UNRWA officials are hitting back after a US proposal to remove the agency’s mandate by calling on countries hosting Palestinian refugees to take over food aid services. The US blames the humanitarian effort for prolonging the refugee issue. While UNRWA says political failures have sustained the issue.
Beto O’Rourke says at a campaign stop in New Hampshire that Israeli human rights violations hurt the U.S. “These truths that we hold so dear — that we are all created equal– ‘all of us’ needs to mean, ‘All of us,’ not relationships of convenience for short term security gains but relationships that allow us to continue to be the example for so much of the rest of the world.”
“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.
Looking back on this year, it is difficult to choose one moment, one tragedy, or one political decision that stands out among the rest. Palestinians witnessed a tumultuous year in 2018, as they saw hundreds killed from the West Bank to Gaza, their rights slowly stripped away inside Israel, and the heart of Palestinian identity, Jerusalem, pushed further out of reach. But as evidenced by the ongoing fight for the rights of refugees in Gaza’s Great March of Return, the fight against expulsion in places Silwan and Khan al-Ahmar, and the fight for equal rights as citizens in Israel, the fight for Palestinian rights continued as well.
The residents of the Shufat Refugee Camp in occupied East Jerusalem were recently surprised to find sanitation workers from Israel’s Jerusalem Municipality, escorted by Israeli border police and garbage trucks, picking up trash in the streets, which is normally the job of UNRWA sanitation workers. The cleanup, was ordered by Jerusalem mayor Nir Barkat as the first step in his plans to “end the refugee lie” and shut down UNRWA operations in Jerusalem completely.
Nidal al-Azza, 50, is a Palestinian activist and leading advocate for Palestinian residency and refugee rights. Al-Azza sat down with Mondoweiss to discuss the current US foreign policy in Israel and Palestine, and the effects of Trump’s political decisions on the Palestinian people, Palestinian leadership, and the future of the Palestinian cause.
The Trump administration’s decision last month to cut $360 million to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) is a purely political decision that has no relevance to the definition of Palestinians as “refugees”, nor to their legal rights.
Just days after Palestinian children returned back to school, the Trump administration announced it would be cutting all funding to UNRWA — the UN agency responsible for providing life saving services to 5 million Palestinian refugees across the Middle East. Mondoweiss spoke with some of those affected, who expressed fears of losing essential services like food assistance, jobs, water, and most importantly, education.
The head of UNRWA pens an open letter to Palestinian refugees and UN staff, condemning the U.S. decision to defund the agency by stating “5.4 million men, women and children who cannot simply be wished away.”
Donald Trump has fully, finally, abandoned America’s commitments to UNRWA. Marilyn Garson worked for UNRWA from 2013-2015, and writes that although UNRWA is no one’s ideal she advocates for the agency because it is vital, and because it is vastly preferable to the alternatives at hand. Garson writes, “UNRWA’s skills are not unique, but not one of them can be quickly replicated or scaled by others – particularly not in Gaza, Syria, or the West Bank. That is UNRWA’s real, underlying strength: it is there. That’s what has made it a straw man target for Donald Trump’s hatred.”