The most exalted UN creation – the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees – is being isolated by the UN. While Israel destroyed UNRWA’s infrastructure several times and more severely during the genocide that started on 7 October 2023, the UN has failed its own humanitarian paradigm not only through funding, but now through collaboration with the US Board of Peace. 

Two diverging statements within days of each other – one by UNRWA’s Commissioner General Philippe Lazzarini and the other by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, portray the divide between the humanitarian agency and its creator. 

In his final letter to the UN General Assembly, Lazzarini declared, “It is therefore incomprehensible to record here that, without immediate political and financial support from Member States to deliver UNRWA’s mandate and to protect against efforts to dismantle its operations, the Agency is near the end of its viability.” He also noted that Israel’s attacks against UNRWA since the start of the genocide were unprecedented.

Four days later, in an exclusive interview with Politico, Guterres stated that the UN is “cooperating actively with structures created by the Board of Peace.” He followed up with, “Everything else now is a personal project of President Donald Trumo, in which he has full control of everything.” So for Guterres, sacrificing Palestinians to Zionist colonialism, Israeli genocide and US real estate plans did not violate the UN Charter, but US belligerence against the rest of the world constitutes a red line. One which the UN is in no position to combat anyway. Guterres seems to conveniently forget that the so-called international institution is made up of individual countries with varied vested interests. 

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The problem is that while Lazzarini clearly outlined Israel’s violations, he did not outline the UN’s role in UNRWA’s decline. There is more to the UN than the image it can no longer protect and promote – that of an international body that can refer to international law to save face. The UN, whose foundations are rooted in the perceived injuries of former colonial powers, has acted for decades as a front for the same countries to maintain and consolidate their power globally.

Palestine is the most visible example of how the UN not only protected colonial interests, but enabled colonialism to violate all norms of international law.

Palestine is the most visible example of how the UN not only protected colonial interests, but enabled colonialism to violate all norms of international law.

Guterres’s statement is not just a reflection of himself, but of decades of UN complicity with colonialism and imperialism.

UNRWA has no political mandate, as Lazzarini emphasised in his letter, but it operates within colonial politics and politics enabling colonialism. Without diminishing Israel’s role in destroying the agency, UNRWA’s decline must also be attributed to the UN. Lazzaarini wrote, “The attacks against the Agency are not about neutrality or operationality. Rather, they seek to undermine UNRWA to weaken Palestinians’ rights within Final Status issues in the Israel-Palestine conflict.” Israel’s genocide has shown that it has gone beyond weakening Palestinians’ rights. Zionism was about eliminating the indigenous from Palestine, Israel is operating within that colonial framework. The UN knew what it was supporting when it endorsed the 1947 Partition Plan – the eventuality of ongoing ethnic cleansing. UNRWA’s decline does not eliminate Palestinian refugees – the refugees remain with or without the agency. However, Israel and the UN are responsible for the perpetual Palestinian refugee status: Israel through forced displacement and genocide, and the UN by protecting both colonialism and genocide, even at the expense of disintegrating one of its own institutions. 

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