Peter Beinart is a bit shocked by the sheer cruelty of the U.S. and European cutoff of funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA):
What does that mean in the midst of this humanitarian cataclysm? UNRWA is currently sheltering 1.2 million displaced people in Gaza, as 90% of people in Gaza have been displaced from their homes. It’s providing health care services to roughly 1 million people in Gaza. It is the lead actor in providing the humanitarian assistance – what little humanitarian assistance there is – that gives people in Gaza the chance that they might eat a bite of food that day, that their children might not die of typhoid or cholera. Probably the single most important institution in standing between people in Gaza and death right now is UNRWA. And the Biden administration is gonna suspend aid to UNRWA at this moment?
The civilian population of Gaza is being deliberately starved to death by the Israeli government, and the U.S. and some of its European allies have rushed to snatch away some of the last crumbs that are available to the starving people. The aid cutoff is one of the more malicious and cynical things that Western governments have done since the war started. In response to allegations that 12 UNRWA staff members participated in the October 7 attack, the Biden administration and several other major donor governments have chosen to inflict collective punishment on more than two million people. Because a handful of people allegedly committed crimes, everyone must suffer. That is unfortunately the Israeli and U.S. approach to Gaza in miniature: the innocent many are forced to pay for the crimes of a guilty few.
Beinart says he sees “a certain amount of evil in the policies” of the Biden administration here. That is putting it mildly. It is bad enough that the U.S. arms and supports the Israeli government while it kills tens of thousands of civilians, displaces millions, and uses starvation as a weapon, but it is even worse to join in strangling the population by shutting off funds for the main source of their last reliable humanitarian assistance. Even if the allegations against these dozen people are true, that is no reason to condemn millions of people to even harsher suffering and death.
The U.N. is pleading with the donor governments to reverse their decisions. The head of UNRWA, Philippe Lazzarini, called the decisions to cut off funding “shocking” and “irresponsible.” He also said, “Palestinians in Gaza did not need this additional collective punishment. This stains all of us.” Humanitarian relief organizations have said much the same. Jan Egeland, the head of the Norwegian Refugee Council said, “Donors, do not starve children for the sins of a few individual aid workers.”
Read the rest of the article at Eunomia
Daniel Larison is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.
