As the voices demanding democratic freedoms and justice resonate around the Middle East and beyond, British and American relationships with key allies in the region are being critically reassessed by friends and foe alike. The West’s decades-long support for Egypt and Tunisia is raising profound and legitimate questions about its role in support of democracy and individual rights. Likewise, the UK approach to Israel, particularly in relation to the Palestinians, is leading many on the Arab street to ask where Britain will position itself in the emerging Middle Eastern order. Events in Cairo, Benghazi and Tunis have brought the UK to a defining moment. Getting the balance right between national interests on the one hand and justice for all on the other will become an ever more urgent task.
The balance between soft and hard power is key. Stability and security for Britain and her allies remain over-arching goals both at home and abroad. But assuring that these are not achieved at the expense of individual rights, social justice or development, are fundamental to its credibility and, more important, to its security. As hundreds of thousands of politically disenfranchised and economically marginalized youth take to the streets in demand of their rights, Britain has the chance to assume a defining role as champion of the rights of all, including those of the Palestinians.
Here, I believe soft power is of paramount importance. Britain’s generous and long-standing support for human development in the Middle East doesn’t garner many headlines, but its long and consistent role in empowering the most disadvantaged in the world’s most troubled region is something of which the Brits can be proud. In particular, Britain’s work with the UN’s largest humanitarian Agency in the Middle East, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, UNRWA, remains a cornerstone in that endeavour; an endeavour which is also in the interests of Israel.
An often unheralded UN Agency because of its region-specific work, UNRWA has been providing relief and development assistance to millions of Palestine refugees for more than six decades in Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the West Bank. Quietly amid the conflicts and crises of the region the Agency has been improving the lot of the dispossessed and downtrodden. By the mid 1960s, it was educating as many girls as boys in its schools. Over three decades it reduced infant mortality among the refugees from 16 per cent to 2.2 per cent. In 1962 it opened the Middle East’s first vocational training center for women, sending tens of thousands of well qualified women into the job markets ever since. Today the Agency operates 10 vocational training centers across the Middle East, imbuing into many the mindset of entrepreneurialism, creating employment and reducing aid dependency. Its microcredit programme, established in 1991 has provided nearly 200,000 loans worth over $200 million helping 20,000 people achieve the dignity of economic independence.
Today, UNRWA employs over 22,000 education staff in nearly 700 schools for some 500,000 children across the Middle East. Education remains a priority for an Agency committed to providing training and skills to the next generation, ultimately furnishing them with a belief in a prosperous, dignified and peaceful future. It runs extensive primary health facilities social services provide assistance to over a quarter of a million of the region’s most impoverished.
Following an extensive review of foreign aid, the UK government has called into question its assistance to no less than eight UN Agencies. By contrast UK aid to UNRWA, assessed by the Department for International Development, DFID, under a different process, has increased over the last three years, under a special five-year funding agreement. The agency has been rewarded with extra UK funding because it has met impressive performance standards set out by DIFD. Yet UNRWA continually faces financial crises, which constantly threaten to force the agency to reduce its services to millions of the most disadvantaged in the Middle East.
In contrast, just last week, the Chair of the US Foreign Affairs Committee, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen called for UNRWA to be defunded. Nothing could be more dangerous for American interests, for the region or for Israel. Already internationally isolated, Israel would come under huge pressure to fulfill its obligations under international law and provide services to the Palestinian refugees living under occupation. Israelis should be mindful of the risks entailed by the Ros Lehtinen campaign which she is waging, in part, in their name.
Defunding UNRWA is the last thing the Middle East needs right now. At a time of heightened instability in the Middle East, the argument for more consistent, year on year funding to UNRWA has never been more compelling. Indeed, I urge other countries to commit to the kind of long-term funding agreements that Britain has signed with UNRWA. This would free the Agency from time-consuming fund-raising and allow it to dedicate greater effort to the more important task of delivering services such as educating half a million children in the Middle East, inculcating into the next generation in that troubled region a belief in a peaceful, prosperous, stable and dignified future.
As the new Middle Eastern order emerges, the West’s long-standing championship of the human development of Palestine refugees can serve as a counterweight to its better-known history of focusing on security and stability and will allow it to stake a claim to being a nation that supports development and the universal values being so hungrily claimed across the Arab world.
Paul McCann is a freelance journalist and former Spokesman for UNRWA.
