Australia / Israel Review

On November 12, ABC Radio National’s Steve Cannane made the following claim prior to an interview with Roger Hearn, an official with the UN refugee agency for Palestinians, UNRWA: “He [Hearn] says UNRWA has enough food to feed all of Gaza sitting across the border in Israel, but the Israeli ban on UNRWA operating inside Gaza means it cannot be delivered.”

In the subsequent interview, Hearn never actually says this. That makes sense, because, if he did make such a claim, it would be pretty nuts (Hearn did make some similar claims in a previous Al Jazeera interview). The Israeli legislation does not ban UNRWA from operating in Gaza – though it does end Israeli cooperation with the agency, making operating there much harder. But more importantly, the ban is not yet in effect – it does not start until Jan. 28. So, if UNRWA has enough food inside Israel to feed all Gazans, it has two and a half months to get it into the Strip. 

But, of course, it is not true that it has any such stockpile of food in Israel – and Hearn never claims it does in the interview. He says there are unspecified amounts of food stalled in Egypt and Ashdod, and mentions various barriers to getting it to Gazans, including the new Israeli legislation and other administrative barriers, but also “serious trouble with trucks getting looted once they arrive in Gaza.”

What neither Cannane nor Hearn mention is that there are huge amounts of aid already inside Gaza that are not being distributed. A couple of days before that ABC interview with Hearn, COGAT – Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories – shared a video showing 900 truckloads of aid sitting on the Gazan side of the Kerem Shalom border crossing waiting for aid organisations to collect and distribute it. Some have reportedly sat there for months. So even if UNRWA could get all the aid supposedly stalled in Ashdod into Gaza, it is not at all clear it would then be successfully distributed.

 The truth is the UNRWA situation is the subject of vast amounts of hyperbole like what Australian listeners heard on Radio National on Nov. 12. It is widely implied, or even said, that distributing aid to Gazans is impossible without UNRWA. Yet COGAT records show that UNRWA has distributed only 13% of the aid entering Gaza over recent months, with other agencies distributing far more. What’s more, UNRWA does not appear to be disputing the COGAT figures.

But the UN says UNRWA is the irreplaceable “backbone” of the aid distribution system, and the Israeli decision to cease cooperating with it is unthinkable – and the ABC amplifies this message. 

But I believe some other comments from UN officials more accurately reflect what is going on. 

Philippe Lazzarini, the UNRWA Commissioner-General, said this following the Knesset’s passage of the UNRWA legislation:

The vote by the Israeli Parliament (Knesset) against UNRWA this evening is unprecedented and sets a dangerous precedent. It opposes the UN Charter and violates the State of Israel’s obligations under international law. 

This is the latest in the ongoing campaign to discredit UNRWA and delegitimise its role towards providing human-development assistance and services to Palestine Refugees [emphasis added]. 

Note the comment about a “dangerous precedent” – which comes way before any remark about the effects of the decision on aid delivery. UN officials – and a lot of other people – just cannot bear anyone pointing out the severe flaws of UN agencies because they see the UN as the great hope of humankind. How can they convince humankind of the need to unite through the UN if people point out that key agencies are completely dysfunctional and counter-productive – or even facilitate terrorism? 

The case for dismantling UNRWA on the above grounds is overwhelming. But it remains unthinkable because it would set a “dangerous precedent”.  The UN says UNRWA is in charge of Palestinians, and no one should be allowed to get away with challenging the UN, no matter how dysfunctional or counter-productive a UN agency has become. Thus, the current wave of “UNRWA hysteria”. 

“Sick of the Jews”

In keeping with this column’s effort to call everyone’s attention to the rejectionist, genocidal and racist rhetoric coming out of the “moderate” Palestinian Authority (PA), not just Hamas, it is worth documenting how the PA reacted to the mass, pre-planned attacks by gangs of youths on Israeli football fans in Amsterdam on Nov. 7. 

The PA’s official Foreign Ministry put out a statement (Nov. 8) condemning “the barbaric acts that the fans of one of the racist Israeli football teams carried out in Amsterdam for three consecutive days” and calling on the “the Dutch Government to investigate the [Israeli] hooligans and defend the Palestinians and Arabs in the Netherlands from these Israeli settlers and soldiers, who came to the Netherlands in order to transfer their racist ideas and their crimes to the European capitals.”

That’s right – the gang attacks never happened in the PA’s telling. All violence was by the Israeli football fans – also painted as legitimate targets for violence by labelling them “soldiers and settlers”. 

However, on official PA TV (Nov. 10), Tayseer Nasrallah, a Revolutionary Council member for Fatah, the ruling PA party, seemed to acknowledge that there were attacks on the Israeli fans – but implied this was wonderful. He told the compere: “What happened in the Netherlands two or three days ago is the best proof that the world is sick of the Jews.” Notice he did not even bother to hide that his problem is with “Jews” – not Israelis or “Zionists.”

What’s more, the official Information and Culture Commission of Fatah appeared to agree with Nasrallah that Amsterdam was a wonderful comeuppance to be celebrated. It published a cartoon showing an Islamic star puncturing and deflating a Jewish soccer ball, with the caption, “Amsterdam: A greater act than all the noise that was heard.” [All above quotes from Palestinian Media Watch]