Palestinians fear US cut off future
UN refugee program loses American money
“The reason why the numbers go up is because the people who are responsible for the peace process ... have failed to bring about the resolution of refugee status of these people.” Chris Gunness, spokesman, U.N. Relief and Works Agency
BETHLEHEM, West Bank – Gazing through the window of his family’s modest falafel shop, Samer Sa’ad is deeply worried about his children’s future in the overcrowded Dheisheh refugee camp.
Sa’ad is one of 15,000 Palestinians trying to eke out a living in this 0.2square-mile patch of land. The Trump administration decided to zero out funding for one of their only lifelines: a United Nations program that operates schools, health clinics and other basic assistance programs for Palestinian refugees in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.
“Education, especially here in the camp, is the key to a better future. The schools need funding,” said Sa’ad, the father of three young children. Nearby, dozens of children dodged traffic on the camp’s narrow main road as they made their way home from an elementary school funded by that program, called the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).
Sa’ad said he worries the Trump ad-
ministration will try to dramatically slash the number of Palestinians classified as refugees. Like many Palestinians, Sa’ad hopes to return to the home his family left behind in what is now Israel. The prospect for repatriation – what Palestinians call the “right of return” – is limited to UNRWA-certified refugees.
“I dream of freedom, of an end to the Israeli occupation, but I’m afraid I will never be able to reclaim our home and our land,” Sa’ad told USA TODAY.
In announcing its decision to nix funding, State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said the United States could no longer “shoulder the very disproportionate share of the burden of UNRWA’s costs.” America has historically been the program’s largest donor, providing about $350 million of the agency’s $1 billion-plus annual budget in recent years.
Nauert criticized UNRWA’s mandate to grant refugee status to the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of refugees displaced from Israel during the Arab-Israeli wars in 1948 and 1967. Nauert said the practice creates an “endlessly and exponentially expanding community of entitled beneficiaries.”
UNRWA was established in 1949 after 700,000 Palestinians fled or were forced from their homes during the Arab-Israeli war the year before. The agency was supposed to be temporary – operating only until a peace agreement settled the status of those refugees.
Nearly 70 years later, UNRWA serves 5.4 million Palestinian refugees. Prospects for an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal appear to be bleaker than ever. The Palestinians’ right of return remains one of the biggest obstacles to a resolution – a key demand of the Palestinians and a nonstarter for Israel.
Israeli leaders say a large influx of Palestinians would turn Israel into a Palestinian country, negating the purpose of creating a Jewish state. In a pre-emptive move, the Israeli government passed a “Nation State law” that codifies Israel as the national homeland of the Jewish people.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised the U.S. funding freeze Sept. 2, calling UNRWA a “refugee perpetuation agency.”
UNRWA’s leaders said its mandate dictates how, and how many, people are eligible for the refugee designation. It’s morally right, they argued, that “family unity” is taken into account in trying to help those displaced by conflict, whether in the West Bank or elsewhere.
“Enshrined in the principle of humanity and the international law norm of family unity is the commitment to continue serving communities affected by war until a political solution has been found,” Pierre Krahenbuhl, UNRWA’s commissioner general wrote Sept. 1 in an open letter responding to the Trump administration’s funding decision.
UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness said the growing Palestinian refugee population was not a problem created by the U.N. agency.
“The reason why the numbers go up is because the people who are responsible for the peace process – broadly speaking the international community – have failed to bring about the resolution of refugee status of these people,” he said. “It’s the conflict that perpetuates UNRWA, not UNRWA that perpetuates the conflict.”
Gunness said the Trump administration’s decision has rippled through the refugee camps.
“The sense of shock and foreboding is palpable,” he said. UNRWA has enough money to keep schools running only through the end of September, he said. Several other countries, from Germany to Jordan, scrambled to see whether they could fill the funding gap.
If they can’t, “the consequences for the refugees we serve are catastrophic,” Gunness said. “We will have to stop educating 526,000 children” and cut health care and other services.
Gerald Steinberg, a professor of political science at Bar Ilan University, called UNRWA a “political organization, not a humanitarian one.”
“Repatriation is an option, not a guaranteed right, and both sides have to agree,” Steinberg said. “Yet this is the only narrative UNRWA presents. All other refugees, who are cared for by UNHCR (the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees), lose their refugee status when they become permanent residents or citizens of another country. Not so the Palestinians.”
Steinberg said supporters of the Palestinian right of return “forget that the United Nations created two states: a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Jews accepted it and absorbed hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees forced out of Arab countries. The Arabs rejected it, declared war and became refugees.”
In the Dheisheh refugee camp, Sa’ad was not the only Palestinian trying to keep the dream of returning home alive, despite the latest news.
Yazan Alsaqa, 18, a university student who works in a sandwich shop in Dheisheh, said he doesn’t care whether the United States considers him a refugee.
Walking from behind the sandwich shop counter, where he was putting falafel and hummus into a pita pocket, Alsaqa produced a piece of paper declaring his refugee status.
“My grandfather was a refugee, my parents are refugees, I’m a refugee. No one can say otherwise,” he said.
Hanan Abu Ajemiya, 48, a grocery store owner, was less sanguine.
“I’m worried,” she said. “I want the right of return to my ancestral home in Palestine. I don’t believe I’ll ever be given the chance to return, but I can’t give up hope.”