Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger.

News clip: UNRWA is a terror organization under the agency of the UN.

Micah Loewinger: We're listening to a February 5th protest outside UNRWA Jerusalem building recorded by The Times of Israel.

News clip: UNRWA kindergarten teachers learned to hate and want to kill Jews. They spent 75 years indoctrinating Arabs all around the world to hate Israel and to never accept its offer of peace.

Micah Loewinger: These accusations that UNRWA radicalizes Palestinian refugees long predate the latest war. Since 2022, UNRWA says it's investigated 66 neutrality breaches among its 30,000 workers, including alleged support for Hamas and other extremist groups

Mehul Srivastava: For about 20 or 30 years from now UNRWA has been a target of right-wing Israeli politicians for historical reasons.

Micah Loewinger: Mehul Srivastava Financial Times correspondent, who we heard from earlier in the show.

Mehul Srivastava: When UNRWA was set up in 1949, it was essentially the only international agency, the biggest UN agency taking care of Palestinian refugees, not just in Gaza in the West Bank, but in Lebanon, in Syria, Jordan, elsewhere. In '48, there were about 750,000 Palestinian refugees.

Micah Loewinger: Today, UNRWA is a quasi-state employing mostly Palestinian workers. Its size and scope would likely surprise its founders, who envisioned it as a temporary solution to the intractable politics in the region just after the establishment of Israel and the displacement of Palestinians.

Mehul Srivastava: One of its original mandates was based off resolution that refugees of the war from 1948 that birthed the state of Israel, have a right to return to their homeland.

Micah Loewinger: He's referring to UN General Assembly Resolution 194, which stated that, "Refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date." What Palestinians today call the right of return.

Mehul Srivastava: This issue, the right to return, has, over time, become one of the most politically explosive issues between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

Micah Loewinger: Lex Takkenberg is a humanitarian law expert and a former chief of ethics for UNRWA, where he worked for 30 years. He's written extensively about the origins of the agency, and he says that to understand the current day battle over UNRWA, you have to look at its predecessor, the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine, which was formed to mediate with the Arab nations and Israel and find a solution to the refugee crisis.

Lex Takkenberg: In early '49, they started to meet with Ben-Gurion, the first Israeli president, and urged him to take refugees back as demanded by the General Assembly. Ben-Gurion's answer was, "We're still in the formative stage. We have enough of a demographic issue with those Palestinians that did not leave. We're not going to take refugees back."

Micah Loewinger: Essentially, Ben-Gurion felt that giving citizenship to these Palestinian refugees would threaten Israel's Jewish majority.

Lex Takkenberg: That's what it comes down to. Towards the summer of '49, so six months into the mandate, they begin to think, okay, there are three solutions for refugee problems. The most desirable one is voluntary return, repatriation to where you come from. The next best is integration into the host countries, the countries of asylum. Then the third last resort is resettlement in certain countries,

Micah Loewinger: Some of the neighboring states worried that by permanently hosting these refugees, they would- undermine the right of return, and Israel, for demographic reasons, didn't want non-Jews affecting their nascent majority, so the UN started to scout for alternative paths forward. You say that this is when the UN did a big about-face, so a complete 180. Can you explain what happened next?

Lex Takkenberg: The Americans began to think, "How can we integrate the refugees starting in the economies of the host countries?" The idea came up to bring Gordon Club, the president of the Tennessee Valley Authority, one of the new deal schemes after the 29 financial market crash, to see whether that miracle in Tennessee could be replicated in the Jordan Valley, in the Euphrates Basin, in the Sinai.

Micah Loewinger: The Tennessee Valley Authority, which as you mentioned was the depression era public works project part of FDR's New Deal that brought economic development to Tennessee by hiring thousands of people to build essential infrastructure. The theory was essentially if we give Palestinians work, they'll have steady income and maybe through employment, they will assimilate outside of Palestine. The Israelis don't want to grant the right to return, but maybe through employment the Palestinians won't want to or need to return.

Lex Takkenberg: Exactly. This also explains why the US for many, many years paid 50% of UNRWA's budget. UNRWA was very much an instrument to help sustain Israel to take the pressure on return away. They thought that this could all go very quick. You set up these work streams, it takes a few years and then the host countries will take over responsibility and that's it. The host countries were suspicious from the beginning and so were the refugees themselves.

To make a long story short, the work in UNRWA name never got off the ground. The work schemes were shelved, but the refugees were still there, and they still needed support. It was not just shelter and food that they needed, they had children, so they needed education and healthcare. Basic relief became comprehensive humanitarian assistance.

Micah Loewinger: I want to talk about some of the major narratives about UNRWA in Israel. First, let's start with the idea that UNRWA is getting in the way of peace for Israel. This is something that I've seen in the Israeli Press and from Israeli officials.

Lex Takkenberg: It is peace as defined by these Israeli politicians that you'll refer to, which is a peace in which Israel succeeds in replacing the indigenous Palestinian population by a Jewish vast majority. The continued existence of UNRWA is seen as standing in the way of that. The right of return does not depend on whether UNRWA continues to exist. Their rights to return to compensation flows from the egality of what happened in '48, '49.

Micah Loewinger: Another narrative that I've heard referenced by Netanyahu is his frustration with the intergenerational refugee status that has been granted to descendants of the original Palestinian refugees. Back in 2017, 2018 when Netanyahu began trying to shut down UNRWA, he said that the agency could not go on dealing with the "great-grandchildren of refugees who are not refugees." Clearly, he takes issue with the definition of refugee that the UN uses.

Lex Takkenberg: Under the international refugee regime and under international refugee law, descendants of the original refugee whose situation is not resolved continue to be refugees. That is not unique for the Palestinian case. UNHCR dealing with other prolonged refugee crisis like the Afghan refugee crisis or some of the refugee crisis in Africa, is also dealing with intergenerational refugees. What makes the Palestinian case unique is that it has taken more than 75 years. There is still no political settlement.

Micah Loewinger: Another longstanding critique of UNRWA is that its schools in the Gaza Strip, West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, are radicalizing Palestinian young people. Where does this narrative come from? Is there evidence for that?

Lex Takkenberg: That critique originates in a criticism of the textbooks that are being used in the UNRWA schools. In those schools, textbooks were used of the host countries, Egypt at a time, and Jordan. Textbooks typically reflect the state of relations between the country in question and its neighbors.

Israel discovered that in these textbooks there were elements of glorification of armed resistance and antisemitic tropes that they strongly objected to. They started demanding a censorship of those textbooks, and by extension said schools in which those textbooks are used teach hate. It prompted UNRWA to set up in place an arrangement whereby all new textbooks that are coming up are scrutinized. Any objectable content is overridden with enrichment materials, but the issue of the textbooks has remained.

Micah Loewinger: Critics of UNRWA think it goes further than that. They think that the teachers themselves are too sympathetic to Hamas or Islamic Jihad. I want to play you a clip of UN Watch Executive Director Hillel Neuer testifying before US Congress on January 30th in the lead-up to the American defunding of UNRWA.

Hillel Neuer: I've come here to ask the Congress of the United States to not just suspend but to end the funding for good and to take the lead in dissolving an organization that is riddled with incitement to hate, involvement in terrorism, and the perpetuation of war.

Lex Takkenberg: Hillel is part of an outfit that is part of the Israeli public affairs machinery to deal with any systematic criticism of Israeli actions in the occupied territories. UN Watch make generic statements. They have a track record of roaming the internet and finding objectionable social media post, in some instances have been posted by local UNRWA personnel, especially in the earlier war of 2014, when for the first time a war played out on social media.

At that time, UN Watch was able to compile a couple of dozen screenshots of UNRWA teachers and a few other employees in Gaza and in the West Bank that had put objectionable content on their social media profile. UN Watch continues to recycle that they have even used these old screenshots in their recent report.

Micah Loewinger: You touched on one perspective among the Palestinian refugee community and some of those who work for UNRWA. I'm sure during your 30 years, you became well aware of the diversity of opinions among Palestinians about UNRWA. I imagine some Palestinians are frustrated by the kind of contradiction of UNRWA, that it was created in the context of this right to return.

Lex Takkenberg: Whenever UNRWA said, we are going to move from distribution of flour in kind to a cash voucher to help families in hardship, there was suspicion that this was tantamount to abolishing the refugee issue. When UNRWA wanted to replace the tents in the 1950s for cement brick shelters, this was settlement of the refugees. Every effort that UNRWA has done to modernize the operations was met with suspicion. They first and foremost realized that UNRWA has become the reminder of this unresolved political question.

Micah Loewinger: In January, The Times of Israel quoted an anonymous senior official who opposed getting rid of UNRWA in the middle of this war. Clearly, there's some debate in the Israeli government about how this organization is beneficial to Israel, not simply a threat.

Lex Takkenberg: The military and security establishment always said, "Let's not drive it too far, UNRWA is useful." That changed with the new Israeli government. In particular, it changed after 7th October when essentially Netanyahu, and the defense establishment, and the security establishment became held hostage by these extremists in the government. The commonsense approach seems to have for now lost to the upper hand of the extremist that say, "UNRWA is a symbol of the unresolved refugee question. Let's get rid of UNRWA, then part of the problem is solved."

Micah Loewinger: Let me ask you about that, because Netanyahu has said in his day-after plan that he submitted to his war cabinet in February that he intends to see the permanent closure of UNRWA. If UNRWA were to close, what would happen to Palestinian refugees who rely on the agency outside of Gaza?

Lex Takkenberg: It's not up to Israel to decide what happens to UNRWA, but of course, UNRWA operates in cooperation with the host authorities. In Gaza and the West Bank Israel is the occupying authority. UNRWA must arrange and cooperate with them, and Israel can simply stop providing visa and work permits to international UNRWA employees. It can prevent goods from coming in and going out where necessary. It can de facto prevent UNRWA from operating.

Micah Loewinger: Netanyahu has also said he wants to replace UNRWA with a new international body.

Lex Takkenberg: Netanyahu said, let World Food Program take over those relief operations. World Food Program has no infrastructure in Gaza. It doesn't have warehouses, it doesn't have trucks, it doesn't have personnel. Netanyahu ironically said, "Well, let World Food Program ask UNRWA to send 400 of their local personnel to join World Food Program."

We have seen a number of improvised relief operations that went terribly wrong and where Israel has killed desperate people trying to get food from trucks. We have seen what happened to the World Central Kitchen a few days ago. UNRWA is the only show in town in Gaza.

Micah Loewinger: Meanwhile, the second largest aid group in Gaza, American Near East Refugee Aid announced this week that it was suspending operations after the attacks on World Central Kitchen Workers. UNRWA funding has been threatened, its operational capacity has been threatened. The alternatives to UNRWA are packing up and leaving. What can be done to alleviate starvation in Gaza?

Lex Takkenberg: By preventing UNRWA from operating, attacking World Central Kitchen, triggering ANERA and other humanitarian groups to cease operations, Israel seems to be intent on mass starvation as a further element in its ongoing genocide. We cannot interpret it in another way. A spokesperson from UNICEF was saying a couple of days, "I'm seeing in front of my eyes people who are starving and yet 12 kilometers away from me on the eastern border of Gaza, there are tens of thousands of trucks parked that in a matter of hours could resolve this crisis." That's where we are.

Micah Loewinger: Lex, thank you very much.

Lex Takkenberg: Thanks for having me.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: Lex Takkenberg is a senior advisor at the Arab Renaissance for Democracy and Development. He formerly worked at unrwa for over three decades.

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, it's time for sports media to reckon with its gambling addiction.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media.

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