You’ve probably seen the stories about the UN Agency which allegedly had amongst its employees Hamas operatives who directly participated in the October 7th massacres in southern Israel. The story is both more and less than it seems. The background helps illuminate this as well as much of what we’ve seen over the last three months.
United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) was founded in 1949 to administer refugee camps for the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who had either fled the fighting or were driven out by the Israeli military during both phases of the Israeli War of Independence, what Palestinians call The Nakba. (Most of this happened during the first phase of the war.) There were camps in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. Those camps are still there 75 years later. “Camps” is a misnomer. Over time permanent buildings replaced temporary structures and tents. Schools, hospitals, civic buildings and businesses grew up. They are more like towns, or districts of towns. The vast majority of residents of the camps are third and fourth generation descendants of the original refugees of 1947-48. Under UNRWA’s framework they are also refugees. UNRWA still plays a central role administering these communities — running schools, hospitals, various civil services.
The UN has an entirely different agency for supporting and resettling refugees, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Its mandate covers the entire globe except for Palestine, or rather refugees and descendants of refugees who were living in Mandatory Palestine in 1947-48. Those come under the mandate of UNRWA.
UNRWA’s mandate is also different. Its mandate is to run the camps, not to resettle refugees, as UNHCR does. The logic of this arrangement is that the outcome of the 1948 war is considered unsettled. To put this in slightly different terms there are more than 5 million UNRWA registered Palestinian refugees (including both refugees and descendants of refugees) either living in UNRWA camps or eligible for UNRWA services on the premise that they will one day return to what is now Israel.
UNRWA goes under the label of “the UN.” But that’s really a misnomer. It’s more properly seen as an extra-territorial Palestinian para-state under loose UN oversight and funded by UN member states. What does a state do after all? It runs schools, social services, hospitals. It’s a major supplier of jobs. Those are all what UNRWA does. Its employees are almost all Palestinians. Again, who else would you expect to be working in hospitals and schools in Gaza or in the Palestinian refugee camps in neighboring countries? The point is that UNRWA is a Palestinian entity. As such it’s a cross-section of Palestinian society. Of course it has Hamas sympathizers and operatives among its employees. It would be shocking if it didn’t.
The Israeli intelligence dossier, which led the U.S. and now Japan, Germany, the UK and a list of other governments to suspend payments to UNRWA, says that 23% of male UNRWA employees are affiliated with Hamas versus 15% for the population of Gaza at large. There are various reasons why that number might be higher for UNRWA employees in Gaza. Gaza is or at least was governed by Hamas and since the provision of social services is inherently intertwined with governmental authority it would be unsurprising that Hamas affiliation became tied to or an advantage in employment over 17 years.
Regardless of why this would be the case and assuming it is the case, it doesn’t detract from the basic point: UNRWA is a Palestinian entity and it mirrors, at least broadly, Palestinian society at large. Another point to keep in mind is that when you hear things the “UN” says about the situation in Gaza that almost always means UNRWA. It’s not really “the UN” in whatever sense you interpret that to mean, it’s a Palestinian national entity operating under what amounts to a regional UN franchise.
Israelis have long argued, correctly, that UNRWA’s school curriculum is chock full of incitement to violent resistance against Israel, lots of content that can reasonably be viewed as anti-Semitic and a commitment to the eventual return of refugees and their descendants to Israel proper, something that would pretty much by definition mean the end of the Israeli state. The evidence for this is not even in question. UNRWA’s UN appointed leaders have at various points conceded that this is the case, committed to reforming it without anything happening.
Of course, it’s no surprise that Israel would be against this kind of curriculum. The United Kingdom wasn’t crazy about curricula in the Irish Republic or in nationalist communities in Northern Ireland, let alone communities dominated by the IRA.
All of these things can and are true at once.
And you know what one country won’t cut off cooperation with UNRWA? Israel.
As Anshel Pfeffer explains in this piece in Haaretz, 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. That is especially the case now because it’s the one path to getting food aid into the Gaza Strip. Otherwise the IDF would have to do it.
There’s a very basic question about why it is that the UN and various member states have for 75 years funded an agency whose raison d’etre is keeping an inter-generational population of refugees or refugee descendants in general squalor based on the assumption that their descendants will return to what is now Israel, something that will almost certainly never happen. It makes the broader conflict incalculably difficult to resolve since any Palestinian leaders who try to come to a settlement which doesn’t include a right of return to what is now Israel are immediately branded as traitors to a demand and vision that four generations in the camps have been raised on. In key ways, UNRWA amounts a longterm investment in the irresolvability of the conflict.
This is the argument the Trump administration used to cut off U.S. funding for UNRWA (later restarted under President Biden), one of several goodies Trump handed out to the far-right Zionist pals in his orbit, like formally moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. But the actual effect of the cut off was and is to cut off or reduce basic social services these extraterritorial Palestinian communities rely on for basic health and welfare. There’s the issue in the abstract and the issue in the real world of today in which if you’re a teen living in a refugee camp in Lebanon this is where you get medical care, where you get vaccinations, how your schools are funded. One of the biggest opponents of Trump’s cut off of UNRWA funding was the Israeli national security establishment for the reasons I mentioned above.
As for what I’ve called the question in the abstract, Palestinians would say that of course the Israelis are against this: formally settling the refugees and their descendants in the countries they’ve been living for the better part of a century would solve the Israelis’ problem for them. And they’re right. All of these things can and are true at once. That’s the world we operate in.
Of course, it’s not all or nothing. When the Israelis and Palestinians have come near to negotiating a global settlement, it’s involved a mix of a very limited right of return to Israel proper (often through a framework of family unification), a right of return to a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza and global framework of monetary compensation. The curriculum taught in UNRWA schools is very much all or nothing. But that’s just how aggrieved nationalist communities work. It’s not surprising.
As I said, the UNRWA/Hamas story is both more and less than it seems. The revelations are unsurprising. No diplomats or journalists or aid workers from the region can in any way be surprised by it. But it’s also a window into a complicated story which has made the conflict so difficult to resolve — even when the parties are trying to resolve it, which is only part of the time.