A Palestinian sheikh holds the key to his house from which he was displaced during the (European) Nakba.

“We must prevent them from returning,” David Ben-Gurion wrote in his memoirs two months after the Nakba of the Palestinian people and the declaration of the establishment of Israel in 1948, where the tragedy of more than 700,000 refugees began - half of the original population of Palestine at the time - and with them began the story of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees. (UNRWA), the keeper of the memory of asylum and the memorial of the right of return that Israel is trying to eliminate, as Trinidad Deros Bronte wrote in the Spanish newspaper El País.

Only a few of these 700,000 remain - who were displaced or forced to flee the massacres of Jewish gangs - but there are 6 million Palestinians registered on asylum lists in Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. Israel refuses their return because this destroys “the national homeland exclusively for the Jews.” It ends Israel itself, as Bronte quotes UNRWA history specialist Julita Espin Ocampo.

Ocampo believes that UNRWA's connection to the right of return is what made Israel accuse 12 of the agency's employees (numbering about 31,000) of participating in the October 7 attacks.

Agency liquidation

Despite the absence of evidence - Bronte says - 12 countries, including the two most important supporters (the United States and Germany), decided to suspend their funding to the agency, which strikes at the heart of humanitarian aid, especially in Gaza, where 85% of the population is on the brink of famine.

In Gaza, the population depends more than ever on the agency and its facilities (including 700 schools), which since the beginning of the Israeli war have housed about 75% of about 2.2 million Gazans. The cost of this was the death of about 160 of the agency’s employees, in addition to more than 30,000 Palestinians it killed. Israel.

The writer quotes Lubna Shomali from the Palestinian Resource Center for Citizenship and Refugee Rights (an organization based in the occupied West Bank that provides advice to UNRWA) as saying that in attacking the agency, Israel aims to achieve various goals that were strengthened by the war, the first of which is to eliminate the agency’s aid with the aim of displacing the remaining Palestinians. The residents of the Gaza Strip by depriving them of all aspects of life (food, medical services, electricity, etc.) and then annexing the Gaza Strip. The other goal is to eliminate the right of return of 6 million refugees.

Threat to the Israeli narrative

Shomali adds that the agency's mere existence - with its charter that requires providing aid to Palestinian refugees - "threatens the Israeli narrative and its insistence that there are no Palestinian refugees. If the refugee is absent, the right of return is absent."

The article reviewed a number of statements by Israeli officials who attacked the agency and its role in this context, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who recently accused UNRWA of perpetuating the “Palestinian refugee problem.”

Israeli Foreign Minister Yisrael Katz also described UNRWA as “part of the problem,” and accused it of establishing what he called a false narrative about the existence of Palestinian refugees who must return to the country, calling for “work relentlessly to disengage the agency from Gaza.”

Nakba memorial

The author says that although the agency’s charter does not refer to the right of return of Palestinian refugees, United Nations Resolution No. 302, by which the agency was established and issued in 1949, is in turn based on Resolution No. 194, which guaranteed this right.

The author quotes historian Jorge Ramos Tolosa, a professor at the University of Valencia - and the author of numerous books on Palestine and Israel - that the presence of the agency “reminds the reason that made these people refugees, and deprived them of returning, and that Israel is a colonial project that grants all rights to the Jews, but deprives the Palestinians of the right to return to their land.” He adds, "The mere word 'refugee' refers Israel to the way it was established: the Nakba."

Middle East affairs expert Isaias Parinada says that Israel is trying to stifle the agency until it is unable to perform its tasks. It is condemning it to death, believing that by doing so it can very simply liquidate the refugee issue.

The humanitarian aid provided by UNRWA and the employment opportunities it provides (31,000 Palestinian refugees working there) have helped stabilize these refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, and neighboring countries, and prevented them from dissolving in the host countries, which is the goal that Israel’s leaders have always explicitly desired. Therefore, the Palestinians see in UNRWA - according to the agency’s history specialist Julita Ocampo - “is an embodiment of the international community’s commitment to the right of return.”

Source: El Pais