Halting UNRWA Funding Is Malicious Collective Punishment
The aid cutoff is one of the more malicious and cynical things that Western governments have done since the war started.
Peter Beinart is a bit shocked by the sheer cruelty of the U.S. and European cutoff of funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA):
What does that mean in the midst of this humanitarian cataclysm? UNRWA is currently sheltering 1.2 million displaced people in Gaza, as 90% of people in Gaza have been displaced from their homes. It’s providing health care services to roughly 1 million people in Gaza. It is the lead actor in providing the humanitarian assistance—what little humanitarian assistance there is—that gives people in Gaza the chance that they might eat a bite of food that day, that their children might not die of typhoid or cholera. Probably the single most important institution in standing between people in Gaza and death right now is UNRWA. And the Biden administration is gonna suspend aid to UNRWA at this moment?
The civilian population of Gaza is being deliberately starved to death by the Israeli government, and the U.S. and some of its European allies have rushed to snatch away some of the last crumbs that are available to the starving people. The aid cutoff is one of the more malicious and cynical things that Western governments have done since the war started. In response to allegations that 12 UNRWA staff members participated in the October 7 attack, the Biden administration and several other major donor governments have chosen to inflict collective punishment on more than two million people. Because a handful of people allegedly committed crimes, everyone must suffer. That is unfortunately the Israeli and U.S. approach to Gaza in miniature: the innocent many are forced to pay for the crimes of a guilty few.
Beinart says he sees “a certain amount of evil in the policies” of the Biden administration here. That is putting it mildly. It is bad enough that the U.S. arms and supports the Israeli government while it kills tens of thousands of civilians, displaces millions, and uses starvation as a weapon, but it is even worse to join in strangling the population by shutting off funds for the main source of their last reliable humanitarian assistance. Even if the allegations against these dozen people are true, that is no reason to condemn millions of people to even harsher suffering and death.
The U.N. is pleading with the donor governments to reverse their decisions. The head of UNRWA, Philippe Lazzarini, called the decisions to cut off funding “shocking” and “irresponsible.” He also said, “Palestinians in Gaza did not need this additional collective punishment. This stains all of us.” Humanitarian relief organizations have said much the same. Jan Egeland, the head of the Norwegian Refugee Council said, “Donors, do not starve children for the sins of a few individual aid workers.”
Everyone should be clear that the decision to cut off the funding will mean even more dead innocents than there would have been already. Instead of lifting the siege and working to avert one of the worst man-made famines on record, the U.S. and its allies have chosen to help it along. This is one of the only times in modern history that the world has been warned about a major famine and the main response from many of the world’s wealthiest countries has been to hasten and deepen the famine. If that isn’t evil, what is?
The U.S. and other Western governments have not managed to hold the Israeli government accountable for even one of the many violations of international law that it has committed over the last three and a half months, but when it comes to punishing a humanitarian agency for the crimes of a few staffers in the middle of a famine they couldn’t have been faster. The inhumanity and cruelty of these governments will not be forgotten. It is not lost on most other nations around the world that the International Court of Justice just ruled against Israel and told Israel that it “must take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip,” and then the immediate Western reaction was to kneecap the agency responsible for providing humanitarian assistance to the Palestinians of Gaza.
When the history of the atrocity famine in Gaza is written, it will record that these Western donor governments were accomplices in the crime.
I watched Beinart's video. He's very clearly an earnest and good man. But even while acknowledging Biden's evil policy, it's still not enough for him to withhold his vote from Biden because Trump is worse. So Bienart will knowingly vote for a man whose gratuitous cruelty on a massive scale will kill many thousands of innocents. Beinart will not hold Biden accountable. This is why nothing ever changes, and the rot deepens.
I wish all the other countries of the world would up their game to say, "Hey, US and lapdogs, we don't need your money as a hostage tool. We'll make up double what you've cut." (Too many are debt ridden to do so, I suppose.) Still, this is just so pathetic. One more low in which we sink.