At least a dozen countries, including the US, have suspended funding to the UNRWA, the United Nations agency responsible for delivering aid to Palestinian refugees.
This follows allegations made by Israel that 12 UNRWA employees participated in the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack. The UNRWA responded by dismissing all accused employees and opening an investigation.
While the seriousness of the accusations is clear to all, and the US has been keen to downplay the significance of its pause in funding, the action is not in keeping with precedent.
Western donors did not, for example, defund other UN agencies or peacekeeping operations amid accusations of sexual assault, corruption or complicity in war crimes.
In real terms, the funding cuts to the UNRWA will affect 1.7 million Palestinian refugees in Gaza along with an additional 400,000 Palestinians without refugee status, many of whom benefit from the UNRWA’s infrastructure. Some critics have gone further and said depriving the agency of funds amounts to collective punishment against Palestinians.
Refugee aid, and humanitarian aid more generally, is theoretically meant to be neutral and impartial. But as experts in migration and international relations, we know funding is often used as a foreign policy tool, whereby allies are rewarded and enemies punished. In this context, we believe the cuts in funding for UNRWA fit a wider pattern of politicisation of aid to refugees, particularly Palestinian refugees.
What is UNRWA?
The UNRWA, short for the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, was established two years after about 750,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled from their homes during the months leading up to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 and the subsequent Arab-Israeli war.
Prior to UNRWA’s creation, international and local organisations, many of them religious, provided services to displaced Palestinians. But after surveying the extreme poverty and dire situation pervasive across refugee camps, the UN General Assembly, including all Arab states and Israel, voted to create the UNRWA in 1949.
Since that time, the UNRWA has been the primary aid organization providing food, medical care, schooling, and, in some cases, housing for the 6 million Palestinians living across its five fields: Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, as well as the areas that make up the occupied Palestinian territories: the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The mass displacement of Palestinians, known as the Nakba, or “catastrophe”, occurred prior to the 1951 Refugee Convention, which defined refugees as anyone with a well-founded fear of persecution owing to “events occurring in Europe before January 1, 1951.” Despite a 1967 protocol extending the definition worldwide, Palestinians are still excluded from the primary international system protecting refugees.
While the UNRWA is responsible for providing services to Palestinian refugees, the United Nations also created the UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine in 1948 to seek a long-term political solution and “to facilitate the repatriation, resettlement, and economic and social rehabilitation of the refugees and the payment of compensation.”
As a result, UNRWA does not have a mandate to push for the traditional, durable solutions available in other refugee situations. As it happened, the conciliation commission was active only for a few years and has since been sidelined in favour of the US-brokered peace processes.
Is UNRWA political?
The UNRWA has been subject to political headwinds since its inception, especially during periods of heightened tension between Palestinians and Israelis.
While it is a UN organisation and thus ostensibly apolitical, it has frequently been criticized by Palestinians, Israelis, as well as donor countries, including the United States, for acting politically.
The UNRWA performs statelike functions across its five fields, including education, health, and infrastructure, but it is restricted in its mandate from performing political or security activities.
Initial Palestinian objections to the UNRWA stemmed from the organization’s early focus on the economic integration of refugees into host states.
Although the UNRWA officially adhered to the UN General Assembly’s Resolution 194 that called for the return of Palestine refugees to their homes, UN, UK, and US officials searched for means by which to resettle and integrate Palestinians into host states, viewing this as the favourable political solution to the Palestinian refugee situation and the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In this sense, Palestinians perceived the UNRWA to be both highly political and actively working against their interests.
In later decades, the UNRWA switched its primary focus from jobs to education at the urging of Palestinian refugees. But the UNRWA’s education materials were viewed by Israel as further feeding Palestinian militancy, and the Israeli government insisted on checking and approving all materials in Gaza and the West Bank, which it has occupied since 1967.
While Israel has long been suspicious of the UNRWA’s role in refugee camps and in providing education, the organization’s operation, which is internationally funded, also saves Israel millions of dollars each year in services it would be obliged to deliver as the occupying power.
Since the 1960s, the US—UNRWA's primary donor—and other Western countries have repeatedly expressed their desire to use aid to prevent radicalization among refugees.
In response to the increased presence of armed opposition groups, the US attached a provision to its UNRWA aid in 1970, requiring that
“UNRWA take all possible measures to assure that no part of the United States contribution shall be used to furnish assistance to any refugee who is receiving military training as a member of the so-called Palestine Liberation Army (PLA) or any other guerrilla-type organisation."
UNRWA adheres to this requirement, even publishing an annual list of its employees so that host governments can vet them, but it also employs 30,000 individuals, the vast majority of whom are Palestinian.
Questions over the links of the UNRWA to any militancy have led to the rise of Israeli and international watch groups that document the social media activity of the organization’s large Palestinian staff.
Repeated cuts in funding
The United States has used its money and power within the UN to block criticism of Israel, vetoing at least 45 UN resolutions critical of Israel.
And the latest freeze is not the first time the US has cut funding to UNRWA or other UN agencies in response to issues pertaining to the status of Palestinians.
In 2011, the US cut all funding to UNESCO, the UN agency that provides educational and cultural programs around the world, after the agency voted to admit the state of Palestine as a full member.
The Obama administration defended the move, claiming it was required by a 1990s law to defund any UN body that admitted Palestine as a full member.
But the impact of the action was nonetheless severe. Within just four years, UNESCO was forced to cut its staff in half and roll back its operations. President Donald Trump later withdrew the US completely from UNESCO.
In 2018, the Trump administration paused its US$60 million contribution to the UNRWA. Trump claimed the pause would create political pressure for Palestinians to negotiate. President Joe Biden restarted US contributions to UNRWA in 2021.
Politicisation of refugee aid
Palestinians are not the only group to suffer from the politicisation of refugee funding.
After World War II, states established different international organisations to help refugees but strategically excluded some groups from the refugee definition.
For example, the US funded the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration to help resettle displaced persons after World War II but resisted Soviet pressure to forcibly repatriate Soviet citizens.
The US also created a separate organisation, the precursor to the International Organization for Migration, to circumvent Soviet influence. In many ways, the UNRWA’s existence and the exclusion of Palestinian refugees from the wider refugee regime parallel this dynamic.
Funding for refugees has also been politicised through the earmarking of voluntary contributions to UN agencies. Some agencies receive funding from UN dues, but the UNRWA, alongside the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the International Organisation for Migration, receives the majority of their funding from voluntary contributions from member states.
These contributions can be earmarked for specific activities or locations, leading to donors such as the US or European Union dictating which refugees get aid and which do not. Earmarked contributions amounted to nearly 96% of the UNHCR’s budget, 96% of the IOM’s budget and 74% of UNRWA funding in 2022.
As a result, any cuts to UNRWA funding will affect its ability to service Palestinian refugees in Gaza, especially at a time when so many are facing hunger, disease and displacement as a result of war.
Nicholas R. Micinski, Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, University of Maine and Kelsey Norman, Fellow for the Middle East, Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy, Rice University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.