Right now, as the new academic year is about to get underway across Palestine, there is a harsh and biting reality hitting home for Palestinian pupils — a tough lesson in exactly what it means to be of that heritage, and how the United States and Israel are in political lockstep together. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) is finding it extremely difficult to open its school doors: It has no money to pay the teachers for half a million children.
Sadly, there is one simple answer why UNRWA, which was established in the aftermath of the 1949 war and has been looking after generations of displaced Palestinians since then, is now broke: US President Donald Trump ordered his officials to stop payments of $200 million (Dh735.6 million), a mean-spirited and small-minded decision meant to coerce Palestinians into backing his myopic vision of peace — one that included recognising occupied Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and moving the US Embassy there from Tel Aviv.
Because of Trump’s decision, there will now be Palestinian children who may very well go without formal education, instead schooled in the knowledge of US loyalties to the Zionist lobby, with lessons in occupation politics and the hard economics of life in Gaza.
Throughout its seven-decade existence, a significant proportion of UNRWA’s funding has been provided by the US. With those funds now withheld, UNRWA is facing an existential crisis, one that goes to the root cause of inequality, disparity and discrimination faced by Palestinians in their daily lives and activities in the Occupied Territories and the Gaza Strip.
In Gaza itself, this shuttering of schools is but the latest crisis of the many faced there by a people under siege from the Israeli regime. Since April, more than 160 Palestinians have been murdered and hundreds more wounded by occupation forces determined to keep them hemmed into what amounts to be a vast open prison. Under intermittent attack from the skies from occupation air power, Palestinians now face a school year without schools. Is there any other ignominy that they must endure solely by virtue of birthright?
Certainly, the solution to UNRWA’s current predicament is finding alternative funds to allow its teachers to teach and children to learn. That’s a challenge now that must be met by countries across the Middle East, who now, more than ever, need to show — and pay — for solidarity with the Palestinian cause and people.
