As UNRWA sexual misconduct allegations unfold, the international community decides to punish ordinary Palestinians

Ramona Wadi

Allegations of misconduct at UNRWA are being trumped up to justify cutting its funding [Getty]

Since Donald Trump entered the Oval Office, UNRWA has made headlines on several occasions as Washington moved to cut its funding and undermine its work, but recent allegations of sexual misconduct and alleged misuse of the agency’s funds by the organisation’s top personnel could be just as damaging as the US assault on the organization.

UNRWA is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. In truth, other UN-affiliated organisations have been accused of similar aberrations, but the international community's response to these has been more subdued. 

In January 2019, for example, the World Health Organisation (WHO) was under investigation following allegations of corruption and racism.

Comment: Without waiting for outcome of investigations into alleged misconduct at Palestine's refugee agency, the international community moved to cut its funding, risking further marginalisation of Palestinians, writes Ramona Wadi

Staff from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), the World Food Programme (WPF) and the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) have also been investigated for rape, sexual misconduct and exploitation in recent times.

Yet when it comes to the same kind of violations allegedly perpetrated by the top echelons at UNRWA, the international community has decided to mount a completely different kind of response with unmatched furore.

Without waiting for the outcome of any investigation, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Belgium immediately suspended funding to the organisation, despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees rely on UNRWA for employment and education.

Going further, the US administration, which has persistently lobbied for dismantling UNRWA to eliminate the Palestinian refugee question on behalf of Israel, engaged in outright revisionism, altering its own original hyperbole about the reason for withdrawing funding from the organisation to claim.

According to former US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, these allegations are "exactly why we stopped their funding".

US Special Representative Jason Greenblatt also took to Twitter to express feigned concern over the allegations.

"Palestinians residing in refugee camps deserve much better," he claimed, weeks after the conclusion of the US "peace to prosperity" summit in Bahrain, which sought to lay down the groundwork for holding Palestinians perpetually hostage to humanitarian endeavours.

The UN and its agencies, as representatives  of the international community, have often played a duplicitous role that replicates the corrupt dynamics inherent to world politics, business and power

International hypocrisy

These UNRWA allegations have exposed the international community's true dynamics when it comes to UNRWA and Palestinian refugees.

UNRWA donors have often exalted the agency and the larger entity it belongs to, the UN. Yet the UN and its agencies, as representatives of the international community, have often played a duplicitous role that replicates the corrupt dynamics inherent to world politics, business and power.

Javier Ⓧ@intlibecosoc "Trump envoy Jason Greenblatt calls for dismantling UN Palestinian refugee agency, @UNRWA" @The_NewArab#ImpeachTheMF #WhiteSupremacy #FreePalestine https://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/news/2019/5/22/us-calls-for-dismantling-un-palestinian-refugee-agency … US calls for dismantling UN Palestinian refugee agency The United States has called for dismantling the UN agency, weeks... alaraby.co.uk 1 11:05 AM - May 23, 2019 Twitter Ads info and privacy See Javier Ⓧ's other Tweets

In other words, the international community has always been aware of flawed organisation and corruption in international organisations, but this was largely ignored. That is, until it became expedient to use misconduct allegations as a premise to drag Palestinian rights into a new cycle of exploitation.

UNRWA's particular mandate – to provide humanitarian aid for Palestinian refugees and their descendants – has been routinely portrayed as apolitical. Yet the organisation's structure mirrors that of political entities.

Indeed, it employs politics when it comes to hierarchy and funding, but when it comes to Palestinian rights, these are treated as a purely humanitarian endeavour, in line with what the UN envisaged throughout the decades since Israel established its colonial presence in Palestine.

Moreover, the UN's failure to enforce the Palestinian right of return as per its own resolutions has facilitated the international exploitation of Palestinians, including by its own organisations such as UNRWA.

Today, the Palestinian right of return is rarely brought up as an international concern. Rather, the international community and the UN have prioritised is safeguarding the bureaucracy that creates careers built upon the deprivation of rights.

Hence we have a situation where Palestinians speak of returning, while the UN and UNRWA speak of funding structures that are complicit in preventing Palestinian autonomy.

UNRWA provides necessary basic services which Palestinian refugees would otherwise be deprived of

Cutting off UNRWA punishes Palestinians

Nevertheless, UNRWA provides necessary basic services which Palestinian refugees would otherwise be deprived of.

Withholding funding from the organisation does not put UN bureaucrats in any economic peril. It will mean a capitulation to US and Israeli demands that Palestinian refugees are stripped of their identity and left with even less access to services than they have now.

Instead of punishing Palestinians this way, this recent spotlight on UN agencies must be used to highlight the widespread complicity in ensuring that Palestinians are burdened with the ramifications of power abuse by officials who have given measures of humanitarian aid that do not promote a unified, collective voice for Palestinian refugees.

While there may be slight divergences, Palestinian refugees have, through no will of their own, been forced to remain on the sidelines of organisations and resolutions purporting to protect their rights. In reality, decades of pretence at an international level have resulted in gross abuse of power which is now being exploited by the US and Israel to accelerate their plans to reinvent their definition of who qualifies as a Palestinian refugee.

Unfortunately, the current debate on UNRWA is not serving the purpose to highlight what is at stake. The media focus is repeating the same mistakes which the UN has made ever since it enabled Israel's colonisation of Palestine. It is encouraging the perception of Palestinians as a voiceless appendage to the news, thus further divesting them of their rights.

As a result, the debate on whether or not to fund UNRWA is discussed as an organisational dilemma, which is what Israel and the US are relishing. Less focus on Palestinians – that is, to picture UNRWA in a corrupt vacuum rather than another international hierarchy tarnished by corruption – will consolidate the US-Israeli propaganda aimed at dismantling UNRWA.

Without funding, the organisation’s collapse may be seen as imminent. It is imperative, however, to look beyond and shift focus on the Palestinian refugees. With or without UNRWA, Palestinian refugees have been used by the international community. They have been degraded in an inhumane experiment that pretends to uphold their rights while divesting them of political action.

Depoliticising UNRWA and the current investigations will not help Palestinians

UNRWA and its deficiencies are an international responsibility which must be addressed with one sole aim – that of ensuring Palestinians receive rights beyond basic necessities in order to make the transition from humanitarian recipients to political actors.

Depoliticising UNRWA and the current investigations will not help Palestinians. On the contrary, the politics that present a neutral façade must be called out. Likewise, funding UNRWA must become both a political statement and an obligation.

The US and Israel have been able to campaign for UNRWA’s demise and influence decision-making as regards withholding funding due to an absence of international political commitment towards Palestinian refugees.

By all means, individual and organisational accountability must be established while reflecting on the fact that the allegations point towards rampant and complicit abuse within human rights echelons.

Still, UNRWA must not be painted as the victim. Unlike the Palestinian refugees, UNRWA has a platform from which it can influence public opinion to maintain its structure.

Palestinian refugees, on the other hand, have remained incarcerated by a flawed international system that prioritised colonialism over their political rights. If, in its haste to defund UNRWA, the international community loses sight of this fact, as it probably already has, it is important to state that the manipulation of human rights mandates go far beyond visible or alleged misconduct.

Fixing the problem with UNRWA starts there.

Ramona Wadi is an independent researcher, freelance journalist, book reviewer and blogger specialising in the struggle for memory in Chile and Palestine, colonial violence and the manipulation of international law.

Food Theft as a Form of Cultural Genocide

by LAWRENCE DAVIDSON

Back in 2012 I wrote a short book entitled Cultural Genocide (Rutgers University Press). It looked at four case studies of this phenomenon: the American Indians, Russian treatment of Jews in the 19th century, Chinese assimilation of Tibet, and Israel’s ongoing treatment of the Palestinians. It is an aspect of Palestinian plight that I want to revisit here.

The idea behind cultural genocide is relatively simple—it is the systematic erasure of the culture of indigenous people subject to colonization. The endgame here is that the conquered land will no longer be popularly identified with the culture and traditions of those who were once native to it. Instead, their culture will be replaced by that of the colonizer. The most common way of doing this is to disperse or actually wipe out a good part of the indigenous population, with the resulting trauma causing their culture, at least in its native form, to disappear. However, sometimes the colonizers will appropriate elements of the native culture as their own. This is cultural genocide by theft as well as destruction.

In Cultural Genocide I laid out how the Israelis were attempting to undermine and ultimately destroy Palestinian culture in a seemingly never-ending effort to “Hebraize” the territory now called Israel. Here are some of the techniques employed:

(1) the practice of renaming, which began as early as the 1920s: “With the help of archeologists, geographers and biblical scholars” the Zionists “began to systematically erase Palestine’s Arab history and heritage from what would be Israel’s own official records, maps and histories”;

(2) The physical destruction of Palestinian archeological sites, artifacts, ancient mosques and historic houses to the extent that the Unesco World Heritage office describes the Israeli actions as “crimes against the cultural history of mankind”;

(3) The purposeful looting and subsequent destruction of Palestinian libraries, archives and museums; and

(4) the imposition of literally thousands of regulations designed to make it impossible for Palestinians in occupied territory to express themselves culturally or politically. (For further information, see Cultural Genocide, pp. 77-80.)

Mislabeling Palestinian Cuisine

When I wrote this book in 2012, the issue of the appropriation of native foods as the colonizer’s own did not come up. It was, if you will, “under my radar.” It got on my radar about five years ago, whereupon I began complaining (often to no avail) to supermarkets and restaurants about hummus and falafel being advertised as “Israeli food.”

I was again reminded of the issue by a series of events, most recently, a local catered dinner to raise money for Playgrounds For Palestine. The food was all Palestinian. The well-known chef Anan Zahr reminded us all that “this is a crucial time for the Palestinian people, whose identity and culture are aggressively threatened on a daily basis by the Israeli government. It is so important for us to highlight and showcase the Palestinian cuisine to prevent ongoing food appropriation.”

To “highlight and showcase Palestinian cuisine” here in the West is a difficult task, if only because the effort must overcome a sea of ignorance and indifference. Despite the decades of ongoing conflict that has been grist for the mill of mass media, there are still millions of Americans, and others too, who know little about the cultural genocide of the Palestinians. What resides now in the minds of most people (when they consider the topic at all) is Israel presented to them as a “normal country” periodically threatened by Muslim Arabs. And, just as the Italians eat Italian food, and the French eat French food, the average American assumes that the Israelis eat “Israeli food.”

A good example of this was the controversy sparked by celebrity chef Rachel Ray, who appears on a number of on-line and televised cooking shows. Back in December 2017Ray, who is not Jewish, put out a number of tweets describing “an Israeli nite meal.” The foods she tweeted about included hummus, tabbouleh (“tabouli”), stuffed grape leaves, chicken fried in za’atar and cucumber salad—all of them traditional Palestinian foods.

As the Times of Israel described it, “the posts spurred a cascade of more than1,600 replies, most of them critical.” This is an expression of the fact that Palestinians “see Israeli claims to these foods as just one more form of oppression.” Yousef Munayyer, who directs the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, placed the situation in context: “place names, street names, historical markers have been changed. Forests have literally been planted above our villages, obfuscating the very remnants of our history and the graves of our ancestors. So please understand, when you label this food ‘Israeli’ you’re participating in a broad process of replacement that goes way beyond what is on a plate and is instead about denying Palestinians [to] even have a place at the global table.” He asserted that Ray’s tweets had contributed to “a culture in which Palestinians, as a people, are often told they do not exist.” In other words, by taking Palestinian food and renaming it Israeli, the Zionists perform an act of cultural genocide.

All of this must have left Rachael Ray’s head spinning. She did not directly respond to the consequences of her faux pas but quickly moved on to tweeting about Greek cuisine. As far as I can learn, her mislabeling of Palestinian cuisine as Israeli was largely due to ignorance. She has no particular connections to Israel beyond the fact that she has a friend who goes there and brings her back recipes. She certainly is no hard-core Zionist. For instance, back in 2008 Ray was accused of giving moral support to a “murderous Palestinian jihad,” by appearing in a commercial for Dunkin Donuts wearing a scarf that “looked too much like a keffiyeh.”

The Zionist Response

Zionists and their supporters have a response to these complaints. However, like all their other arguments, they rest on an utter unwillingness to take responsibility for their own collective actions. What they do in this case is talk around the issue, thus avoiding a complete picture. Thus, their principle response, given here by one Alex Kay, goes like this: “Israeli cuisine is a beautiful celebration of Jews from around the world, including 800,000 Jewish Arabs thrown out from Arab countries. In Israel you have Eastern and Western food mixed perfectly. … Palestinians don’t own chopped salad or za’atar.”

It is quite beside the point whether or not Israeli cuisine is “a beautiful celebration of Jews from around the world” or “in Israel you have Eastern and Western food mixed perfectly.” The context for the complaint of food appropriation has nothing to do with the celebration of “Jewishness” or a melding of cuisines. Nor, quite frankly, has it to do with the allegation that 800,000 Jewish Arabs were “thrown out from Arab countries” soon after Israel was founded. This assertion is an exaggerated element of the broader Zionist mantra. Jewish Arabs faced much less hostility in most Arab countries than the Zionists say they did, particularly considering that, at the time, the Zionists had begun to ethnically cleanse Palestinians. However, in every case these Arab Jewish communities faced relentless Zionist pressure to emigrate. And, when they did go to Israel they faced discrimination because of their Arab heritage.

The only pertinent allegation in the Zionist retort is “Palestinians don’t own chopped salad or za’atar.” Yet, within the broader context in which Israel’s appropriation of Palestinian food takes place, the truth is that the Palestinians do “own” these foods—not only historically, but also morally. As noted above, that greater context is one of purposeful destruction of the Palestinian people, and that makes all the difference.

As long as the Israelis practice ethnic cleansing and continue down the road to apartheid state status (as they did with their recent nationality law), their claim on any aspect of Palestinian heritage—be it land or food—is a de facto act of cultural genocide. And, if this form of destructive racism is not to become ever more frequent, every aspect of Zionist appropriation must be fought, right down to the last “Israeli” falafel.

Lawrence Davidson is professor of history at West Chester University in West Chester, PA.

Israel’s occupation was a plan fulfilled

By Ilan Pappe

Palestinian refugees continued to cross into Jordan after the Allenby Bridge
between Jordan and the West Bank had been bombed on 8 June,
the fourth day of the 1967 war. (UNRWA)

In June 1967, I was 12 years old. I recall helping to fill sandbags to fortify the entrance to our home in Haifa in preparation for war. The army was already geared towards war and official Israel terrified its society and supporters around the world, as Zionist leaders did in 1948, with warnings of another Holocaust.

Just recently, I finished writing a book about this period, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories.

Through the work on this book, I realized that the Israeli manipulation of Jewish fear in 1967 was even more cynical than it was in 1948, when the Jewish leadership genuinely could not foresee the results of its decision to ethnically cleanse Palestine.

The cabinet meetings reveal a group of politicians and generals, who ever since 1948 looked for a way of rectifying what they deemed was the gravest mistake of the otherwise triumphant “war of independence”: the decision not to occupy the West Bank.

In 1948, the West Bank had been left in Jordanian hands due to a tacit understanding between the Zionist leadership and the Hashemite Kingdom so eloquently described by historian Avi Shlaim in his book Collusion Across the Jordan.

The occupation lobby

There was a proper lobby in Israel pushing the government at various historical junctures to find a pretext to occupy and annex the West Bank. It was made of ideologues who deemed the West Bank as the heart of the ancient homeland without which it could not survive, and of strategists who firmly believed the Jordan River was a natural bulwark in the way of invading armies from the east.

They nearly had their way twice before 1967. In 1958, the pretext was the possible “radicalization” of Jordan. The US vetoed such an act. In 1960, Israeli threats against Syria and constant frictions in the north created a chain of events that provided another opportunity.

The plot unfolded in 1960, as it would in 1967. The tension in the north led Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser to react by dispatching forces to the Sinai and closing the maritime route to Eilat, which runs up the narrow Gulf of Aqaba.

In 1960, it was Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion who prevented that crisis from developing into a war or a pretext for occupying the West Bank; after masterminding the 1948 expulsion of more than 750,000 Palestinians, he had no desire to incorporate another million and a half into Israel.

A preventable war

Ben-Gurion was ousted from meaningful political life in 1963. In that year, the preparations for a possible occupation of both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were stepped up. Over the next four years, the army prepared detailed plans for the eventual takeover of these territories.

We have no access to the military plans, but we do have access to the legal plans that were drafted from 1963 onwards detailing how to rule the lives of millions of Palestinians: military judges in waiting, legal advisors, military governors and rulers and a firm legal infrastructure to run life from the very moment of occupation. Intelligence on possible resistance and its leaders were properly gathered so that a swift takeover would evolve from the outset of the occupation.

And the moment was not long in coming. The Israeli rhetoric and actions against Syria intensified in 1966 and 1967.

The inevitable next crisis unfolded in May 1967. The Greater Israel lobby, which included most of the army generals and the young Labor Party ministers, was determined not to let that opportunity slip. As with any escalating conflict, there are multiple exit points. Nasser followed in 1967 the same policy he pursued in 1960. He, as well as the Soviet Union, with which he was allied, took seriously the Israeli threats to attack Syria and he wished to reopen the Palestine question.

Alas, as in 1948, Egypt’s war rhetoric did not match its military capacity or preparations. Worse was the situation of King Hussein of Jordan. When Israel assaulted the Egyptian air force on the morning of 5 June 1967, he still hoped that a symbolic retaliation (to which he was committed under his defense agreements with Egypt and Syria) would exonerate him from the allegation of treason and save the West Bank. He was wrong on both counts.

The war was preventable. However, the Israeli military and political elite made sure that every exit point would be blocked and no one would stand in the way of fulfilling the Zionist vision of Judaizing the whole of historic Palestine.

A plan fulfilled

The total collapse of the Arab armies that enabled Israel to get as far as the Suez Canal and nearly occupy Damascus was a bonus the Israelis did not predict. But the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip was a plan fulfilled: it was not the freak outcome of a very successful war.

The takeover plans of previous years enabled Israel to install its military rule over the West Bank and Gaza immediately after the war. The system was already successfully imposed on the Palestinian minority in Israel – those Palestinians who had survived the ethnic cleansing two decades earlier and remained inside the “Jewish state.”

Now the system and the people operating it were transferred to rule a new Palestinian group. The new version was even worse: it was built on the sheer power of the army to control every aspect of life, violating in the process basic human and civil rights.

The means of maintaining this rule have changed, but it is still intact and there is no intention to end its existence.

This year, yet another generation of this evil bureaucracy begins its term in office in operating the system. It has been resisted by the Palestinians, including in the form of the uprisings, or intifadas, that began in 1987 and 2000, and will still be resisted. But the international system has not condemned the occupation sufficiently to bring it to an end.

Joining in the occupation

Immediately after the war, Moshe Dayan, the defense minister, opened the West Bank to Israelis.

We joined in as a family. Our guides were from the “Israel Exploration Society,” founded in 1913 in an attempt to substantiate the Zionist claim for Palestine with archaeological finds.

With such tour guides, you see what allegedly had been there thousands of years ago, but you do not see the present. You gaze at ancient ruins while ignoring the humanity around them. The early Zionists, pre-state, were taken on a similar tour upon their arrival to the “land without people.”

The year 1967 became the closure for 1882, the date of the first Zionist colony in Palestine. But now it was colonization de luxe done by a rich and powerful Jewish state.

The destruction of Qalqilya, the expulsion of the refugees from destroyed camps near Jericho and the ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem were events I only read about later on, although they were visible to us when we marched through the West Bank as an army of tourists “redeeming” our ancient homeland.

The military and political elite in Israel already in June 1967, whether on the left or the right, regarded the West Bank – and some even the Gaza Strip – as an integral part of future Israel. The debate was how to achieve it without incurring international, and in particular American, rebuke, and without granting citizenship to the millions of Palestinians living there.

This is why colonization of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip began very early on, allowing Israel to annex de facto any part of the territories it desired. This annexation was carried out through the confiscation of Palestinian land and, where necessary, expulsions.

Israel’s charades

Two charades unfolded which helped to mesmerize the world and overlook the Israeli strategy on the ground. As a teenager, I partook in the first one and as a young student played an active role in the second.

The first was the charade of an internal debate in Israel between so-called “redeemers” and “custodians,” otherwise known as the divide between the right and the left in Israeli society. The right asserted that the West Bank and Gaza Strip were “redeemed” and should be annexed, the left that they should be in custody until peace is concluded.

Until then, both camps agreed on the “unification of Jerusalem” – a city whose boundaries Israel expanded deep into the West Bank as it settled more territory – as well as on the need to settle the Jordan Valley and to keep the Palestinians under military rule.

As a youngster, like so many in the world who should have known better, I believed genuinely this was an ideological debate on war and peace.

I also bought into the second charade that was manipulated from above: the “peace process.” The main message from Israel was that its actions were temporary, even when it was settling vast areas of the occupied territories, and that its violations of basic human rights were short-term necessities that would stop once peace came.

The process moved nowhere, and when it moved as we saw in 1993 – with the “breakthrough” of the Oslo accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization – it really moved backwards.

However, it provided time and immunity to solidify the strategy of deepening the colonization with irreversible facts on the ground.

Naïve “custodians” like myself were the ones sent abroad to sell the “process.” I was even ready to represent Peace Now, the main extra-parliamentary custodian movement of the left, while pursuing my doctoral studies in the UK (although I was dismissed from the group very early on for meeting openly with PLO representatives in London at a time when it was forbidden).

In fact, these meetings helped me to wake up to the wider historical and ideological contexts of Israel’s actions in 1967 and after.

From abroad, ironically, it was much easier to look directly at the inhumanity and suffering Zionism caused in its century in Palestine. It was a farewell from me to the Israeli Zionist left.

Gentle question

Fifty years on, the Zionist left is unfortunately the force the official international community relies on to bring peace. However, most Israelis have stopped playing the first charade of left and right – each with their own excuse or explanation.

Many of them also believe there is no need anymore to play the second charade. Official Israel is no longer worried about how to avoid international rebuke.

Implementing incremental genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza did not move the powers that be, and the ongoing colonization of the West Bank and the siege of Gaza remain Israel’s best means of fulfilling the vision of a Greater Israel. As long as Israeli leaders face no consequences, they will continue to pursue their vision of a Greater Israel.

If this vision can be implemented through a partition of the West Bank into bantustans – apartheid South Africa-style enclaves where Palestinians are given nominal autonomy but no real control – this is also fine in the eyes of most of the Jewish electorate. (This is why optimistic two-staters can quote again and again the high figure for those in Israel who say they believe in a two-state solution and yet vote mainly for parties that oppose it.)

So why is the world still playing the charade? For regular readers of this publication, the answers are clear and there is no need to repeat them.

But at this moment of commemoration, let us approach those who we deem decent and knowledgeable as friends of ours – those friends and comrades who still talk about the two-state solution, the Israeli “peace camp” and the “peace of the brave” – and gently ask them how long will they play a charade, while the reality of colonization and oppression becomes harsher by the day and can only be stopped when as many people as possible give power to the truth.

The author of numerous books, Ilan Pappe is professor of history and director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter.