Neutrality contributes to UNRWA’s precarious standing

“It is UNRWA’s neutrality that allows it to operate on all sides and among various parties, to ensure the safe, sustained and unimpeded delivery of assistance and protection in an effective and efficient manner.” Hypothetically, one should add. Despite UNRWA’s insistence on neutrality, and despite neutrality becoming a condition for continued funding for the agency, Israel’s attacks on the agency testify to the contrary. Neutrality only serves violent interests, and when it comes up across colonialism, the illusion of a safe space is demolished.

Earlier this week, Israel destroyed UNRWA’s headquarters in Jerusalem, which the agency described as “an unprecedented attack against a United Nations agency and its premises.”

Several videos on Facebook show Jerusalem’s Mayor Aryeh King inside UNRWA premises in Sheikh Jarrah, breaking a printed depiction of UNRWA’s logo in a conference room. He was accompanied by Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir. King also recorded a video in which he called for the annihilation on UNRWA staff.

In the face of Israel’s violence, why does UNRWA still operate under neutrality? Israel has made no secret of wanting to destroy not just the organisation, but also the definition of Palestinian refugees while perpetually creating them. Destroying UNRWA destroys the Palestinian refugees’ visibility on the international stage. The neutrality clause has already paved the way for this happening. Neutrality ultimately normalises the existence of forcibly displaced Palestinian refugees and their descendants, through UNRWA’s non-political approach combined with political support for Israeli colonialism. In turn, all the Palestinian refugees Israel created post 1967, including almost all of Gaza’s remaining population since the genocide, are all normalised through the humanitarian paradigm and neutrality.

However, one fault in the UN’s humanitarian paradigm is believing that somehow it can withstand colonial violence. Israel’s permanent presence in Palestine was reinforced by solutions that were supposed to be temporary. The UN created a humanitarian paradigm that constantly faces colonial permanence. The same international political support for Israel’s colonialism and genocide is supporting the current attacks against UNRWA. While UNRWA was required to regurgitate neutrality as the foundation for its humanitarian work, as well as to justify donor funding, donors were sustaining colonialism and genocide for Israel. UNRWA cannot operate from a position of neutrality because it does not work in a neutral setting. Binding itself to the principle has only contributed to the agency’s slow destruction.

Neutrality didn’t protect UNRWA’s staff from being killed by Israel in the Gaza genocide. It didn’t protect its premises from destruction. And these are just the most recent examples of Israeli violence against the agency, because its infrastructure had been repeatedly targeted in the past. And UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres’s threat to seek legal recourse at the International Court of Justice is just another bureaucratic move, if it happens, that will not question the implications of forcing a humanitarian aid agency to adhere to neutrality principles when it operates in a colonial setting sustained by international complicity. The UN cannot expect protection for UNRWA by forcing it into vulnerability through neutrality.

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20260122-neutrality-contributes-to-unrwas-precarious-standing/