Israel Has History of Friction With U.N. Agency for Palestinians – The New York Times

Source: Israel Has History of Friction With U.N. Agency for Palestinians – The New York Times

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The United Nations Relief and Works Agency, known as UNRWA, is one of the oldest U.N. agencies, founded in 1949 to care for Palestinian Arabs who had fled or been forced from their homes during the wars surrounding the creation of the state of Israel in the late 1940s. When a separate U.N. agency was later founded for refugees of other conflicts, UNRWA remained independent.

To Palestinians and their supporters, the group remains an essential lifeline for millions of descendants of those refugees, whose status and future have never been resolved in negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian leaders. It is one of the largest employers in Gaza, with 13,000 people, mostly Palestinians, on staff.

Many of them live in underdeveloped urban neighborhoods — still known as refugee camps — in cities across the Middle East. In Gaza, they form the majority of the population, and UNRWA plays a pivotal role in providing them with education, social services and — during the current war — aid and shelter.

“Because their plight as refugees has never been resolved, they continue to be refugees,” said Chris Gunness, a former spokesman for UNRWA.

“These are some of the most vulnerable people in the Middle East,” he said. “They badly need a U.N agency that will provide them with emergency and humanitarian services.”

For Israel, however, the group and its advocacy are an obstacle to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Many Palestinians want the refugees to return to their former homes in what is now Israel. Israel fears such a migration would undermine Israel’s Jewish character. Israelis say that UNRWA’s existence separate from the wider U.N. refugee protection system prevents them from properly setting down roots elsewhere in the Middle East.

“UNRWA became a central mechanism in keeping a permanent question mark over the existence of a Jewish state,” said Einat Wilf, the co-author of a book about UNRWA. The organization helps to foster “a nationalism that is singularly focused on the idea of return and revenge,” she added.

That wider dispute forms the backdrop to regular clashes over what UNRWA schools teach their students and UNRWA’s relationship with Hamas.

Israel says UNRWA’s school curriculums foster opposition to Israel’s existence, a claim dismissed by UNRWA, and accuses the group of falling under Hamas’s influence.