Jack Gross and Dylan Saba interview Lisa Bhungalia in Phenomenal World: On October 28, the Israeli Knesset voted to shut down the operations of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and to designate it as a terrorist organization. While this drastic attack on the UN was met with widespread condemnation from the international community, it was not wholly unexpected. For decades, Israel has regarded the number one provider of education and humanitarian services to the Palestinians of Gaza with contempt and suspicion. Just earlier this year, in response to still-unsubstantiated Israeli allegations that UNRWA employees took part in the October 7 attacks, the United States led a series of countries in terminating funding to the UN organization.
The month of October marked a sustained escalation of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, with particular brutality inflicted on Palestinians in the northern Strip. Amid scenes of devastation, bound and blindfolded men, and expulsion marches, the sustained deprivation of aid has caused yet more widespread suffering. A letter from the United States issued on October 13 warned of consequences should the Israeli government not increase aid flows into Gaza in the following thirty days. The deadline has passed, with aid at its lowest level in eleven months, and no consequence has been forthcoming.
To understand the relationship of Israel and the US to UNRWA, its place within the broader ecosystem of aid organizations across Palestine, and the weaponization and politicization of aid delivery, we spoke with Lisa Bhungalia, author of the recent book Elastic Empire: Refashioning War Through Aid in Palestine.
The interview, conducted before the Israeli Knesset vote, has been condensed and edited for clarity.
An interview with Lisa Bhungalia
Jack gross: In January, the United States terminated funding to UNRWA. What should we understand about this decision, and its impact on aid provision in occupied Palestine?
lisa bhungalia: Yes, in January the US paused its donations to UNRWA following allegations made by Israel that twelve (this was later increased to nineteen) UNRWA employees, out of roughly 30,000 UNRWA staff, had links to October 7. Even as Israel failed to provide credible evidence to substantiate its allegations, the United States, alongside fifteen other countries, suspended their donations to the refugee agency. Nearly all countries have since restored funding following independent investigations into Israel’s accusations. but notably, in some cases, some of those restored funds have been earmarked for “risk management” (that is, an emboldening of a counterterrorism paradigm and attendant policing and surveillance mechanisms into civilian aid flows).
Meanwhile, in the United States, Biden signed into law HB 2882 (or the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2024) in late March, which includes a provision that prohibits funds from being used for UNRWA—so now there is a legally sanctioned, wholesale cutoff of US funds to UNRWA—the US was UNRWA’s largest donor, providing over a quarter of the agency’s budget. Moreover, the Knesset recently passed legislation designating UNRWA as a “terrorist organization” and banned the UN agency from operating on Israeli-controlled territory. The consequences of this designation are significant due to the fact that the designation mobilizes a “no contact policy” thereby prohibiting any direct interaction between Israel and UNRWA, a prohibition with especially insidious implications as UNRWA must structurally interact with Israel to carry out its humanitarian operations in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The legislation is expected to lead to the closure of UNRWA’s East Jerusalem headquarters and will effectively block the delivery of humanitarian aid into Gaza via Rafah. Israeli lawmakers directly cited the January allegations when drafting this legislation.
Notably, Israel’s original allegations came directly on the heels of the International Court of Justice ruling in January, which determined that Israel is plausibly in violation of the Genocide Convention. I won’t rehearse the political motivations behind Israel’s timely maneuver here, though these are likely clear; rather the story of UNRWA indexes a different kind of war, one enacted through laws and lists which mobilize a politics of ban, sanction, and punishment on targeted entities.
Just to lay bare the mechanics of what has happened in the case of UNRWA, here we have an agency consisting of nearly 30,000 employees of which nineteen are alleged to be linked to a crime. This allegation, in turn, constitutes grounds for the termination of all funding to the said organization—this is the fungibility argument written into US (and Israeli) counterterrorism law, which holds that any support to a designated terrorist entity could potentially free up other resources to carry out prohibited acts; therefore any support to the said organization is banned.
The salient point here is that this current moment and developments therein animates the surfacing of a different kind of war, one that has developed largely in the shadows over the course of the last three decades. This war has a history which really takes shape with the Oslo Accords, Bill Clinton and Executive Order 12947, Oklahoma City and the passage of the “material support ban” in 1996, and the subsequent birth of the “list-based approach to terrorism.” The body of law surfacing here, which criminalizes the “financial foundation of the global terror network” (these are George Bush’s words) effectively imposes a relation of ban on the designated entity by prohibiting relations with and financial flows to the blacklisted entity enacting what I have called elsewhere, “asphyxiatory violence,” a modality of violence that realizes its destructive effects through less spectacular means than a bomb or tank, and instead through a quieter, temporally stretched process of constriction, one that progressively erodes conditions of livability through forced disconnection and isolation.
Now that Israel has designated UNRWA to be a “terrorist organization,” it is hard to see how UNRWA will be able to continue operating in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza given its forced structural entanglement with Israel, as Israel controls the entirety of the Palestinian occupied territories including the internal and external borders. While Israel’s campaign to undermine UNRWA is decades-long, it appears that the “terrorist” designation might be the act that ultimately collapses the agency, the consequences of which are dire especially, but not exclusively, for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip at this very moment.
Jg: Palestinians are “aid dependent” as the term goes, and the politicization of that fact is not a new phenomenon. What is UNRWA, and what is the broader aid landscape throughout occupied Palestine?
lb: Palestinians are heavily aid dependent due to ongoing processes of dispossession and a decades-long occupation, which have, among other things, undermined their ability to develop a self-sustaining economy. This feature was structurally built into the Oslo Accords. Following the Oslo Accords in the 1990s, there was a very sharp uptick in foreign aid—intended, the argument went, to build the institutions for a future Palestinian state. As the occupation never ended, the latter has yet to become a political possibility.
We can start with UNRWA. Established in 1949 by the UN General Assembly in the aftermath of Israel’s founding and the concomitant displacement of over 700,000 Palestinians, UNRWA was tasked with a mandate to provide assistance and protection to Palestinians who lost “both home and means of livelihood” and their descendants. The only UN agency concerned with the plight of Palestinians specifically, UNRWA remains the principal aid agency providing critical humanitarian assistance, food aid, relief, and other services to Palestinian refugees in the Gaza Strip, West Bank, and in the surrounding Arab states of Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon.
More here.
