The UN Relief and Works Agency, as its name indicates, has a limited mandate mainly concerned with relief work for the refugees from Palestine who were forcibly displaced from their homes during the 1948 war. 

Nearly 75 years later, it is an indispensable organization, not for its services but for its institutional memory, which is also that of Palestinian society worldwide.

The refugee issue has been the main stumbling block toward a peace agreement between the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel. One of the principal weaknesses in the Oslo process was that its mechanism of negotiations did not include adequate representation of the Palestinian refugees outside Palestine, nor of the official host countries — Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, which make up UNRWA’s fields of operation outside the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

A future peace agreement will have to include a detailed component that would satisfy the millions of refugees and bring closure to the conflict. The issues are complicated, foremost of which are the right of return, recognition of responsibility, compensation for refugeehood and for property, as well as restitution. While the issues may be difficult to resolve in an agreement that politicians can sell to their respective constituencies, the implementation of such an agreement would be impossible without an institution that has been in touch with individual refugees since the beginning of the conflict. This institution is UNRWA, not because of its original mandate but because of a by-product of it and because of an institutional vacuum that leaves it as the only body that can do so.

It was not always meant to be this way. UNRWA was never meant to bear all the burdens of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. When it was created by UN General Assembly Resolution 302 in December 1949, another body already existed: the Conciliation Commission for Palestine, which was created a year earlier by UNGA Resolution 194. The UNCCP, as it was known, had a mandate to resolve the conflict and the UN resolution had components dealing with refugees and Jerusalem. It ceased its operations in the early 1960s, even though it still exists on paper and its mandate is renewed every year with the renewal of Resolution 194. It also left valuable archives.

Later bodies like the UN High Commission for Refugees excluded Palestinian refugees from their mandates. Article 1D of the 1951 Refugee Convention states that the convention does not apply to refugees already receiving protection or assistance from an existing UN agency. This meant it excluded Palestinian refugees. This was at the demand of Arab countries, who objected to the mandate of the UN High Commission for Refugees because it included options for resettlement, as well as for return. Only return was seen as an acceptable option for the Palestinians, hence the amendment of the convention. At the time, UNRWA was there to provide essential services like registration, education and health temporarily, until such a time that the refugees would return home.

In 1990, in the run-up to the Madrid peace conference, a journalist handed me his book about UNRWA, saying that “here you have the institutions of a future Palestinian state.” UNRWA has about 32,000 employees. Only just over 100 of them are international staff, with the rest being refugees and local staff trained to deliver services directly to the refugees. The organization has a governance structure that follows UN standards. The fact that the institution is constantly in a financial crisis and running on a deficit is certainly draining, but it also creates a more resilient and efficient staff.

The current debate over UNRWA is an intensely emotional one. Israel accuses the organization of perpetuating the problem of refugees. The refugees themselves still cling to the refugee camps as part of a guarantee of their right of return. Integration in the host countries, or what they call “tawteen,” is seen as providing a permanent resettlement solution that deprives them of their rights. There have been instances where refugees resist camp improvement initiatives because being too comfortable may also lead to permanent resettlement.

Both arguments are wrong. The Israeli demand of shutting down UNRWA will not make the refugee issue go away. Some of the most ardent campaigners for refugee rights are those who live comfortably in places like Toronto, Boston or in Europe, even if they have another nationality. The demand for justice is political and not humanitarian.

At the same time, maintaining the refugee camps in miserable conditions does not increase the likelihood of a just solution, nor does improving the conditions reduce it.