When it comes to genocide and Palestine, the world is — deliberately — getting its priorities wrong

As Israel’s ban on the UN Refugee and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) looms closer, the language used by officials deals more with possibilities than realities. The reason, it seems, is to give Israel enough of an advantage in carrying out its genocide, while Palestinians remain trapped by the atrocities that the international community refuses to halt.

For example, last year US President Joe Biden signed an agreement – allegedly temporary – banning US funding for UNRWA for a year. A recent report by Axios, however, notes that the outgoing Biden administration has warned the Trump administration transition team that “there could be a humanitarian catastrophe” in Gaza if Israel bans UNRWA from operating.

“We wanted them to know what is going to happen 10 days into their presidency,” an unnamed US official was quoted as telling Axios. “We thought it was the responsible thing to do. It’s a catastrophe waiting to happen.”

Keeping in mind that in his first presidency, Donald Trump cut off all funding to UNRWA and led other countries following suit, while Biden temporarily restored aid and suspended it again in his last year as president, the scene is set for complicity with Israel’s decision.

Meanwhile, Gaza has been experiencing a humanitarian catastrophe as a result of genocide which is being fragmented into existing separate catastrophes, such as famine, displacement, cold and lack of shelter. UNRWA’s possible forced ending of its operations in Gaza, however, is now being touted as the humanitarian catastrophe without any acknowledgement of the current catastrophes induced by genocide carried out by the settler-colonial state of Israel.

Obliterating UNRWA will not obliterate Palestinian refugees.

Only decolonisation can do that. What Israel is doing, through colonialism and genocide, is to create more Palestinian refugees. “A catastrophe waiting happen”, therefore is not correct. The catastrophe has been ongoing for decades, and if UNRWA is banned from operating, Palestinians in Gaza will be facing the worsening of an already existing catastrophe that is also the international community’s doing given that it substituted Palestinian political rights for the humanitarian paradigm. All, of course, in the service of Israeli colonial expansion.

In a letter to the UN General Assembly dated December 2024, the international organisation’s Secretary-General Antonio Guterres wrote that the cessation of UNRWA’s activities “would have devastating consequences” particularly since no alternative to the agency has been set up to replace it.

Coming from the UN, and the Secretary-General in particular, such discourse is reminiscent of the countdown to Gaza becoming unliveable. Yet, when unliveable transitioned to completely destroyed once the genocide started, the UN mellowed its discourse once again. Guterres is now warning of impending devastating consequences, but what of all that has happened since the 1947 Partition Plan and subsequent ethnic cleansing? Each step in Israel’s colonial expansion brought about consequences that were both directly related to the implementation of settler-colonial ideology, which the international community endorsed without hesitation.

While UNRWA’s work is crucial, it is also important to recognise its limitations which stem from the fact that the international community invests more in colonialism and genocide than it does in the humanitarian paradigm. UNRWA was supposed to be as temporary as Israel’s colonisation was purportedly envisaged and imparted to the rest of the world and to the Palestinian people. Now that the world is witnessing a genocide that it doesn’t want to stop, what is really the greatest problem? UNRWA’s demise, or the web of complicity which endorses and participates in Palestine’s destruction and the genocide of the Palestinian people? The world is getting its priorities wrong.

When it comes to genocide and Palestine, the world is — deliberately — getting its priorities wrong