during the war in Gaza, an image taken from video released in February 2024

According to Omri Shafer Raviv, an expert on Israel’s early policies in the territories, Dayan had little faith in grand visions and believed that Israel needed one thing more than anything else: time.

On June 15, 1967, a few days after the war ended in a stunning Israeli victory, Dayan paraded in the cabinet meeting his UNRWA agreement as if it were a victory on the battlefield. On the question of what to do with Gaza, he said: “I suggest we not touch Gaza because in Gaza, we have an extraordinarily good arrangement, and I suggest we leave dealing with this to last.”   Yigal Alon, notably Dayan’s political rival, responded, “I agree that concerning Gaza, we have time.”

Time enabled Israel to build an evolving mode of administration for the Occupied Territories and, in particular, the Gaza Strip, which essentially partnered with UNRWA and its international backers. As economist Shir Hever, no supporter of Israeli policies, concluded, “the Israeli government mainly benefits from the burden of responsibility lifted from its shoulders.”As long as aid prevents mass famine in the OPT, the Israeli government can continue to shrug off its responsibility for the wellbeing of the Palestinian population under its effective control.”

Indeed, every dollar spent on refugee education, health, and basic necessities found its way into the Israeli economy. Every sack of rice distributed to a Palestinian refugee family subsidized the low wage of a Palestinian worker and freed some income toward buying Israeli consumer goods. Every paycheck received in dollars by one of the tens of thousands of UNRWA employees had been converted in some way into shekels.

The protocols reveal that Israel’s dependence on UNRWA was no coincidence, but rather it was something Dayan, the occupation’s “architect,” was acutely aware of.

Netanyahu was probably also aware of this when, in 2018, he secretly tried to dissuade the Trump Administration from cutting all funding to UNRWA, citing concern that it would destabilize the Gaza Strip. According to Dr. Einat Wilf, a staunch anti-UNRWA Israeli researcher, Netanyahu’s government was also behind Germany’s increase in contributions to UNRWA designed to offset Trump’s cuts. Netanyahu strove to retain Israeli overall control of the Territories without taking responsibility for the basic human needs of millions or to deal with the consequences of UNRWA’s deficit.

Retaining the Palestinians in a liminal status, under international custodianship, sustained their demand to return to what is today the state of Israel. But these very conditions also enabled their status as stateless people whose right to self-determination can be indefinitely postponed. And this is also the status quo that allowed Israel to defy international law by annexing East Jerusalem and establishing illegal settlements throughout the West Bank. In the balance between undercutting the right of return and propping up the settlements, Israel chose the latter.

In a way, UNRWA is merely the first of several foreign-funded intermediaries that Israel publicly maligned but still leaned on to sustain its status as the sole sovereign between the river and the sea and to continue with its settlements policy, without having to foot the bill. The Palestinian Authority is often the target of Israeli right-wing attacks and yet, the Israeli security establishment considers it a vital partner in containing terrorist activity in the West Bank.

Moreover, even Hamas rule in Gaza, which Netanyahu vowed to collapse in 2009, developed an above-board symbiotic relationship with the subsequent Netanyahu governments. Netanyahu and settler-leader Betzalel Smotrich have explicitly admitted that the propping of Hamas in Gaza with Qatri dollars, allowed Israel to abstain from negotiations and avoid the possibility of a Palestinian state. UNRWA is essentially the foundation upon which Israel built the post-1967 status quo.

On October 7, the status quo may have met its end. The intensity, scale, and brutality of that day, the taking of innocent hostages, and the enraged Israeli reaction led to the destruction of the very infrastructure – schools, hospitals, and distribution facilities – UNRWA uses to service the civilians of Gaza, and seemingly, wore off Israel’s patience and acceptance of UNRWA’s flaws.

We are now seeing a preview of what a post-UNRWA Gaza looks like, and it’s not pretty.

Netanyahu has declared his opposition not only to Hamas’ return but also to any transfer of power to the Palestinian Authority. He does not offer a path to statehood, nor does he express a desire or willingness to take care of the basic needs of the Palestinian population or even a program for dismantling UNRWA, transferring its mandate to any other authority.

Instead, Netanyahu offers Arab countries the “privilege” of funding the reconstruction of Gaza. Seemingly, he wants a return to the status quo ante, also known as the “managing the conflict” policy that he turned into Israel’s indefinite strategy. But if we, Israelis, Palestinians, and the international community, are determined to resolve this conflict, we should take note of the decisions and indecisions that brought us here and ensure we do not repeat the same mistakes.

To end Hamas’ rule in Gaza and protect its citizens, Israel must work with the U.S., the EU, the Arab world, the UN, and, most importantly, the Palestinians themselves – to produce a new strategic vision for the region. This vision must include an independent Palestinian state with effective institutions that could replace the decrepit ones, including UNRWA, that failed miserably.

Arnon Degani is a historian of the Israeli Palestinian Conflict, a fellow at Molad and currently teaching at Lehigh University.  Ido Dembin is the executive director of Molad: The Center for the Renewal of Israeli Democracy, an independent think tank.

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