A helpful article on UNRWA, the UN agency that provides services to Palestinian refugees

Sometimes I despair at the total chaos that is Israel/Palestine. It has been reported that there were 12-13 Palestinian men who worked for UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East) that took part in the massacres and abductions on October 7. UNRWA employs about 13,000 Palestinians in Gaza. Josh Marshall, a historian turned political analyst, offers some astute analysis of this revelation here (hint: this revelation is not at all surprising to anyone who knows anything about how UNRWA functions in the Palestinian territories). Writes Marshall,

“Israel relies on and works closely with UNRWA because it’s the only infrastructure for providing basic services to much of the population in the occupied territories, in the West Bank but especially in Gaza. Even on the most cynical reasoning, it helps prevent the kind of social services collapse and breakdown of civil order which makes the occupation much more complicated and deadly.”

It’s worth noting that Western countries fund UNRWA, this UN institution that takes care of the Palestinian refugees who live under the military occupation of the Israeli Defense Force. The U.S. alone gave over $340 million to UNRWA in 2022. Which is good, but also bad. We give Israel $3.8 billion/year to buy weapons made in the U.S., an important caveat (though I was surprised to hear John Mersheimer, UChicago political science professor, say that he doesn’t think the Military Industrial Complex plays a significant role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict). And then we are basically providing Israel with an agency that takes care of the basic needs of millions of Palestinians. At our expense (and the expense of U.K., Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan, among others)! Literally! And figuratively (if you think about our foreign policy interests)! That seems like a very one-sided deal. And, well, it is.

Israel has become a foreign policy liability for the U.S. Most of the world does not support Israel’s indiscriminate killing and collective punishment of civilians in Gaza. Here in the U.S., we could not muster the political courage to tell Israel to stop killing women and children. And the whole world saw us fail. We’re still failing as I write this.

And prior to all of this, a consensus was emerging that Israel is rightly understood as employing an apartheid system. As the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem concludes: “More than 14 million people, roughly half of them Jews and the other half Palestinians, live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea under a single rule. Greater Israel (Gaza, Israel, the West Bank) is under the control of one power, Israel. … [T]he entire area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River is organized under a single principle: advancing and cementing the supremacy of one group – Jews – over another – Palestinians.”

We’ve reached a point where our support for Israel is neither moral, nor strategic. Again, check out Josh Marshall’s concise and insightful comments on UNRWA here.