Benjamin Netanyahu sat down for his regular cabinet meeting and had some words for a new ally – and an old enemy.
“Last week I met with US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley,” the Israeli prime minister told his colleagues. “I thanked her, on your behalf as well, for her decisive words in favor of the state of Israel – and against the anti-Israel obsession at the UN.”
“It is time UNRWA be dismantled,” he declared.
It was June 2017: the beginning of Donald Trump’s presidency. The possibilities for Netanyahu – who once bunked in the childhood bed of Trump’s son-in-law – seemed endless. In a few months, the American president would buck decades of foreign policy precedent and move his country’s embassy to the disputed city of Jerusalem.
In the case of UNRWA – the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees – Netanyahu would not get his wish so quickly. It would take another eight years.
The Israeli parliament, or Knesset, on Monday voted through legislation to ban UNRWA from Israel and prohibit any contact between it and Israeli officials. The two laws do not mean the immediate end of the agency. Nor do they technically prevent it from working in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza. But given the near-inextricable link between the agency’s ability to function there and the Israeli authorities, they almost certainly mean the end of UNRWA’s operation as we know it.
There are as many opinions on why UNRWA, which provides services and aid to millions of Palestinians across the Middle East, was banned as there are people to ask.
Many point to allegations by the Israel Defense Forces that a handful of UNRWA’s 13,000 employees in Gaza participated in the October 7 massacre, which saw 1,200 people killed and around 250 taken hostage. In a country still reeling from the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust, this has been a potent and impossible to ignore argument against UNRWA.
Others see the move as another step in the erosion of Palestinian rights and the removal of their distant but long-promised right to return to the villages, now in Israel, from which they and their ancestors were violently evicted when the Jewish state was created in 1948.
In any case, the head of UNRWA has said that the legislation “will only deepen the suffering of Palestinians, especially in Gaza where people have been going through more than a year of sheer hell.”
‘Low-hanging fruit’
Boaz Bismuth, a Likud member of Knesset, wrote one of the two bills to ban UNRWA, which passed 92 to 10. In the wake of October 7, he believed that dismantling the agency was urgent.
“I did not see December ’49,” when UNRWA was created, he insisted. Nor, he said, was he motivated by the claim that UNRWA perpetuates Palestinian refugee status. “All this is totally irrelevant for me. What was relevant for me in my bill was the fact that they participated on the 7th of October massacre, and this is why they will not work in Israel anymore.”
The Israeli government in January said that 12 UNRWA staff members in Gaza had participated in the Hamas-led attack on Israel, and later added more to that list. The agency immediately fired most of the individuals concerned. A UN investigation found that nine employees “may have” been involved in the October 7 attack.
The Washington Post in February obtained CCTV footage from Kibbutz Be’eri on October, which it said showed one of the UNRWA employees accused by Israel of involvement, carrying the corpse of an Israeli man killed by Hamas militants.
UNRWA to this day maintains that Israel never provided it with evidence against its former employees. The agency says it had regularly provided Israel with a full list of its staff members, and has accused Israel of detaining and torturing some of its staffers, coercing them into making false confessions about ties to Hamas.
But Bismuth said that “for me, UNRWA equals Hamas” – and his view is widespread in Israel. In a country where Netanyahu is politically ascendant against the odds, supporting his party’s legislation was plain old good politics.
“UNRWA was low-hanging fruit for this Israeli government,” said Aaron David Miller, a longtime American policymaker in the Middle East who was a key player in the last serious round of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, in 2000.
A long history
UNRWA is nearly as old as Israel itself. The violence surrounding the creation of Israel in 1948 displaced close to a million Arabs from their homes in what had been British-mandate Palestine – an event Palestinians call the Nakba, or “catastrophe.”
The UN General Assembly, which had consented to Israel’s creation, declared that all the displaced Arabs should be allowed to return “at the earliest practicable date.” A year later, it created UNRWA “to prevent conditions of starvation and distress.”
To Israelis, UNRWA is an anachronism that represents the unrealistic and distant dream of millions of Palestinians to return to their homes in what is now Israel. That is what Netanyahu means when he says the agency “perpetuates the Palestinian refugee problem.” Philippe Lazzarini, the Swiss commissioner-general of UNRWA, has made clear that even if his agency were dissolved, it “will not strip the Palestinians from their refugee status.”
Israelis have long accused UNRWA of perpetuating anti-Israel ideology in schools they run. A UN-commissioned inquiry found that examples in textbooks of anti-Israel bias were “marginal” but nonetheless constituted “a grave violation of neutrality.”
Israeli leaders believe that Palestinians do not deserve their own refugee agency and should permanently resettle where they now live – assisted, if need be, by the agency responsible for all other refugees in the world, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR.
“What makes Palestinian refugees different is that they’re not seeking refuge in a third country,” said Diana Buttu, a Palestinian human rights lawyer. “They want to go home.”
‘What more do they want?’
Saleh Shunnar, displaced from his home in Gaza by the year-long war, knows what it means to be a refugee.
“Israel has always wanted to do this,” he said, speaking from a tent encampment in Deir Al-Balah, in central Gaza. “If they shut down UNRWA, that means there is no Palestinian refugee cause. They took away the Palestinian cause.”
Those fears run deep for many Palestinians. But concerns about the impact on so-called final status negotiations are “tethered to a galaxy far, far away, rather than to the realities back here on planet earth,” said Miller, the former American negotiator.
“I can understand why the Palestinians would regard this as a systematic first step to undermine the right of return,” he said. But the issues facing any negotiations over a Palestinian state are so numerous and so fraught that the right of return is far down the long list of obstacles, he said.
That is particularly the case when so many Palestinians face an imminent humanitarian catastrophe.
“These are the simplest of needs,” Deir Al-Balah resident Ghalia Abd Abu Amra said of the aid she receives. “What more do they want to take from us than what they already have? Our homes are gone, now they want to take UNRWA too?”
The massive tent camps for internally displaced Gazans have steadily become entrenched. Cloth walls become tarpaulin. Mud floors are replaced with wood. This transformation has been happening for decades across the 58 refugee camps run by UNRWA in the Palestinian territories and elsewhere in the region, as tent camps became residential blocks.
For millions of Palestinians, UNRWA functions as a parallel government. It is a vast organization that provides services that governments – whether in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Gaza, or the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem – are unable or unwilling to provide. It educates half a million students. It employs 3,000 medical professionals. It helps feed nearly two million people.
“UNRWA has saved Israeli taxpayers billions of dollars over the last 57 years,” said Chris Sidoti, an Australian human rights lawyer who sits on the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory. “Israel, as the occupying power under the fourth Geneva Convention, is responsible for the care, protection, and the provision of services to persons under occupation.”
“The international community has been doing that by its financial support for UNRWA,” he told journalists in New York. “So if UNRWA is kicked out, the cost for the Israeli taxpayer is going to be ginormous. So this is a decision that is bad for the Palestinians and ridiculous for Israeli taxpayers.”
Bismuth, the Knesset member who authored the UNRWA legislation, said that Israel would step in.
“You will not have a vacuum,” he said. “I feel good with my bill. Because all the services that they got – not only will they continue to get it, but we will even upgrade it.”
Indeed, UNRWA’s benefit to Israel had long been recognized by those in the government responsible for Palestinian affairs, said Nadav Tamir, a former diplomat who now serves as executive director of J Street Israel, a left-wing lobby group. He characterized their view as: “‘Of course UNRWA is problematic, but we don’t have another option, we need someone to take care of the issues.’” Before October 7, he explained, politicians could not overcome the “realpolitik” that UNRWA was an asset in taking a problem off Israel’s plate.
What that will look like remains a mystery to most. Miller is blunt: “Israelis don’t have a long-term solution.” In conversations with UNRWA staff members in the refugee camps around Jerusalem – who asked to remain anonymous because they are not authorized to speak with the media – confusion reigned.
No one knows whether, when the legislation fully go into effect in three months, schools will remain open or medicine will be delivered. Tens of thousands of Palestinians who work for the agency could soon be unemployed.
“Most Israelis don’t really know the facts,” Tamir said. “They don’t really understand that there is no alternative. They think, ‘Oh, we can just bring another organization, or we could somehow do it on our own.’”
Even if the Israeli leadership decides that it can cast aside the moral issue of providing for Palestinian civilians, shutting down services for millions poses a threat for Israel itself.
“It’s a strategic issue that will promote more terrorism and of course all kind of epidemics that are not stopping at the border,” Tamir said. “So people who really know the situation I think are concerned. But most people and most politicians don’t really care about the reality. It’s all about the perception.”
Zeena Saifi, Abeer Salman, Mohammed Al-Sawalhi, and Shira Gemer contributed to this report.