JERUSALEM – A decision to end all U.S. funding for the United Nations program aiding millions of Palestinian refugees will not bring an end to their belief in their “right to return” to land now part of Israel, Palestinians said on Friday.
The Trump administration is expected to announce in the coming weeks that it is stopping its more than $1 billion contribution to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA, a U.S. official told The Washington Post this week.
The administration will also call for a reduction in the number of Palestinians and their descendants officially recognized as refugees from the more than 5 million who are counted today to the few hundred thousand who were alive when the agency was created seven decades ago, the official said.
The pullback is part of the administration’s efforts to recalculate U.S. foreign aid spending. It is also a response, in the words of U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, to continued Palestinian hostility toward America, which has intensified in the wake of a number of U.S. policy changes they deem pro-Israeli.
The United States, meanwhile, is preparing to present its new peace plan for the Israelis and Palestinians.
The Palestinians, who remain angry over a decision by Trump to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and transfer its embassy there, said Friday that cutting funding and redefining refugee status would have little impact on their right to return to the land they lost when Israel was created in 1948.
“It is only the U.N. that is entitled to give legal status or a description of refugees, and not individual countries,” said Ghassan Khatib, vice president for development and communications at Birzeit University, near the West Bank town of Ramallah.
“The U.N. has defined the Palestinians as refugees and they have their own statistics, the change in the American position will not have an impact on the international understanding of refugees, unless other countries follow suit,” he said.
Losing the U.S. funding for the refugee program, however, would be hard on Palestinians, he admitted.
UNRWA currently provides aid, mostly in the form of education, health care, food security and other essentials to some 800,000 Palestinians registered as refugees in the West Bank, 1.3 million people in the Gaza Strip, as well as 534,000 in Syria, 464,000 in Lebanon and 2 million in Jordan. Its budget in 2017 was more than $1.1 billion, of which a third came from the United States.
Early this year, however, the Trump administration announced it was slashing its scheduled payment of $130 million to $65 million. Now, under the new decision, even that sum is in doubt. Additionally, the State Department said last week that a separate $200 million slated for the Palestinian Authority would be “redirected” elsewhere.
In Gaza, Amal Khalil, a 53-year-old widow, is worried. She has relied on aid from UNRWA to feed herself and her family for many years.
“It has already been reduced more than once, I do not know that it will be further reduced or stopped completely,” she said Friday.
Adnan Abu Hasna, a spokesman for UNRWA in Gaza, told a local radio station on Friday morning that if funds to the organization were suddenly stopped then the entire education system was in danger of collapsing. He said the current funds would likely only last till the end of next month.
Just a month ago UNRWA said it was forced to fire more than 250 employees in Gaza and the West Bank and move 580 people to part-time contracts because of the budget cut. Overall, the U.S. withdrawal from agency is said to have been left it with a deficit of $217 million.
On Friday, as it grew clear that the United States would cut its funding completely, some countries said they would increase their contributions with Germany and Japan pledging to up their contribution. German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said, however, that it was unlikely the increase would cover the hole left by the U.S. withdrawal.
The agency’s now uncertain future has left Israelis in a quandary, with members of the security establishment expressing concern over a total collapse of Palestinian society infrastructure and what might replace UNRWA if it now crumbles.
“In Gaza, I am especially concerned that Hamas will take over, which is worrying because even at kindergarten level they educate their young to hate Israel and not to accept any form of peace,” said Amos Gilad, a former director of the political security staff at Israel’s Defense Ministry and current head of the Institute for Policy and Strategy at the Interdisciplinary center in Herzliya.
“UNRWA is also negative but everything is relative,” he said.
But Einat Wilf, a former Israeli parliamentarian and co-author of a book on the subject, said she would be happy to see the end of UNRWA, which she said was the number one obstacle to peace.
“Israeli governments have traditionally viewed UNRWA as a moderating force among Palestinians, the lesser of two evils,” said Wilf. “But, in my opinion, UNRWA has allowed the Palestinian national identity to coalesce around the right to return and the undoing of Israel.”
But Ahmad Abu Irtema, an organizer of Great Return March that has been taking place at the border fence between Israel and Gaza since late March, said Friday “the right of return is a permanent right and is not affected by outside decisions.”
“It is a legal and moral right based on the U.N. resolution, and it is a national right of the Palestinian people,” he said.
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