Read Palestine

UNRWA

Properties2
tags
aliasesUnited Nations Relief and Works Agency

3 min read

Summary

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency, the international agency for Palestinian refugees whose nonpolitical paternalism, in The Question of Palestine’s account, held Palestinian survival just short of political independence and was partly replaced on a political level by the PLO.

Details

  • The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) is named by Said among the international agencies forming the horizons of Palestinians in exile, with refugee camps in one or another Arab country (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.152 / printed p.131).

  • UNRWA had been set up to help with the specific problem of Palestinian refugees in their main places of exile, although its main goal has always been survival for Palestinians just short of political independence; its policy was in harmony with the annual UN General Assembly resolution calling upon Israel to take back the refugees, issued on neutral humanitarian grounds (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.152-153 / printed p.131-132).

  • Against an explicit national self-consciousness in its Palestinian wards, UNRWA stood, in Said’s account, for a nonpolitical paternalism of doled-out food, clothing, and medical and educational facilities, its charitable concern reducible to sterile figures; Palestinian-staffed UNRWA schools sharpened the disparity between the refugees’ history and their actuality (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.153 / printed p.132).

  • Palestinians who worked in UNRWA were probably important to the shift in Lebanon and Jordan by which Palestinians gradually assumed responsibility for social services, formally completed on a political level with the rise of the Palestine Liberation Organization, even though UNRWA continues its work (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.153-154 / printed p.132-133).

  • Pappe gives UNRWA’s origin in Chapter 11: the UN created a special agency instead of involving the International Refugee Organization, at Israel’s and Zionist organisations’ urging, because the IRO assisted Jewish refugees in Europe and always recommended repatriation first. UNRWA came into being in 1950, not committed to the return Resolution 194 stipulated, but to provide employment, subsidies, more permanent camps, schools and medical centres to approximately one million Palestinian refugees (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.272-273). Palestinian nationalism aimed also at replacing UNRWA as the educating and social/medical provider (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.273).

  • Sitta’s register is built on UNRWA’s records: its refugee columns are headed as the UNRWA record of registered refugees as on 9/4/97, giving 2,919,377 registered refugees for the register’s main-list localities and 474,513 for its extra villages, 3,393,890 combined, carried forward to 3,602,887 registered refugees in 1998 and a total estimate of 4,940,269 including 1,337,382 unregistered (The Palestinian Nakba 1948 — The Register of Depopulated Localities in Palestine, PDF p.1, p.20).

  • In Makdisi, UNRWA’s emergency food assistance in Gaza rose from fewer than 8,000 families in the 1980s to 120,000 families by the mid-1990s as closure was institutionalised; by March 2007 UNRWA and the World Food Programme were providing food to 80 percent of Gaza’s population, UNRWA distributing to 860,000 persons a supplemental package meeting 61% of recommended calorie intake for two months (Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, PDF p.218, p.226, p.228).

  • Its Gaza schools care for 200,000 refugee children; its Gaza director John Ging says children come to school “hungry and unable to concentrate”, and UNRWA reported failure rates of up to 80 percent in some subjects (PDF p.263).

The Palestinian Nakba 1948 — The Register of Depopulated Localities in Palestine, The Question of Palestine, Palestine Liberation Organization, Self-determination

Graph View

Backlinks