9 aug 2019
The Boullata family noted that if Kamal is to be buried in Berlin, the funeral will be held at St. Georgios Antiochian Orthodox Church in Berlin on Thursday August 15 at 10:30 AM.
Boullata, a Palestinian artist, historian, and writer who drew from his interests in light and transparency, conditions of creation and exile, and Byzantine and Islamic aesthetic culture, literature, and history for his geometrically abstract paintings, died at the age of 77.
He was born in Jerusalem, Palestine, and studied at the Academy of Rome and the Corcoran Museum School in Washington, DC, after being exiled from Jerusalem following the 1967 occupation.
In 1993, he received a Fulbright fellowship to conduct field research on Islamic art in Morocco and Spain, and in 2001, he was awarded a Ford Foundation grant to research post-Byzantine painting in Palestine.
He has authored four books on Palestinian art, including Belonging and Globalisation (2008) and Palestinian Art: From 1850 to the Present (2009), and has edited books on modern poetry and contemporary culture. From 2012 to 2013, Boullata was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin.
Boullata, a Palestinian artist, historian, and writer who drew from his interests in light and transparency, conditions of creation and exile, and Byzantine and Islamic aesthetic culture, literature, and history for his geometrically abstract paintings, died at the age of 77.
He was born in Jerusalem, Palestine, and studied at the Academy of Rome and the Corcoran Museum School in Washington, DC, after being exiled from Jerusalem following the 1967 occupation.
In 1993, he received a Fulbright fellowship to conduct field research on Islamic art in Morocco and Spain, and in 2001, he was awarded a Ford Foundation grant to research post-Byzantine painting in Palestine.
He has authored four books on Palestinian art, including Belonging and Globalisation (2008) and Palestinian Art: From 1850 to the Present (2009), and has edited books on modern poetry and contemporary culture. From 2012 to 2013, Boullata was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin.
Over 700 schools run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) will open their doors in time for the new scholastic year 2019-2020 in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria within less than a month.
The steadfast support of UNRWA partners and donors is, once again, enabling the Agency to carry out its largest programme: education for more than half a million Palestine refugee boys and girls.
For nearly 70 years, UNRWA has preserved the right to education to Palestine refugee children and has provided inclusive and quality education, including during times of conflict, blockade and occupation, allowing 2.5 million students to graduate from its schools since 1950.
“Any child in the world should be preparing for a new school year these days, and so should Palestine refugee children,” said UNRWA Commissioner-General Pierre Krähenbühl.
Access to education is a fundamental right and a pillar of our Agency’s mandate. Quality education is at the heart of human development and the numerous achievers around the world who had attended UNRWA schools can tell thousands of stories about their years in UNRWA schools: we are extremely proud of them all.”
UNRWA operates 709 elementary and preparatory schools in its five fields of operation, including eight secondary schools in Lebanon, providing free basic education for over 530,000 Palestine refugee children. Pupils in UNRWA schools follow the host countries’ national curricula and textbooks, which the Agency enriches to encourage the development of critical thinking skills, empathy and tolerance.
“We are extremely grateful to our donors whose dedication to preserving the right to education has allowed us to announce today that all UNRWA schools in our five fields of operations will open,” added Krähenbühl. Many families will find deep reassurance knowing that their children will be in classrooms come September.
The courage displayed every single day by our students in the pursuit of their education despite the challenges of having to cross check-points, live in areas of conflict or under occupation is an inspiration to us all.”
UNRWA is confronted with an increased demand for services resulting from a growth in the number of registered Palestine refugees, the extent of their vulnerability and their deepening poverty.
UNRWA is funded almost entirely by voluntary contributions and financial support has been outpaced by the growth in needs.
As a result, the UNRWA programme budget, which supports the delivery of core essential services, operates with a large shortfall.
UNRWA encourages all Member States to work collectively to exert all possible efforts to fully fund the Agency’s programme budget.
UNRWA emergency programmes and key projects, also operating with large shortfalls, are funded through separate funding portals.
UNRWA is a United Nations agency established by the General Assembly in 1949 and mandated to provide assistance and protection to some 5.4 million Palestine refugees registered with UNRWA across its five fields of operation.
Its mission is to help Palestine refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, West Bank, including East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip achieve their full human development potential, pending a just and lasting solution to their plight.
UNRWA services encompass education, health care, relief and social services, camp infrastructure and improvement, protection and microfinance.
The steadfast support of UNRWA partners and donors is, once again, enabling the Agency to carry out its largest programme: education for more than half a million Palestine refugee boys and girls.
For nearly 70 years, UNRWA has preserved the right to education to Palestine refugee children and has provided inclusive and quality education, including during times of conflict, blockade and occupation, allowing 2.5 million students to graduate from its schools since 1950.
“Any child in the world should be preparing for a new school year these days, and so should Palestine refugee children,” said UNRWA Commissioner-General Pierre Krähenbühl.
Access to education is a fundamental right and a pillar of our Agency’s mandate. Quality education is at the heart of human development and the numerous achievers around the world who had attended UNRWA schools can tell thousands of stories about their years in UNRWA schools: we are extremely proud of them all.”
UNRWA operates 709 elementary and preparatory schools in its five fields of operation, including eight secondary schools in Lebanon, providing free basic education for over 530,000 Palestine refugee children. Pupils in UNRWA schools follow the host countries’ national curricula and textbooks, which the Agency enriches to encourage the development of critical thinking skills, empathy and tolerance.
“We are extremely grateful to our donors whose dedication to preserving the right to education has allowed us to announce today that all UNRWA schools in our five fields of operations will open,” added Krähenbühl. Many families will find deep reassurance knowing that their children will be in classrooms come September.
The courage displayed every single day by our students in the pursuit of their education despite the challenges of having to cross check-points, live in areas of conflict or under occupation is an inspiration to us all.”
UNRWA is confronted with an increased demand for services resulting from a growth in the number of registered Palestine refugees, the extent of their vulnerability and their deepening poverty.
UNRWA is funded almost entirely by voluntary contributions and financial support has been outpaced by the growth in needs.
As a result, the UNRWA programme budget, which supports the delivery of core essential services, operates with a large shortfall.
UNRWA encourages all Member States to work collectively to exert all possible efforts to fully fund the Agency’s programme budget.
UNRWA emergency programmes and key projects, also operating with large shortfalls, are funded through separate funding portals.
UNRWA is a United Nations agency established by the General Assembly in 1949 and mandated to provide assistance and protection to some 5.4 million Palestine refugees registered with UNRWA across its five fields of operation.
Its mission is to help Palestine refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, West Bank, including East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip achieve their full human development potential, pending a just and lasting solution to their plight.
UNRWA services encompass education, health care, relief and social services, camp infrastructure and improvement, protection and microfinance.
5 aug 2019
Palestinians protest near the Gaza-Israel fence on 12 April
Proponents of settler-colonialism argue that Palestinian natives of Palestine are foreigners in their own land
Like all settler-colonial ideologies, Zionism has always been obsessed with race. Having emerged at the height of European colonialism and race science, it sought to learn from both.
Zionists understood that making racial claims was foundational and essential for their colonial project, a realisation that still informs Israeli colonial and racial policy today.
European racialism
In the late 18th century European philologists invented the category “Semitic” to describe the languages of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Horn of Africa - Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic and Amharic, among others - to distinguish them from Indo-European “Aryan” languages.
Since then European Christians began to consider European Jews, who did not speak Hebrew, as “Semites”, based on the religious Jewish and Christian claims that European Jews were the descendants of the ancient Palestinian Hebrews.
What is remarkable, however, is that no one suggested then - or now - that European Christians were also the descendants of the ancient Palestinian Christians!
When antisemitism emerged as a political ideology, it latched onto the Semitic linguistic category that encompassed Jews, and antisemites converted this into a racial category. In 1879, German Wilhelm Marr, who popularised the term “antisemitism”, insisted that the hostility of antisemites to Jews was not based on their religion, but on their “race”.
Historical research has established for many decades that European Christians and Jews were native European converts to the two Palestinian religions of Christianity and Judaism, and not descendants of their ancient adherents, anymore than today’s Indonesian or Chinese or Bosnian Muslims are descendants of the ancient Arab Muslims of the Arabian peninsula.
But given the force of European racialism and its deeply racist culture then and now, the belief in the foreignness of Jews persisted. It is a belief that the Zionist movement espoused.
Racial purity
Zionism accepted the claim of a Jewish “race” separate from the race of gentiles, and proceeded to justify its colonial project based on this. Just as Europeans understood their “superior” race as the justification for their colonialism, Zionism, as a new member of the colonial club, used similar arguments to colonise the land of the Palestinians.
To further Zionism’s racial claims, Zionist Jewish scholars established in Berlin in 1902 the Association of Jewish Statistics to study, among other matters, the causes of the racial “degeneration” of European Jews. The very notion of racial “degeneration” had been invented a decade earlier by the second-most important Zionist leader at the time after Theodor Herzl: Max Nordau, whose 1892 book Degeneration popularised the term.
Zionist scholars focused on the concept of the Jewish race, the centrality of Jewish demography to the survival of the race, the physical health of European Jews, the rate of intermarriage with non-Jews, the Jewish birth rate, and rates of Jewish conversions to Christianity.
They diagnosed the situation of European Jews as one of “degeneration”, allegedly caused by their residence in the “diaspora.” The task for Zionism was to “regenerate” them by creating a settler-colonial state for European Jews in Palestine.
To Zionists, the decline in Jewish births signalled “degeneration”.
Some of their scholars were most concerned with the racial purity of Jews, arguing that the Enlightenment threatened this through mixed marriages, which introduced impure blood into the race - although they acknowledged that children of these marriages often remained outside Jewish communities, helping to preserve the racial purity of Jewish communities.
Newcomers to Palestine
In contrast, diasporic social conditions and antisemitism were viewed as the social causes of Jewish mental and physical “degeneration” - which, unlike racial degeneration, could be reversed through Jewish colonisation of Palestine, which Zionism was undertaking on their behalf.
Now that they had affirmed Jews were a race, Zionists needed to prove they were direct descendants of ancient Hebrews, as there seemed to be other contenders for this claim - namely, the Palestinians who had inhabited the land since time immemorial. Like neighbouring Egyptians, Syrians and Iraqis, Palestinians are said to have mixed with peninsular Arabs after the peninsular Arab conquest of the region in the seventh century.
Zionists do not claim that today’s Egyptians, Syrians and Iraqis are pure descendants of the invading Arabs, rather than indigenous peoples who mixed with them. Yet, Zionists, like Netanyahu, insist fantastically that all Palestinians are newcomers to Palestine from the Arabian peninsula.
While modern Egyptians non-controversially claim ancient Egyptians as their ancestors, and modern Iraqis claim the Babylonians and the Sumerians, the threat came from Palestinians, who would claim that ancient Hebrews alongside Canaanaites, Philistines and all other ancient inhabitants of Palestine as their ancestors.
The irony, however, was that even the founders of modern Israel, David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, insisted in a 1918 book that Palestinian peasants - then the majority of the Palestinian population - were the descendants of ancient Hebrews.
The Palestinian peasants, the authors argued, had held on to their Hebrew ancestors’ traditions, most obviously through maintaining the same names for their villages, and that "in their veins, without a doubt, flows much Jewish blood – from the Jewish peasants who in the days of the persecutions and terrible oppression had renounced their tradition and their people in order to maintain their attachment and loyalty to the land of the Jews.”
Dangerous precedent
That the leaders of the Zionist movement would recognise Palestinians as the ancient inhabitants of the land, whose majority converted from Judaism and other local faiths to Christianity and later to Islam, was a dangerous precedent that had to be erased from the memory of official Zionism and Israel. And so it was.
This background terrifies Zionist ideologues and imperils their racialist claims. Here, the advances in genetic science in the last few decades and the baseless claims of many of its commercial practitioners have been a gift for Zionist racialism.
While the ongoing charlatan search for the “Jewish gene” has become the Holy Grail of race and racist scientists, especially Zionist ones, some in Israel have found immediate, practical uses to increase the number of Jews worldwide, and therefore increase the number of those that Zionism claims have a colonial claim to Palestinian land.
Two years ago, a group of Israeli Jewish experts on genetics and Jewish religious law claimed that the so-called “Jewish gene” could help to prove “Jewishness” in line with Jewish religious law”, eliminating the need for the arduous process of conversion to Judaism by those whose Jewishness could not be ascertained by rabbis.
In line with this bogus race science, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently jumped on the findings of geneticists and archaeologists who uncovered the skeletons of ancient Philistines, whose genetic markers they attributed to southern Europe.
This was taken as proof by Zionist racialists that modern Palestinians are not linked to the ancient inhabitants of Palestine, and therefore have no claim to their own homeland.
Right of return
Zionism’s arguments are two-pronged: that European converts to Judaism and their descendants who were away for 2,000 years have the “right” to return to their ancient homeland and drive out the inhabitants of the land; and that the Palestinian natives of Palestine are foreigners to their own lands.
Unlike Jews, who can maintain a “right of return” after two millennia of domicile in Europe to an Asian land from which they did not originate, Palestinians, whom Israel expelled in 1948 and after, are denied the right to return to their actual lands after a mere seven decades of expulsion.
What makes this Israeli racist argument acceptable to most white Americans and Europeans is the very racism that has anchored it since the 19th century. We are still steeped in race science and colonial justifications, as we were back in the late 19th century.
The irony is that liberal and conservative supporters of Zionism and Israel among Europeans and Americans, Jews and gentiles alike - who claim to oppose racism and colonialism - find nothing unpalatable in Zionism’s insistent and continuing commitment to both.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Joseph Massad
Joseph Massad is Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University in New York. He is the author of many books and academic and journalistic articles. His books include Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan, Desiring Arabs, The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians, and most recently Islam in Liberalism. His books and articles have been translated to a dozen languages.
Proponents of settler-colonialism argue that Palestinian natives of Palestine are foreigners in their own land
Like all settler-colonial ideologies, Zionism has always been obsessed with race. Having emerged at the height of European colonialism and race science, it sought to learn from both.
Zionists understood that making racial claims was foundational and essential for their colonial project, a realisation that still informs Israeli colonial and racial policy today.
European racialism
In the late 18th century European philologists invented the category “Semitic” to describe the languages of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Horn of Africa - Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic and Amharic, among others - to distinguish them from Indo-European “Aryan” languages.
Since then European Christians began to consider European Jews, who did not speak Hebrew, as “Semites”, based on the religious Jewish and Christian claims that European Jews were the descendants of the ancient Palestinian Hebrews.
What is remarkable, however, is that no one suggested then - or now - that European Christians were also the descendants of the ancient Palestinian Christians!
When antisemitism emerged as a political ideology, it latched onto the Semitic linguistic category that encompassed Jews, and antisemites converted this into a racial category. In 1879, German Wilhelm Marr, who popularised the term “antisemitism”, insisted that the hostility of antisemites to Jews was not based on their religion, but on their “race”.
Historical research has established for many decades that European Christians and Jews were native European converts to the two Palestinian religions of Christianity and Judaism, and not descendants of their ancient adherents, anymore than today’s Indonesian or Chinese or Bosnian Muslims are descendants of the ancient Arab Muslims of the Arabian peninsula.
But given the force of European racialism and its deeply racist culture then and now, the belief in the foreignness of Jews persisted. It is a belief that the Zionist movement espoused.
Racial purity
Zionism accepted the claim of a Jewish “race” separate from the race of gentiles, and proceeded to justify its colonial project based on this. Just as Europeans understood their “superior” race as the justification for their colonialism, Zionism, as a new member of the colonial club, used similar arguments to colonise the land of the Palestinians.
To further Zionism’s racial claims, Zionist Jewish scholars established in Berlin in 1902 the Association of Jewish Statistics to study, among other matters, the causes of the racial “degeneration” of European Jews. The very notion of racial “degeneration” had been invented a decade earlier by the second-most important Zionist leader at the time after Theodor Herzl: Max Nordau, whose 1892 book Degeneration popularised the term.
Zionist scholars focused on the concept of the Jewish race, the centrality of Jewish demography to the survival of the race, the physical health of European Jews, the rate of intermarriage with non-Jews, the Jewish birth rate, and rates of Jewish conversions to Christianity.
They diagnosed the situation of European Jews as one of “degeneration”, allegedly caused by their residence in the “diaspora.” The task for Zionism was to “regenerate” them by creating a settler-colonial state for European Jews in Palestine.
To Zionists, the decline in Jewish births signalled “degeneration”.
Some of their scholars were most concerned with the racial purity of Jews, arguing that the Enlightenment threatened this through mixed marriages, which introduced impure blood into the race - although they acknowledged that children of these marriages often remained outside Jewish communities, helping to preserve the racial purity of Jewish communities.
Newcomers to Palestine
In contrast, diasporic social conditions and antisemitism were viewed as the social causes of Jewish mental and physical “degeneration” - which, unlike racial degeneration, could be reversed through Jewish colonisation of Palestine, which Zionism was undertaking on their behalf.
Now that they had affirmed Jews were a race, Zionists needed to prove they were direct descendants of ancient Hebrews, as there seemed to be other contenders for this claim - namely, the Palestinians who had inhabited the land since time immemorial. Like neighbouring Egyptians, Syrians and Iraqis, Palestinians are said to have mixed with peninsular Arabs after the peninsular Arab conquest of the region in the seventh century.
Zionists do not claim that today’s Egyptians, Syrians and Iraqis are pure descendants of the invading Arabs, rather than indigenous peoples who mixed with them. Yet, Zionists, like Netanyahu, insist fantastically that all Palestinians are newcomers to Palestine from the Arabian peninsula.
While modern Egyptians non-controversially claim ancient Egyptians as their ancestors, and modern Iraqis claim the Babylonians and the Sumerians, the threat came from Palestinians, who would claim that ancient Hebrews alongside Canaanaites, Philistines and all other ancient inhabitants of Palestine as their ancestors.
The irony, however, was that even the founders of modern Israel, David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, insisted in a 1918 book that Palestinian peasants - then the majority of the Palestinian population - were the descendants of ancient Hebrews.
The Palestinian peasants, the authors argued, had held on to their Hebrew ancestors’ traditions, most obviously through maintaining the same names for their villages, and that "in their veins, without a doubt, flows much Jewish blood – from the Jewish peasants who in the days of the persecutions and terrible oppression had renounced their tradition and their people in order to maintain their attachment and loyalty to the land of the Jews.”
Dangerous precedent
That the leaders of the Zionist movement would recognise Palestinians as the ancient inhabitants of the land, whose majority converted from Judaism and other local faiths to Christianity and later to Islam, was a dangerous precedent that had to be erased from the memory of official Zionism and Israel. And so it was.
This background terrifies Zionist ideologues and imperils their racialist claims. Here, the advances in genetic science in the last few decades and the baseless claims of many of its commercial practitioners have been a gift for Zionist racialism.
While the ongoing charlatan search for the “Jewish gene” has become the Holy Grail of race and racist scientists, especially Zionist ones, some in Israel have found immediate, practical uses to increase the number of Jews worldwide, and therefore increase the number of those that Zionism claims have a colonial claim to Palestinian land.
Two years ago, a group of Israeli Jewish experts on genetics and Jewish religious law claimed that the so-called “Jewish gene” could help to prove “Jewishness” in line with Jewish religious law”, eliminating the need for the arduous process of conversion to Judaism by those whose Jewishness could not be ascertained by rabbis.
In line with this bogus race science, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently jumped on the findings of geneticists and archaeologists who uncovered the skeletons of ancient Philistines, whose genetic markers they attributed to southern Europe.
This was taken as proof by Zionist racialists that modern Palestinians are not linked to the ancient inhabitants of Palestine, and therefore have no claim to their own homeland.
Right of return
Zionism’s arguments are two-pronged: that European converts to Judaism and their descendants who were away for 2,000 years have the “right” to return to their ancient homeland and drive out the inhabitants of the land; and that the Palestinian natives of Palestine are foreigners to their own lands.
Unlike Jews, who can maintain a “right of return” after two millennia of domicile in Europe to an Asian land from which they did not originate, Palestinians, whom Israel expelled in 1948 and after, are denied the right to return to their actual lands after a mere seven decades of expulsion.
What makes this Israeli racist argument acceptable to most white Americans and Europeans is the very racism that has anchored it since the 19th century. We are still steeped in race science and colonial justifications, as we were back in the late 19th century.
The irony is that liberal and conservative supporters of Zionism and Israel among Europeans and Americans, Jews and gentiles alike - who claim to oppose racism and colonialism - find nothing unpalatable in Zionism’s insistent and continuing commitment to both.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Joseph Massad
Joseph Massad is Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University in New York. He is the author of many books and academic and journalistic articles. His books include Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan, Desiring Arabs, The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians, and most recently Islam in Liberalism. His books and articles have been translated to a dozen languages.
2 aug 2019
The Hamas Movement has called on the Greek authorities to receive Palestinian refugees fleeing to the country and work on securing their living needs.
In a statement, Hamas’s refugee affairs office expressed concern over the harsh living conditions which 160 Palestinian refugees suffer from after they escaped the scourge of war in Syria.
It said that the Palestinian refugees on the Greek island of Rhodes live in a camp that used to be a pig slaughterhouse, where there are rampant rodents and insects, adding that the refugees living there are not provided with any basic services, such as electricity and medical treatment.
“The Palestinian refugees look forward to their minimum human rights and life requirements until they return to their homes,” Hamas underlined.
Hamas appealed to the Greek authorities to receive the Palestinian refugees escaping death and to provide them with their vital living needs as other migrants.
In a statement, Hamas’s refugee affairs office expressed concern over the harsh living conditions which 160 Palestinian refugees suffer from after they escaped the scourge of war in Syria.
It said that the Palestinian refugees on the Greek island of Rhodes live in a camp that used to be a pig slaughterhouse, where there are rampant rodents and insects, adding that the refugees living there are not provided with any basic services, such as electricity and medical treatment.
“The Palestinian refugees look forward to their minimum human rights and life requirements until they return to their homes,” Hamas underlined.
Hamas appealed to the Greek authorities to receive the Palestinian refugees escaping death and to provide them with their vital living needs as other migrants.
The Hamas Movement has said that the revelation of corruption within UNRWA at this time will be in the interest of the Zio-American project.
In a statement on Thursday, member of Hamas’s international relations office Basem Na’im called for necessarily holding the corrupt officials without compromising UNRWA and the Palestinian people’s rights.
“No Palestinian can accept any cover-up of corruption in UNRWA or seeing corrupt people escape accountability, but it is obvious that disclosing corruption cases and releasing judgments in advance before investigations are concluded do not seem something innocent,” Na’im said.
He expressed his belief that such corruption claims came at this particular time after the failure of the financial siege on UNRWA and were raised ahead of the upcoming vote on renewing UNRWA’s mandate in September.
The Hamas official pointed out that Israeli and US officials hastened to call for shutting down UNRWA following corruption leaks, although there were more serious investigations into corruption cases against other UN institution, but no one demanded their closure.
In a statement on Thursday, member of Hamas’s international relations office Basem Na’im called for necessarily holding the corrupt officials without compromising UNRWA and the Palestinian people’s rights.
“No Palestinian can accept any cover-up of corruption in UNRWA or seeing corrupt people escape accountability, but it is obvious that disclosing corruption cases and releasing judgments in advance before investigations are concluded do not seem something innocent,” Na’im said.
He expressed his belief that such corruption claims came at this particular time after the failure of the financial siege on UNRWA and were raised ahead of the upcoming vote on renewing UNRWA’s mandate in September.
The Hamas official pointed out that Israeli and US officials hastened to call for shutting down UNRWA following corruption leaks, although there were more serious investigations into corruption cases against other UN institution, but no one demanded their closure.
1 aug 2019
The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor has denounced Switzerland and the Netherlands for suspending their financial support for UNRWA following a leaked UN report on long-time corruption within the refugee agency.
The Geneva-based rights group warned on Wednesday of serious repercussions to result from the shrinking international support for UNRWA, whose services has become threatened to come to a halt.
Euro-Med added that such step by Switzerland and the Netherlands would only affect the lives of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees, who have been displaced by the Israeli occupation of their land for more than seven decades.
“The danger is not only confined to the relief services for the Palestinian refugees being halted but also to their right of return being undermined because the existence of the agency has been linked, since its inception, to providing services for the Palestinian refugees until a just solution to their cause has been found, in accordance with the UN General Assembly’s resolution no. 194, which stipulates their right to return to the lands they were expelled from during the Arab-Israeli conflict in 1948 and the emergence of Israel,” a statement released on the website of Euro-Med said.
Its statement underlined that “corruption should not be dealt with by halting funding but rather by strengthening the mechanisms of transparency, monitoring and direct supervision if necessary, especially since those who oversee and run the operations of UNRWA are mostly from European Union countries.”
The Geneva-based rights group warned on Wednesday of serious repercussions to result from the shrinking international support for UNRWA, whose services has become threatened to come to a halt.
Euro-Med added that such step by Switzerland and the Netherlands would only affect the lives of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees, who have been displaced by the Israeli occupation of their land for more than seven decades.
“The danger is not only confined to the relief services for the Palestinian refugees being halted but also to their right of return being undermined because the existence of the agency has been linked, since its inception, to providing services for the Palestinian refugees until a just solution to their cause has been found, in accordance with the UN General Assembly’s resolution no. 194, which stipulates their right to return to the lands they were expelled from during the Arab-Israeli conflict in 1948 and the emergence of Israel,” a statement released on the website of Euro-Med said.
Its statement underlined that “corruption should not be dealt with by halting funding but rather by strengthening the mechanisms of transparency, monitoring and direct supervision if necessary, especially since those who oversee and run the operations of UNRWA are mostly from European Union countries.”