Israel’s Foreign Ministry, headed by Benjamin Netanyahu, is opposed to President Trump’s plan to suspend US funds to the Arabs of Gaza, Judea and Samaria (“But with the Palestinians no longer willing to talk peace, why should we make any of these massive future payments to them?”), according to a Channel 2 News report Saturday night, because the Israelis are concerned about a humanitarian disaster in the refugee camps.
Last week, according to several US media sources, the State Department suspended between $100 and $125 million in funding to UNRWA, which was scheduled to be paid on the first business day in January.
The move was met with sharp criticism from Sen. Patrick Leahy, the ranking Democrat in the Senate Appropriations Committee, who announced: “Only this White House would be so cynical and delusional to think after needlessly inciting the Palestinians’ outrage over Jerusalem, that cutting off aid for Palestinian refugees would force their leaders to negotiate a peace agreement.”
Of course, Leahy could be wrong (an old Arabist, he’s been wrong before), but according to the Channel 2 report, Netanyahu also does not want those funds cut. Instead, he has suggested transferring US funds from the tarnished United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), to the international refugee agency, a.k.a. the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
Should the move result in the termination of UNRWA, it could, for the first time since WW2, revoke the special status of the Arabs residing in refugee camps in Gaza, Judea and Samaria as permanent refugees.
UNRWA has a much broader definition of “refugee” than the UNHCR, including not only the immediate displaced people, but also their descendants in perpetuity.
As such, UNRWA has notoriously been part of the problem rather than the solution, helping to prevent Arabs whose grandparents had left their homes in Israel 70 years ago from seeking economic rehabilitation. This has been Israel’s official view for generations, which could now become US policy.
In a sharp difference from UNRWA, the UNHCR is committed to increasing refugees’ access to livelihood opportunities and reducing dependency on humanitarian aid. The agency is mandated to lead and co-ordinate international action to protect refugees and resolve refugee problems worldwide, with a strong option of resettling in a new country.
Effectively killing UNRWA and replacing it with an organization which has mobility rather than stagnation as its goal could result in an end to a 7-decade tragedy when millions of displaced Arabs have been forced to live as nomads, in order to serve the political goals of their overlords, be them Arab governments who used the refugees to divert attention from their own tyrannical rule, or professional terrorist gangs, such as the PLO and Hamas, whose very existence depends on there being a refugee tragedy.