“We must ensure that they never come back.” Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion wrote this sentence in his diary on July 18, 1948, two months after he announced the founding of Israel. “They” were the 700,000 Palestinians – more than half of the local population – who were expelled or forced to emigrate for fear of massacres by Zionist militias. This collective wound, which Palestinians have dubbed the Nakba (catastrophe), is inextricably linked to Israel's history. Also from the founding in 1949 of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), the humanitarian aid organization for these Palestinians that eventually became the repository of the memory of their exile. Their records, their photo archives, the certificates that identify refugees as such, are the passport that is supposed to guarantee them a right that the United Nations recognized in 1948 and that Israel denies them: the right to return to what is now Israeli territory and theirs To recover property or be compensated.
Of the 700,000 UN-registered refugees, few remain, but those still alive and their descendants include 5.9 million UNRWA-registered people in Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. Their return to Israel would leave Jews in the minority and endanger its character as a “nation-state of the Jewish people,” a “threat to the existence of this state” in the eyes of that country, describes Mexican expert on behalf of the UN Julieta Espín Ocampo. This professor at the European University of Madrid believes that one of the reasons Israel has accused a dozen of the organization's 31,000 employees of involvement in the October 7 Hamas attack is UNRWA's connection to the right of return lies.
Israel has provided no concrete evidence of this alleged involvement in the attack, which left 1,200 people dead. Nevertheless, 16 countries – including the two main donors: the United States and Germany – have stopped funding the UN agency, jeopardizing the humanitarian aid it provides. Especially what it offers in Gaza, where 85% of the population, on the verge of famine due to the total Israeli blockade, has been displaced by the war. According to credible data from the Hamas government, Israeli attacks on the Palestinian enclave have killed more than 28,000 people, and Gazans are now more dependent than ever on UNRWA's assistance. And their shelters, since the agency's facilities have welcomed 1.7 million displaced people out of a total population of 2.3 million since the start of the war, according to its data. 154 of its workers are on the death lists of this war.
Loubnah Shomali, advocacy officer in Ramallah (West Bank) of the Resource Center for the Rights of Palestinian Refugees and their Residence (Badil), an NGO with consultative status at the United Nations, agrees that the attacks Israel has been targeting for years are humanitarian Organization serves several goals that were reinforced by the Gaza war. The first, ending UNRWA humanitarian aid “to drive the Palestinians out of the enclave” and annex it to Israel. This country, he says, “creates what is called in international law a coercive environment: without food, without water, without medical care, without electricity and without shelter, you either stay and die or you leave.” Another goal is “elimination the “right of return” of 5.9 million Palestinian refugees.
“The very existence of the agency, that its mission is to provide such assistance to Palestinian refugees, poses a threat to Israel’s narrative and its insistence that Palestinian refugees do not exist.” And if there are no refugees, there is no right of return says Shomali.
A February 1 tweet from Israeli government spokesman Eylon Levy equated the right of return with “an unlimited right to Palestinian immigration (for 5.9 million people).” Israeli law provides for a virtually unlimited right to emigrate to Israel, although not for these Palestinians, but for Jews of any nationality. Three days later, Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz said in another tweet: “UNRWA, implicated in Hamas' terrorist activities in Gaza, perpetuates the false narrative that Palestinian 'refugees' must return to Israel.” We are actively working to withdraw UNRWA from Gaza. “They are part of the problem and not the solution.” Last Wednesday, in a speech to the nation, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu again accused the agency of “perpetuating the Palestinian refugee problem.”
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UNRWA, which is implicated in Hamas' terrorist activities in Gaza, perpetuates the false narrative that Palestinian “refugees” must return to Israel. We are actively working to resolve ourselves @UNRWA from Gaza. They are part of the problem and not part of the solution.
— ישראל כ“ץ Israel Katz (@Israel_katz) February 4, 2024
The UN agency does not include in its mandate the promotion of the return of Palestinian refugees to its country, but the text of Resolution 302 of 1949, which created it, mentions another resolution, namely 194, which established the right of return . The agency provides emergency humanitarian assistance to more than 1.5 million Palestinian refugees in the Gaza Strip. Of the nearly half a million refugee children who attend the more than 700 schools, almost 300,000 studied in the Gaza Strip before the war. These enormous numbers are again explained by the Nakba: these million and a half Gazans of the enclave's 2.3 million inhabitants are refugees. UNRWA supports and provides education, health, microcredit and other assistance, including to the 4.4 million refugees in the West Bank, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, its data shows.
“UNRWA, a UN agency dedicated to Palestinian refugees, remembers why they remain refugees, why they are not allowed to return and that the State of Israel is a colonial and exclusivist project that gives Jews all the rights, but them “takes away all rights.” the right of Palestinians to live on their land. The term refugee itself reminds Israel of the founding of its state in 1948: the Nakba. This is their Pandora’s box,” analyzes historian Jorge Ramos Tolosa, author of several books on Palestine and Israel and professor at the University of Valencia.
Isaías Barreñada, a professor at Complutense University and an expert on the Middle East, points out that Israel is “trying to strangle UNRWA so that it cannot fulfill its mandate and is doomed,” although he is somewhat concerned about this In simple terms, the refugee question disappears.”
Forget
“The old will die; “The youth will forget,” Ben-Gurion is said to have said of the Nakba. The Israeli prime minister seemed to count neither on the strong Palestinian identity nor on the refugees' determination to return, nor on the fact that the UN refugee agency would “involuntarily” contribute to the memory and construction of Palestinian nationalism, emphasizes Espín Ocampo, who is writing his doctoral thesis dedicated to UNRWA.
“Identity cards, ration cards, health services, but above all refugee camps [58, en los que viven aún 1,5 millones de refugiados] and the education system offered by UNRWA had a decisive influence on the development of identity and the resulting Palestinian struggle,” explains an article by this specialist. Humanitarian aid and jobs at the agency – 95% of its 31,000 employees are refugees – have trapped this population in Gaza, the West Bank and neighboring states and allowed them to fail to assimilate with those of their host countries, a point made repeatedly by Israelis Target leader. For the Mexican professor, Palestinians believe that UNRWA embodies “the commitment of the international community” to their right to return.
Protesters in Madrid hold a drawing of Handala, the iconic figure of a refugee child by Palestinian artist Naji al Ali, in Madrid on January 27. Pablo Blazquez Dominguez (Getty Images)
In the Israeli wall that encloses the West Bank; On T-shirts, pendants and banners at pro-Gaza demonstrations around the world there is one image: Handala, the figure with which the cartoonist Naji al Ali portrayed the 10-year-old refugee child from the Nakba that he himself was and was said it would only grow when the refugees returned to Palestine. This ragged, barefoot boy, who, according to an essay by artist Fayeq Oweis, embodies “the bitterness, resistance and dignity” of Palestine, has become a symbol against injustice and an icon for Palestinians. Naji al Ali was murdered in London in 1973, presumably by an Israeli Mossad double agent.
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