The right of return of Palestinian refugees, Israel's eternal reproach to the UN agency

“We must make sure they never come back.”

Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion wrote that phrase in his diary on July 18, 1948, two months after proclaiming the creation of Israel.

“They” were the 700,000 Palestinians—more than half of the native population—expelled or forced into exodus for fear of massacres by Zionist militias.

That collective wound baptized by the Palestinians as Nakba (catastrophe) is inseparable from the history of Israel.

Also from the creation, in 1949, of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), the humanitarian aid agency for these Palestinians, which eventually became the repository of the memory of her exile.

Their records, their photographic archive, the certificates that accredit refugees as such, are the passport that should guarantee them a right that the United Nations recognized in 1948 and that Israel denies them: that of returning to what is now Israeli territory and recovering their properties, or be compensated.

Of those 700,000 refugees registered by the UN, few remain, but among those still living and their descendants there are 5.9 million people registered by UNRWA in Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan.

Their return to Israel would leave the Jews in a minority and would compromise its character as a “nation-state of the Jewish people,” a “threat to the very existence of that State” in the eyes of that country, describes the Mexican specialist in the agency of the UN Julieta Espín Ocampo.

This professor at the European University of Madrid believes that one of the reasons why Israel has accused a dozen of the organization's 31,000 employees of having participated in the Hamas attack on October 7 refers to UNRWA's connection with the right of return.

Israel has not offered concrete evidence of this alleged involvement in the attack in which 1,200 people died.

Even so, 16 countries—including its two main donors: the United States and Germany—have suspended funding to the UN agency, jeopardizing the humanitarian aid it provides.

Above all, what it offers in Gaza, where 85% of a population on the verge of famine due to the total Israeli blockade is displaced by the war.

Israeli attacks on the Palestinian enclave have killed more than 28,000 people, according to credible Hamas government data, and Gazans are now more dependent than ever on UNRWA assistance.

And their shelter, since the agency's facilities have welcomed 1.7 million displaced people since the start of the war, out of a total population of 2.3 million, according to its data.

154 of its workers appear on the death lists of this war.

Loubnah Shomali, advocacy officer in Ramallah (West Bank) of the Resource Center for the Rights of Palestinian Refugees and their Residency (Badil), an NGO with consultative status at the United Nations, agrees that the attacks that Israel has been directing for years against this humanitarian agency serve several objectives that the Gaza war has accentuated.

The first, ending UNRWA humanitarian aid “to expel the Palestinians from the enclave” and annex it to Israel.

That country, he says, is “creating what in international law is known as a coercive environment: without food, without water, without medical care, without electricity and without shelter, you either stay and die, or you leave.”

Another of these goals is to “eliminate the right of return” of 5.9 million Palestinian refugees.

“The very existence of the agency, that its mandate is to provide such assistance to Palestinian refugees, is a threat to Israel's narrative and its insistence that Palestinian refugees do not exist.

And if there are no refugees, there is no right of return,” says Shomali.

A tweet from Israeli government spokesperson Eylon Levy on February 1 equated the right of return with “an unlimited right of Palestinian immigration (for 5.9 million people).”

Israeli laws provide for a practically unlimited right to emigrate to Israel, but not for those Palestinians, but for Jews of any nationality.

Three days later, Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz stated in another tweet: “UNRWA, involved with Hamas' terrorist activities in Gaza, perpetuates the false narrative that Palestinian 'refugees' need to return to Israel.

We are actively working to disengage UNRWA from Gaza.

“They are part of the problem and not the solution.”

Last Wednesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu again accused the agency in a speech to the nation of “perpetuating the Palestinian refugee problem.”

UNRWA, entangled with Hamas's terrorist activities in Gaza, perpetuates the false narrative of Palestinian 'refugees' needing to return to Israel.

We are actively working to disengage @UNRWA from Gaza.

They are part of the problem and not part of the solution.

— ישראל כ”ץ Israel Katz (@Israel_katz) February 4, 2024

The UN organization does not include in its mandate favoring the return of Palestinian refugees to their land, but in the text of resolution 302 of 1949 that created it, another resolution is mentioned, 194, which established the right to return.

The agency provides emergency humanitarian assistance to more than 1.5 million Palestinian refugees in Gaza.

Of the almost half a million refugee children who attend its more than 700 schools, almost 300,000 studied in the Strip before the war.

These enormous figures are again explained by the Nakba: those million and a half Gazans, of the 2.3 million inhabitants of the enclave, are refugees.

UNRWA assists and provides education, health, microcredit and other aid, including to the 4.4 million refugees in the West Bank, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, according to its data.

“UNRWA, a UN agency dedicated to Palestinian refugees, remembers why they remain refugees, why they are not allowed to return and that the State of Israel is a colonial and exclusivist project that gives all rights to people Jews and that, however, takes away the Palestinians' right to live on their land.

The term refugee itself reminds Israel of how its State was created in 1948: the Nakba.

That is their Pandora's box,” analyzes historian Jorge Ramos Tolosa, author of several books on Palestine and Israel and professor at the University of Valencia.

Isaías Barreñada, a professor at the Complutense University and also an expert on the Middle East, points out that Israel “is trying to strangle UNRWA so that it cannot fulfill its mandate and is doomed to disappear, thinking in a somewhat simplistic way that with that the refugee question disappears.”

Forgot

“The old will die;

the young will forget,” Ben Gurion is believed to have said about the Nakba.

The Israeli prime minister did not seem to count on the strong Palestinian identity, on the determination of the refugees to return, nor on the fact that “involuntarily”, the UN refugee agency would contribute to the memory and construction of Palestinian nationalism, emphasizes Espín Ocampo, who dedicated his doctoral thesis to UNRWA.

“Identity cards, ration cards, health services, but, above all, the refugee camps [58, in which 1.5 million refugees still live] and the educational system offered by UNRWA had a profound influence on decisive way in the evolution of identity and the consequent Palestinian struggle,” explains an article by this specialist.

Humanitarian aid and jobs in the agency – 95% of its 31,000 employees are refugees – have fixed this population in Gaza, the West Bank and neighboring states and have allowed them not to assimilate with that of their host countries, a purpose repeatedly expressed by Israeli leaders.

For the Mexican professor, Palestinians consider that UNRWA “embodies the commitment of the international community” to their right of return.

Protesters in Madrid hold a drawing of Handala, the iconic character of a refugee child by Palestinian artist Naji al Ali, on January 27 in Madrid.

Pablo Blázquez Domínguez (Getty Images)

In the Israeli wall that encloses the West Bank;

on t-shirts, pendants and banners in the demonstrations for Gaza around the world, an image is lavished: Handala, the character with which the cartoonist Naji al Ali represented the 10-year-old refugee child from the Nakba that he himself was and whose He said it would only grow when the refugees returned to Palestine.

That ragged, barefoot boy who embodies “the bitterness, resistance and dignity” of Palestine, according to an essay by the artist Fayeq Oweis, has become a symbol against injustice and an icon for Palestinians.

Naji al Ali was murdered in London in 1973, believed to have been by an Israeli Mossad double agent.

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