Last week, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs released statistics ahead of the new year that showed a 69 percent increase in settler attacks on Palestinians in 2018 compared to 2017. OCHA recorded 265 incidents in which Israeli residents of the West Bank allegedly targeted Palestinians or their property. In total, 115 Palestinians were injured in those attacks and 7,900 trees and 540 vehicles were destroyed.
In late December, dozens of humanitarian organizations, businesses, educational institutions, and local municipalities across the West Bank and Gaza were faced with a harsh reality: grants they had been promised for 2019 from USAID, one of the largest and most important humanitarian agencies in the region, would not be coming. The decision to shut down USAID in the West Bank and Gaza is the latest in a series of efforts by the Trump administration to force Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority to the negotiating table.
“What new year are you talking about bro?” said Samar Al-Atrash, 33, a mother of seven children living in a Gaza refugee camp on December 31, 2018. “You need a wizard’s wand to change this misery.” Much of Gaza is impoverished, but conditions are even worse in the camp.
According to multiple reports, in early September the Trump administration will issue a report recognizing no more than half a million Palestinian refugees, will reject any right of return, and ominously will ask Israel to ‘reconsider’ UNRWA’s mandate to operate in the West Bank. Marilyn Garson writes, “Trump and those around him have spent the year trying to obviate – rather than solve – Palestinian claims. Now they wish to deny the refugee status of 90% of Palestinians. If Trump has his way, only a few elderly refugees will remain. The Right of Return will be moot. It would not exist now, he says, if UNRWA didn’t keep it alive. He will make the right disappear by de-funding UNRWA and de-registering its five million phantom refugees. The realization of Palestinian rights may be a marathon, but right now, it is also a sprint. The race is on, to be made to vanish or to be seen and heard.”
Israa M. Khater on her visit to the Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon: “My nation has been reduced to human trash. We are simply meant to be sustained, contained, but never returned. So comes the international aid, a humanitarian initiative by no other than those who stripped us of everything we owned. It comes preconditioned on our admission of defeat, on our acceptance of what cannot be logically accepted. Can one be grateful to what amounts to nothing compared to what has been lost?”
Amena El-Ashkar, a Palestinian refugee from Lebanon, will speak on the Nakba Tour at events across the U.S. and Canada this fall alongside Khawla Hammad, a survivor of the Nakba who was “16-years-old when she last lived in Palestine. That was 1948, when the Zionist militias drove her out along with her family and more than half the Palestinian population in Palestine. Since then, she has lived as a refugee in Lebanon, with no citizenship in any country, and few rights.”
“For sale: Gazan passport, never used.” If you had to sum up life in six words, what would you write? Here’s what Palestinian refugees in Gaza and Lebanon are saying.
In Tikkun, Peter Beinart struggles to make Israel both Jewish and democratic without affecting Palestinians: Lerner: Would…