USA News Hub

The United Nations established UNRWA in 1949 in order to serve all of the people displaced during the war that founded the state of Israel. Its mandate originally covered Jewish refugees as well as Muslim and Christian Palestinians (that’s why the name is “Palestine Refugees,” not “Palestinian”). But since 1952, its role has been to serve as a kind of quasi-state for the 750,000 Palestinians who were expelled or fled their homes during the war. Today, UNRWA registers them and their descendants, who now number almost six million; it provides emergency food assistance for about 1.7 million refugees, 70 percent of them in Gaza. It is the U.N.’s oldest continuously running refugee agency.

Politically, UNRWA has been a delicate subject in Washington and Tel Aviv since the second half of the twentieth century. “There’s a long history of Israel being suspicious and apprehensive about UNRWA, because UNRWA was seen as being embedded in the Palestinian refugee setting, and many Israelis felt, rightly or wrongly, that UNRWA was biased against Israel,” said Irfan, the historian. “But I think the point that gets lost in a lot of this, is that for a very long time, much of the Israeli state privately favored UNRWA, for the simple reason that it cheapened the cost of the occupation.”

The current far-right obsession with dismantling UNRWA—both in Israel and the U.S.—began as a fringe position in the early 2000s, when the far right launched a campaign against UNRWA’s schools, which for much of its long lifespan have been the agency’s main focus. In late 2000, a group called Jews for Truth Now took out full-page ads in Israel and America claiming that a textbook “introduced” into the curriculum of the Palestinian Authority—which UNRWA’s schools, which have to teach the curriculum of the host country, would be obligated to use—contained the phrase, “There is no alternative to destroying Israel.”