Humanitarian aid in return for forced displacement

When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu embarked upon his campaign to destroy the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), one of the aims was to alter the definition of who qualifies for refugee status. The bans on UNRWA have made it near to impossible for the agency to operate, while Gaza is also starved due to Israel preventing humanitarian aid from entering the enclave. What did not alter, and is clear for the entire world to see, is the contradiction in Netanyahu’s statement to eliminate Palestinian refugees. The Israeli government keeps creating them, and the plan now is to create refugees through the supply of humanitarian aid.

Netanyahu’s briefing to the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee set the record straight on Israel’s ethnic cleansing and genocidal plans. Destroying more houses, Netanyahu said, will ensure Palestinians have nowhere to go. “The only obvious result will be Gazans choosing to emigrate outside of the Strip,” he declared. There is no choice in forced displacement, and Netanyahu is determined to allow no choice in the matter. Humanitarian aid has been weaponised to the ultimate erasure of Palestinians.

Israeli media reported that Palestinians who access humanitarian aid under the new plan “will be barred from returning to places in Gaza outside of the new humanitarian zone being set up in southern Gaza”. In a letter to the Israeli government, parts of which were quoted in news reports, the director of the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Fund (GHF) Jake Wood stated, “GHF emphasizes that a successful humanitarian response must eventually include the entire civilian population in Gaza.”

But benevolence is not part of Netanyahu’s plan, and neither does it factor for GHF. GHF cannot be completely oblivious of the fact that it is directly participating in Israel’s ethnic cleansing plan.

While the humanitarian paradigm was always destined to fail by allowing the international community control over political rights, Netanyahu completely altered the very basics of humanitarian aid, which is supposed to provide temporary alleviation from deprivation of basic needs. Humanitarian aid was first weaponised politically by the international community to allow Israel the chance to colonise Palestine. In its final stages, Israel is now weaponising humanitarian aid to starve Palestinians to death, or ethnically cleanse them from Gaza.

What does GHF consider “a successful humanitarian response”? One that rounds up Palestinians under threat of starvation or displacement? Or is it dissociation between humanitarian aid and weaponising humanitarian aid?

In the face of such inhumane distortion, which will lead to more killing of Palestinians, the international community should take note of what they created: not just Israel, but also a humanitarian paradigm that crumbled at Israel’s behest.

Today is the 77^th anniversary since the Nakba, which started the official ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their land. The details of atrocities that should have horrified the international community into stopping the Zionist colonial project. Instead, Palestinians are now facing bureaucratic institutions and human rights agencies that justify atrocities through their own human rights agendas. These agendas match the political aims and objectives of the colonisers and their accomplices.

It is evident that the international community never saw beyond setting up UNRWA to feed Palestinians while Israel steals their land. The GHF will move beyond the previous subtleties and become complicit in genocide just as the UN was complicit in the initial ethnic cleansing of Palestine by approving the 1947 Partition Plan, but the origins of distorting humanitarian aid since its inception must never be forgotten. The 1948 Nakba and its aftermath remain a permanent reminder.

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