The pointless war against UNRWA

And the cruel delusion of Palestinian return

As I write the Israeli government is threatening to invade the southern Gazan city of Rafah, temporary home to tens of thousands of displaced civilians, having just rescued two October 7^th hostages from a building in the same city. And just about everybody else in the world, including Britain and the US, is urging them not to.

Residents close to the building where the hostages were being held told journalists that they never saw anything amiss, which is what they always say because, frankly, with Hamas running your ‘hood wouldn’t you? Meanwhile you don’t have to accept the Gazan health authority’s figure of civilian deaths (they will never tell you how any of those killed are in fact combatants) to know that definitively non-combatant kids are dying or being maimed every day. Each one is both a tragedy in itself and a foreshadowing of tragedy to come. And four months in, not a sniff of a solution.

UNRWA and Hamas: not a love story

So much we know. But also in the last few days the Israelis have once again implicated the principal aid agency in the area, UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) as having been in some way corrupted by association with Hamas. In this instance it was the discovery in tunnels under the principal UNRWA office in Gaza City – abandoned by UNRWA on October 12^th – of what appeared to have been banks of computers that the Israelis claim were used for Hamas intelligence operations.

In response the commissioner general of UNRWA, Philippe Lazzarini, made a statement saying that the premises had last been inspected a month before the October 7^th and nothing was found, but adding:

UNRWA is a Human development and humanitarian organisation that does not have the military and security expertise nor the capacity to undertake military inspections of what is or might be under its premises. - In the past, whenever suspicious cavity was found close to or under UNRWA premises, protest letters were promptly filed to parties to the conflict, including both the de facto authorities in Gaza (Hamas) and the Israeli authorities.

I can’t vouch for “whenever” but it is certainly true that in 2017 UNRWA reported to the UN having found a tunnel running underneath two boys’ schools run by the agency.

This weekend’s claims follow those made a few weeks ago concerning the participation of UNRWA employees in the massacres and hostage taking of October 7^th. Israel claimed that 13 employees – mostly teachers hired by UNRWA – had either been directly or indirectly involved. One was said to have been traced by his phone to the area of the music festival where so many people were murdered. UNRWA itself subsequently suspended nine of its staff, though a full report remains pending.

The Israeli claims have led to two generic partisan responses. The first (from the Israeli government itself and its most vocal supporters) is that UNRWA is in effect a Hamas tool and cannot be trusted and – by implication - should not be supported by the international community, which currently funds it on a voluntary basis. The second is that the Israeli claims are either false or exaggerated in an effort to discredit an agency that both supports Palestinian refugees and monitors the effects upon them of Israeli actions.

Both partisan responses are wrong for reasons I’ll go into. But even more important the controversy masks a much deeper problem to do with UNRWA’s very existence.  Because at the heart of its function lies a delusion which has been one major factor in the  failure of attempts to find a solution to the conflict in Israel and Palestine. That delusion is the Palestinian Right of Return.